Corridor of Mirrors: The Eternal Return

Wandering around Paul’s mansion one day while he is out, Mifanwy enters a long hallway lined with mirrored doors; opening one, she confronts a white, eyeless dummy dressed in a sumptuous period gown. There is a mannequin behind each door, their faces vaguely suggesting mummified corpses; the allusion to Bluebeard’s wives is inescapable. But Mifanwy quickly recovers from her shock and wallows in the fabulous clothes and jewels, which Paul has collected in anticipation of finding the right woman to wear them. (The film’s opulent costumes, which appeal to the ten-year-old girl within every female viewer, were designed by Owen Hyde-Clark and constructed by Maggy Rouff.) Mifanwy happily succumbs to the joys of playing dress-up. This Galatea is motivated not by love but by vanity; she is intoxicated by herself, infatuated with her own image, more than with Paul. It is also clear that their romance is never consummated—and this is by his choice, not hers. They are, in a way, more like children sharing a private world of make-believe than like adult lovers.

He seems to dominate her (“Even in my sleep he would be there in the corridor of mirrors,” she recalls, “watching me dress up for him”). Romney often has a drugged look, which conveys the idea that Paul’s house is an opium den of fantasy, a perfumed prison. Once you enter it, Mifanwy is warned, it’s impossible to leave, “because if you did, the world would seem so cruel and ugly that you would have to come crawling back.” But she has a hardheaded, irreverent side that is never fully eclipsed. She notices that Paul hates laughter. Like Scottie seeing Midge’s parodic self-portrait in Vertigo, he recoils from any attempt to puncture his romantic obsession with humor or common sense. Corridor of Mirrors has its own equivalent to the hypnotic Portrait of Carlotta. Paul finally unveils for Mifanwy a fifteenth-century painting he discovered in Italy during World War I, depicting a woman named Venetia who is her spitting image. He goes on to recount his gradual realization that he was this woman’s lover in a previous life, and that in Mifanwy he has found her again. Appalled by this lunacy, she flees into marriage with a dependable, unromantic childhood friend whose idea of an endearment is to call her “imbecile woman.” Her choice is eminently sane—confirmed when Paul later tells her how in that earlier life he strangled the faithless Venetia with her own hair. But in her rejection of Paul, Mifanwy reveals a cruel streak; she seems to take pleasure in crushing and mocking his fevered dreams. That this heroine is spoiled and selfish, and often not very likable, gives the film a stimulating ambiguity: Mifanwy is at once a woman in peril and a femme fatale who destroys with her hard, derisive laughter.

Out of some mixture of curiosity, flattered vanity, and lingering compassion, she returns to attend the jaw-dropping Venetian masked ball that Paul throws in her honor, one of the most spectacular of all cinematic shindigs. Fireworks cascade above the terraced gardens of his villa, cluttered with splashing fountains and flickering braziers and living statuary. Performers scattered around the grounds present commedia dell’arte and Grecian dances à la Isadora Duncan. A troubadour sings the melancholy folk song “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” as Paul and Mifanwy drift in a canopied boat around the lagoon; later they waltz deliriously in the mirrored hallway.

Just as their images are multiplied, Paul’s terminal romantic fixation is reflected back by two women who love him: nightclub singer Caroline (Joan Maude) and housekeeper Veronica (Barbara Mullen). Caroline is a sullen, overripe redhead whom Paul dismisses with a scathing remark about being “amazed by the vulgarity of an age which could produce such a type as yours.” Veronica is a strange, wizened, ageless little woman; she tells Mifanwy that she was once her master’s lover, the first of his living dolls to be used up and cast away when he got tired of her. Is she telling the truth, or is she delusional, a waif rescued from the gutter who has invented this imaginary past for herself? One of the women winds up murdered, and Paul is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, embracing this dramatic exit from a life that is now empty since his loss of the woman he believed to be his once and future love. He chooses his illusion, what he calls his “attitude towards life,” over life itself.

The dreamy, hothouse mood of Corridor of Mirrors occasionally staggers over the line into the ludicrous, just as the ethereal score by Georges Auric mounts at times to overpowering bombast. But some of the best moments come when the movie acknowledges its own solemn silliness, as when Paul, having just discovered his treasured portrait slashed to ribbons, dejectedly peels off the fake beard and mustache he donned for the masked ball. The film itself, like Paul, is defiant in its stylization and lavish in its resources, but perhaps ultimately too eccentric to be seen as more than a novelty. It failed to establish Edana Romney, who made few other films; her lush beauty and forceful presence are ideal for this tailored part, but her acting style is somewhat limited and heavy-handed. Director Terence Young went on to a long career, but his best-known work, for the James Bond franchise, is hard to connect with this debut, which pays homage to Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), also scored by Auric.

There is more than a hint of the gentleman vampire in Paul Mangin, with his cape and his lonely palace and his devotion to a centuries-old romance. He defies the modern world, just as the film defies the drabness and austerity that dominated postwar British crime movies. Where the French, before the war, had fused lyricism and grit in the style of poetic realism, British cinema of the forties was split, almost schizophrenically, between realism and poetry, restraint and excess, cold-eyed views of the present and indulgent fantasies of the past. Corridor of Mirrors comes down firmly on the side of fantasy even as it ostensibly argues for the virtues of the ordinary. It was released the same year as Powell and Pressburger’s dazzling, hallucinatory The Red Shoes; Michael Powell later theorized that the enormous popularity of that film came from the fact that, after years of being indoctrinated with the necessity of giving their lives for freedom and democracy, people were ready for the message that they should “go and die for art.” Paul Mangin would surely approve. There is more than a hint of the film director in him too, fanatically dedicated to realizing his vision, and especially to shaping the performance of his leading lady. He accepts his failure, and his muse’s rebellion, with equanimity; perhaps he will do better in his next life, in the next film to take up his immortal obsession.

Corridor of Mirrors is available on FilmStruck through August 10.