The Dark Mirror **** (1946, Olivia de Havilland, Lew Ayres, Thomas Mitchell) – Classic Movie Review 2273

Robert Siodmak directs one of Hollywood’s better Forties psychological film noir thrillers in 1946. It finds Olivia de Havilland on rousing form, enjoying herself enormously in two roles as identical twins Terry and Ruth Collins, one good, the other a murderess. Vladimir Pozner’s original story, in which woman suspected of murdering her doctor boyfriend has an identical twin sister, was nominated for an Oscar.

Lew Ayres and Thomas Mitchell co-star as the twins’ kindly psychiatrist Dr Scott Elliott and the relentless veteran detective Lieutenant Stevenson who have to puzzle out which sister is the man’s killer and which one is normal.

After Dr Frank Peralta is found stabbed to death through the heart in his apartment, two neighbours swear that they saw Ruth Collins leaving there late that night. But Ruth has a sister, Terry. Yet both twins have an alibi for the night of the murder and the shrink starts a series of tests to discover which twin committed the crime and meanwhile falls for the normal twin.

This is an excellent, suspenseful, entertaining mystery, tensely and smoothly directed from an absorbing screenplay by producer Nunnally Johnson, based on Pozner’s story. And there’s neat trick photography by Milton Krasner to make the twins possible and credible on screen, as well as another of Dimitri Tiomkin’s fine scores.

The film marked Ayres’s return to movies after his conscientious objection to service in World War Two. De Havilland was trying method acting and insisted that everyone in the cast met a psychiatrist.

It was remade for TV in 1984 with Jane Seymour as the twins and Vincent Gardenia as the cop.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2273

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