Eyes Without A Face

TCM starts its Halloween movie fest Monday, 10/30 at 2:00 AM (EST) with George Franju’s, “Eyes Without a Face (1959).” This movie has been hailed as the most “elegant of gore movies.” The movie based on a novel written by Jean Redon is both a beautiful, but disturbing story. A doctor (Pierre Brasseur) has a beautiful daughter (Edith Scob) that has had a horrible auto accident. Her face is monstrously disfigured. The doctor keeps her hidden away in his mansion, away from the world in a secluded area. He is just happy to have her alive–but appearances are everything. He must make her beautiful again. Louise (Alida Valli), the doctor’s devoted assistant helps him with his scheme.

The assistant is to lure young, and beautiful women to the mansion so that the doctor can strip their skin then use it to reconstruct his daughter’s face. Sounds pretty spooky huh? Yes, indeed.

Review: “What keeps EYES WITHOUT A FACE from falling into schlock category, unlike the novel it was adapted from, is Franju’s direction. Despite a face-lifting sequence that will make you thankful for black and white, the movie is infused with a visual poetry that transcends its original material and turns it into what could be called the most elegant of gore movies.”

“Valli’s lines are charged with chilling double entendre, particularly in the scenes where she lures a new victim to the house under the pretense of a room to rent. Hearing the dogs barking from the laboratory, the young woman asks uneasily if there are many of them. To which Louise, deliberately misunderstanding her, replies with a smile: “See? You will be safely guarded.” And indeed she will. Still with the same chilling smoothness, as she gently pressures her into renting the room, Valli adds: “Tomorrow, it will be too late”, mere seconds before the poor girl is smothered with ether. “

“This duality is at the core of the movie, whose protagonists have crossed the line between good and evil almost out of their own accord, blinded as they are by passion: Genessier’s for his experiments, more than for his daughter as she herself bitterly reflects. Louise’s for the surgeon who once performed miracles on her own face. Watching those characters interacting with each other is like witnessing the accelerated decay of a once beautiful body. None of them has a grip anymore on what exactly constitutes a human being. They just go through the motions, their best intentions forgotten. In the end, it’s up to Christine to remind everyone, in a most drastic way, that it’s all a question of free will.” [Source: feoamante.com]

Watch it if you dare…