The Face Behind the Mask

Janos Szabo is a watchmaker newly arrived in America from Hungary; he wants work and knows nobody. A fire breaks out in the hotel where he is staying and his face is burned beyond recognition. After that he can find work nowhere; people cannot look at him. He has a mask made; it looks like a face and never moves. Unable to find work he enters the criminal world and soon heads a gang. Robert Florey directs. Peter Lorre plays Janos. The idea is exclusion turning into crime. Janos is not a bad man; the narrative shows step by step which door closes, and crime is presented not as a choice but as the only road left. Lorre's performance is confined by the mask, which is a difficulty; with the face immobile the acting falls to the voice, the posture and the hands. It was made cheaply for Columbia and circulated as a B picture; it was reappraised later as an early instance in the history of noir. Migration is open inside the narrative; Janos's accent and foreignness are an obstacle from the first scene. It runs a little over sixty minutes and moves fast. The ending takes place in the desert and stays away from the usual resolution of the genre. Who it is for: viewers who like early noir and Peter Lorre. Who it is not for: the production is small, the supporting characters are thin, and the romantic line is established too quickly.