Paul Henreid got sick of playing bland heroes like Casablanca‘s Victor Laszlo and in Hollow Triumph set out to prove he could be just as convincingly bad. Having optioned the novel this crime drama was based on, he produced the film himself and, according to legend, directed most of it too, once original director Steve Sekely had been fired by the studio.
The result is either a triumph or a hollow triumph, depending on your approach to the movie and your attitude towards implausibility. If you’re taking things very seriously, then problems over likelihood and credibility entirely undermine everything. If not, they’re all part of the fun.
But on to the plot, which is about a habitual criminal fresh out of jail who immediately pulls a heist on a casino run by characters no one would want to tangle with. Why John Müller (Henreid) chose a Mob casino is just the first of many improbable elements – this is a master villain who’s meant to be smart, very smart.
Anyhow, now wanted by both sides, Müller heads to San Francisco to lie low. There he flukes into the discovery that he has a spitting image, respected psychiatrist Dr Bartok (also Henreid). Implausibility number two. Of course Müller adopts Bartok’s identity, having boned up on enough psychoanalytical theory to convince the patients he’s the real deal. He even convinces Bartok’s secretary, Evelyn, to play along. The only missing element is the scar on Bartok’s face, which Müller decides to copy with some self-guided scalpel work. In a few weeks, new scar healed, the transformation is complete – except Muller has scarred the wrong side. The bad guy is now a good guy and the mirror Müller used to perform the operation has become a metaphor.
If all this sounds like spoilerish levels of plot, the film’s title when it was reissued, The Scar, was also fairly free and easy with details. In any case, all this is a set-up. The real film starts here, quite late on: is Müller going to get away with it?
Evelyn, played by Joan Bennett in her noir femme fatale phase, is easily as smart as Müller and/or Bartok. Suspecting early on that Müller is up to something, she plays along because Bartok has been giving her the romantic runaround and this way she gets some of the action, even if it is second hand (if that’s the right appendage). Any chance at anything at all has to be grabbed because, in Evelyn’s words, “It’s a bitter little world full of sad surprises.”
It’s only later that Müller, posing as Bartok, discovers the good doctor has another woman on the go, an official girlfriend, Virginia (Leslie Brooks), and that Bartok has been racking up serious debts with her… at the casino. Can you see where this is going?
Fate works in mysterious ways in this movie but it’s impetuosity that’s Müller’s real problem. If he’d just laid low… we’d have no movie. The fact that Müller is spelled with its Germanic umlaut in situ also seems significant. Weren’t most American Müllers just plain Muller, or even Miller, by the end of the Second World War?
But the not-quite-ness of the name is all of a piece with the plot and its themes, doubles and impersonations being an itch that film noir often wants to scratch.
Henreid pulls off the bad guy acting and is tasty in the fight sequences, which have some wallop. He’s excellent, in fact, but then he felt he had something to prove. And his direction doesn’t suck either – it’s nothing flashy but it gets the job done, and leaves the fancy footwork to the plot, which is nuts.
John Alton is the DP, so the noirish looks are not in doubt. Bright lights and dark shadows, low angles and wide lenses, Alton gives Hollow Triumph a stylish look, as he had with the previous year’s He Walked by Night.
Joan Bennett’s character is a bit of a muddle. How much does Evelyn know and when does she know it? It’s honestly best just ignored. Hollow Triumph has enough energy to ride over its gaping plot fissures and is as enjoyable as it is ridiculously nonsensical. All this plus, in Sol Kaplan’s score, a foretaste of the Star Trek theme, which he’d write about 15 years later.
Hollow Triumph – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
