A well-to-do wife and mother (Edana Romney) travels to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London to rendezvous with an old flame (Eric Portman) executed ten years before as their strange, tragic romance unfolds in flashback.
The director of DR. NO blends Hitchcock with Cocteau in this psychological pseudo-"period" melodrama with Gothic overtones that is equal parts REBECCA and VERTIGO as filtered through BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Reincarnation (maybe), obsession, fetish, romance, madness and murder are interwoven in an opulently stylized, dream-like tale. The unusual plot involving a past affair with one of Mme. Tussaud's wax-work murderers is absorbing and holds the interest from the outset. There's a literal as well as symbolic "corridor of mirrors" and many small touches that make the story come alive. Eric Portman plays wealthy Paul Mangin, a man living in the past, who holds a strange fascination for an impressionable young girl and goes from frightening to vulnerable over the course of the film. Edana Romney (a British cross between Mexico's Maria Felix and Hollywood's Faith Domergue) plays Mifanwy Conway (love that name!) and brings this seemingly frivolous character to life as her situation becomes increasingly more disturbing. Their ill-fated union plays out in Mangin's Venetian-style mansion where time stands still and Mifanwy almost comes to believe they were once lovers in fifteenth-century Italy but when she starts using her head instead of her heart, tragedy follows. In a film with many visual images that will stay in the mind long after it's over, the high point comes during a Venetian costume ball and a satisfying denouement ties up every loose end save one -the lady's still a dead ringer for the Rensiassance temptress in a 400 year-old painting Mangin fell in love with during the war. The literary references scattered throughout include "Otello", "Wuthering Heights" and "Through The Looking Glass" while the lovers' first waltz foreshadows Vincente Minnelli's MADAME BOVARY made the following year. Christopher Lee and Lois Maxwell ("Miss Moneypenny" in director Young's James Bond films) have small roles.
Unusual and hypnotic.
The director of DR. NO blends Hitchcock with Cocteau in this psychological pseudo-"period" melodrama with Gothic overtones that is equal parts REBECCA and VERTIGO as filtered through BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Reincarnation (maybe), obsession, fetish, romance, madness and murder are interwoven in an opulently stylized, dream-like tale. The unusual plot involving a past affair with one of Mme. Tussaud's wax-work murderers is absorbing and holds the interest from the outset. There's a literal as well as symbolic "corridor of mirrors" and many small touches that make the story come alive. Eric Portman plays wealthy Paul Mangin, a man living in the past, who holds a strange fascination for an impressionable young girl and goes from frightening to vulnerable over the course of the film. Edana Romney (a British cross between Mexico's Maria Felix and Hollywood's Faith Domergue) plays Mifanwy Conway (love that name!) and brings this seemingly frivolous character to life as her situation becomes increasingly more disturbing. Their ill-fated union plays out in Mangin's Venetian-style mansion where time stands still and Mifanwy almost comes to believe they were once lovers in fifteenth-century Italy but when she starts using her head instead of her heart, tragedy follows. In a film with many visual images that will stay in the mind long after it's over, the high point comes during a Venetian costume ball and a satisfying denouement ties up every loose end save one -the lady's still a dead ringer for the Rensiassance temptress in a 400 year-old painting Mangin fell in love with during the war. The literary references scattered throughout include "Otello", "Wuthering Heights" and "Through The Looking Glass" while the lovers' first waltz foreshadows Vincente Minnelli's MADAME BOVARY made the following year. Christopher Lee and Lois Maxwell ("Miss Moneypenny" in director Young's James Bond films) have small roles.
Unusual and hypnotic.