Mirage (1965)

Mirage is a 1965 suspense thriller directed by Edward Dmytryk. Although in fact the exact genre to which this film should be assigned remains uncertain for much of its running time. It’s part psychological thriller and part crime thriller with suggestions that it might at any moment veer off in the direction of the espionage thriller, the techno-thriller or even science fiction.

Gregory Peck stars as David Stillwell. At least he believes his name is David Stillwell. That’s about the only thing he’s fairly certain of and he’s really not at all sure even about that.

David Stillwell has had a rather puzzling day. People keep greeting him as though they hadn’t seen him for a long time, even when they saw him the day before. And then there’s the girl on the stairway who is sure she knows him. He’s equally sure he’s never met her. They met on the stairway during the blackout, the blackout being another puzzling thing about David’s day. The power went off all over the building, just about the time that noted do-gooder Charles Calvin jumped from the 27th floor.

Calvin’s suicide is definitely puzzling although David is fairly sure it has nothing to do with his problems. But then, given that David cannot remember anything at all that happened prior to the last two years, and can remember precious little that has happened since, he can’t possibly say there can’t be a connection.

And did I mention the guy who pulled a gun on him in his apartment? The guy who told David he was about to take a trip to Barbados where he would meet the Major. And he was to be sure to bring his briefcase with him, although this is another puzzle because his briefcase is completely empty.

It’s not surprising that after a day like this David Stillwell should decide to see a psychiatrist. Only the psychiatrist doesn’t want to see him. David decides the next best thing would be a private detective. That’s what private detectives do for a living, isn’t it? Find out stuff about people. So a private detective should be able  to tell him who he is. Unfortunately his confidence in this particular PI, Ted Caselle(Walter Matthau), is not enhanced when Caselle tells him this is his very first case.

There is only so much even the best PI can do. Ultimately it’s up to David to remember whatever it is that he doesn’t really want to remember. It’s something that shattered all his illusions and exposed the hypocrisy of the professional do-gooders of this world. His big problem is that remembering is only going to be possible if he can stay alive long enough and there are obviously people who do not intend that he should survive. 

Gregory Peck is ideally cast here as a regular guy who responds to his extraordinary circumstances in a very ordinary way. He is scared, confused and angry. Peck has no trouble convincing us that he is one very confused guy, and being Gregory Peck he’s also a fairly likeable kind of guy so the audience is going to be on his side from the start.

Walter Matthau provides some low-key comic relief although Caselle is not played entirely for laughs. It’s not that kind of film. It’s an intense kind of film so any overt comedy would be out of place but Matthau’s brand of sly understated humour provides a welcome break in the tension.

Diane Baker as Shela has to be mysterious, which she manages well, and she also has to be a kind of low-key femme fatale (I’m using the term low-key a lot but that’s the sort of movie it is). It’s a generally effective performance.

Edward Dmytryk had plenty of experience with this type of movie (having directed film noir classics like Murder, My Sweet and psychological dramas such as The Caine Mutiny) and he’s always in full control.

Universal’s DVD release provides a rather grainy anamorphic transfer. The graininess may be inherent in the source materials and may well have been a deliberate choice. It certainly doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the film.

Mirage is an effective offbeat thriller that keeps the audience guessing. We really have no idea where this movie is going until quite late in proceedings. There’s more than a hint of film noir (or possibly neo-noir, this being 1965). Highly recommended.

The Caine Mutiny (1954)

By the end of the 1940s Humphrey Bogart was growing tired of tough guy roles and was seeking to expand his range as an actor. This led him to take on roles in romantic comedies (Sabrina), adventure romances (The African Queen) and offbeat comedy thrillers (Beat the Devil). It also led him to take on one of his most acclaimed roles of the 50s, in the war drama The Caine Mutiny (which earned him his third Oscar nomination).

The Caine Mutiny is a war movie with very little action. It’s more concerned with psychological stresses and moral choices and it deals with those themes in a more complex way than you’d expect in a Hollywood movie.



It is 1944 and Ensign Willie Keith has been assigned to his first shipboard posting. To say that the posting comes as a disappointment to the wealthy young Yale-educated officer would be an understatement. The USS Caine is not exactly the most glamorous ship in the fleet. In fact it’s just about the bottom of the barrel. It’s a battered destroyed converted for minesweeping duties and it may well be the slackest ship in the US Navy. Keith has an opportunity to take a much more glamorous appointment on an admiral’s staff but he is shamed into remaining on board the Caine.

It’s not that that the Caine is an unhappy ship. The captain is easy-going, the atmosphere is relaxed. It’s just that the captain is a bit too easy-going and the atmosphere a bit too relaxed. No-one on the Caine gives a damn. Being an officer on the Caine is a dead end. The Caine is engaged mostly in boring routine duties such a target-towing and there are no opportunities for an ambitious officer to distinguish himself.



