Eyes Without a Face

I was visiting friends this weekend and they had a DVD of a film I'd never heard of, a French horror film from 1960 called Eyes Without a Face. It was a Criterion Collection disc, and a pristine print of a genuinely creepy film.

It was also ahead of its time, dealing with a medical procedure that is now possible--the face transplant. The film begins with a mysterious woman driving through lonely streets in the middle of the night. She dumps a body in the river, and when it's fished out by the police a Dr. Génessier is notified. The body has no face, and it seems his daughter has the same affliction, having been disfigured in a car accident. He identifies the body as hers, which gives hope to another man who's daughter is missing.

Of course not is all that it seems. The woman who dumped the body is the doctor's assistant (she's played by Alida Valli, who was the femme fatale in The Third Man). The doctor's daughter is very much alive. Her father has been conducting experiments in trying to graft a new face to hers, but unfortunately he's been getting donors by force.

The film, directed by Georges Franju, is very quiet and restrained. It also has a very shocking scene for 1960, as it shows the doctor applying a scalpel to a woman's face and then peeling it away. Apparently this caused fainting back in 1960, and the film was subsequently cut.

At 84 minutes, the film is still a bit padded. I joked that it seemed half of it consisted of people walking up staircases. Still, it's a creepy bit of cinema, especially the lifelike mask that the doctor's daughter wears. This film could have been cut down to make a particularly chilling hour-long episode of The Twilight Zone.