Rent Hollow Triumph (1948)
3.5 of 5 from 54 ratings
1h 40min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
Directed by Steve Sekely (Day of the Triffids), Hollow Triumph stars Paul Henreid as Johnny Muller, a thief whose casino raid has gone wrong. Only he and Marcy, (Herbert Rudley) escape. Soon Marcy ends up shot in the street and Johnny needs to escape. He is being pursued by the police and the casino owners. Out on the street, Johnny is mistaken for a psychiatrist. Dr. Bartok. He visits his office where the secretary (Joan Bennett) also mistakes Johnny for her boss, until she notices that the scar on her "boss's" cheek is missing Johnny decides to replicate the scar but manages to put it on the wrong side of his face. Do people really look at other people's faces? Will the scar give him away? Is he marked for death? - Actors:
- Paul Henreid, Joan Bennett, Eduard Franz, Leslie Brooks, John Qualen, Mabel Paige, Herbert Rudley, Charles Arnt, George Chandler, Sid Tomack, Alvin Hammer, Ann Staunton, Paul E. Burns, Charles Trowbridge, Morgan Farley, Robert Ben Ali, Ray Bennett, Robert Bice, Jeanne Blackford, Lulu Mae Bohrman
- Directors:
- Steve Sekely
- Producers:
- Paul Henreid
- Writers:
- Daniel Fuchs, Murray Forbes
- Studio:
- Glass Key
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Thrillers
- Collections:
- Top 10 Films By Year, Top 10 Films of 1948
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Reviews (2) of Hollow Triumph
Scars, Shadows and Second Chances - Hollow Triumph review by griggs
I expected a solid little noir and got something nastier and smarter. Hollow Triumph tucks a tight, twisty plot into just over 80 minutes, with enough devious surprises to make you grin even as it darkens. The central gimmick – a crook slipping into the life of a lookalike psychiatrist, right down to copying his scar – sounds pulpy, but the film leans into the psychological fallout rather than just the shock value.
John Alton’s cinematography is sublime: faces carved out of darkness, cheap rooms turned into cathedrals of bad decisions, rain and cigarette smoke doing half the acting. Paul Henreid makes a surprisingly convincing heel, gliding between charm, arrogance and rising panic, while Joan Bennett does a lot with not nearly enough screen time – cool, weary, and far sharper than anyone bothers to notice.
It’s also very much a Steve Sekely film, even if Alton steals the limelight. The staging is lean: no fat, just one bad choice rolling into the next. People misremember faces, mix up names, fail to register who’s standing right in front of them; it has a touch of American Psycho in embryo, with that same dead-eyed sense that you could swap one man for another and no one would care. Here, identity isn’t sacred; it’s just paperwork.
What lingers is the nihilism. Nobody really sees anyone else; everyone’s too wrapped up in their own angle. That bleak ending is undercut – or maybe sharpened – by a lovely, throwaway exchange with a cleaning lady. One brief moment of human warmth in a city that treats people like shadows.
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Forties Noir. - Hollow Triumph review by Steve
Adapted from a now obscure thriller (by Murray Forbes) this has the narcotic feel of David Goodis' cult novels with its cast of nobodies undone by dumb bad luck and their own stupidity. The film was soon out of copyright and is now impossible to see apart from on fuzzy duplicates with appalling sound and no subtitles.
Yet beneath the years of deterioration, there's a really evocative film noir steeped in pessimism and inhabited by some incredibly fatalistic deadbeats. Paul Henreid makes the mistake of holding up a casino run by gangsters and plans to save himself by murdering a lookalike and stepping into his shoes.
But it's film noir so the dead man turns out to be in as much trouble as his killer. And the doomed crook puts his doppelganger's scar on the wrong cheek anyway, after the photo developer reverses the negative! Henried is miscast as a tough heavy, but Joan Bennett is amazing as his astonishingly defeatist rainy day gal.
Henreid produced and ended up directing without credit. Noir legend John Alton is the cinematographer, though his artistry is now buried under the haze. There's an ultra low budget and the twists are improbable, but the impression of malign fate has a way of lingering. Escape is futile... Someone should restore this, pronto!
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