The Kiss Before the Mirror (Universal, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I continued our progress through the complete films of James Whale (though I haven’t yet received my grey-label orders of his last two features, Green Hell and They Dare Not Love) with his tw o productions from 1933, The Kiss Before the Mirror and The Invisible Man. I’ve written about both these films on the moviemagg blog before – my previous post on The Kiss Before the Mirror is at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/04/kiss-before-mirror-universal-1933.html) – and I’m grateful that Universal Home Video has made this one available on an official DVD, perhaps because the cast features at least two people recent moviegoers are likely to have heard of: Frank Morgan from The Wizard of Oz and Gloria Stuart from James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic. The Kiss Before the Mirror is a quite good movie but also an oddly schizoid onityy, and it’s occurred to me as we make our way through James Whale’s film in chronological order, it’s pointed up his one weakness as a director: his love of the British theatrical tradition, from which he emerged as a director first on stage and then on film (in the movie version of his star-making play, R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End), was so complete that when he hired an actor from it, he would let them overact big-time.

The Kiss Before the Mirror is a movie that could easily be remade today with only minor changes: celebrated Viennese criminal attorney Paul Held (Frank Morgan – a quite good serious role for the man best known today as the title character in The Wizard of Oz) is asked to defend his friend Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) for the murder of Bernsdorf’s wife Lucy (Gloria Stuart). We know he did it because we saw him in the film’s opening scene stalking his wife as she went to the home of her lover (Walter Pidgeon), was admitted and the two started to romance each other. In a later flashback scene Walter tells Held that the reason he suspected his wife was having an affair, and decided to follow her while holding a gun, was that earlier in the day he had seen her primping in front of a mirror in their home. He had leaned over to kiss her and she had recoiled, claiming he had spoiled her makeup and leading him to realize that the reason she was so elaborately prettying herself up was to meet an illicit lover. As Held prepares his case, mostly working at home (that sounds pretty contemporary!), he notices his own wife doing the same thing, getting herself ready for what appears to be a hot date with another man. He leans over to kiss her and gets the same reaction Walter did – she accuses him of ruining her makeup and drives him away – and he likewise stalks her and spots the other man in her life but decides to wait. His plan is to get Walter an acquittal on what would now be called a diminished-capacity defense, saying basically that he was driven so mad by jealousy that he shouldn’t be held legally responsible; and then, once he sets that as a court precedent, Paul will murder his own wife and make a similar claim.

The Kiss Before the Mirror began life as a play by Hungarian author Ladislas Fodor which premiered in Vienna in September 1932 – just eight months before the release of Whale’s film. The adaptation and screenplay for Whale’s film was done by William Anthony McGuire, who was best known as a writer of stage musicals – so, like the film’s star, its writer was someone being cast against “type” – and McGuire retained the theatricality of the original material. So did Whale; there are quite long scenes in which Morgan and Lukas stand in the center of the screen and declaim endlessly the way they would have in a play, and Morgan’s jailhouse interview with Lukas (which takes place, ironically, in a recycled set from Frankenstein; it was the cell in which Colin Clive and Edward Van Sloan locked up the Monster right after its creation) is actually one of the better parts of the film precisely because of the fruitiness of the performances, the degree to which the actors are savoring every word and every exchange. At the same time The Kiss Before the Mirror is quite a cinematically innovative film in many of its particulars. At a time in which cameramen were trying to talk directors out of using moving-camera shots – James Curtis’s biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, describes a bizarre meeting of the American Society of Cinematographers in which directors defended the use of the moving camera and cinematographers made the arguments against it (mostly that it added too much time to film schedules and made it harder for cameramen to keep the image in focus) – Whale moved the camera more often and more elaborately in The Kiss Before the Mirror than in any of his previous films, including the marvelous Frankenstein-esque shots of Gloria Stuart heading through the woods towards the home of her lover and Paul Lukas following behind in a world of similarly fake trees and painted backdrops. At one point, to emphasize the appeal Paul Held is making in his closing argument and saying that the emotions that led Walter to kill his wife are ones we all share, Whale and cinematographer Karl Freund do a 360-degree pan shot around the entire courtroom – which was considered a huge innovation for Stanley Kramer when he did it in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1960.

There are other aspects of The Kiss Before the Mirror that anticipate Alfred Hitchcock: not only the killing off of a major star of the time early in the movie the way Whale did with Gloria Stuart did here and HItchcock did with Janet Leigh in Psycho in 1960 (and at least Hitchcock let Leigh live until the mid-point whereas in The Kiss Before the Mirror Stuart gets knocked off in the first reel) but the richly detailed cameo parts he creates, notably in the courtroom scene in which a huge woman insists on standing up – much to the disgust of the much smaller man sitting behind her – and one man is initially barred from entering the courtroom because the guards are checking for passes, until he explains that he’s the defendant … in an entirely different case. The Kiss Before the Mirror is a haunting movie and the issues it raises – the clash between marriage and career, the extent to which sexual exclusivity should or shouldn’t be the sine qua non of a marriage, and the whole role of the legal process in policing sexual morality and whether the well-to-do like Walter and Paul get breaks in the treatment of their spouses people with money don’t get (Whale was not a politically conscious director but the relative affluence of their characters is emphasized in Charles Hall’s set designs: the rooms in this movie are so overwhelmingly huge one could readily imagine Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and a chorus line dancing through them) – are au courant today.

The Kiss Before the Mirror is on the whole surprisingly well-acted – Nancy Carroll as Paul Held’s wife Maria is nicely understated and a welcome counterpoint to the highly theatrical playing of Frank Morgan as her husband and Paul Lukas as the defendant (Carroll was an actress who became prominent in the late silent era and managed to keep her career going after the transition to sound, at least partially because she was an excellent dancer and she got into quite a few musicals, including one of my quirky favorites, Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round) – and it’s also an unusual movie in that it’s enough off the beaten path you’re not quite sure just how it’s going to end. We don’t know in advance whether Held’s strategy for defending his client will work and we certainly don’t know whether he will kill his wife, divorce her or forgive and reconnect with her. All too many movies are so clichéd and predictable in their writing, we think midway through, “Oh, we know where this is going.” In this one we really don’t know which of the many possibilities the writers will select. The Kiss Before the Mirror may be one of those movies I love more than it really deserves – it’s sufficiently theatrical (especially in Morgan’s and Lukas’s overripe delivery of dialogue) that even if you didn’t know in advance it was based on a stage play, you would probably guess it – and yet the overall atmosphere of the piece, the careful buildup of the minor characters and the surprising starkness with which the central conflicts are portrayed make this a particularly good film of its time and a story modern audiences could relate to if it were carefully and respectfully updated. James Whale did a surprisingly compelling remake in 1938 called Wives Under Suspicion in which he and his new writer, Myles Connolly, made an intriguing change in the story: instead of a defense attorney who worries that his wife is cuckolding him the same way as his client’s did, the central character is a prosecutor who’s obliged to prosecute a wife-murderer and then finds himself tempted to kill his own wife for the same reasons. It’s also worth noting that the original title of the play on which The Kiss Before the Mirror was based was Suspicion, and that was the title James Whale wanted to use for the remake – but Universal’s marketing department insisted on adding “Wives Under … ” to the title, so Suspicion was saved for Alfred Hitchcock to use for his 1941 movie in which Joan Fontaine plays a recently married woman who grows to suspect (correctly in Hitchcock’s cut, incorrectly in the film as it stands with a cop-out ending the producing studio, RKO, forced him to shoot) that her new husband means to kill her for her family’s money.