Corridor of Mirrors (1948)
Directed by Terence Young, and starring Eric Portman, Edana Romney, and Barbara Mullen. Edana Romney co-wrote the script.
Eric Portman plays Paul Mangin, who thinks he is Cesare Borgia reincarnated and that Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney) is his lost love from a previous life. Corridor of Mirrors also showcases appearances by Christopher Lee and Valentine Dyall. A table at a nightclub with Mifanwy and her companions offers a fleeting glimpse of an astonishingly young Christopher Lee in his film debut, marking the beginning of a legendary career.
Terence Young’s film is a masterpiece of exquisite British filmmaking, immersing us in a rich atmosphere and evoking a mood that rivals the best psychological suspense thrillers and horror films from the forties, like the shadow plays of Val Lewton and the Gothic dark romances such as Wuthering Heights 1939, Rebecca 1940, and Jane Eyre 1943.
Corridor of Mirrors evokes an atmospheric, hallucinatory spectacle akin to Henri Alekan’s cinematography as he follows Josette Day’s travels through the mansion in Cocteau’s 1946 fable-like masterpiece Beauty and the Beast, imbued with its baroque, gilded, and ornate set design. Andre Thomas’s poetic lighting and camera angles suffuse the landscape of labyrinthine corridors, creating a somber and otherworldly landscape that evokes traces of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as Edana Romney journeys through the dreamy complexity of the mansion, trying to break free of the spell, as she pursues the white cat, who is an emblem of Alice’s white rabbit.
Terence Young’s haunting directorial debut is one of those rare films that sweeps you straight into its opulent, unsettling dreams. It is a stunning and dreamlike gothic noir steeped in romantic obsession, sorrow, and psychological unease. At the center of it all is Paul Mangin, an enigmatic, larger-than-life artist absolutely obsessed with the past. The story spirals around this mysterious figure who cloaks his mansion and himself (in velvet capes), in Renaissance grandeur and holds the profound certainty that his soul has spent lifetimes, shaped by love and loss, echoing across centuries. Paul’s interest in Mifanwy is nothing more than a reflection of a cherished image, a portrait whose allure her appearance unsettlingly echoes, devoid of true understanding or affection.
Edana Romney wasn’t just cast as Mifanwy; she shaped the role herself, working closely with co-producer Rudolph Cartier to adapt Chris Massey’s novel into the screenplay. Watching her on screen, she moves almost like she’s sleepwalking, and while her acting is somewhat restrained, it actually adds to the film’s hypnotic, dreamlike quality. Throughout, she’s shadowed by a mysterious woman and a fluffy white cat, both quietly watching, which only deepens the sense of eerie voyeurism and subtle unease.
When Paul meets the beautiful Mifanwy Conway, lovely, possibly shady, and just curious enough to get drawn into the sinister spell, his fixation deepens. He’s convinced she’s the reincarnation of a long-lost lover from centuries ago and seeks to shape her to fit this spectral ideal. She rides beside Paul through shadowed London streets, the horse-drawn cab winding toward a vast, brooding mansion at the city’s heart. Paul, a forbidding aesthete veiled in grand delusions of a past life as an Italian noble, seeks to ensnare the sensuous Mifanwy in the dark embrace of his twisted reverie.
From its shadow-drenched corridors and warped reflections, the film blurs the boundary between reality and hypnotic fantasy. Corridor of Mirrors is a wild, shadowy fever dream drenched in mystery and illusion. It carries you from these dark, mirror-lined hallways and the lavish costume balls right into haunting galleries filled with faceless mannequins. Reality and fantasy melt together here; sometimes, you aren’t sure which is which. It’s like stepping into a twisted fairy tale. Each scene pulses with the quiet torment of lives trapped in mirrors, echoes of Pygmalion, Bluebeard, and Cocteau’s haunted fairy tales. It is as if the characters are caught in a maze of glass, unable to escape their own reflections and obsessions.
Paul Mangin’s obsession leads to madness, murder, and a shattering denouement amid wax effigies in Madame Tussauds, where the film’s onyx gloom gives way to truth and a tragic sense of justice.
The film’s Gothic atmosphere occupies a rare and haunting space, yet it draws subtle echoes from both Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Fritz Lang’s eerie 1947 thriller, The Secret Beyond the Door. In the latter, a new bride, Joan Bennett, uncovers a chilling secret: her husband’s obsession with recreating rooms where murders have taken place, a macabre blurring of the lines between love and death, passion and violence.
André Thomas’s cinematography is a world unto itself, with its eerie, poetic visual style transforming the film into a hypnotic dreamscape. He plays with light and reflection brilliantly so that you almost lose track of where the real world ends and fantasy begins, those iconic mirrored corridors, where characters and their secrets multiply endlessly in flickering candlelight, and movement, fracturing reality and plunging the film’s characters into a labyrinth of shifting perspectives. Thomas’s cinematography exquisitely captures the film’s sumptuous costumes and intricate décor, draping each scene in a play of shimmering shadows and delicate highlights. His lens lingers on textured fabrics and ornate surroundings, bathing the opulence in a luminous glow that feels both intimate and grand, inviting us to step into a world where every detail is a visual feast. Thomas bathes the set in a chiaroscuro haze in key sequences, such as Mifanwy’s passage through the mansion’s long, mirrored hall lined with faceless mannequins. Nothing is quite what it seems. This approach blurs the line between fantasy and reality, uniting the film’s aching romantic longing and its creeping psychological dread. In every veil and distortion, the characters’ tangled obsessions and fractured selves mirror each other.
George Auric’s (who scored Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête) score for Corridor of Mirrors flows like a dark, Gothic, melancholic river beneath the film’s haunting imagery, its melodies rising and falling with the rhythm of obsession and longing. The music is at once ethereal and grounded, shimmering with delicate strings that weave through shadowy passages and shadow-drenched ballrooms, while moments of brooding brass and subtle piano suggest the deep undercurrents of psychological unease and brooding desperation. The late moments, underscored by sweeping, delicate orchestration, evoke the grandeur and tragic beauty of the unfolding drama, making his score an essential part of the film’s haunting allure. Auric’s composition turns every whispered secret and silken touch into a symphony of passion and peril. The gowns were designed by Owen Hyde-Clark and constructed by French couturier Maggy Rouff.
“In projecting the slow abandonment of one’s identity, her third and final performance on the big screen evokes the pleasure, and the terror of romantic submission, Smith says — Mifanwy is a princess who, unlike Cinderella, who waits for a prince, or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, immobile without the touch of a man’s lips, must break her own spell.” (Imogen Sara Smith for Criterion)
Corridor of Mirrors is a lush, visually extravagant meditation on identity and desire, where the past’s spectral grip suffuses every candle-lit room and character’s haunted gaze. The artistry of set and cinematography deepens its poetic melancholy, making the film a rare British gem, finely blended of exquisite and unsettling, and forever suspended between passion and despair, somewhere between the promise of love and the weight of memory.
See you in the mirror soon, MonsterGirl
