The Dark Mirror Blu-ray Review
Two heads are crazier than one.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 23, 2012
The April 15, 1942 edition of
The Film Daily, once one of Hollywood's leading industry papers, contains one of the
most remarkable
full page "ads" ever placed in a movie related publication. It read:
An Open Letter to Lew Ayres
The newspapers this week have carried a story from Miami which has distressed me deeply because things I said have
been misquoted.
These are the facts:
During an informal dinner in my home at Miami Beach where I spent a few days, you were being discussed and severely
criticized. I felt that
my guests should know you as I do. It was not my province to judge your philosophy or the road you have taken. I
said: "Since Lew Ayres
is not with us, since this boy is away at camp, I can speak as an individual and not as the head of a company in which
he is a star."
I told my guests that you were one of the finest men it has ever been my privilege to know, a person of utter sincerity.
I explained to them
that you had asked your country to send you to the front lines as an ambulance driver no matter how great the risk,
that it was your hope
to save human lives, that you could not kill. In this connection I told them a fat with which they were not familiar, that
you did not eat fish or
meat or anything that had to be killed. I told them ath in hall Hollywood there was no more charitable individual, that
there was no cause
for which you did not give bountifully. I pointed out specifically the splendid work you have been doing for the Red
Cross. I told them that
you not only made large contributions of money but that day and night, apart from your studio duties, you had devoted
yourself to
conducting classes in first aid.
Among those present was a Miami newspaperman. He expressed great interest in many of these statements, was
delighted to get a true
picture of an individual who had been misunderstood. Mind you, at no time did I discuss or express agreement with the
stand you have
taken. Frankly, I must confess that I have never understood your position. It is a peculiarity beyond my personal
comprehension.
What you saw in the papers was a distressing misrepresentation, doubtless unintentional. I wanted you to know.
—Nicholas M. Schenck
Younger readers may well wonder what all the fuss was about, and indeed even who Lew Ayres was, but in the early
days of the United
States' involvement in World War II, Ayres' highly publicized pacifist stance was front page news. It was a life long
passion of the actor's,
something perhaps fostered by his early starring role in the anti-war classic (recently released on Blu-ray),
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Initially the American
government wouldn't guarantee Ayres, who had studied medicine in college, a spot with an ambulance crew, hence the
mention above of
the "camp" Ayres had reported to (a Civilian Public Service camp), but wiser heads soon prevailed, and Ayres did indeed
serve with
distinction as part of a medical crew on the front lines. The public relations damage was done by that time, however,
and Ayres had a tough
row to hoe when he returned to Hollywood after the conflict.
The Dark Mirror was his first post-World War II
project, and though he
is cast (perhaps not so coincidentally) as a kindly doctor, albeit one who cures mental rather than physical illness, the
film is without a doubt
a showcase for one performer and one performer only: Olivia de Havilland in a
tour de force outing as twins,
one of whom may have
committed a vicious murder.
The forties were rife with films featuring kindly psychoanalysts helping troubled patients find balance. Hitchcock's
Spellbound and another film starring de Havilland,
The Snake Pit, posited the "wonders" of the modern
mental health system. Sure, there were problems, like the nefarious asylum employee in
Spellbound and an
underhanded nurse in
The Snake Pit, but the general thesis here was that mental illness could be
cured.
It might just be my decades' long fascination with
Frances Farmer, but I've long felt it was no mere
coincidence that American film started celebrating the supposed success of psychoanalysis shortly after Farmer's
notorious
problems and, somewhat ironically, her brief 1944 release from a Washington state institution where she had been
pronounced "completely cured" due to the "modern miracle" of psychoanalysis. (Another irony is that Farmer's ex-
husband Leif Erickson co-starred with de Havilland in
The Snake Pit, a casting choice that seems to have hardly happened purely by chance.)
Ayres' Dr. Elliott is, like the Ingrid Bergman character in
Spellbound, romantically interested in the ostensible
patient of
The Dark Mirror, though the film of course has the twist that there are actually
two patients,
identical twins Terry and Ruth Collins, both played by de Havilland. When blustery policeman Lt. Stevenson (Thomas
Mitchell) enlists Elliott's aid in ferreting out which of the sisters may have committed a vicious murder, Elliott puts the
entire gamut of psychoanalytical tools to work in trying to dig down into the sisters' somewhat twisted relationship.
The Dark Mirror is not an entirely successful film, partly because it never really exploits the
noir ambience
it rather fitfully flirts with at several moments. Perhaps due to Mitchell's comic take on the policeman's character, the
film has a weird tonal imbalance that veers from the melodrama of the Collins sisters to the romance involving Elliott to
bizarre little "bits" for Mitchell, some of them rather incredibly supported by whimsical cues from composer Dimitri
Tiomkin (listen to what happens on the soundtrack when Lt. Stevenson talks about being confused by "Chinese
music").
The other major stumbling point in the film is how it completely tosses away one of the most intriguing aspects of its
very conceit: the fact that people haven't been able to tell Terry and Ruth apart. Instead the film relies on an almost
funny gambit of having the sisters wear little necklaces with their names on them, no doubt a shortcut for late forties
audiences perhaps not so used to films with one good and one bad twin.
The Dark Mirror would have been a
much more effective piece had it plied the ambiguity at the core of its story with more nuance, instead of making things
so crystal clear.
The film is nonetheless quite effective at times, mostly due to some stellar special effects (look at screencap 1 for a
startling little piece of matte work that is far more impressive in motion than it appears here) as well as de Havilland's
commanding performance(s) as the Collins sisters. De Havilland was able to rather convincingly play a disparate set of
characteristics, from mousy timidity (rather similar to her sister Joan Fontaine's performance in
Rebecca) to
overweening arrogance (rather like Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers in the same Hitchcock film). De Havilland is the best
reason to watch
The Dark Mirror, a film that probably doesn't quite achieve the
noir heights that some of
director Robert Siodmak's other films in the idiom do. The film plays more like a standard potboiler now, with so many
"good and evil twin" films which have come in
The Dark Mirror's wake, but even within the often standard
melodrama approach, upon reflection (sorry) there are some nice little touches along the way here.
