The story is standard melodramatic noir though apparently De Havilland was dabbling in method acting at the time and asked all immediate fellow cast members to seek psychotherapy. Some rudimentary techniques are used to allow De Havilland to play scenes against herself and, while nowhere are majestic as modern examples such as Jeremy Irons in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, for its time it works incredibly well. Olivia De Havilland plays twins who both enter the circles of suspicion over a doctor’s murder in New York. Whereas The Spiral Staircase anticipates the slasher film by a few decades, The Dark Mirror is an early example of Hollywood’s obsession with abnormal psychology that would culminate in films like Psycho. Most well known for his other 1946 release The Killers, Siodmak also released two further films that year both of which laying groundwork for stories that would become a future obsession of Hollywood. This week’s films are from across different genres and continents but all cover the subject of women making important and, sometimes, life or death decisions whilst being under the duress of men.Īvailable on Blu-Ray through Arrow Academy’s 4 Film Noir Classics Box set or as a standalone disc.Īs someone with an often misspelled surname and first name I can understand, empathetically, the problems faced by the director Richard Siodmak as displayed by this brilliant on set photo from a later film.
SUPER HEALTH CLUB SCENES RICHARD SERIES
Welcome to the second edition of this, to use the language of streaming, limited series covering my A to Z marathon over lockdown. QUAD's Facilities Officer Daryn Shepherd is using his free time during lockdown to complete an A - Z of cinema, which he will be documenting here on our blog.