Universal loved Whale for his horror films (Frankenstein 1931) but found him too erudite and intellectual, i.e., too English, otherwise, so for the film The Kiss Before the Mirror, a film about adultery and murder from a play by Ladislas Fordor, they gave him a minimal budget, a sixty-seven minute running time and some left-over sets. Nonetheless, with the help of cinematographer Karl Freund (who shot F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, 1924) the English James Whale made a low-key, pre-Code masterpiece of expressionism and camera mobility. Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) kills his wife Lucy (Gloria Stuart) while she is disrobing for her lover (Walter Pigeon) and is defended by Paul Held (Frank Morgan in an unusually serious role). While defending Walter his lawyer begins to suspect his own wife (Nancy Carroll) and follows her to a tryst with her lover. Paul apparently feels that if he can get his friend Walter off on a temporary insanity plea he can them safely kill his own wife.
Of course not all goes as planned when Paul points a gun at his wife during his defense of Walter and she faints. Whale's nightime shots are appropriately sinister and in the courtroom he pans 360 degrees to show the interest of the spectators and all the participants in the trial. The film is very much on the side of the adulterous women, who feel ignored and slighted by their husbands.
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