Le balafré

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.

Hollow Triumph is a very good film noir that's often missing from Essential Noir lists, usually only because it's not very well known. Now whereas we could debate for hours whether this movie deserves a place in those lists or not (or debate on which noirs absolutely need to go in those lists), why don't we just take a closer look at the film?

THE STORY SO FAR... Johnny Muller is a criminal, planning to rob a casino with the help of a few friends and two cars. The robbery doesn't go too well and only the car with Johnny and 'Marcy' manages to escape. They hide as it's all too clear that the casino people will do all to get their money back. Hiding wasn't a bad idea, Johnny finds out: one day the newspaper shows a picture of 'Marcy' shot on the streets. No points for guessing who's behind it. Johnny is looking for a way out and finds one when a man on the streets takes the gangster for Dr. Bartok, a psychiatrist. Johnny pays a visit to the doctor's office where even Bartok's secretary mistakes Johnny for her boss, till she observes the one difference that can distinguish the lookalikes: Bartok has a scar on his cheek. Johnny takes a picture of Bartok and uses all his surgical knowledge to copy the scar on his cheek. Unfortunately, due to a mix-up at the photo lab, the photo's printed the wrong way round and Johnny finds himself with the scar on the wrong cheek. But who really pays that much attention to people's faces?

SO IT'S A FILM NOIR THEN... Yes, it is. We have the gangster looking for a way out, the femme fatale (the secretary) with no faith left in mankind and we get a hard-boiled vision on life: who really cares about good and bad? Who really observes other people? Ask yourself the question: would you notice a scar moving to the other side of a person's face? That person is still there, the scar's still there and let's face it: scars can't move, can they?

WHAT MAKES THIS FILM SO SPECIAL? Not the beginning, I found it a bit weak, but a very good climax at the end of the film somehow makes us forgive that.

First, let's look at the cast and director. The director Steve Sekely (born in Hungary as István Székely) made 50 films. His career started in Hungary in 1930. Nine years later he moved to the USA. Most of his films are quite unknown, the biggest exception being an adaptation from a John Wyndham novel: The Day of The Triffids (1962).

Starring as John Muller, we find one Paul Henreid, a man you might recognise from Casablanca (where he played Victor Laszlo) or as the lead in the film classic usually watched for the wrong reason, Of Human Bondage. The femme fatale is often essential to a film noir, which makes the choice of Joan Bennett as Bartok's secretary a very good deal. She didn't only play the lead in Max Ophuls's film noir The Reckless Moment, she was also in the three noirs director Fritz 'Metropolis' Lang directed in the forties: Scarlett Street, The Woman in the Window and - save the best for last - Secret Beyond The Door. In Hollow Triumph she may not play the lead, but she's still an essential part of the movie.

But what makes this movie so special is... the lighting technique. Director Steve Sekely observed how one lamp can light (parts of) a room and took all sorts of lights (from natural exterior light to big Hollywood spots) to light his movie in such a way Hollow Triumph is a lust for the eye. The light (or absence of) is also a motiv in the film (e.g. during the robbery disabling the lights is an essential part of the plan, but it's the presence of light that exposes them when they want to drive away). But Sekely uses all those forms of light in such a subtle way it doesn't bother you when you're watching the film. On the contrary, it even adds to your viewing pleasure.

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.