The New Pictures

The Dark Mirror (Universal-International) begins with a shadow-menaced shot of a corpse, then plunges headlong into a feverish chase after a knife-wielding paranoiac killer. Made with considerable style, it is a more diverting whodunit than most of the current crop of movies that mix homicide with psychiatry. Thanks to some suave legerdemain in its direction and playing, it even gives the impression of being a better movie than it is.

The excellent opening scenes, tight-packed with sharply observed detail, are models of celluloid suspense. Police Detective Thomas Mitchell coldly interviews the victim's neighbors until he tracks down Suspect Olivia de Havilland, hard at work behind her cigar counter. To the detective's consternation, Miss de Havilland has an identical twin. One of the girls was too near the scene of the crime. But the police cannot get a murder indictment without knowing for certain which girl has the unbreakable alibi. The twins themselves aren't talking.

At about this point, unhappily, the picture begins to renege on its early promise. The thrills continue but their quality diminishes. Psychiatrist Lew Ayres, a specialist on the personalities of twins, sets out to discover which girl is which. By falling in love with the sweet, normal Miss de Havilland, he runs the risk of getting his back stabbed by the just-as-pretty De Havilland who is criminally insane.

Most of The Dark Mirror's high surface polish can be attributed to 1) oldtime Satevepost Fictioneer Nunnally Johnson, who produced and wrote the screenplay, and 2) Director Robert Siodmak, who makes a fairly regular habit of getting his name associated with slick first-rate thrillers (The Spiral Staircase, The Killers).

As the maddening set of twins, Olivia de Havilland does a neat job of keeping everyone, including the audience, properly baffled. Lew Ayres, who left Hollywood under a wartime cloud in 1942 when he registered as a conscientious objector, makes his first postwar screen appearance. Whether because of the fan and exhibitor furor about his C.O. status, or because of his 22 months Pacific service as a noncombatant Medical Corps sergeant and chaplain's assistant, the Ayres face and screen personality have undergone a startling change. With little remaining resemblance to the confused kid of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), or even to brash young Dr. Kildare, Actor Ayres now looks and acts every one of his 37 years.

The Bachelor's Daughters (Andrew Stone-United Artists) is a pleasant slice of hokum with a predictable plot, but it achieves an endearing and fairly unusual quality which the trade likes to refer to as "heart."

The amiable little story involves four department-store salesgirls (Claire Trevor, Gail Russell, Jane Wyatt, Ann Dvorak) who long for a flashy stage setting to help them catch millionaire husbands. They hit on the scheme of pooling their room rents and leasing a $300-a-month Long Island house. A nice retired saleslady (Billie Burke) agrees to act as their mother. After a bit of high-pressure persuasion, the store's pinchpenny fop of a floorwalker (Adolphe Menjou) is dragged along as a window-dressing husband & father.

This moth-eaten plot, nimbly performed, takes on a restful, unpretentious air. Most rewarding performance is Menjou's as the crusty, fussy bachelor, who finally works as hard bailing his "daughters" out of jams as any real, doting father would. Most unusual performance: the boy friend of one of the salesladies, played--mostly at the piano, fortunately--by Eugene List, the G.I. pianist who entertained Truman, Churchill, Stalin and other notables at the Potsdam Conference.

White Tie and Tails (Universal-International) takes place in the never-never land of romantic farce. It is an agile, simpleminded frolic about a butler, an heiress and a gambler. Dan Duryea, whose pinched, deep-frozen face has heretofore made him particularly suited to playing down-at-heel mugs, is oddly cast as a typically uppity butler.

One night when his rich employers are vacationing in Florida, the butler borrows his absent boss's dress suit and town car to play gentleman (he isn't really a butler at heart, of course--only an unsuccessful painter). Before he knows it, he has rescued a lady in danger (Ella Raines) by indiscreetly signing a hot check for $103,000 payable to a tough-skinned, softhearted gambling king (William Bendix).

By the time hero & heroine begin to wriggle out of the underworld's clutches, the unwinding plot is too glib and fast to follow. So are the sociological overtones of the young couple's last-reel decision to starve in an artist's garret rather than gorge in a butler's pantry.

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