Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/02/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, November 2, 2024

The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941)

Evelyn Keyes and Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask

Cast: Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, John Tyrrell, Cy Shindell, Stanley Brown, James Seay, Warren Ashe, Charles C. Wilson, George McKay. Screenplay: Allen Vincent, Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson, based on a radio play by Thomas Edward O'Connell. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Sidney Cutner.

A real sleeper, Robert Florey's The Face Behind the Mask performed poorly at the box office and was critically dismissed on its release, but over time it has gained admirers. Florey and cinematographer Franz Planer do what they can with the movie's scrawny budget, achieving some haunting expressionistic images and telling the story with great economy: The film runs only 69 minutes. It's a showcase for Peter Lorre, who plays Janos Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to the United States whose naïve enthusiasm is smothered when he's horribly scarred in a fire. (We get only a brief glimpse of his scarred face, but it's enough to make what follows plausible.) Trained as a watchmaker and skilled with his hands, Janos is unable to find work. Then a chance encounter with a small-time thief (George E. Stone) sets him on the road to crime. Trying to earn money for plastic surgery, he becomes the head of a small ring of jewel thieves, using his expertise to break into safes and circumvent burglar alarms. (It's a sign of the small budget, and of Florey's narrative economy, that we never see him and his gang at work.) They make enough for Janos to have a rather creepy mask made to cover his disfigurement, but on learning that surgery can never fully repair his face he becomes despondent. Then he meets a blind woman (Evelyn Keyes) who doesn't care what he looks like, and they fall in love. It's a rather soppy twist to the story, and Keyes is never able to make her character other than a saccharine cliché, but the film takes a darker turn that undercuts the sentimentality. Lorre is terrific throughout, as Janos ranges from meek to menacing to heroic.