source: Corridor of Mirrors

Moviecut—Corridor of Mirrors

Corridor of Mirrors

I have never been a fan of Eric Portman and am therefore no fan of any of the films he appeared in.So I will just say that the photography is excellent and leave it at that

This had a really interesting slow build with lots of atmosphere and gothic mystery. I was really digging it until the rushed ending that tries to tie everything together and ends up undermining the whole thing. It's seriously a terrible final 10 minutes of an otherwise top notch film. Bleh...

Deep brooding melding of numerous ideas and themes including riffs from Hitchcock, Beauty and the Beast, Val Lewton, Lewis Carrol, and on and on. Its the very Gothic tale of a woman who meets a man who may have loved her in the past. A triumph of the filmmakers art the story left me cold. I suspect that watching the film well after midnight was a bad idea where its lush visual pleasures helped me to nod off. I know that the films insistence about being about something didn't help, I wanted a 1940's mystery, what I got was psychological drama. I'm going to have to watch this again down the road when its much earlier in the evening.(It is great to look at though)

CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS is a late 1940s drama with some supernatural touches surrounding the whole past-life experience set-up. Unfortunately it plays out as a stodgy and dated character drama lacking the kind of incident and memorable events that a story like this needs. The main actors chosen for the roles give disaffected turns and it's one of those movies that the viewer simply can't get engaged with at all. What it does boast is some atmospheric direction from Terence Young, bringing to life some fine locations and the like, and bit-parts from various future stars including Lois Maxwell and Christopher Lee.

I thoroughly enjoyed this rather gothic tale of a young woman's love affair with an obsessive connoisseur of beauty, who believes he's loved her before in a past life. The Venetian costume party is certainly a high point, visually, of the picture. The whole film is strangely reminiscent of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, primarily because of eerily smooth camera movement and the elaborate castle setting. How can any romantic not enjoy a murderous love story that ends in Madame Tussaud's wax museum?

A recommendable film if you'll overlook and forgive certain elements (the dialog and acting are rather stiff by today's standards). The twisting plot unfolds satisfactorily: in the introduction a woman travels to keep an ominous meeting and recalls a previous love affair. In flashback we learn of her lover's strange obsession to transform her into the image of another woman. He himself seems to belong to another time and place, lost in the past. Is he sane, is he safe to trust? Only after keeping her appointment, do we learn the true nature and motivations of the man.. and of others. This film predates "Vertigo" by a decade, but the similarities are eerie. Enjoy the lush sets and costumes. The score does much to set the tone of mystery and fantasy. And finally, Edana Romney is gorgeous (I think I once knew someone who looked JUST like her... )