Mirage

I rented this in honor of Walter Matthau - and he was the liveliest part of this film - the screen really came alive when he was on screen. I love Greg Peck - but he was pretty low key in the part, maybe a little too much so. Diane Baker was quite good - her career was really on an upswing when she made this film - wonder why she didn't become a bigger star.

Definitely an entertaining movie - with some nice twists and turns to keep you interested all the way to the end.

Edward Dmytryk may have been poaching in Alfred Hitchcock territory in directing Mirage, but I can hardly see how Hitchcock could have done the film any better. In fact I'm convinced that Gregory Peck was cast in the lead on the strength of his performance in the Hitchcock classic Spellbound, the parts are so similar.

Gregory Peck when we first meet him is making his way down the stairs of a skyscraper that has sustained a blackout. As people talk to him who seem to know him he answers with the appropriate small talk, but he doesn't remember anything other than his name. At the same time, a prominent foundation leader, Walter Abel, plunged to his death from that skyscraper and of course the Peck's amnesia and Abel's death are connected. But in this case the whole point of Mirage is remembering how. And Peck better remember soon because people like Jack Weston, George Kennedy and House Jameson keep trying to kill him.

As in Spellbound, the amnesiac Peck has a woman friend trying to help him. But there was no doubt about Ingrid Bergman's loyalty to Peck in trying to unravel his situation there. Diane Baker has the same function in this film, but there is some doubt as to whose team she's actually playing on. Similarly there is Kevin McCarthy who seems a friend at first, but later on we're not so sure. McCarthy has a key role in bringing the whole affair to a climax.

The ruthless villain of the piece is Leif Erickson who started in films playing the fathead rival to whomever the hero was in a film. As he got older, directors saw greater potential in him and used him in a lot of more serious parts, mostly villainous and this one is one of his best.

Although I think the film is great, Gregory Peck kind of fluffed it off, my guess is also that his role is too much like the part he did in amnesia. But he did according to the Michael Freedland biography of Peck, recommend to Eddie Dmytryk that he cast Walter Matthau in the role of the private detective who Peck goes to. Peck also consults Robert H. Harris a psychiatrist and both the shrink and the gumshoe come to the same conclusion that Peck really doesn't want to remember his recent past, possibly because of some trauma. Matthau's role in Mirage was one of his best character roles prior to getting stardom with his Oscar winning performance in The Fortune Cookie. Harris is also quite good, in fact he's my favorite in the cast.

Although the similarities between Spellbound and Mirage are too obvious to overlook, one should not belabor the obvious. Mirage is a fine enough suspense thriller to stand on its own. And Alfred Hitchcock would not have minded being mistakenly credited with directing it.

This wonderfully ingenious mystery is one of the better faux Hitchock films out there. The setup is excellent, the mystery comes quick and keeps deepening, and the cast is solid, especially Matthau.

The mystery is clever and the solution is also pretty clever and holds together nicely. So the whole movie *should* be great.

But as ingenious as it is, the creators couldn't find a neat way to explain it all, resulting in a bit too much exposition in the last quarter.

And once the central mystery is solved, there is still a story to deal with, and the movie really struggles with that, in part because it seems afraid to really deal with the political issues it raises, like some movie from the 40s that tries to follow the plight of an unwed mother without mentioning sex. It's not that I didn't understand the whole story by the end, but that the resolution had a strange, muted feeling to it.

Still, overall this is well worth watching.

I saw "Mirage" on television shortly after its theatrical release (1965) and I never quite forgot it, especially the part about the stairs that lead to nowhere, and the dream scene where the two men are standing under the tree on the lawn. My earliest recollection of seeing "Spellbound" was a decade or two later. Both movies feature Gregory Peck in the role of an amnesiac that may have committed a murder, and even though I was greatly intrigued by the similarity, I was keenly aware of the fact that it was not the same movie that I remembered from the '60s. These two movies are each intriguing in their own right, and the unlikely similarity between them only adds to that intrigue. Eventually I saw "Mirage" again just a couple of years after seeing "Spellbound", and I was glad at having finally untangled these two movies in my mind.

Another similarity shared by these two movies is that in both movies, the character played by Gregory Peck is befriended by a charming young woman, played by Ingrid Bergman in "Spellbound" and by Diane Baker in "Mirage". Both movies also incorporate the use of surreal dream sequences. "Spellbound" is of course noted for its use of dream sequences that were created by Salvidor Dali.

"Spellbound" has the feel of a Hitchcock movie from an earlier era, whereas "Mirage" has the feel of a movie made in the middle '60s, and one that could have been made by Hitchcock at that later date. They are both good movies, but personally I prefer "Mirage", and I think that "Spellbound" would be largely forgotten were it not for the inclusion of the Dali dream sequences and for the fact that Hitchcock directed it. The dream sequences in "Spellbound" are far more surreal than the dream sequences in "Mirage", and they are brought to consciousness through psychoanalysis. In "Mirage" the plot is more intricate (which is to be expected of a movie that was made in the '60s as compared to one made in the '40s) and the dream sequences, which occur as spontaneous flashbacks, are more involved with the unfolding of that more intricate plot. In "Mirage", the character makes a couple of hasty visits to a psychiatrist while trying to understand what is going on with his mind, and it is during the first such visit that he comes to grips with the fact that he is suffering from amnesia. The psychiatrist helps him to understand what is going on with his mind, but there is no psychoanalysis. Interestingly, whereas psychiatry is treated with due respect in the movie made in the '40s, the psychiatrist is practically made fun of in the movie made in the '60s.

Both movies are certainly entertaining to watch, and anyone who has found either of these two movies enjoyable will almost certainly enjoy the other one as well. You may also derive some satisfaction from the untangling of your memories of these two uncannily similar movies.

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, this film shows Gregory Peck suffering from amnesia and he soon learns it's a life and death situation. He tries to recover his memory before those who are trying to kill him succeed. He tries to make sense of it all. I found it exceedingly difficult to stay with it because there seemed to be no ending, but wait!! What a way to go to recover what happened and why! The film takes place in New York, and the acting and music are sure winners! Walter Mathau, Diane Baker, Kevin McCarthy, Walter Abel all show great intensity in feeling and emotion. 7/10