All that is about to change when the ship gets a new captain. Lieutenant-Commander Philip Francis Queeg is regular navy, not a reservist, and he believes in doing thing the navy way. He is determined to enforce some discipline. That does not please the Caine’s officers. The previous captain had allowed the executive officer, Lieutenant Maryk (Van Johnson), to more or less run the ship and he’d allowed officers like Lieutenant Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray) to do whatever they wanted. So Keefer, a cynical intellectual, had divided his time between working on his novel and complaining. Clearly he believes that it’s a shocking injustice that a man of his exceptional gifts should have to do anything as tedious as doing his duty.

Keefer immediately sets out to undermine Queeg’s authority. Unfortunately for Lt-Commander Queeg he’s rather vulnerable to Keefer’s attacks on his authority. Queeg has seen almost continuous active service since the war began and he’s close to being burnt out. His nerves have been shaken and he makes mistakes. With loyal and competent officers to support him he would undoubtedly overcome those problems, but he’s not going to find loyal and competent officers on the Caine.



To compound these problems Queeg has an approach to command that is entirely foreign to the Caine. He believes in the importance of the little things and is enraged by he slovenliness of the crew. And he’s inclined to be prickly and to obsess over minor infractions of regulations. This gives Keefer (who fancies himself as an amateur psychologist) the perfect opportunity to paint the captain as a paranoid neurotic. And even more unfortunately it creates a situation where the basically decent and loyal executive officer Maryk is inclined to listen to Keefer’s promptings. Finally, after Queeg has made several apparent errors of judgment, Maryk is persuaded to relieve Queeg of his command. Maryk and Keith (who was officer of the deck at the time) now face a court martial at which they will have to justify their extraordinary actions.

This rather far-fetched plot could easily have collapsed but it’s saved by two things - the quality of the acting and the ambiguity of the situation that led to the mutiny. Bogart gives a bravura performance. He avoids making Queeg merely a ridiculous figure and gives him a certain tragic dignity. Because this story is a tragedy. Queeg is not a bad man and he’s not even a bad captain, he’s just seen too much action and he’s tired and he’s increasingly isolated as his officers turn on him. Maryk can be seen as an equally tragic figure, a competent officer with a fatal flaw - he’s a weak man who forgets where his duty lies and is manipulated into committing the ultimate act of disloyalty.



The key question is, when the typhoon hits, is it Queeg who loses his nerve or is it Lieutenant Maryk? It’s a question that the movie leaves open and this is its greatest strength. Queeg certainly exhibits signs of instability, but does this actually make him unfit for command? When he asks his officers to support him, in the film’s most moving scene, they ignore him.

Van Johnson’s subtle performance as Maryk is superbly effective. Fred MacMurray was always at his best playing slimy villains and Lieutenant Keefer is as slimy as they come. José Ferrer is excellent as the defence counsel who would have been far happier prosecuting this case.



Edward Dmytryk wisely doesn’t try anything fancy. He has a superb cast and he’s content to allow the actors to carry the story, which they do in fine style. The Caine Mutiny is a fine example of 1950s Hollywood film-making.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

In 1942 RKO had filmed Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely as one of their Falcon B-movies, with Philip Marlowe replaced by the Falcon, Gay Lawrence (played by George Sanders). Two years later they decided on a more straightforward adaptation, and with Edward Dmytryk directing Murder, My Sweet was the result.

With Dick Powell cast as Philip Marlowe RKO recognised they had a problem. Powell was still known almost exclusively as a lightweight star of musicals and there was a danger that audiences would assume that Farewell, My Lovely was a musical. Hence the name change, to make it clear that this was a murder mystery thriller.

Powell was keen to change his image and this movie accomplished that purpose fairly successfully. He went on to make quite a few notable movies in the film noir canon.



John Paxton wrote the screenplay, making some changes to the plot but keeping much of Chandler’s dazzling hardboiled dialogue. Marlowe is hired by Moose Molloy (Mike Mazurki) to find his girlfriend Velma. Moose has been in the penitentiary for eight years and it’s been six years since he had a letter from her. She used to be a dancer at a joint called Florian’s but the bar has changed hands and no-one knows anything of her. Most guys in Moose’s position would have figured out that Velma probably doesn’t want him to find her, but once Moose gets an idea in his head it’s pointless trying to reason with him. This is obvious to Marlowe, but Moose’s money is as good as anyone else’s.

Then Marlowe gets another client, who offers him a large amount of money to accompany him to a rendezvous where he is to buy back a jade necklace stolen from a lady friend. It sounds like easy money but the client ends up dead and Marlowe finds himself drawn into an increasingly complicated web as it becomes obvious that the two cases are linked.



