Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) (1960)

This I learned of from none other than John Carpenter in the documentary, Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest, which I saw first when it was broadcast on AMC in October of 2002, as an episode of their Backstory series, and later as a special feature on the 25th anniversary DVD of Halloween, which I got in the spring of 2004. Carpenter referenced Eyes Without A Face as being a likely inspiration for the look of Michael Myers' mask and, as he talked, it showed one of the film's posters (the one you see here) and some stills of the girl with the face mask, which he described as, "Real creepy, because it was featureless, and immobile, except for her eyes." I remember agreeing with him, as those images were quite unsettling to me at the time. A couple of years later, I bought that book on horror films from Virgin Books I've mentioned many times and Eyes Without A Face happened to be one of the films highlighted in it. It was also featured in 101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die, which I bought a few years after that, so I knew this was a highly regarded film, both in French horror cinema and horror cinema in general, although the details of the plot and characters hadn't really stuck in my head. That changed when I finally saw it for the first time in 2015, back when Hulu had their deal with the Criterion Collection. I found it to be quite affecting in many ways, both in how utterly sad and hopeless a character the girl at the center of the story was, as well as how disturbing the subject matter was, with the infamous face removal scene being far more graphic and realistic than I was prepared for. I liked the film enough to where, in 2018, I bought the Criterion Blu-Ray at Barnes & Noble (by sheer luck, I happened to be there on a weekend where they were having a sale on their Blu-Rays) and, having re-watched it several more times since then, I can say it is a film I admire and enjoy. It's an effective combination of soft, feminine delicacy, grisly imagery, and utterly unsettling ideas, and it tells its story in a methodical, well-executed manner, although I do think the ending feels a bit rushed and abrupt. I caution you, though, that you have to be in the right mood to watch it, as it's very grim, downbeat, and bittersweet, with little-to-no humor at all, and can really get to you if you're not prepared for it.

On a cold winter's night, a woman dumps a body in the Seine River just outside of Paris. When the body is found, Prof. Genessier, a prominent physician and plastic surgeon, is called in by the police to confirm if it's his daughter, Christiane, who disappeared from his clinic while she was being treated for horrible facial wounds she received in a car accident. Arriving at the morgue, Genessier is told the state of the body is identical to that of Christiane when she was last seen and, when he sees it, he does identify her. Christiane's funeral is held shortly afterward, with the mourners including Jacques Vernon, her fiance, who works with Genessier at his clinic, and the professor's secretary, Louise, who happens to be the one who dumped the body. It turns out that Christiane was actually removed from the clinic by her father and is hidden away at his massive villa just down the road, while the body Louise dumped into the river was a woman whose face Genessier had attempted to graft onto Christiane's. Undeterred by this failure, and with a new feeling of freedom now that everyone believes Christiane is dead, Genessier is intent on repeating the operation until it's successful. Louise, who is completely loyal and devoted to the professor for repairing damage to her own face, helps him by luring young women to the villa. Although Louise is certain that Genessier can succeed, Christiane, who resents him as he was the one driving when the accident happened, has given up all hope and now feels like a prisoner in her own home. Her father makes her wear a face mask that she despises in order to hide her disfigurement and, after another attempted graft eventually fails, she becomes all the more despondent and depressed, wishing for death. She also begins to feel guilty over the harm her father has caused for her sake, which may soon prove disastrous for everyone involved.

Based on a book by Jean Redon, Eyes Without A Face was the second fictional feature film directed by Georges Franju, who began his career with a series of documentaries in the late 40's and on into the late 50's. (A word of warning about that: his first documentary, Blood of the Beasts, which is centered around the day-to-day business inside a Paris slaughterhouse, is a special feature on the Criterion Collection's release of this film. While I recommend getting that release if you're at all interested, you'd best watch that documentary at your own risk, as it is, indeed, real footage of animals being killed and butchered and is very hard to watch. I actually regret watching that.) His first fictional feature was 1959's Head Against the Wall, but it and Eyes Without A Face, which he didn't like being described as a horror film, were ultimately the first two of only a small handful of features he would direct in his lifetime, the other notable ones being 1962's Therese Desqueyroux, 1963's Judex, 1965's Thomas the Impostor, 1970's The Demise of Father Mouret, and 1974's Nuits Rouges. He also directed some television but, by the late 70's, he'd retired altogether and spent the rest of his years presiding over the Cinematheque Francaise, a film archive organization he'd co-founded way back in 1936. Franju died in 1987, at the age of 75.

When he hired Franju to direct the film, producer Jules Borkon gave him several stipulations in order to avoid various censorship problems, one of which was not to depict Prof. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) as a mad scientist, out of fear that German censors would draw comparisons with the horrific experiments of the Nazis. Sure enough, while he's definitely an imposing figure, and the acts he commits are horrific, Genessier doesn't come off as a wholly evil man; rather, he's seen as someone with good intentions but badly misguided. Having removed his daughter, Christiane, from the clinic, he's determined to repair her disfigured face himself, no doubt out of guilt for being the cause of the car accident that led to it. His methods, however, are hideous and inhumane, as he has Louise abduct young women around Christiane's age and similar in appearance in order to perform heterograft operations and attach their faces onto hers. Despite a recent failure that resulted in the death of one such woman, Genessier refuses to give up, having pretended the woman was Christiane herself when the body was discovered to ensure that nobody would come around his villa, asking questions, and potentially expose what he's doing. He reassures Christiane that he's doing it all for her, not comprehending how much he's tormenting her by keeping her isolated in the house, forcing her to wear the face-mask, which she despises, and making Jacques Vernon, her fiance, who works at the clinic near the house, think she's dead. Also, despite how confident he appears in his abilities, attempting to instill such faith in Christiane, Genessier is revealed to actually have doubts and mixed feelings. Upon performing another surgery, he tells Louise, "I'm afraid... All I can do is hope. If this were a success... God. You couldn't put a price on it. I've done so much wrong to perform this miracle." Sure enough, though it initially seems to have been a success, and Genessier acts as though he were confident all along, Christiane's body rejects the new face and she has to go back to wearing her mask. Not that it stops him from having another girl, this one a patient at his own clinic, abducted in order to try again.

