Hollow Triumph

I like Paul Henreid, and Joan Bennett does a fine job in this film, but please, one can only suspend disbelief for so long. There are enough holes in this plot to fill a golf course. An ex-con plans a robbery of a mob casino, and the robbery goes awry. Now, he must try to get away from the mob. So far, so good. Then the film goes off the deep end; I mean the deep end as in the Pacific Ocean.

I will not reveal the complications and plot, as they are too fantastic for any rational person to swallow. An eight-ounce horse pill would be easier to swallow. Suffice it to say that the attempt is fascinating, and responsible for the 6 star rating; however, is it believable? Not in the slightest.

The educated criminal John Muller (Paul Henreid) is released from prison and reunites his gang. He plots a scheme to heist the casino owned by the dangerous and powerful mobster Rocky Stansyck, but the holdup goes wrong. Two thieves are captured by the Stansyck's gangsters and they disclose the identities of Muller and his partner Marcy (Herbert Rudley) before being murdered. Marcy travels to Mexico and Muller hides in a city. Soon Marcy is killed in Mexico and Muller is jumpy. One day he is followed by a man and he learns that the man is the dentist Dr. Swangron (John Qualen) that tells that Muller is the doppelganger of hie neighbor, the psychoanalyst Dr. Bartok, and the only difference is a scar on the face of Bartok. Muller visit's Bartok 's office and meets his secretary, Evelyn Hahn (Joan Bennett). He also studies and prepares to impersonate Dr. Bartok. Will his plan work?

"Hollow Triumph" is a great film-noir with an ironical story of an intelligent gangster that decides to pose of psychoanalyst ans assume the identity of a man that is identical to him. He succeeds but he does not know who he is impersonating and he will find in the end. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "A Cicatriz" ("The Scar")

An escaped robber named Johnny Muller (Paul Henreid) in a desperate attempt to hide from the hired killers chasing after him decides to take the place of a look-a-like psychoanalyst named Dr. Bartok. The only difference is a scar Bartok has on his face...Johnny carries out his plan with surprisingly success except for one small detail. Along the way to becoming Dr. Bartok, Johnny meets and unexpectedly falls in love with Bartok's secretary Evelyn, who has lost faith in mankind, in one of the greatest film noir romances ever put to film.

The best thing about this unlikely Film Noir film is its superb ending...with the close-up on Evelyn's face at the end and an ending we are aware of but she is not.

John Muller (Henreid) is a smart, good looking, nihilistic criminal. He gets out of jail and immediately hatches a plan for a heist, bringing together his old gang. The plan works, but not very well, and his identity is revealed to the mob boss he has ripped off. Muller runs and begins stalking a new identity. Muller is anything but likable, but somehow, his characterization is sympathetic enough to allow the audience to at least consider redemption as an option. As Muller's plan is set in motion, elements of his past creep back into his life and threaten him. But the biggest threat is the most sympathetic, well-portrayed, and engaging character in the film - Joan Bennett's Evelyn.

Hollow Triumph, or The Scar, is not typical noir. It includes relatively few of the clichés of the genre, and incorporates an unusual amount of realistic human emotionalism. Although the film may be predictable at times - especially for those steeped in noir traditions - it also presents many surprises along the way.

Paul Henreid (Casablanca, Dead Ringer, etc) produced and starred (dual role) in this compelling noir. Henreid and veteran B-film director Stephen Sekeley put together a creative team and cast with great talent and comparatively little star power, ending up with a relatively obscure, but excellent example of the genre. John Alton's cinematography is standard noir and awesome. Bennett and Henreid are superb, and the script, though sometimes hyperbolic, helps create memorable characters and story.

Recommended.

I'm commenting here only about some of the rather silly comments expressed elsewhere about Paul Henreid. First of all, he wasn't "Hungarian/French/American", but Austrian/American, born a member of the Austrian nobility in Trieste and raised in Vienna. His original name was too long to reproduce here, but he first acted under the name of Paul von Hernreid. Several have mentioned his THICK accent, but he has almost no accent at all in most of the film, and what accent remains is so light as to be indeterminable (almost the kind of Continental European accent one can hear in Audrey Hepburn's speech when she's not making a determined effort to speak English with no accent at all); whatever the accent may be, it is certainly not "thick"! And his brother in the film is played by American Edward Franz, who very often played roles in which he had no definable accent but seemed to be speaking with one just the same(!). That is pretty much the way I heard him in this film, too. Others claim Henreid was trying to change his good-guy image, but he had already done that several times in films, most especially as Nazis in two English-made films (one of which being the quite notable NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH) prior to arriving in the U.S., and concurrently with this film he appeared in ROPE OF SAND as one of the most despicable villains of the late 1940s (at one point, he blinds Burt Lancaster by forcing his head into the sand, and then tries to run over him with a truck!). As with at least a few of the commentators, I usually find that Henreid lacks a certain amount of star charisma, but he seems to have more of it in this film than in any other of the thirty or so films I've seen him in. Ironically, it is in what is probably his least-known starring role effort. Too bad.