Old Yorker

Robert Florey (1941)

Released as a ‘B’ picture but that is a technicality:  The Face Behind the Mask is a powerful, well-directed melodrama.  Peter Lorre is Janos ‘Johnny’ Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to America who arrives in New York brimming with hope for his new life.  On his first night in the city, the lodging house in which Janos is staying catches fire.  He suffers horrific facial injuries which prevent his getting employment, even though he’s not only a skilled watchmaker but is willing to put his hand to any gainful employment.  Janos decides that he can’t expect his sweetheart from Hungary, who was to have joined him in America, to be prepared to continue their relationship.  He writes to sever ties with her and is on the point of suicide when he encounters a struggling crook called Dinky, who takes a liking to him.  Janos joins Dinky in a gang of thieves and, through a combination of aptitude and near-nihilism, makes a success of lawbreaking, raising enough money to have a realistic latex mask created to cover his mutilated features.  Janos is both well off and mired in crime by the time he meets and falls in love with a young blind woman, Helen, who’s immediately attracted to his caring civility and gentleness.  She’s as unaware of his crimes as she is of his appearance.   Janos tries to break his criminal ties and start a new life with Helen.  One of the other gang members, resentful that Janos has usurped his position and wrongly believing that he has betrayed the gang to the police, organises a plot to kill Janos – a plot which kills Helen instead.  Janos plans and executes revenge on the gang.  They charter a plane to escape to Mexico.  Janos, in disguise, pilots the plane to the Arizona desert.  In the middle of nowhere, he lets out the plane’s fuel, dooming the gang and himself to certain death.

Peter Lorre, although vitally eccentric, looks relatively normal and is uncharacteristically effervescent at the start.  It seems Lorre didn’t have a high opinion of The Face Behind the Mask yet he makes something genuinely tragic out of what happens, physically and psychologically, to Janos Szabo.  You barely get a glimpse of Janos’s mutilated face except in his horrified reaction to seeing it in a hospital mirror.  Thereafter Robert Florey shoots Lorre from behind or has his face obscured by shadow – until Janos gets his mask.  (The make-up for this, by the uncredited Ernie Parks, is remarkable.)  When he meets Helen, Peter Lorre gives you touching reminders of the sweet nature that was so in evidence when Janos first arrived on the ship from Europe.  It’s possible in retrospect to see links between the character’s fate and that of Lorre himself, as an immigrant of a different kind in Hollywood, where he mostly failed to avoid being cast as freakish oddballs.  You don’t feel this as you watch the film, though:  Janos’s inability to escape his face and subsequent entrapment in his life of crime are strongly individual and Lorre delivers a finely varied performance.  The strange serenity that he gives Janos once the man’s hope of happiness with Helen has gone is particularly arresting.  Knowing what he has to do, he proceeds calmly and shockingly.

George E Stone is excellent as Dinky, a character who helps to ground the story in place and time.  Dinky is a criminal because he’s penniless and desperate enough not to mind what Janos looks like.  He remains loyal to Janos and, although beaten up by other members of the gang, is the only one of them who survives.  The gang heavies don’t fit so well – they look more like cops.  Don Beddoe is good as an actual cop, the friendly Irish-American Jim O’Hara, who plays an inadvertently fateful role in the story.  When he meets Janos shortly after the latter’s arrival in New York, O’Hara recommends that he find accommodation in the place that burns down.  Janos keeps O’Hara’s note, sent to him in hospital after the fire, in which the police lieutenant asks him to get in touch once he’s recovered.  (It’s the discovery of this note that causes the envious gang member to think Janos is a police informer.)   The tight screenplay is by Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson and Allen Vincent.

3 September 2014