Review of Eyes Without a Face (1960) by Jack G — 22 Mar 2009

You know you've seen this kind of premise before, from the likes of super B horror (or Z horror) movies where there's a mad doctor performing a crazy experiment on someone; maybe Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi or someone starred and was directed by an old pro at doing hokey special effects with creaky old music slapped on. I imagine the filmmaker George Franju saw some of these too and decided, in the Godardian New-Wave tradition (Franju, after all, was the co-founder of the Cinematheque so he too must have been a vociferous film buff), to make a movie as criticism, to make a film about a highly respected doctor in France who has a daughter without flesh on her face and takes the skin off of many girls (because if you at first don't succeed, try, try again) to graft on to her face as a new one, as seriously as anyone might take a film of the most prestigious kind. This is one of those stories for grown-ups, or just anyone looking for a superb rendition of horror made personal, straight-faced, creepy as f*** and unforgettable.

Part of it is just the direction, as it never does anything too crazy to sensationalize or make gimmicky. There's consummate professionalism going all the way for Franju. But at the same time he's also interested in a certain eerie, Gothic approach: the opening scene with Alida Valli (of the Third Man) in the car driving with the other dead woman in the backseat in a trench-coat and hat is about as horrifyingly shot as any scene I can think of in movies of the past 50 years. There's other scenes like that, or ones that just subtly pile on the atmosphere like when the doctor's daughter, played by the beautiful and perfectly sensitive Edith Scob, just walks around the house or around the dogs used for experimentation. But maybe most effective of all is how he doesn't turn away or cut much during a really harrowing scene at the mid-point when we see up close the "process" of cutting off the skin of a sedated woman. For a movie from 1959 it's still shocking, for its deliberate pace and its need to avoid senseless shock value. What is there does the trick.

And while the performances are all very good, particularly from the actor playing the doctor who barely ever raises his voice unlike so many mad scientists and PHD's in these kind of horror movies, and from Valli and from some of the supporting players (at most, for conventional sake, we get the one girl who screams at the sight of Christiane's "real" face at one point), it's the dark and doom-like atmosphere that really make Eyes Without a Face stand out as a classic. Not to mention, of course, the music by Mauriece Jarre. This is music that would give chills to the most hard-bitten genre fans; Maurice Jare goes from notes of a bizarre carnivalesque nature to more sad passages with Christiane, like when she's just walking around or when we see her with the mask on. In fact it's one of those scores that is so good that you cannot picture the music without the movie, or visa-versa (the same can also be said of his Lawrence of Arabia score).

And yet the director is also wise to only use the music when it fits best, and so the film takes on an oddly and daringly realistic tone at times. The camera-work takes some liberties with style (I mean that as a compliment), but it's never too over-the-top, never too much with the "hey, look at me, I'm doing a creepy horror movie!" It also helps that he has some fantastic writing to work from- two of the writers also wrote the original Diabolique and Vertigo- as that element also is keenly aware of what makes horror really tick. You won't easily forget Eyes Without a Face, as a piece of pure cinema and as a not too dated piece of genre oneupmanship. And it's still, ultimately, a fun time to have even with all of the gloom and fatalism of the picture.