The Eyes Without a Face (1959)

(aka. "Les Yeux sans visage", "Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus")

Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, Francois Guerin, Alexandre Rignault, Beatrice Altariba, Juliette Mayniel. Written by Pierre Boileau, Pierre Gascar, Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon and Claude Sautet from the novel by Redon. Directed by Georges Franju. France. 95 minutes.

How to describe this film, one that is simultaneously obscure and legendary, in mere words? In many ways The Eyes Without a Face is more like a piece of music than a work of narrative fiction. Like the immortal celluloid emerald crafted by his fellow frog-sucker Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast, Georges Franju here made a sublime cinematic fairy tale that never loses its strength to pluck the heart strings no matter how the years wear on. The difference here is that Franju's vision is of a much darker variety. Black as pitch, in fact. It combines the dreamy imagery of a fairy tale with the visceral bloodletting of a balls-out B horror movie. It is at once an "art film" and a lurid Grand Guignol creep show.

The rather simple plot concerns one Professor Genessier (Brasseur), a brilliant surgeon consumed with guilt over the facial disfigurement of his daughter Christiane in a car accident for which he was responsible. He fakes Christiane's death, hides her away in his mansion, and sets out to repair the damage with skin grafts. Unfortunately, he needs the facial tissues of young women for the procedures, and they're not exactly lining up to volunteer. So he sends his nurse Louise (Valli), who also happens to be his lover, out to find beautiful young women and lure them back to the mansion, where he drugs them and removes their faces in an attempt to repair the damage done to his daughter's. But Christiane's body rejects the transplanted tissue, time after time.

The place where Franju - a Frenchman who cut his teeth on a frightening documentary about slaughterhouses called Blood of the Beasts - really crossed the line was in showing the surgery in cold, clinical detail. The camera follows one of the procedures with an eye that is at once dispassionate and voyeuristic. We watch as Professor Genessier cuts along the border of the helpless woman's face and slowly, with the care of an artist working in the most delicate and fragile of mediums, the flesh, he lifts the woman's face off. The screen, at long last, mercifully fades to black. It's a ruthlessly effective scene that, despite the fact it's in black and white, will make you feel like you've got a colony of ants crawling under your epidermis.

The critical and financial success of Eyes spawned a throng of rip-offs, much in the way John Carpenter's Halloween led to a jillion mad slasher flicks. Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco himself has re-made the film numerous times (i.e. originally with The Awful Dr. Orlof and more recently with Faceless). What distinguishes Eyes from the host of crude imitators that followed in its wake - and most horror films in general - is the poetic, lyrical imagery that ultimately dominates the film, typified by Scob's visionary performance as Christiane Genessier.

Scob's Christiane is one of the true great female monsters of the silver scream; right up there with Elsa Lanchester's Bride and Barbara Steele's Princess Asa in Black Sunday. She glides through the house like a wraith, face hidden behind a featureless white mask, her only real source of affection coming from the dogs and doves her father keeps for his cruel experiments. Scob's ability to convey oceans of emotion using only her wistful, demon-haunted eyes, is nothing short of stunning. It's impossible to take your eyes off her when she's on-screen.

Eyes isn't a perfect film, what with a plot holes or two here and there (the subplot involving Christiane's fiancé', for instance, is never really properly explored or resolved) and it drags in places. But, when gazing upon the picture as a whole, these minor quibbles hardly seem to matter. The Eyes Without a Face is not a perfect movie but it is an unforgettable one. And how many Mad Surgeon films can that be said about?

*** Feautureless White Masks Full of Maggots

* Dead meat, ripe n' reeking.
** Moribund, but showing a slight flicker of life.
*** Good and healthy.
**** Brimming with vitality.

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