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After executing a casino robbery that goes wrong, gangster Johnny Mueller goes to ground and looks for a way out. He finds it in the person of a psychiatrist who happens to look just like Johnny, except for a scar on his cheek. Johnny manouevers himself into a position to replace the good doctor and bumps him off. During the act, Johnny discovers--much to his horror--that he has put the scar to match the doctor's scar on the wrong cheek. Too late to back down, he risks it. To his amazement, no one notices that the scar is on the wrong side. During the course of the film, Johnny's relationship with the doctor's secretary grows from opportunism to genuine romance, but when she reallizes who he is and what he has done, she resolves to get out of her crummy life and sail far far away. Johnny is given the chance to leave behind his past and go with her, but unfortunately, the good doctor had a past of his own, a past that eventually catches up with Johnny...

If there is a better metaphor for the alienation and dehumanization of the modern man in all of film noir than the scar on Johnny Mueller's face, I don't know what it is. Urban life has become so fast paced that the migration of a scar from one side of a face to the other is barely noticed. There is a scene near the end of this movie when a cleaning woman is the first person to suggest that it has moved, and Johnny almost kisses her for noticing. No one pays attention to anyone but themselves, the film suggests, and that narcissism makes us all profoundly alone. The Scar is an arresting movie, which is something of an accomplishment given how derivative many of its scenes are. It cuts and pastes film noir cliche`s whole. The end result is greater than the sum of its parts, though. It has a hard-nosed approach that borders on heartlessness and it doesn't really give the audience an innocent to root for. By removing any trace of sentiment from its assembled second-hand scenes, it re-invents them as something fresh and nasty. The fate given to Joan Bennett's character, the doctor's secretary, is particularly cruel. She has had enough of being tough and her fragile interior is beginning to show through. She lets Johnny get under her skin and the film wrests that from her. She ends the movie in heartbreak, never allowed to know that Johnny tried to do right by her. The irony of Johnny's ultimate fate is brutal and perfect and hints at a sort of divine justice in the world, but it's cruel, too. The audience knows it's coming, but it's hard to take, none-the-less.

Even though it seems to be cut from the James M. Cain school of hard-boiled, in which the sexual predations of the characters ultimately undo them, The Scar is ACTUALLY cast in the mold of Detour.  Fate puts its finger on all of the characters here and sends them blithely to their dooms. The Scar is as dark at heart as just about any film ever made. It's a great big impersonal world out there--you can't get attached to anyone, because, sure as tomorrow's sunrise, Fate is going to take them away from you.