Better than most people think

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Eyes Without A Face is the type of horror film which earns more respect than your average film of the genre, thanks in part to its class and sophistication. It's essentially a glorified B-movie but one which turns archetypes found in the mad scientist genre on its head. After all, horror stereotypes are not actually scary; normal people acting in an abnormal way is what's truly frightening.Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) has the look of a potential madman even resembling the maniac John Barrymore yet remains subdue throughout the film as a man wrestling with his conscience. His assistant isn't a hunchback but rather a manipulative woman Louise (Alida Valli) who kidnaps young girls of the doctor's behalf; much like in William Wyler's The Collector, in which victims can be so easily kidnapped and taken to a secluded house without a trace. Without the creepy carnival like music she would appear a different character - not so manipulative and eerie; ah the power of editing.Eyes Without a Face presents by far the best combination I've ever seen of a movie which is unsettling yet beautiful at the same time; the two keywords which sum up the viewing experience. I'm not a massively squeamish person yet the thought of plastic surgery makes my body muscles tighten. Watching any scene with the facially disfigured Christiane (Edith Scob) makes me feel uneasy but simultaneously enraptured at the same time creating a unique combination of viewer emotion. Even with the absence of a woman's most important physical asset, Edith Scob is the pinnacle of femininity in Eyes Without a Face. The manner in which she walks and moves in that white coat-like dress couldn't be more angelic and I haven't even mentioned the mask. If there is ever a cinematic image more implanted into one's mind, it's Edith Scob wearing that mask. It's creepy, it's unsettling, it's emotionless, yet it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen more so than most flesh and blood faces. The masks used in the film where moulded to fit Edith Scob's own face, could that be the contributing factor to its beauty? Or is it the angelic figure which carries the mask, whose surrogate mother still brushes her hair despite the disfigurement.Equally as eerie and hauntingly beautiful is the only scene in which Christiane appears without the mask. Out of context it wouldn't entirely seem this way but the very idea that this face has been transplanted onto her from another girl is so uncanny to watch. This is also helped in part of Scob's stunning piece of facial acting in which the Christiane is not yet used to her new face with the limited, almost robotic like display of facial movements.My only issue with Eyes Without Face are two plot contrivances. At the beginning of the film when Dr Genessier identifies the remains of a recovered body as those of his missing daughter, the authorities at the morgue don't even bother asking the other man they asked to come along to look at the remains to view the body for himself. Likewise when the character of Paulette goes missing after leaving the hospital to investigate Dr Genessier on their behalf, the police don't follow up on her disappearance. Are these plot contrivances for the connivance of the plot or did the filmmakers deliberately set out to portray the authorities as being that incompetent?Regardless, such plot contrivances are only minor annoyance in a movie with such startling scenes, imagery and set design from the painting of Christiane's mother to Dr Genessier's chamber. I've long felt that a medical or laboratory like aesthetic is one of the most effective surroundings to capture in glorious black and white. This beauty culminates in the film's ending in which Christiane performs a simple undoing of everything her father has been working on. This is not a Charles Foster Kane style destruction of a room but rather she gracefully stabs her surrogate mother and symbolically sets dogs and birds used for Genessier's experiments free. Aside from the doctor getting mauled by the dogs, the ending is intense yet peaceful. Some films stick with you more than others: Eyes Without a Face is one of those which I found myself thinking about its visual images for days after seeing and they won't be leaving me soon.

Eyes Without A Face stars Pierre Brasseur as renowned French surgeon Docteur Génessier, who tries in vain to restore his daughter Christiane's beauty after a car-crash leaves her horribly disfigured. With the help of his devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli), the doctor abducts young women, grafting their faces onto Christiane, with little success.Highly regarded by many horror connoisseurs, director Georges Franju's macabre mad-scientist classic benefits from a truly cruel villain in Docteur Génessier, who not only mutilates innocent girls, but isn't above tormenting one victim's father (by denying him the right to his daughter's body at the morgue), and treating Christiane like a guinea pig in his experiments. Eyes Without A Face also features some impressive early gore (albeit in black and white), with the surgical removal of a girl's face shown in unflinching detail, and grisly deaths for Louise and Docteur Génessier, who ultimately receive poetic justice.For me, though, the film is just a little too lethargic to be a wholly satisfying experience, the 'haunting' scenes with Christiane in her smooth rubber mask a tad repetitive and a little too much time spent where nothing much of interest occurs. Overall, it's a reasonably entertaining piece, but not as great as its reputation would have one believe.

