Gaumont Studios, 1959

starring: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli

directed by: Georges Franju

the plot: Due to his careless driving, celebrated plastic surgeon Dr. Genessier (Brasseur) disfigures his beautiful daughter Christiane (Scob). He resolves to return the girl to a state of beauty by grafting the faces of unsuspecting female patients onto her skull. His devoted assistant Louise (Valli) trolls Paris for innocent young girls to lure back to the isolated sanitarium for the grisly transplants. 

why it’s good: In many respects, this film is not good, and yet it’s worth spending the 88 minutes to watch it. Fronju, who never garnered any serious respect as a filmmaker, understood the power of the medium better than many mainstream directors. He keeps this pristine black-and-white film in consistent darkness; in several scenes, headlights reflected on a rainy windshield are the only illumination. He has a master’s grasp of the power of sound, so crucial to the efficacy of theater and film—the constant barking of the caged dogs used for experiments in the basement, or the maddening and endless cry of a crow in a desolate cemetery. There’s some very disturbing stuff, such as a slow and deliberate scene in which a girl’s face is surgically removed. The fact that this tormented victim is then left to live imprisoned is objectionable, even by a horror film ethos. The acting isn’t great, but that oddly works, as the performers serve the material in an almost Brechtian Theatre of Alienation manner.

why you should own it: Several prominent American film critics consider “Eyes Without a Face” a gem. The doctor is so obsessed with restoring his daughter’s beauty that he clearly misses the point. If the film has anything of value to say, it is this: Our aesthetic standards are dangerous. As a poet once said, the summer of a woman’s beauty is but brief. The father of this film wants to restore a beautiful face to the lovely daughter who can’t even bring herself to speak to the man she loves on the telephone. The irony here is sharp as a scalpel. The concept of a face-transplant in 1959 was pure science fiction. Today, these transplants  are actually being performed, albeit without the neat results seen in this 53-year-old film. This movie attracted little attention upon its initial release, but it won’t seem to go away. With a small budget and a lousy studio, Franju did his best to manifest an atmosphere of frightening isolation and deliver a powerful inquiry as to why an ideal woman must be physically beautiful to all of us (People magazine: “Is Angelina Jolie the Most Beautiful Woman in the World?”). Twenty-five years after his death, Franju’s subtle but intense commentary on this idea echoes like that horrible crow in the cemetery. “Eyes Without a Face” is available on a fine Kino Video VHS cassette, and a Criterion DVD with no frills—because everyone involved is dead.