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on the part of the boomingly ge- nial Wade. Taylor-Compton (cer- tainly an experienced victim) is appealing and sympathetic, while her fellow roastees are equally believable (if not always as lik- able); and while the widescreen photography (2.40:1) may seem an odd choice for such a claus- trophobic tale, it works, thanks to the near-equal emphasis on what’s taking place outdoors. 247°F (often spelled out in cata- logues as 247 DEGREES FAHR- ENHEIT) follows the leader a bit too obviously to be as harrow- ing an experience as FROZEN itself but it lives up to its own modest ambitions and sustains itself through a satisfying con- clusion without resorting to any hokey contrivances.


Anchor Bay’s DVD is pre- sented in Dolby Digital 5.1 with a choice of subtitles in English or Spanish: the only extra is a 4m 19s sampling of deleted/ex- tended expositional moments from the early portion of the film. Aside from the bonus of a Dolby TrueHD sound mix, the Blu-ray version ($29.98) is identical.


THE DARK MIRROR


1946, Olive Films, 85m 18s, $24.95 (DVD), $29.95 (BD) By Tim Lucas


This entertaining murder mystery from Robert Siodmak (CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY, PHAN- TOM LADY) involves identical twins, making it a “whichdunit” rather than a “whodunit”, but that’s only one of its pleasures. It’s also one of the earliest films to incorporate modern psychia- try into its storytelling, appearing less than a year after Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND (1945), and it’s also technologically innovative, with cinematographer Milton Krasner (a veteran of two Invis- ible Man sequels, working here with a visual effects team that


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included an uncredited Eugen Schufftan) enabling star Olivia de Havilland to not only act oppo- site herself (which, after all, had been a camera trick since the days of Georges Méliès) but to actually touch and cradle her other self onscreen in illusions that must have astounded audi- ences of the day. (Not all of them succeed by contemporary stan- dards, and one is quite bad.) This was a full decade after Boris Karloff’s similarly good-and-evil dual role in THE BLACK ROOM (1935), but the technology avail- able at that time limited his char- acters’ interactions in ways that aren’t here. Nunnally Johnson (THE THREE FACES OF EVE) scripted from an original story by Vladimir Pozner, who was him- self leading a double life at the time as a later-outed Soviet spy. De Havilland plays sisters


Ruth and Terry Collins, who oc- casionally swap shifts at a kiosk job in an office building, one of whom is quickly implicated in the stabbing murder of a doctor with offices there. The sisters insist on


their innocence and protect each other by refusing to admit which is without an alibi. The courts are eventually obliged to drop the case, but negative publicity and public suspicion causes them to lose their jobs. Off the books, Police Lt. Stevenson (Thomas Mitchell) recruits psychiatrist Dr. Scott Elliott (Lew Ayres)—the author of a book on twins, casu- ally acquainted with the sisters— to hire them for a supposed research project, in fact a series of tests intended to determine which of them is the killer. As both Ruth and Terry fall in love with Scott, jealousy threatens to unmask the guilty party well in advance of the inkblot tests. Despite the dark subject mat- ter, the early part of the film seems to anticipate audience tit- ters in response to the special effects and responds with more humor than seems appropriate, but the opening shot alone im- mediately shows the hand of a master filmmaker. Cleverly, we’re apprised of character names (and roles) by having most of them


Still impressive optical effects allow Olivia de Havilland to share scenes with her own murderous twin in Robert Siodmak’s THE DARK MIRROR.


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