In "Eyes Without a Face," mad scientist Docteur Génessier, whose specialty is transplanting tissue from one person to another, is working to overcome the tendency of the recipient to reject the foreign tissue. He also has a practical purpose, which is grafting a new face on his daughter, Christiane, who was disfigured in an automobile accident that was his fault. His Igor is Louise, whose disfigured face was restored by Génessier, for which reason she is extremely loyal to him and willing to aid him in his evil doings. In particular, Louise picks up young women who look the way Christiane did before her disfigurement, takes them to Génessier's house so he can remove their faces and transplant them onto Christiane. Unfortunately, he has thus far been unsuccessful, the result of which is that a bunch of dead women's bodies without faces keep turning up, all of whom seem to be of the same physical type. In fact, we see Louise dump one such woman into a river at the beginning of the movie. One way in which all the women are similar is that they all have blue eyes. Now, this makes no sense, because Christiane's eyes are fine, hence the title: she has the eyes; what she needs is a face. So why the women whose faces are being removed have to have blue eyes is a mystery.Génessier identifies the woman found in the river as his daughter so that people, including her boyfriend Jacques, a doctor who works in Génessier's clinic, will think she is dead and not wonder where she is, for only Génessier, Louise, and Christiane know of her horribly burned face. In the meantime, Christiane wears a mask around the house so as not to gross everyone out including herself. The mask is an immobile version of what she used to look like. One of the amazing things about this mask, which allows us a clear view of her eyes, is how expressive her "face" is. We have all heard the expression, "The eyes are a window to the soul." This movie really demonstrates it. We get a good sense of what Christiane is feeling and thinking as she walks around the house owing only to the expressiveness of her eyes.Louise's next victim is Edna. She tricks her into getting into the car with her, and the next thing you know, Edna is strapped to the operating table having her face lifted, so to speak. We actually get a glimpse of her face after the skin has been removed, squarely placing this film into the category of Grand Guignol. At first the transplant seems to be a success, but eventually it becomes necrotic and has to be removed again. Back on goes the mask. For some reason, Génessier keeps Edna alive, as if he is doing her a favor, but she leaps to her death. Adding to the creepiness of this movie are all the big, howling dogs Génessier has locked up in small cages to be used for his transplant experiments.One of Edna's friends reports her missing. She tells the police about the woman that Edna said she was going somewhere with, but all she can say by way of identification is that Edna said the woman wore a pearl choker (Louise wears a choker to hide the scar on her neck). Later, Jacques receives a strange phone call from Christiane, who misses him terribly. She only utters his name, but he recognizes her voice. He goes to the police, and when Inspector Parot mentions the pearl choker in passing, Jacques thinks of Louise. As a result, she and Dr. Génessier become suspects.A woman named Paulette, who fits the profile of missing girls, blue eyes and all, is picked up by the police for shoplifting. Parot and another inspector threaten her with prosecution unless she acts as a decoy. She agrees to go to Génessier's clinic and fake an illness. And here is the point in the movie where police incompetence becomes so absurd that it is laughable. Do they have a plainsclothes officer watching the clinic to see what happens to her when she is discharged? No. And so, when Paulette is released late at night and walks down the street to get a bus, she is offered a ride by Louise and accepts. Too bad nobody is around to see her get in the car.Jacques calls Inspector Parot to let him know Paulette has left the clinic. Parot concludes that this puts Génessier and Louise in the clear, since they obviously did not kidnap Paulette, but let her leave the clinic instead. However, Parot decides to make sure she got home all right. Gosh! She never got home. So the two inspectors drive out to Génessier's clinic just to be sure. They ask Génessier if Paulette was released from clinic. Yes she was, he tells them. The inspectors shrug and go home, concluding it was just a false trail and the choker was just one big coincidence.Before Paulette's face can be peeled off, Christiane releases her from the table, stabs Louise in the neck right through the choker, and releases the dogs, who then go after Génessier, ripping half his face off. Christiane wanders off into the woods with one of the doves she also released perched on her hand, just to give the movie a little symbolism. You see, this is a French film, so you can't expect it to make sense the way a Hollywood production would.

This picture has the look and feel of an American made Forties or Fifties horror flick but it's actually a French film made in 1960 and directed by Georges Franju. I don't know what single word might best describe it, but the one that immediately comes to mind is creepy. Everything about the picture tends to horrify the viewer, established with the opening scene as we see the images of passing skeletal trees against a sky of night time darkness. We learn that a middle aged woman (Alida Valli) is on her way to dispose of a body in a nearby river, another failed experiment at the hands of a gifted surgeon named Genessier (Pierre Brasseur). From there, things take an even more frightening turn, as the story explores Genessier's obsession to restore the face of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car crash for which he was responsible.The story uses some of that pseudo-scientific babble I love to come across in these types of films, that stuff about a 'heterograft', whereby radiation is a requirement to biologically modify a host body to receive a donor transplant. Because radiation is too intense in the required dosage, exsanguination is deemed the next best available strategy for the type of procedure explained by Professor Genessier to his attentive audience. Funny, but none of that was going on when the good professor got down to the real nitty gritty of his work on daughter Christiane (Edith Scob).You know, it's hard to describe, but there was something of an ethereal beauty in both the masked and newly engineered face of Christiane following the operation. Didn't you think for a moment that the new face of Christiane would be that of victim Edna Gruber (Juliette Mayniel)? Instead, you had this beautiful face appear, rather astonishingly to convey success for the questionable transplant operation. It's best described by the professor - "There's something angelic about you now" in a cautious appraisal of his daughter's beauty. However things take a disastrous turn as the operation proves fruitless; the girl's body rejects the new face and the mask is required once again.But you know what I found to be truly outrageous? What was with that police scheme to insert Paulette Merodon (Beatrice Altariba) into the professor's den of horror? There didn't seem to be any control in place to monitor the girl's movements, and she could have been another goner in the doctor's twisted scheme of things.Well I don't know if modern day viewers of a young age would be affected by the story as much as I was. I think the real terror for them would be watching Christiane use that ancient contraption known as a dial telephone. And then, as if to totally confuse the present day techie, boyfriend Jacques has to answer the phone without benefit of caller ID. Oh, the horror! Well in any event, I thought this film was a genuine creepfest, heartily recommended to genre fans, particularly as I mentioned earlier, to fans of classic horror films of the Forties and Fifties where the mad scientist reigns. In iconic fashion, the evil doctor gets his in the end here, as we learn the answer to that age old question - who let the dogs out?