the mirror

"Not only is it a good painting, it's also you."
"Can you tell that so quickly?"
-- exchange between Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) and the woman (Joan Bennet) whose portrait he has been admiring in a window, from Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944).

"Mother isn't -- m-my Mother, uh -- What is the phrase?
  She isn't quite herself today."
-- Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) 

Movies often invoke mirrors to indicate when characters might be harboring ulterior motives, or divided loyalties, or ambivalent emotions.  So it's not surprising that the mirror has become such a staple of film noir, where doppelgangers and double crosses are as commonplace as, oh, blackmail and murder.   Listen closely to a character who is reflected in a mirror: he or she may not be telling the whole story, factually or emotionally.

Like doorways and windows (hint, hint), mirrors may also be used to suggest glimpses into other dimensions -- dreams, nightmares, fears, illusions, alternate plots or plans -- of which the characters themselves may or may not be fully aware...

	Edward G. Robinson pauses to gaze at a (framed) portrait of a beautiful woman, when her mirror-like reflection appears in the window  in Friz Lang's aptly titled masterpiece, The Woman In the Window  -- a film that itself has a double of sorts: Lang made the equally brilliant Scarlet Street (1945),  the following year [see below] and cast the same principal actors (Robinson, Bennett, Dan Duryea) in similar roles (victim of fate, tempting young woman, scheming villain).
The Woman in the Window (1944): Moments after a murder in self defense, Prof. Wanley (Robinson) and Alice (Bennett) are reflected in mirrors -- indicating  there could be more complications to their unfolding nightmare than meets the eye.  Turns out, she's been leading a double life, seeing a married man on the sly. And by going to Alice's apartment against his own good judgement, he's found himself through the looking glass.
	Alice's bedroom in The Woman in the Window (1944) also features mirrored walls.  Are there other, un-dreamt-of dimensions to Prof. Wanley's  "dream girl"?
Two sides of Chris (Angie Dickinson) are reflected in a mirror at the head of a bed in John Boorman's harsh and cerebral neo-noir Point Blank (1967). But which one is real? Walker (Lee Marvin) enlists her in his plan to avenge himself on some syndicate men by getting her to seduce one of them.
	At the funhouse climax of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1948), multiple mirrors reflect the multiple planes of fabrication and deception surrounding and closing in upon the characters, until no one can tell what is real and what is illusion...
All illusions, plans, and pretenses  are shattered in the final scenes of Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai (1948).  Here, Everett Sloan crawls among sharp, brittle fragments of smashed loyalties and broken dreams.
	Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) takes a decidedly noir-ish approach to horror (and has a well-developed "double" motif running all the way through).  In these two frames from the early scene in which Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) checks into the Bates Motel under an assumed name, the mirror images hint that both she and Norman (Anthony Perkins) may be involved in some form of duplicity.
Early in his career, American filmmaker Joseph Losey directed noirish films with such deliciously dark titles as The Prowler, The Concrete Jungle, Chance Meeting and Finger of Guilt.   Losey even did a 1951 remake of Fritz Lang's M -- before the Hollywood blacklist drove him into exile in Britain. There he filmed Harold Pinter's The Servant (1963), a noir-styled psychological thriller about a manservant (Dirk Bogarde) who usurps the authority of his employer (James Fox).  Here, Bogarde dominates the frame, polishing a distorting mirror that contains the small image of Fox, who becomes a captive in his own home.
	The Dark Room's mirror was created from this image of actress-turned-director Ida Lupino in Beware, My Lovely (1952).

back into the dark room