Terence Young’s bizarre, haunting Corridor of Mirrors, now on Blu-ray from Kino, opens with Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney, who co-wrote the screenplay) receiving a threatening telegram at her home in Wales, where she lives with an unseen husband and her three children. She immediately rushes to London, to Madame Tussaud’s to meet her “lover”—the wax figure of Paul Mangin (Eric Portman). Most of the rest of the film is told in flashback, as Mifanwy recalls her increasingly obsessive affair with Paul, an eccentric, wealthy artist who becomes convinced that Mifanwy is the reincarnation of a woman his past self loved. As the pair play at a love affair out of time, dreams and reality, past and present coalesce into an odd, Gothic-tinged romance leading to potential tragedy.
What Corridor of Mirrors misses in connected plot, it makes up for in aesthetic. Dream-like imagery saturates the production, much of it more than reminiscent Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast of two years prior. Paul’s mansion is opulent, including a recreation of a Venetian canal, furnished but unoccupied bedrooms, and a winding maze belowstairs where Mifanwy finally encounters some of her own living mirror images and the reality of her obsession. It’s Bluebeard’s castle in the midst of modern London, a juxtaposition that enhances the supernatural elements of the film and Paul and Mifanwy’s connection. Mirrors line the corridor (it’s the titular role!) of Paul’s home, reflecting and refracting Paul and Mifanwy’s characters, pasts, and aspirations. A fluid camera style emphasizes the dreamy quality of this world, and its potential to slide very quickly into a nightmare.
That element of the fairy-tale, once again referencing Beauty and the Beast, permeates Mifanwy’s existence outside of the mansion as well as within. There are few scenes that actually seem to take place within a recognizable reality of 1948 London, England, or Wales. When she travels with her friend and would-be lover Owen (Hugh Sinclair), in an effort to escape Paul’s dominance, the windswept landscape seems outside a tactile reality. Mifanwy herself exists within her own dreams; she has difficulty in leaving them, even when separated from Paul.
In many ways, Paul develops more as a facet of Mifanwy’s imagination than she of his, despite his late insistence that she’s the reincarnation of an image in a painting. The dreaminess of Romney’s performance sets Mifanwy apart from her surroundings even before Paul’s introduction. She doesn’t fit in with the trappings of the modern world, and her detachment from others around her makes greater sense of her affinity with Paul and acceptance of his increasingly outlandish claims. Paul is a dream lover—Byronic, impassioned, apparently outside of time or place—but ultimately has no greater substance than that. It’s no accident that the audience first sees Paul as a wax figure in a museum, next as an insubstantial figure apparently manifesting on a balcony, and again as a series of mirror images; to us, as to Mifanwy, he’s never entirely flesh and blood.
The film itself suffers a little from this lack of substance, missing some connecting elements that would draw more clearly the contrast between the reality of the outside world and the world that Paul and Mifanwy construct for each other. The soundtrack at times drowns out the imagery, as though Young (directing solo for the first time) didn’t trust his plot enough to hit the proper emotional beats. The final act, somewhat predictable (or perhaps fatalistic) in itself, tries for a clearer solution to story than the rest of the film has set up for. In many ways, Corridor of Mirrors aspires to be that modern-day version of Beauty and the Beast that so much of its imagery conjures but opts finally for a pat ending to a story better left as a dream.
Kino-Lorber has, as always, given us a clean, beautiful restoration of a seminal British film. Even if Corridor of Mirrors is ultimately insubstantial, that is also a part of its charm, and its strangeness. It might be odd, a little meandering, and occasionally incoherent, but then…that’s what dreams are made of.