A Cicatriz

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.

Paul Henreid produced this film in which he starred, eerily portraying a totally amoral man who does not see anything at all wrong with the occasional murder, as long as he 'needs to do it'. John Bennett delivers an equally powerful performance of a woman who, although not good, is certainly not bad, and it is curious that this study of a woman's fixation on a bad man through infatuation was made in the same year as 'Force of Evil' which showed an even more extreme form of that. It must have been 'beauty and the beast' year. The ingenious plot concerns a double-identity, so there are two major threads of intrigue going on at once. Needless to say, Joan Bennett is involved with both Henreids, but prefers the baddie because he is more spellbinding and, let's face it, far from boring. This is a well-directed, sometimes brutal, atmospheric thriller which is something of a lost classic. It is now available on DVD under its alternative title of 'The Scar', which is a most unfortunate title, as people don't like scars (even though there is one in the story). Joan Bennett was really made for these films, as she proved in 'The Woman in the Window' and 'Scarlet Street' for instance. There is something ambiguous about her, something hard that is soft, you can't quite figure her. That's just right for noir. You should never be able to figure noir, everything should stay in the shadows where it belongs. The thing about a good thriller like this is, the mystery goes beyond the story itself and becomes the mystery of people themselves, what is it that goes on inside heads, those impenetrable citadels of secrets.

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")

Yes, "Hollow Triumph" or "The Scar" is a very fine example of film noir. It is tough, gritty, full of duplicity, and identities that shift across screen time. But what really makes this film sing is the vivid low-key photography of John Alton. Yes, perhaps Sekely deserves some credit, but the look is all Alton. "HT" is shot the same year (1948) as two other excellently lensed films by Alton -- "Amazing Mr. X" and "He Walked By Night." Dark sets lit with single light sources, bizarre angles and strong uses of deep focus compositions characterize Alton's work. Alton knew well how to get along with less light, creating the nightmarish worlds we see on the screen. This film's look reminds me of another great noir work -- Welles' 1958 "Touch of Evil" shot by Metty. But as I think of the two cinematographers, Alton seemed to best encapsulate the noir look -- seamy, wet, claustrophobic and dead-ended.

Of worthy mention here too, is: Henreid repeating the cigarette motif we saw earlier in "Now, Voyager," but here given a chain-smoking mania of its own, suggestive of insecurity and metaphoric of his attempts to "cloak" his identity, to shape-shift like a cloud of smoke into something new.

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.