(1946)

Starring Olivia de Havilland, Lew Ayres, Thomas Mitchell; dir; Robert Siodmak


Freudian thought really took off in 1940s America, and movies reflected this in numerous ways. With its shrink-as-protagonist angle, this Siodmak confection sits alongside Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and The Dark Past (1948) in one subset of Hollywood Freudiana.

Siodmak’s German Expressionist roots emerge in conventional visual cues like (eponymous) mirrors and pointedly handled dissolves, such as the one between good twin Ruth and the psychiatrist Dr Elliott (Ayres). What is surprising is how seamless the two-shots throughout of the two Olivias are – not for this director the expected obligatory seam disguised as a window or door frame, bisecting the ‘mirroring’ between the identical twins she plays. Credit for this technical coup appears due Eugen Schüfftan, the veteran of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) whom Darragh O’Donoghue identifies (see link below) as the uncredited creator of The Dark Mirror ’s superb FX.

But unfortunately The Dark Mirror is so contrived it overshadows all this. A degree of contrivance is acknowledged in such a set-up – we expect this. But here the absurdity is more than faint. The critical problem is the lack of differentiation between the two Olivia personas, Terry and Ruth.  This central inadequacy is encapsulated in the film’s need to distinguish between them by having each wear a ludicrous bracelet spelling out either TERRY or RUTH in huge sparkling letters. It’s more suggestive of the treatment of puppies in a litter. Yet this does provide the movie’s best clue to its real impact: if you collapse them together, as their joint Olivia-ness compels viewers to do, you get T/RUTH. The ‘truth’ of this film is of a singular person at war with themselves, struggling to reconcile their conflicting drives.

I don’t believe Olivia de Havilland ever acted opposite her sister Joan Fontaine. Now that would’ve been a promising set-up to yield all sorts of opportunities, a prospect we can only speculate on in the wake of this film’s superficial gimmickry.

• Roger Westcombe