IMDb user comments for
Corridor of Mirrors (1948)

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4 comments in total

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6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Stylistic and mysterious, 18 June 2000
Author: Swift-12

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... )

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6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
A wonderful, interesting Gothic film, 22 September 1999

Author: theorbys from new york city

This is expert, expert film making, rich in atmosphere and mood, and easily as good as the best gothics and psychological 'horror' films of the forties such as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Seventh Veil, or the Val Lewton works. I don't think there was a single scene that did not hold my attention. I could not begin to enumerate all the little touches and flourishes of lighting, camera angle, dialog, story ideas, etc. but I particularly enjoyed the seamless interweaving of references to Lewis Carroll's Alice (when Edana Romney follows the white cat (white rabbit surrogate) through the labyrhinthine corridors of the mansion, or to Othello/Romeo and Juliet at the Venetian ball, or again to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Some compare this film to to Cocteau (it's on the video box), with its ornate and detailed set, as well as its theme, but Corridor of Mirrors for all its fine acting, atmosphere, and mastery of technique is not genius. It is not poetically simple. But if you liked any of the films mentioned above, you will definitely enjoy watching dark, mysterious leading lady Edana Romney (who also co wrote the screenplay) search for the inner resources to free herself from the spell of an incredibly intense and psychologically compelling, but morbid, life.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Obsessive love that borders on madness, or Galatea of the Wax Museum, 18 December 1998

Author: anonymous from Austin, Texas, USA

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?

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
The director of DR. NO blends Hitchcock with Cocteau, 8 October 2007

Author: melvelvit-1 from NYC suburbs

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

A well-to-do wife and mother (Edana Romney) travels to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London to rendezvous with an old flame (Eric Portman) executed ten years before as their strange, tragic romance unfolds in flashback.

The director of DR. NO blends Hitchcock with Cocteau in this psychological pseudo-"period" melodrama with Gothic overtones that is equal parts REBECCA and VERTIGO as filtered through BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Reincarnation (maybe), obsession, fetish, romance, madness and murder are interwoven in an opulently stylized, dream-like tale. The unusual plot involving a past affair with one of Mme. Tussaud's wax-work murderers is absorbing and holds the interest from the outset. There's a literal as well as symbolic "corridor of mirrors" and many small touches that make the story come alive. Eric Portman plays wealthy Paul Mangin, a man living in the past, who holds a strange fascination for an impressionable young girl and goes from frightening to vulnerable over the course of the film. Edana Romney (a British cross between Mexico's Maria Felix and Hollywood's Faith Domergue) plays Mifanwy Conway (love that name!) and brings this seemingly frivolous character to life as her situation becomes increasingly more disturbing. Their ill-fated union plays out in Mangin's Venetian-style mansion where time stands still and Mifanwy almost comes to believe they were once lovers in fifteenth-century Italy but when she starts using her head instead of her heart, tragedy follows. In a film with many visual images that will stay in the mind long after it's over, the high point comes during a Venetian costume ball and a satisfying denouement ties up every loose end save one -the lady's still a dead ringer for the Rensiassance temptress in a 400 year-old painting Mangin fell in love with during the war. The literary references scattered throughout include "Otello", "Wuthering Heights" and "Through The Looking Glass" while the lovers' first waltz foreshadows Vincente Minnelli's MADAME BOVARY made the following year. Christopher Lee and Lois Maxwell ("Miss Moneypenny" in director Young's James Bond films) have small roles.

Unusual and hypnotic.

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