Corridor of Mirrors 1948 – The Last Drive In

Corridor of Mirrors (1948)

Directed by Terence Young, and starring Eric Portman, Edana Romney, and Barbara Mullen. The script was co-written by Edana Romney.

Terence Young plays Paul Mangin who thinks he is Cesare Borgia reincarnated and that Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney) is his lost love from a previous life. Appearances by Christopher Lee and Valentine Dyall.

Terence Young’s film is a masterpiece of exquisite filmmaking, immersing the audience 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, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre.

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 evoked 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.

With beautiful music by composer Georges Auric!