Critical response

Film critic Bosley Crowther panned the film, "For a picture so heavily loaded with lengthy and tedious talk, talk, talk, The Scarf, the new tenant at the Park Avenue, has depressingly little to say. As a matter of fact, it expresses, in several thousand words of dialogue—and in a running-time that amounts to just four minutes short of an hour and a half—perhaps the least measure of intelligence or dramatic continuity that you are likely to find in any picture, current or recent, that takes itself seriously."^[2]

Film critic Manny Farber writing in the May 26, 1951 issue of The Nation characterizes The Scarf as “a disjointed, monstrously affected psycho-mystery freak show.” ^[3] Farber adds:

Producer-directors Ewald André Dupont and Isadore Goldsmith glamorize a singing waitress, a turkey-raising hermit, a jaundiced metaphysical barkeep, and a morose amnesiac fugitive from a desert asylum...Dupont and Goldsmith turn their tinny proletarians into sententious talkers, dubbing them with names like “Level Louie” and “Cash-and-carry Connie" and having them oscillate their eyeballs in a sophisticated version of Griffith’s pantomime. It sounds awful but it’s kind of interesting.^[4]