The Face Behind the Mask

October’s horror focus is reaching its peak, and Noirvember looms, so this week, I bring you a film with one foot in both camps: Robert Florey’s sad, unsettling The Face Behind the Mask.

At first, the movie strikes a rare note: adorable Peter Lorre. Lorre plays Janos Szabo, a fresh-faced (almost doll-faced) Hungarian immigrant whose face shines with an eagerness and innocence that even the famously hard-edged New York City finds irresistible.

But no matter how much affection for Janos cushions those edges, they’re still there, and the film—which opens with a grim 1941 title card that points out that “today’s” European immigrants, desperately trying to avoid the rising tides of war and antisemitism, would be less hopeful, less adventurous … and, thanks to quotas, less welcome—knows it. Maybe, it suggests, Janos’s sweetness is an unfair demand. America can love a man who rhapsodizes over the Statue of Liberty, praises a policeman, and immediately, despite his higher-level qualifications, pitches in to industriously wash dishes, but how will it feel about him once he’s disfigured, uneffusive, and insistent on his own worth? The old Janos made people feel like generous hosts: grand, kindly, and charitable. The new Janos, his face ruined by third-degree burns from a hotel fire, only makes them uncomfortable. His catastrophe makes him slip out of the American narrative that likable, industrious striving gets rewarded, and to deal with that, society—if not all the individuals in it¹—brushes him under the rug.

Eventually, Janos is forced to consider life outside of the society that won’t accept him. If they won’t let you make watches or assemble airplanes, you may as well use the same skills for safecracking.

What makes The Face Behind the Mask stand out in a crime movie sense is how compassionately and nonjudgmentally it follows Janos down this path. This isn’t in accordance with his own values, but it doesn’t play like a descent into hell, either. There’s temptation, yes—Janos first steals because Dinky (George E. Stone), an affable scrounger and crook who never flinched at his face, who was willing to throw in with him when no one else was, needs food, shelter, and medicine; he goes on stealing because he has some faint hope of life-changing (but expensive) plastic surgery—but that puts him on a road, not a slippery slope. Consequences arrive in an unhurried fashion, but the movie never strains itself trying to insist upon them warping Janos’s soul in the process. Stealing for a living, and doing it with a hard-nosed crew, makes him a little more brusque, but for a long time, that’s about it. He doesn’t betray Dinky. He doesn’t become too callous to fall in love. It was 1941, the Hays Code was in full force, but The Face Behind the Mask manages to play Janos’s eventual bad ending as powerful and moving, not karmic; he dies, but the sense that justice is served is reserved entirely for other fates.

But it’s still October, so I’ll end with how this works as horror. It’s wonderfully cinematic on that front, with the fire at the hotel working as an astonishing sequence with a real sense of peril and with Janos’s final bitter victory in the desert playing out like a kind open-air Poe adaptation. Nothing, though, is more effective than how the film shows—and doesn’t show—Janos’s face. We get only one brief full-on look at the burned, peeling shape it has become, and then the film retreats from it (and the makeup work required for it), spending almost an entire act shooting Lorre only from the back. In a way, it estranges us from him—we can’t get used to what we can’t see, and any face is better than none—but if it hurts our connection with him as someone else, it helps our identification. He’s like a video game character we’re piloting around, and we have a Janos-eye view of the world. Everyone who dismisses him, never daring to openly admit why, is looking our way. And since we can’t see his face any more than we can see our own, we’re not invited into the other characters’ horror, prurience, or distaste, only into Janos’s increasing weariness. This is what it’s like to be transformed into a monster. He’s Gregor Samsa.

Once Janos procures a lifelike mask of his own face (rendered here with some unfussy but well-handled makeup) he takes on an incredible uncanniness. He can function now—attending a packed opera house to set up a score, striking up relationships with new neighbors—but there’s a stillness to him, an odd quality that people notice at once. The doll-like looks have stiffened up like porcelain. His burns threw up a perceptual barrier between him and the rest of the world, as they didn’t want to see a person beneath the “mask” of scars; the mask makes him more tolerable to everyone else but can be suffocating to him. He’s trapped behind it, doomed to “almost, but not quite.” It’s no surprise that he falls in love with Helen (Evelyn Keyes), an optimistic, openhearted blind woman whose perception of him has nothing to do with his mask, his scars, or even the face beneath it.

The fact that it’s no surprise also means that it’s where the story becomes a bit too familiar. Keyes has a real effervescence and sincerity, so she makes Helen more convincing by the sheer force of her performance, but she’s ultimately here to be the innocent, adoring love interest whose disability exists to make a fairly hackneyed point. The vulnerable, loyal, cheerfully corrupt Dinky is better-written, though also made deeper by Stone’s performance (to the point where I ran to look him up afterwards).

But it’s Lorre, of course, who moves effortlessly back and forth between the horror, the noir, and even the boisterous opening comedy, and who does a significant amount of that work without even getting to use his natural expressiveness. He’s truly the man for this liminal season.

The Face Behind the Mask is streaming on Tubi.

1. Lt. O’Hara (Don Beddoe) really does want to follow up with Janos and make sure he’s okay; the hospital staff who remove Janos’s bandages are clearly trying to control their reactions, and when a new nurse enters and cries out in shock, they quickly get her out and handle Janos’s ensuing breakdown with nothing but compassion. This isn’t an always-unfeeling world written by a cynical misanthrope, so it feels more real, and more tragic, when things go wrong. ↩︎