THE DARK MIRROR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 406, 3 April 1947, Page 14

THE DARK MIRROR

(Universal-International)

OBERT SIODMAK, who made Phantom Lady, -The Suspect, The Spiral Staircase, and The Killers, is back on the job again; and again re-

veals his interest in diseased minds and homicide. Both subjects are by now mote than a little frayed at the edges, but if there is one director, other than perhaps Hitchcock, who can put them to entertaining advantage it is Siodmak. In the present instance he has the assistance of three gifted players in Olivia de Havilland, Thomas Mitchell, and Lew Ayres. There was a time when I regarded Miss de Havilland as being principall¥ a Beautiful Face; and since it was an unusually | beautiful one, that was enough. But recent evidence (including the otherwise regrettable To Each His Own) suggests that she has developed from: an ingenue into an Actress. And (continued on next page) ;

(continued from previous page) those, like myself, who can find contentment in merely looking at Miss de Havilland, should be gladdened by the news that in The Dark Mirror there is a double helping of her, since she plays the role of ideniical twins. I have never in my own experience come across this phenomenon of two persons so exactly alike that they cannot be told apart; but if one is to believe only a fraction of the books one reads and the films one sees, it happens by no means infrequently. And it seems to be a sine qua non of fictional twinship that the sisters or brothers should be as dissimilar in character as they are alike in looks. Thus it was, for instance, with Bette Davis in A Stolen Life, and thus it is again in The D&rk Mirror where one of the Misses de Havilland is Horrid and Homicidal and the other is Nice and Normal. The H and H one (distinguishable as T-E-R-R-Y by means of a convenient necklace and hereinafter referred to as such) has bumped off a doctor for some reason known only to her paranoic self, but succeeds in baffling the police completely because the N and N one (identifiable as R-U-T-H) gives her an unbreakable alibi. One of them clearly did it, but nobody can tell t’other from which, so Detective Thomas Mitchell dare not even make an arrest. (Thanks to the necklaces, however, the audience is not long left in any such quandary). Then, where old-fashioned crime detection has failed, psychiatry steps in-in the welcome person of Dr. Lew Ayres (no, not Dr. Kildare this time), looking rather haggard after his wartime experiences, but still a very interesting actor. He undertakes to discover which of the twins is psychologically capable of murder, and by means of such fascinating gadgets as lie-detectors, ink-blots, and association tests, he succeeds. Terry goes completely off her head; Ruth, having barely escaped elimination herself, drops, into the doctor’s arms. Scientifically it all looks quite impressive, and Director Siodmak and the players see to it that the entertainment is brisk and charged with tension. Yet two surprising facts emerge. One is that nei‘her Terry nor Ruth can be regular pic.uregoers, otherwise they would have thought twice before submitting themselves to tests by a _ professional psychiatrist: they would know that most screen crimes are now solved that way. The other is that Dr. Lew Ayres, who is allegedly an expert on twins (and consequently would know all about the hereditary factors involved), should not hesitate before marrying the twin sister of a paranoic killer. Such details apart, however, The-Dark Mirror is good melodrama,