Much like its amnesiac protagonist, Mirage is lost in time. A major studio noir directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Gregory Peck, it’s got the professional pedigree of a movie produced decades earlier, except when it comes to the grimier details of its era’s loosened morals. Mirage walks like a stylish 1940s crime cheapie but talks like post-Code 1960s sleaze, with disorienting references to orgies & suicide and a score composed by Quincy Jones. It echoes the political paranoia of its contemporaries like Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate, and yet its official designation as a “neo-noir” feels like miscategorization. It’s a legitimate, bona fide noir that lost track of where it belongs in time, so that the trippier psych thriller touches that color the corners of its black & white frame register as an out-of-bounds intrusion that the can’t be fully reconciled. That dissonance makes for exciting tension as you constantly forget and are reminded of when it was made, and just how much more vulgarity Hollywood could get away with then.
Gregory Peck stars as an amnesiac who has to solve the mystery of his own identity before he’s shot dead. He is literally in the dark at the start of the film, as his office building experiences a sudden blackout at the precise moment when the last two years of his life have leapt out of his memory. It’s also at that exact moment when a fellow tenant of the building has leapt to their death on the concrete below, represented in gory detail by insert shots of a watermelon falling to New York City pavement. Guided by candlelight, Peck navigates his way out of a handsy crowd of hot-to-go office girls and attempts to go about his day in the fresh air of Wall Street sidewalks. Only, he can’t fully remember what shape his day usually takes, and he’s weirdly agitated by any questions that prompt him to think about his personal life or his past. Scared, he seeks context clues about who he is from a skeptical psychiatrist, a former lover who’s scared to fill him in (Diane Baker, modeling jewels by Tiffany & Company according to the credits), and a doddering, in-over-his-head private detective (Walter Matthau, in the comic relief role). The answer to the question of his basic identity is a last-minute twist with its own specific, detailed politics, but most of the movie is about the question itself, hinged on a declaration that “If you’re not committed to something, you’re just taking up space.”
Mirage is not only lost in time; it’s also somewhat lost to time. With no current streaming distribution and no physical copies in the New Orleans Public Library system, the only reason I stumbled across the movie is that I found a second-hand DVD at the thrift store. Its modern obscurity is partially due to its reputation as the B-picture leftovers of Stanley Donan’s Charade, which employed a significant portion of its creative team (Matthau included). It’s much better recommended as either a late-to-the-game paranoid manhunt noir from a director & star who could’ve made a more stripped-down version of the same picture twenty years earlier, or as an early-to-the-game paranoid psych thriller akin to Fincher’s The Game from thirty years later. Mirage‘s visual aesthetic is typical to 1940s noir, and its blasé relationship with sex & violence is typical to the 1960s cocktails set, but its cross-cutting head trip identity crisis is untethered to any specific era. It’s a movie that purposefully dislodges the audience from linear-timeline logic to create a sense of displacement & unease, which is an effect that’s only intensified the further we’ve drifted from its own temporal context.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 