EYES WITHOUT A FACE Movie Review

The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus
Les Yeux sans Visage
Occhi Senza Volto

It sounds like a horror movie plot you've watched a thousand times: a deranged plastic surgeon is obsessed with restoring his disfigured daughter's face to its original beauty. But this time, the atmosphere of dread and spiritual devastation that France's Georges Franju has brought to this nightmarish fable has elevated it to the truly magical—and thoroughly disturbing. Pierre Brasseur is the surgeon whose careless driving has mangled the delicate features of daughter Edith Scob, and his solution is to roam through the dark streets of Paris with his sinister, leather-clad assistant (Alida Valli), looking for young women to capture so that he might graft their faces onto his daughter's. Jean Cocteau wrote that “Franju takes us implacably to the end of what our nerves can bear,” and there are moments in Eyes without a Face when we think we can't look at what we're about to be shown. Of course we can, and we do. (The film's original American release was in a dubbed version sent to drive-ins called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, which also cut short one of the film's most perversely graphic scenes of facial surgery. Despair not, however: the voices of the original French soundtrack—as well as every evil stroke of the surgeon's scalpel—have been fully and lovingly restored.)

NEXT STOP … Beauty and the Beast, The Wasp Woman, Face/Off

1959 84m/B FR Alida Valli, Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Francois Guerin; D: Georges Franju; W: Jean Redon; C: Eugene (Eugen Shufftan) Shuftan; M: Maurice Jarre. VHS.LV INT, TPV