Mirage (1965) is an excitng and fascinating suspense film. The screenplay, by Peter Stone, was based on a novel by Walter Ericson (Howard Fast).

The cast includes: Gregory Peck (as David Stillwell), Diane Baker (as Shela), Kevin McCarthy (Sylvester Josephson), Leif Erickson (Major Crawford), Walter Abel (Charles Calvin), Walter Matthau (Ted Caselle), George Kennedy (Willard), Jack Weston (Lester), Robert H. Harris (Dr. Broden), and Anne Seymour (Frances Calvin).

The music for the film was composed by Quincy Jones. The film was directed by Edward Dmytryk, and produced by Harry Keller.

The opening credits are shown against the night skyline of New York City. Suddenly, the lights go out in a skyscraper. There has been a power blackout in the building. The employees on an upper floor of the building hold flashlights as they walk along the hallway in the dark.

David Stillwell (Gregory Peck) walks down a dark stairway. He meets a woman (Diane Baker), who recognizes him, but he doesn’t recall having known her. They go down the steps from the twenty-seventh floor, all the way to the street.

When they reach the doorway, she sees his face in the shadows. She is suddenly angry, because she thinks that he has pretended not to recognize her. She rushes down the steps to the basement, and he tries to follow her, but can’t find her. They descend through levels marked Sub 1, Sub 2, Sub 3, and Sub 4. But she disappears, and David has to walk back up the stairway to the street level.

When he leaves the building, there is a crowd around the dead body of a man who has fallen from a window in the skyscraper. An ambulance is waiting. The power in the building is restored, and the lights come back on.

Stillwell tries to find the woman on the stairway, but when he returns to the entrance, and takes the steps down to the basement, he discovers that there is no sub-basement. He returns to the lobby of the building. The building is the headquarters of the Unidyne Corporation.

Later, when he is riding the subway, he sees a headline in a newspaper that says: “Charles Calvin Apparent Suicide.” David has a sudden flashback, in which he sees Calvin screaming in terror, falling through the air. David realizes that Calvin was the man who fell out of the window of the skyscraper.

As David returns home, opening the door of his apartment, he is confronted by a man holding a gun. The man, named Lester ( Jack Weston), comes into the apartment, and tells him that “the Major” wants to see him. David hits him on the head with a briefcase, and Lester is knocked unconscious. David then drags Lester’s body into a closet, on the other side of the hallway from the apartment.

David returns to his apartment, turns on the television, and listens to a news report about Calvin’s death. The television report shows a picture of Mrs. Calvin and Crawford Gilcuttie, the president of Unidyne Corporation. Charles Calvin was a well-known attorney, and a famous crusader for world peace. Calvin’s office was in the Unidyne Building.

David falls asleep, and the next morning he goes to a police station to file a report about the man who came to his apartment. When the policeman asks him to identify himself, David realizes that he can’t remember his phone number, or his birthdate, or where he was born. He gives up trying to file a report, and leaves the police station.

As he walks through Central Park, he meets the woman he had seen the previous night on the stairway. She knows him well, but David realizes that he is suffering from amnesia. He has been having recurrent flashbacks about talking with Charles Calvin in a park near a building, but he can’t remember why this is important to him.

The woman he meets in Central Park is named Shela, and she works for the Unidyne Corporation. David is unsure about his own identity, but thinks that he is a cost accountant for Garrison Limited in the Unidyne Building. He remembers that a man named Sylvester Josephson hired him.

David leaves Shela in the park. He visits the office of a psychiatrist named Dr. Broden, whom he hopes will be able to cure his amnesia. But when he tells his story to the psychiatrist, Dr. Broden thinks that he is a fraud.

David leaves the office, and sees a sign on the street for the AAA Detective Agency. He walks in, and meets a detective named Ted Caselle (Walter Matthau). David hires Caselle to help him find out about his past. Caselle admits that he needs the money, and that this is his first case.

They go to the Unidyne Building, and take the stairway down to the basement. But they are followed by a tall man wearing steel-rimmed glasses. The threatening man, whose name is Willard (George Kennedy), starts firing a gun at Caselle, but David is able to subdue him, by hitting him over the head with a plank of wood.

