Eyes Without a Face [DVD] [1960] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Director Georges Franju, who in the 1930s established the Cinémateque Francais with the likes of Jack Lang, is not a pretentious Frenchman, far from it. He loved the bizarre and the grotesque, and if you share his taste for the poetically unfathomable, the suggestive, you will love this new CD from Criterion. 'Eyes Without a Face' is about a surgeon whose daughter was the victim of a car accident that peeled away the skin from her face. His nurse and mistress now picks up pretty young girls with whose skin the surgeon can experiment. His aim is to perfect a skin transplant to help his daughter. When the police gets a whiff of this they pick a young girl as a decoy and ... Well, you will have to see for yourself.

The movie starts out as a somewhat shabby, but highly effective noir with Alida Valli driving her car nervously along the highway, trying to get rid of yet another corpse of a young woman. Gradually the film evolves into the silent horrors of the middle part (the only other two films I know that are equally silent are Bergman's 'The Silence' and Hitchcock's 'Notorious') and the climax of which I shall reveal absolutely nothing, but it is frankly unforgettable.

"Eyes Without a Face" moves back and forth from the sacred and the profane, between the love of a parent for a child and meaningless destruction of human life. Franju conveys this contrast visually through the use of poetic images and realistic scenes. I have read arguments that "Eyes Without a Face" should be considered with "Psycho" as creating the splatter flick, and while it is hard to imagine anything having the impact of Hitchcock's film, Franju's movie is more artistic overall (of course, the shower scene is the master trump when we talk about horror films as "art"). This black & white French film with English subtitles is well worth seeing and could end up on your personal top 10 horror film list.

The "Eyes Without a Face" translation is the British title for this 1959 release, which was called "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus" when released in the United States in 1962, in what must be one of the stupidest titles grafted onto a foreign film in cinema history. Here you have a film that walks a fine line between beautiful visual images, such as when Christiane walks through the house in her mask, and viseral horror, represented by not just the operation scenes but the film's climax. The title is simple and elegant, not to mention appropriate to the story being told, and some suit who heard about Christopher Marlowe while reading an E.C. comic comes up with "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus." Mon dieu, mon ami!

The whole film has a strong Grimms fairy tale feel to it. The scenes set in and around the doctor's house are incredibly atmospheric, with the constant sound of birdsong in the background, and Christiane, in her mask, drifting gracefully through the building like the captive princess in the tower. The face-transplant scene isn't for the faint-hearted, but the most disturbing scene of all is when one of the victims wakes up on the operating-table and catches a glimpse of Christiane without her mask. The portrayel of the doctor is also very good. You sympathise with his obsession to make his daughter's life right again, but are also aware that it has turned him into a monster, willing to sacrifice any number of innocent girls to achieve this aim. Doe-eyed Edith Scob is also perfectly cast as the tragic Christiane.