Scarf
Directed by E.A. DupontJohn Howard Barrington wakes in a carnival sideshow with no recollection of who he is or how he arrived. The carny operator who takes him in, the weathered and watchful Ezra Thompson, asks few questions – a courtesy that suits them both. When Barrington begins to piece together fragments of a past involving a scarf and a woman's death, the comfortable amnesia he has been living inside starts to collapse around him.
A psychiatrist named Dr. David Dunbar enters the picture with credentials that seem just credible enough to be suspicious, and Connie Carter – sharp, self-possessed, and not entirely forthcoming about her own interests – attaches herself to Barrington's search for the truth. The investigation winds back toward a sanitarium, a wealthy family patriarch named Cyrus Barrington, and the question of whether John committed a murder he cannot remember or is being made to believe he did.
The Scarf belongs to the postwar cycle of noir that locates its dread not in criminal enterprise but in the unstable architecture of the self. The carnival setting places the film in a tradition of displaced, rootless protagonists, and the asylum sequences invoke the era's anxious fascination with psychiatric authority and its capacity for both liberation and manipulation.