Later in the park, David again meets Shela, who has been following him. When they talk, she tells him that they had been lovers two years ago. He tries to make her reveal his past to him. She refuses, but he realizes that she knows “the Major,” and that the Major is the head of a conspiracy to prevent him from discovering his past.

David remembers that Joe Turtle, the elevator operator in the Unidyne Building, may be able to help him. But when he tries to contact Turtle, the kindly old man is murdered. Lester is the killer, the hit-man who had previously come to David’s apartment. Lester frames David for Turtle’s murder.

Meanwhile, Caselle discovers that an organization named Garrison Laboratories is linked to the Calvin Peace Foundation. The head of Garrison Labs is Sylvester Josephson, the man whom David remembers as having hired him. Josephson had directed the physiochemistry division at Unidyne Corporation before becoming the director at Garrison. Thus, it is apparent that David is actually a physiochemist working at Garrison Labs. Caselle is later killed by a hit-man.

David returns to see Dr. Broden, and remembers that when he was at Garrison, he was working in a radiation laboratory on the fourth sub-level of the building. Broden is able to help him realize that he is suffering from traumatic amnesia. He has repressed a traumatic memory in his past.

David goes to visit Charles Calvin’s widow, Frances, at her apartment. He discovers that Calvin and Crawford Gilcuttie, the president of Unidyne Corporation, had served in the army together, and that Gilcuttie had been a Major.

David returns to the Unidyne Building, where he remembers that he has a key to a private elevator. He takes the elevator to the sixty-fifth floor of the building, where he walks into a lavish apartment, and meets Josephson, Willard, and the Major.

Willard starts hitting him. David has a sudden flashback, in which he remembers that when he had been a chemist at Garrison, he had discovered a way to neutralize atomic radiation. He had revealed the discovery to Calvin and to the Major.

Calvin had wanted to use the discovery to advance world peace, but the Major had wanted to use the discovery for military purposes. The Calvin Peace Foundation, a non-profit organization, had received illegal support from Unidyne, a private corporation. Thus Calvin’s intentions to help build world peace had been corrupted.

David remembers that he had tried to destroy the paper on which he wrote his discovery. He wanted to prevent his discovery from being misused by the Major. However, when Calvin tried to prevent him from destroying the paper, Calvin had rushed forward, and had accidentally fallen through an open window.

Willard is about to kill David, but Shela appears, and shoots Willard with the Major’s gun, which she has taken from a desk in the room. Shela has apparently been the mistress of the Major. She has realized that the Major is brutal and corrupt.

Josephson grabs the gun from her hand, but David convinces Josephson that the Major will eventually try to kill all of them to cover up the other murders that have been committed in the conspiracy. The police are called, and the Major is forced to surrender.

As the film ends, David and Shela are reunited. They love each other, and they look forward to their future together. Again, the image of the city skyline appears, which began the film.

The sense of mystery and suspense in Mirage is influenced by the films of Hitchcock, and Gregory Peck’s performance as an amnesiac trying to discover his past is an interesting parallel to his role in Spellbound.

Mirage portrays the search for individual identity. The inital black-out in the Unidyne building is a metaphor for the black-out in David Stillwell's mind. The sublevels of the stairway in the Unidyne building are metaphorical stages of his mind and imagination. He tries to descend into his unconscious mind, just as he went into the sub-basement of the Garrison Laboratory.

Stillwell’s name has a notable irony. He is a man trying to reconstruct himself. He is able to do this at the end of the film, when he and Shela are reunited.

The film portrays other themes, such as the politics of conspiracy, and the power of the military-defense establishment.

The screenplay by Peter Stone was based on the novel Fallen Angel, by Walter Ericson. Walter Ericson was a pseudonym for Howard Fast.

Howard Fast is the author of many novels, including Spartacus, on which the Stanley Kubrick film was based.

In the 1950’s, Howard Fast was blacklisted by the literary and film community because of his previous membership in the Communist Party. He found it diffcult to publish work under his real name, and used the pseudonyms Walter Ericson and E.V. Cunningham. This experience is an important source for the theme of conspiracy in the novel Fallen Angel, on which Dmytryk’s film is based.