Mirage is a mid-sixties attempt to recapture the affect of forties film noir, and it's a decent film, if not particularly brilliant. Nearly everyone connected with it had done better, similar work elsewhere. Star Gregory Peck had done the amnesia victim thing twenty years earlier, for Hitchcock. Leading lady Diane Baker had herself worked for Hitchcock. Supporting player Kevin McCarthy had amnesia problems of his own in Nightmare, ten years earlier. Director Edward Dmytryk had shown himself a master of noir back in the forties with Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire. But the button-down sixties didn't lend themselves easily to noir, and while my heart goes out to cinematographer Joe MacDonald, and the entire technical staff, in trying to make black and white 1965 New York feel like the RKO backlot of fifteen to twenty years earlier, it was a losing battle. Still, the movie's worth watching as an attempt to recreate what may well be unrecreateable, the mean dark streets of the war and postwar years, in their garish neon and streetlamp splendor.
