I was watching Simpson’s the other day and the episode culminated in the familiar showdown in the funhouse hall of mirrors, where one guy is trying to shoot the other and he says “Go ahead, take the shot, but which one will you shoot?”
I was wondering, as this situation is old and familiar, does anyone know where it showed up first? The earliest I have ever seen it is in an old Batman comic book, but my guess is it predates that. Who came up with this situation?
According to this site it was probably Orson Welles in his movie The Lady From Shanghai with Rita Hayworth.
Edgar Rice Burrough’s ‘Warlord of Mars’ (1913) includes a scene inside the temple of the sun, in which Carter and the evildoers who have absconded with his wife confront each other through the reflections of a glass maze. There probably would have been a battle there, except that it came too early in the novel for Carter to get his wife back. I suspect Burroughs borrowed from an even earlier literary source.
I believe the original novel of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1911) has a hall of mirrors showdown between Raoul and the Phantom.
Good cites, all.
And I’ll bet we can get more and earlier citations if we let the denizens of Cafe Society have a crack at the question.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
I haven’t read the novel, but that scene does appear in the new film version.
I had read the novel, a long time ago (It’s dreadful, actually. Absolutely typical post-Victorian potboiler gothic…every single adapted version of it is better than the original novel, including The Phantom of the Mall! Trust me on this) but seeing the movie on Saturday reminded me of it.
The Simpsons episode very specifically references The Lady From Shanghai: I can state this with confidence, having studied the latter frame by frame for an undergraduate Film Studies essay many moons ago. Of course, no-one’s mentioned the Mirror Demon scene from Conan The Destroyer yet…
And of course, it’s worth mentioning the mirror-fight between Bruce Lee and Kein Shih in Enter the Dragon (1973). Not the first, clearly, but it helped keep the image alive.
Unfortunately, don’t believe that the scene is as you remember it. Raoul and the Persian fall into a room lined with mirrors, but the Phantom uses it to convince the two that they are in the midst of a desert ! There’s a sand floor and a fake palm tree in there, too. The mirrors were su[pposed to convince them that the desert went on forever. I swear, the heros in Gaston Leroux’s novel get taken in by ruses that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old today. They reproduced this scene in the 1925 version, but without Raoul and the detectve being taken in. The current movie version, as noted, plays tis as a Hall of Mirrors confrontation, which works better.
I’d completely forgotten the John Carter version. Beats anything I was gonna say.