Questions of Identity

Mirage opens with a skyline view of Manhattan at dusk, and Director Edward Dmytryk quickly and Hitchcockily establishes the city's menacing mood. One glittering spire of steel and glass, suddenly goes dark. Inside the building, corridors teem with silhouetted confusion-- elevators stall, office parties begin, and the leader of a world-famous peace foundation plummets 27 floors to his death. Hero Gregory Peck, looking vaguely troubled, chooses to walk down. En route he meets an enigmatic beauty (Diane Baker) who seems to know him intimately, though he has never seen her before. Or has he?

He follows the girl into a subbasement four floors below street level, and loses her. When he returns later, even the stairs have disappeared. He decides he is imagining things and tries unsuccessfully to get psychiatric help. He turns to a private detective (Walter Matthau), earnestly introducing himself as a cost accountant; then he realizes with a shock that he hasn't the slightest idea what a cost accountant is. After a quick check, Matthau reports succinctly: "For the last two years you've been doing something you know nothing about in an office that doesn't exist."

Before Peck discovers that he is a traumatized physicochemist, viewers must sweat along with him through several murders, a photogenic chase across Central Park, and a maddening game of mental gymnastics. Scenarist Peter Stone (Charade) varies the pace with droll asides, most of them knowingly shrugged off by Matthau as the reluctant snoop who abhors firearms and acts of heroism, and struggles gamely to look hard-bitten while guzzling Dr. Pepper.

Mirage offers prime-quality suspense up to the crucial point where the film tries to put its jigsaw plot in order. His amnesia beaten out of him, Peck recollects a top secret potent enough to neutralize radioactive fallout but not enough to keep a provocative movie from heading toward a mundane and faintly preposterous conclusion. Getting there is all the fun, but no one wants to find that out during the last reel of a thriller.

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