Janos (Lorre) is an improbably talented young man arrived from Hungary in New York. He's an expert watch maker and a pilot so his hopes of getting a job and being able to send for his girlfriend back home are not unreasonable. Unfortunately, the hotel his stays in burns down and the fire hideously scars his face. Unable to find work or even kindness in the law-abiding world, he turns for aid to the first man too kind to be bothered by his looks, a cheap crook hanging out on the docks.
Janos gets a creepy mask and turns his talents to crime like a Batman villain without a Batman. Lorre is vulnerable and tenacious, dominating the screen and breathing a lot of life into this noir melodrama. The sequence of extremely bad luck put me in mind of Detour, though The Face Behind the Mask doesn't lend itself to an "unreliable narrator" interpretation, due to multiple points of view. I suppose it's best taken simply as a particularly cruel nightmare, which it succeeds at being.
The Face Behind the Mask is available on The Criterion Channel and on YouTube.
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