20th Century-Fox Dynamo (February 1960)

SIX WHOSE ILLICIT LIVES LEAD TO A RENDEZVOUS OF TRAGIC IRONY “Saw lady" JULIETTE GRECO Mistress “Lecherous bully'* ORSON WELLS Civil Leader A POWERFUL DRAMA OF HUMAN FOIBLES A foreword to the script that guided the production of “Crack In The Mirror ” stated that the point of the story depends upon each of the three stars in the picture playing two roles, since, in a sense, each has an identical counterpart. It concludes with this further statement: “vary them (the characters) physically, if you like, but in each instance the same actor must play both roles . . . We who judge, we judge, ultimately, ourselvesHow Messrs. Zanuck and Fleischer carried out the foregoing in converting this extraordinary story to the screen is indicated by the following detailed synopsis of the finished screenplay. • In a sordid part of Paris, Eponine Mercadier (Juliette Greco) lives with Emile Hagolin (Orson Welles), a brutish, much older man she has grown to hate, but cannot leave because she and her two small daughters have no other place to turn for food and shelter. She is in love with Robert Larnier (Brad- ford Dillman), a young laborer employed on the same construction iob as Emile. “Lover boy" BRADFORD DILLMAN Respected lawyer In 3 much more elite section of the cit Y another triangle exists which, Continued on page 38 CRACK IN THE MIRROR A REMARKABLE POINT OF VIEW AOOUT LOVE, LUST, MURDER AND PEOPLE A daring, unflinching, sometimes stark drama of two romantic triangles on vastly different social levels of Paris, brought together by a murder and suddenly welded by a surprise climax, “Crack In The Mirror” is a Darryl F. Zanuck Production, directed by Richard Fleischer and stars Orson Welles, Juliette Greco and Bradford Dillman. It is based on the novel, “Drama In The Mirror” by Marcel Haedrich, noted French journalist. Zanuck changed the first word in the title, feel- ing that it adds impact, implies more accurately the story’s unusual premise. Despite Orson Welles’ contention that having each of the three stars play dual roles was “a plot of Zanuck’s to cut casting costs and ultimately do away with actors entirely”, the producer points out that the multiple dual casting is no “gimmick”. “It’s the basic point of the story”, says the pro- ducer, “that two sets of people, no matter how different their environments, are essentially the same.” While Zanuck Sr. was preparing “Crack In The Mirror”, Richard, his 25-year-old son and partner in Darryl F. Zanuck Productions, completed his first stint as a producer with “Compulsion”. The results of that box office hit so pleased the’ firm’s senior partner that he drafted four key mem- bers of the “Compulsion” unit for “Crack In The Mirror”: Actors Orson Welles and Bradford Dill- man, Director Richard Fleischer, and Cinemato- grapher William Mellor, Academy Award winner for “A Place In The Sun”. Having three stars portray six people presented a challenge which the “Mirror” team determined to meet without resorting to the split screen and doing it with mirror techniques, customary solu- tions to filming dual roles. It required careful plot construction, planning of camera angles and con- siderable foresight to bring it off, but they suc- ceeded. Since the two sets of romantic triangles do not come together until the story is well under way, the early scenes presented no problem in this respect. But, as the drama gathers momentum, moves rapidly toward its climax, two of three stars—Juliette Greco and Bradford Dillman —are brought into the same courtroom with the other characters they also portray. By that time Welles was no problem. One of the characters he plays had been murdered, and in his other role he was defending the couple accused of the crime. Interiors were all filmed at Paris’ Studios de Boulogne, including a vast reproduction of a court- room in the Palace of Justice. Here many scenes had to be done twice: once with Miss Greco and Dillman as the down-at-heels defendants; again with them in their alternate roles; she as the stylist mistress of distinguished attorney Welles, Dillman as his young assistant, ambitious to take his boss’s place in legal circles and in the arms of his mistress. Thus, as the cameras pan from one set of characters to catch the reactions of their counter- parts, what seems to have been a fleeting instant was actually filmed days later. When, for example, standing before his dowdy clients, attorney Welles drops his verbal thunderbolt into the proceedings, the quick reactions of his mistress and his assistant were shot a week later. So carefully plotted were the scenes that “doubles” were used on only three occasions. Two transpired in the huge courtroom, when the cameras peer past one set of characters across the big set to their counterparts —so far away and so similar as to be indistinguishable from the or- iginals. Continued on page 37 36