The film opens with Hungarian watchmaker and engineering genius Janos (Lorre) on a ship sailing into New York harbor. Janos plans to stay in the United States and, once he's gainfully employed and financially stable, send for his fiancée to join him. Janos is such a naive, kindhearted, wide-eyed, eternal optimist that you know New York is going to destroy him, but Florey plays around with these stereotypes by having every New Yorker Janos encounters operate in good faith and help the man out. Lorre has great comedic instincts playing such an aw-shucks character (I don't think I've ever seen Lorre play a naive character before), and he has onscreen chemistry with everyone he meets. A friendly cop (imagine a cop helping someone) sends Janos to a cheap but clean tenement boarding house with a café attached. The boarding house's only two rules are no ironing (it shorts the circuits) and no cooking in the room (so the tenants will eat in the café). Janos immediately finds work as a dishwasher in the café and settles in for his first night of sleep in the Big Apple.
Unfortunately for Janos, the boarding house catches fire thanks to a fellow tenant's careless placement of secret cookware. Janos is trapped in the flames, and his face is horribly burned. Weeks later, a bandaged Janos, still eternally optimistic since his hands escaped the flames, loses that optimism instantly once the bandages come off and he looks in a mirror. He goes berserk, attacking the doctor, and has to be sedated.
Post-release, Janos struggles to find work because of his disfigured face. He breaks up with his fiancée via letter and wanders the streets. While contemplating suicide, he meets petty criminal and street hustler Dinky (George E. Stone), who treats him with respect and humanity. The pair form a friendship and Janos slowly embraces a life of crime as the only viable path to survival. Dinky's other criminal pals are not so humane, but they respect Janos' incredible skills and intelligence, and he eventually becomes the boss of the criminal gang, stealing enough loot to get a plastic surgeon to make him a face mask based off his passport photo. This mask covers his scars but gives him an eerie, frozen look except for his eyes.
Janos bumps into a blind woman named Helen (Evelyn Keyes) on the street, and the two slowly fall in love. The pure-at-heart blind woman falling in love with the disfigured man was a standard cliché even in this first half-century of film, but Keyes and Lorre breathe some fresh life into the stock romance and tap into some genuine feeling. You can probably guess that Helen's influence inspires Janos to quit his life of crime, get a dog, and move to a friendly little house in the country with Helen, and you can also probably guess that his old life of crime will find its way back to him and disrupt his and Helen's country idyll, but the movie takes this standard plot device and transforms it into a nihilistic, visually expressive act of vengeance worthy of some of the darkest horror and crime thriller classics.
Throughout, Lorre is perfect as Janos. He nails the changes the character goes through, from goofy naive optimism to despair to weary resignation to cold calculation to a less naive optimism to bringer of vengeance, and his facial control when Janos is under the mask is impressive stuff.
Robert Florey was a man with an extremely varied film career. A Frenchman from Paris, Florey became obsessed with Hollywood movies as a teen and began his professional life writing for French film magazines as a journalist and critic. He moved to Switzerland and directed some short films before returning to France to work as an assistant at Louis Feuillade's film studio in Nice. Continuing his parallel career as a film writer, Florey was on journalistic assignment in Hollywood when he decided to stay there permanently and pursue his filmmaking goals. He worked his way up the ladder from joke writer to PR man to assistant director before finally making the leap to director. His notable credits include landmark experimental film The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, first Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts, Murders in the Rue Morgue with Bela Lugosi, Daughter of Shanghai with Anna May Wong, a reunion with Lorre in The Beast with Five Fingers, and episodes of Wagon Train, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits.
