Hollow Triumph (1948)

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")

"Hollow Triumph" (aka "The Scar") is a dark thriller about a conceited criminal, a bungled heist and an incredible sequence of events that lead to an extremely ironic conclusion. The moral of the story is that no-one can deny their fate and that any attempts to do so will inevitably prove to be futile. This is a movie that's thoroughly absorbing and enjoyable to watch but one that also contains its share of bitterness and tragedy.John Muller (Paul Henreid) is a college educated con-man who, in the past, studied at a medical school and for some time after practised without a licence as a psychiatrist. When he's released from a prison sentence, the warden arranges for him to be given an office job at a medical supply company in L.A. in the hope that it will encourage him to settle down to an ordinary life and go straight. John has no such intentions and before taking up his job reconvenes his old gang and convinces them to take part in a high-value casino heist.The heist doesn't go according to plan and only John and his old friend Marcy (Herbert Rudley) escape. Marcy is terrified because casino owner Rocky Stansyck (Robert Browne Henry) is a vicious gangster with a reputation for hunting down anyone who crosses him. After the two men share their stolen money, Marcy heads off to Mexico and John leaves to take up his job in L.A.Shortly after beginning his new job, John discovers that he has a double called Dr Victor Bartok who's a successful psychologist and learns that the only obvious distinction between them is that Bartok has a prominent facial scar. John goes to Bartok's office where he meets the doctor's secretary, Evelyn Hahn (Joan Bennett). Although she's involved in a relationship with Bartok, Evelyn also strikes up a friendship with John which he uses to gain access to a number of Bartok's documents.John gets fired from his office job and then goes on to make a scar on his own face before murdering Dr Bartok and assuming his identity. Despite cutting the wrong cheek, no-one seems to notice and John seems to have made himself safe from being killed by Stansyk's men.Paul Henreid is extremely good as Muller and Bartok and convincingly conveys Muller's over-confidence and his disdain for anyone who sees any merit in being employed in a routine job. Joan Bennett is also excellent as Evelyn whose experiences with love have left her terribly disillusioned and the extinguishing of her last hope of happiness is a particularly poignant moment.Despite its lack of box office success, "Hollow Triumph" is a very well written movie with some memorable lines and also John Alton's wonderful cinematography.

You can be forgiven if your heart sinks a little when the titles roll: "An Eagle-Lion Film." The plot could have been cooked up in its outlines during a bull session of a few hours. Nothing is likely to discourage the impression that this is a pretty slow and not very interesting second feature -- except maybe the photography by John Alton, which is pretty good, full of noirish shadows and sometimes odd angles. And there's a touching moment near the end when a charwoman apologetically asks if Henreid's scar isn't on the wrong cheek.Paul Henreid is one of those smart crooks who started out well -- medical school -- and then turned back and was finally convicted for a stick up from which he's now being released. Maybe he's not so smart after all. Giving up a career in medicine for the life of a hold-up man? In any case, the moment he's out of the slams, he gets his old gang together for a big heist at some gambling casino. Something goes wrong, as usual. The guy who runs the casino is unforgiving and he soon learns Henreid was behind the deal. Mister Big knocks off the other three gang members and Henreid is on his own. He hold various menial jobs, like gas station attendant. (No mention of all the dough he made off with after than big heist. Maybe he lost his wallet.)In Los Angeles he stumbles across a curious coincidence. He has a Doppelganger who is a psychoanalyst. The only difference is that the psychiatrist has a scar on his, the shrink's, left cheek. Henreid, desperate to change identities, looks into the shrink's background then knocks him off and takes his place. He romances the shrink's secretary and hangs out at the shrink's clubs. So far so good, except that, at the end, there is an O. Henry twist that satisfies the Breen Office or whatever the Cinematic Superego was called at the time.Paul Henreid's career certainly came like water and like the wind it went. He will always be Victor Lazlo and nobody else. The babe is Joan Bennett who is smoothly believable.There are some curious incidents. One is that, upon his release, Henreid is picked up by a friend who offers him a cigarette. Henreid brushes it away, saying, "You know I never smoke." But half-way through the movie, schmoozing with his secretary, all charm and guile, he gently removes a cigarette from her fingers and begins smoking it himself. He smokes like a volcano throughout the rest of the movie.Another thing is that, had the laws of physics been observed, Henreid would have wound up putting his scar on the correct cheek instead of the wrong one.Here's how he does it in the movie. He hold up a full-face photo of the shrink. The scar is near the right-hand border of the photo. Next to the picture, Henreid holds up a mirror and draws the scar on his own right-hand cheek to duplicate the one in the picture. The problem is that the image we see in the mirror is always flipped. In a mirror, our real right hand seems to be the left hand of the image we're looking at.However, nobody behind the movie REALIZES this! Later, Henreid shows up at the photo shop to collect the negative and they're afraid to tell him that they mistakenly flipped it when they printed it! In other words, he is creating a scar on the CORRECT side of his face, due to the incompetence of the two men at the photo shop and the ignorance of the film's writer.Got that? If the photo shop hadn't flipped the negative around, and if Henreid knew what the hell he was doing when he created that new scar, the scar would have been on the wrong side of his face. But because two mistakes were made, in real life the scar would have been accurately placed. And they say two wrongs don't make a right!

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.