Horrorfest 2010: Eyes Without a Face

I don't often think of French films when I think of horror films, so I was surprised to find out EYES WITHOUT A FACE is a French production. Apparently inspired by the success of those kick-ass Hammer films in England, EYES was France's answer to the resurgence of horror in the late 50s and early 60s.

EYES is the story of a doctor (Pierre Brasseur) who is obsessed with his attempts to restore the face of his daughter (Edith Scob). She was injured in a car accident that he caused, and he's using his experimental surgery techniques to try to graft a perfectly good face onto her almost totally obliterated one.

By day, the doctor looks like an upstanding physician on the cutting edge of his profession, lecturing to enraptured audiences about the potential of his experimental surgery ideas. By night, he experiments on a room full of caged animals (mostly dogs) and sends his assistant (Alida Valli) out to capture young women to use as face transplant subjects. Meanwhile, he keeps his daughter locked up in the house and insists that she wear a creepy, featureless mask that only has holes for her eyes.

Most of the plot deals with the doctor's attempts to fix his daughter's face and what all that entails -- all the dead bodies have to be disposed of somehow, and fresh victims have to be picked up. It's a tough job. Meanwhile, his daughter is getting more and more disillusioned with the whole thing and starts to think maybe she'd rather be dead than a constant victim of the doctor's obsession.

Of course, there are some good scares and a lot of suspense -- probably the most spellbinding sequence is the extended surgery scene where we see the doctor perform the transplant in graphic detail. It's not as gory as some stuff that's out there in movies today, but it's turned my stomach to watch the doctor carve into the face with his scalpel and peel back the skin. The movie also plays coy when it comes to showing the deformed daughter's face, so every scene she's in for the first half of the movie has you wondering if they're finally going to do it. When they do, it's not disappointing.

A couple of the people involved in the production went on to become the best in their field. The first thing I noticed about the film was the offbeat music -- ironically a little too "happy" for this kind of film, reminiscent of the famously disjointed score for THE THIRD MAN. Sure enough, when the music title carred popped up, the name listed was Maurice Jarre -- the guy who went on to become famous for movies like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and DR. ZHIVAGO.

Similarly, the cinematography is beautiful and crisp -- a great use of the contrasts of black and white, with several great scenery shots revealing many background layers to the action. Reading up on the film online, I found out the cinematographer was none other than Eugene Schufftan, famous for later shooting THE HUSTLER, another great example of what you can do with black and white.