Corridor of Mirrors (1948)

Very well executed

Absolutely Fantastic

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

It takes patience to try to get fully in this "Svengali" style story with a few unique twists. Artistically, it is a triumph, stunning to watch for the care that went into it, but somehow as flat as the painting of heroine Edana Romney in her period clothes. There are moments when a joyous spirit overtakes this melodrama, but it is often dour and maudlin.Romney may be a graceful beauty, but she lacks the charisma of other dark haired British beauties. Resembling Merle Oberon with a bit of Margaret Lockwood thrown in, she's equally flat in important emotional scenes that required under playing rather than the shouting she resorted to. However, the camera loves her, as evidenced in a sequence when brooding artist Eric Pittman whirls her around on a restaurant floor the moment he spits her. It takes forever for him to reveal to her why, although the audience pretty much knows. I could see this as an opera with its mixture of melodrama, mystery and potential tragedy. It is certainly a masterpiece of technology, showing how far advanced the British were if you look at some of their best films from the 1940's. At times, this seemed very modern, and the sets seem to shine in 3-D to the point of infinity. Something tells me that this takes repeat viewings to truly be appreciated, although I would undoubtedly look on at Romney in the same way.

Edana Romney (Mifanwy) receives a telegram to meet up with an ex-lover Eric Portman (Paul Mangin) in London at the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. She arrives at the pre-arranged rendez-vous next to Marie Antoinette and as she waits, she daydreams……….and we are taken back in flashback to the days of her love affair with Portman. He is a wealthy artist with some definitely strange ideas. He lives in the past. Literally. And he believes Edana is part of his destiny. Theirs is a 400 year love affair which needs sorting out.It's a good-looking film with a huge house at the centre of the proceedings. It's atmospheric and the costumes are great. There is definitely an unworldly feel as the film develops and the story will keep you guessing as to what is going on in the mind of strange Eric Portman. The acting is good all round, including the minor characters, with a mention to singer Joan Maude (Caroline) who plays a crucial role. The dialogue is funny at times with Romney's father, Bruce Belfrage (Sir David), coming out with the classic "…hardest hard-on…". Listen out for it near the beginning of the film when Romney returns home to find Belfrage watching a film. It's hilarious.So, it's time to organize a Venetian ball…………just watch out if you are a female with long dark hair. You never know what type of nutter is in the area.

A well-to-do wife and mother (Edana Romney) travels to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London to rendezvous with an old flame (Eric Portman) executed ten years before as their strange, tragic romance unfolds in flashback.The director of DR. NO blends Hitchcock with Cocteau in this psychological pseudo-"period" melodrama with Gothic overtones that is equal parts REBECCA and VERTIGO as filtered through BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Reincarnation (maybe), obsession, fetish, romance, madness and murder are interwoven in an opulently stylized, dream-like tale. The unusual plot involving a past affair with one of Mme. Tussaud's wax-work murderers is absorbing and holds the interest from the outset. There's a literal as well as symbolic "corridor of mirrors" and many small touches that make the story come alive. Eric Portman plays wealthy Paul Mangin, a man living in the past, who holds a strange fascination for an impressionable young girl and goes from frightening to vulnerable over the course of the film. Edana Romney (a British cross between Mexico's Maria Felix and Hollywood's Faith Domergue) plays Mifanwy Conway (love that name!) and brings this seemingly frivolous character to life as her situation becomes increasingly more disturbing. Their ill-fated union plays out in Mangin's Venetian-style mansion where time stands still and Mifanwy almost comes to believe they were once lovers in fifteenth-century Italy but when she starts using her head instead of her heart, tragedy follows. In a film with many visual images that will stay in the mind long after it's over, the high point comes during a Venetian costume ball and a satisfying denouement ties up every loose end save one -the lady's still a dead ringer for the Rensiassance temptress in a 400 year-old painting Mangin fell in love with during the war. The literary references scattered throughout include "Otello", "Wuthering Heights" and "Through The Looking Glass" while the lovers' first waltz foreshadows Vincente Minnelli's MADAME BOVARY made the following year. Christopher Lee and Lois Maxwell ("Miss Moneypenny" in director Young's James Bond films) have small roles.Unusual and hypnotic.

This is expert, expert film making, rich in atmosphere and mood, and easily as good as the best gothics and psychological 'horror' films of the forties such as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Seventh Veil, or the Val Lewton works. I don't think there was a single scene that did not hold my attention. I could not begin to enumerate all the little touches and flourishes of lighting, camera angle, dialog, story ideas, etc. but I particularly enjoyed the seamless interweaving of references to Lewis Carroll's Alice (when Edana Romney follows the white cat (white rabbit surrogate) through the labyrhinthine corridors of the mansion, or to Othello/Romeo and Juliet at the Venetian ball, or again to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Some compare this film to to Cocteau (it's on the video box), with its ornate and detailed set, as well as its theme, but Corridor of Mirrors for all its fine acting, atmosphere, and mastery of technique is not genius. It is not poetically simple. But if you liked any of the films mentioned above, you will definitely enjoy watching dark, mysterious leading lady Edana Romney (who also co wrote the screenplay) search for the inner resources to free herself from the spell of an incredibly intense and psychologically compelling, but morbid, life.