Chandler hated crime stories with genius detectives who know the identity of the murderer almost from the moment they take on a case. He liked to have his detective stumble about in the dark making all kinds of wrong assumptions, often with disastrous consequences, before finally putting all the pieces together. Paxton’s screenplay preserves this approach. A slight weakness of the script is the ending which is a little too upbeat to be truly Chandlerian. It’s not a fatal flaw though.

Claire Trevor is the femme fatale, a type of role she played fairly often and usually pretty well. Anne Shirley is the good girl, in her final film role. There are strong performances from the support cast with Miles Mander and Otto Kruger being particularly good.



But for my money Mike Mazurki steals the picture as Moose Molloy. The former professional wrestler started his film career in the early 40s and was still working into the late 80s. He made countless films playing minor roles as heavies but this was one of the rare occasions when he got a substantial and rewarding part that suited his talents and he certainly made the most of it. He was one of those actors with a very limited range who was extremely effective indeed within that range.

Then there’s Dick Powell, and he has always been the most problematical feature of this movie. The first time I saw this film I felt that he was entirely miscast. On a second viewing his performance was a lot more impressive. He’s not really convincing as a tough guy, but then Philip Marlowe was never really as a tough guy either. That’s part of the essential character of Marlowe. He’s not a Sam Spade. Sam Spade was a real tough guy, and a cynical amoral opportunist. Marlowe on the other hand always comes across as being more like an actor trying to impersonate a tough guy. Sometimes he convinces people. Sometime he convinces himself.



The truth is that Marlowe is too sensitive to enjoy violence and has too active a conscience to be totally cynical. That’s why Bogart was so good as Sam Spade, and (in my opinion) not quite right as Marlowe. And that’s why Dick Powell’s performance does in fact work. The times when his performance falters a little actually work in his favour, making Marlowe vulnerable. The odd thing is that Chandler preferred Bogart in the role, which possibly shows that an author isn’t necessarily the person to listen to when you’re adapting a book. I’m still not sure that Dick Powell was the ideal actor to play Marlowe but he is definitely closer to the Marlowe of the books than most actors who’ve attempted the role. I still think Robert Mitchum in the 1975 Farewell, My Lovely is the definitive Marlowe even if he was a least a decade too old at the time, and I still think it’s a tragedy that Mitchum didn’t get to play this role in the 1940s.

Edward Dmytryk goes all out for atmosphere in this adaptation. Like Howard Hawks with The Big Sleep Dmytryk understands that with Chandler you don’t worry too much about the plot, you worry about getting the feel right. Dmytryk and his director of photography Harry Wild go for shadows in a big way. And fog. Wild would go on to photograph lots more film noir.



The Warner Home Video DVD came out in 2004 but is still available in the first of their film noir boxed sets. It’s a beautiful transfer and includes a commentary track by Alain Silver.

This is one of the movies that defined the film noir visual style, and one of the movies that post-war French critics pinpointed as representing a dramatic new approach to the American crime film when they invented the concept of film noir. As such it’s essential viewing.

Cornered (1945)

Dick Powell started his career as a juvenile lead in the classic early 1930s Warner Brothers musicals such as 42nd Street. By the mid-40s he was getting much too old for such roles and tried to reinvent himself as a hardboiled actor in crime ovies. He had some success with this in 1944 with Murder, My Sweet (based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely) and directed by Edward Dmytryk. Cornered in 1945, also helmed by Dmytryk, was his second such role, but the film is much less successful and Powell’s performance is much less convincing.

Powell plays Laurence Gerard, a Canadian pilot who had been shot down over occupied France during the war. Agents of the French Resistance had helped him escape back to England, and he had fallen in love with and married one of them. She was later rounded up with other Resistance fighters and shot by the Germans. When the war ends Gerard is determined to find out who betrayed his young wife, and returns to France looking for answers. He learns that a French collaborator named Marcel Jarnac was responsible, and sets out to track him down. The trail leads him to Argentina.

I was a little surprised that a movie made so soon after the end of the war should concern itself with conspiracy theories about ex-nazis on the run in South America. Many of the people involved in making the film were later blacklisted, and it does have a very strident anti-fascist tone.

Unfortunately the plot is over-complicated and relies too much on coincidence. Powell is deadly dull. I guess he was trying to appear burnt out by the war, but it’s difficult to care much about his character. Thee are a couple of entertaining turns by members of the supporting cast, especially Walter Slezak as a mysterious and ambiguous figure who both helps and hinders Gerard’s investigation.

It’s a surprisingly brutal movie, especially the scene in which Gerard finally encounters Jarnac. Overall it’s reasonable entertainment if you enjoy 1940s B-movies with a hint of film noir. Worth catching if it shows up on cable, but not really worth a purchase.