A dark and highly stylized psychodrama, The Kiss Before the Mirror traces the breakdown of a lawyer who begins to suspect his wife of infidelity, even as he is defending a friend on trial for having murdered his wife. For this operatic material, Whale sought out famed German cinematographer Karl Freund to produce another visually striking and rhapsodically cinematic masterpiece, complete with complicated tracking shots and 360-degree pans, one that (in the words of a critic of the day) “might well have come from the UFA studios a dozen years earlier.” Whale remained rightfully proud of this still largely unknown gem.

This adaptation of John Galsworthy’s last novel focuses on the more dramatic of the book’s two plots, the story of a society woman’s divorce from a violent husband and her affair with a younger man. Like so many of Whale’s melodramas, it benefits from his ability to ground the material in well-crafted detail, whether imagined or, as in this case, remembered from his life in England. The Production Code went into effect while Whale was making the film, and he was forced to cut a scene wherein the sadistic husband attacks his wife. Whale’s camera, highly mobile as usual, is especially brilliantly deployed in the film’s climactic courtroom sequence.