It is a testament to Peter Lorre’s facial versatility that he could contort his face into a rictus of dementia and corruption in M, and 10 years later but with essentially the same features, smile a sweet smile of innocence and candor as Hungarian immigrant Janos Szabo in The Face Behind the Mask.
Janos, watchmaker and self-proclaimed “mechanical genius” arrives in New York in search of the vaunted American dream. The big city, contrary to what one would expect, treats the newcomer well, and Janos soon finds a job in a hotel that also becomes his home.
Unfortunately, one night the hotel burns down and Janos’s face is horribly disfigured. The same city that gave him a moderately warm reception now rejects him because of his appearance. Unable to find honest work, Janos is forced to employ his manual dexterity in criminal endeavors.
All the money in the world, ill-gotten or not, is not enough, however, to undo the damage to his face; Janos, now known as Johnny, turns to wearing what is best described as a Peter Lorre mask that looks like Peter Lorre the same way that Michael Myers’s mask looks like Bill Shatner.
Johnny eventually finds a romantic interest in a blind girl (because a sighted woman in the movies has and always will be too shallow to appreciate inner beauty) named Helen Williams (Evelyn Keyes); proving that The Love of a Good Woman Can Save Any Man, Janos quits his criminal career to the chagrin of his former accomplices, who bump Helen off in an early example of an External Combustion/Disposable Woman combo. All of this leads to an (anti)climax wherein Johnny flies his former henchmen to the desert and strands them all there, himself included, so that they can wait around for a boring death.
Lorre might have singlehandedly made this lesser noir worthwhile, were it not that his uniquely expressive face was deprived of the ability to emote (to put it in a modern perspective, the result is as underwhelming as the digital technology used nowadays to de-age famous actors). Most of the time we’re just listening to Lorre’s all but disembodied voice, which could have actually worked (after all, in addition to his face, he also had a unmistakably distinctive voice) they way it did for Claude Rains in The Invisible Man — but then in that film it was understood and agreed upon that we weren’t going to see much of Rains anyway; here, though, we simply feel cheated.
90% of Everything is Crap 