Better Late Then Never

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Edana Romney (Mifanwy) receives a telegram to meet up with an ex-lover Eric Portman (Paul Mangin) in London at the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. She arrives at the pre-arranged rendez-vous next to Marie Antoinette and as she waits, she daydreams……….and we are taken back in flashback to the days of her love affair with Portman. He is a wealthy artist with some definitely strange ideas. He lives in the past. Literally. And he believes Edana is part of his destiny. Theirs is a 400 year love affair which needs sorting out.It's a good-looking film with a huge house at the centre of the proceedings. It's atmospheric and the costumes are great. There is definitely an unworldly feel as the film develops and the story will keep you guessing as to what is going on in the mind of strange Eric Portman. The acting is good all round, including the minor characters, with a mention to singer Joan Maude (Caroline) who plays a crucial role. The dialogue is funny at times with Romney's father, Bruce Belfrage (Sir David), coming out with the classic "…hardest hard-on…". Listen out for it near the beginning of the film when Romney returns home to find Belfrage watching a film. It's hilarious.So, it's time to organize a Venetian ball…………just watch out if you are a female with long dark hair. You never know what type of nutter is in the area.

Deep brooding melding of numerous ideas and themes including riffs from Hitchcock, Beauty and the Beast, Val Lewton, Lewis Carrol, and on and on. Its the very Gothic tale of a woman who meets a man who may have loved her in the past. A triumph of the filmmakers art the story left me cold. I suspect that watching the film well after midnight was a bad idea where its lush visual pleasures helped me to nod off. I know that the films insistence about being about something didn't help, I wanted a 1940's mystery, what I got was psychological drama. I'm going to have to watch this again down the road when its much earlier in the evening.(It is great to look at though)

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.

This is expert, expert film making, rich in atmosphere and mood, and easily as good as the best gothics and psychological 'horror' films of the forties such as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Seventh Veil, or the Val Lewton works. I don't think there was a single scene that did not hold my attention. I could not begin to enumerate all the little touches and flourishes of lighting, camera angle, dialog, story ideas, etc. but I particularly enjoyed the seamless interweaving of references to Lewis Carroll's Alice (when Edana Romney follows the white cat (white rabbit surrogate) through the labyrhinthine corridors of the mansion, or to Othello/Romeo and Juliet at the Venetian ball, or again to Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. Some compare this film to to Cocteau (it's on the video box), with its ornate and detailed set, as well as its theme, but Corridor of Mirrors for all its fine acting, atmosphere, and mastery of technique is not genius. It is not poetically simple. But if you liked any of the films mentioned above, you will definitely enjoy watching dark, mysterious leading lady Edana Romney (who also co wrote the screenplay) search for the inner resources to free herself from the spell of an incredibly intense and psychologically compelling, but morbid, life.