Despite his good intentions, Genessier certainly has disturbing personality and character flaws, mainly in that he's cold when it comes to both other people and animals. Besides not comprehending what he's doing to Christiane, he also keeps a bunch of stray dogs confined in cages in a hidden kennel beyond his secret operating room. He sees them as nothing more than materials for his experiments, so it's very fitting that, at the end of the movie, he meets his end by them, as they maul

and rip his face apart. Genessier also sees the women whose faces he removes and grafts onto Christiane's as equally disposable. When Louise asks him what she should do with the one girl after the operation, he coldly tells her to keep on feeding her, saying, "I'll decide later." The girl then dies during an escape attempt and Genessier and Louise merely bury her body beneath the tomb of the first girl, the professor not at all bothered by it. Also, at the beginning of the movie, he's met by the father

of the girl whose body he passes off as Christiane's, giving him false hope and reinforcing it by saying, "How odd I should have to comfort you. You still have some hope, at least." That's another thing: he almost always talks in a dispassionate, detached voice and rarely ever gets genuinely flustered or angry. Finally, he's very controlling, which Christiane says is what compelled him to drive, leading to the accident. Even at the funeral for the woman he passed off as Christiane, he takes the wreath into the tomb, telling Louise, "I like order."

Significantly, when Louise loses her nerve over this and tearfully asks if they can leave, Genessier, who does appreciate her loyalty and is shown to have genuine affection for her, given how he succeeded with her surgery, genuinely loses his temper, slamming her against the wall, slapping her, and telling her to shut up. Later, when it seems as though the one operation has worked, he tells Christiane that he'll help her to establish a new identity for herself and even plans on telling Jacques the truth, confident that his love and ecstasy over having her back will make him overlook the horror of it all. And near the end of the movie, he attempts the surgery again and lies about the missing girl's whereabouts to the police and Jacques, making his downfall all the more deserved.

As unsettling as I initially found her mask, Christiane (Edith Scob) is anything but a frightening character; rather, she's one of immense pity and tragedy, someone whose life has been destroyed by her father, only for him to then continue to unintentionally torture her. When we first see her, she's laying face-down on a couch in her bedroom, distraught over having just found an obituary notice with her name on it. Her father says he simply did it for her own good, before pressing her into wearing the face-mask, which she both fears and despises, as she does her own mangled face, which she can still see reflections of, despite all the house's mirrors having been removed. While Louise continually attempts to instill in her confidence in her father's skills, Christiane has no faith in him whatsoever, mainly because she resents him for having caused the car accident that destroyed her face and turned her life into a waking nightmare, telling her, "He's lying to me, because he knows it was his fault." She's lost so much that she adds that she wish she were either blind or dead altogether. After she's left alone in her room, Christiane wanders out and about the house, which she's now all but a prisoner in, and calls her beloved fiance, Jacques. However, she doesn't say a word and he angrily hangs up on her, after which she solemnly looks up at a painting of a lovely young woman with a dove on her hand, longing for that type of freedom. As much as her father doesn't like it, Christiane tends to wander and snoop around the house, at one point watching him and Louise carry their next heterograft subject into the professor's hidden surgical room. Once they've left, she wanders in to look at the girl, silently contemplating the notion of having her face as her own, as well as goes into the kennel in the back and receives genuine affection from Genessier's experimental dogs.

Christiane has lost a lot thanks to her father, but what she's lost above all else is her identity. We don't even know what she looked like before she was in the accident; instead, we see her wearing several faces, both real and artificial, but none of them her own, so whoever she was before is literally dead. Now that I see it in context, I find her face-mask to be more sad than creepy, as it's a static, vague semblance of an identity, with only the eyes and her hair being hers. It's really poignant

to see Louise brushing her hair while she's wearing that mask, as well as Christiane herself wandering around the house, as it feels like they're going through the motions of a normality that's no longer possible. Plus, that white, satin housecoat she wears really makes her seem like a ghost wandering around the house that was once its own, compounding on that notion of false normality. We only see the badly mangled visage behind the mask once, when Christiane removes it and hovers over

the woman whose face is later grafted onto hers, imagining herself having it. It's also shot through contrasted lighting and a somewhat blurred lens, meant to simulate the girl's distorted vision after being drugged, but what we do see is enough to make us realize why Christiane resents her father so much. Although she does look lovely after the operation, it's also unsettling in that, one, we know it's not her actual face, and two, it looks like a flesh-and-blood version of her mask, just with the details of a real face. Even she herself has mixed

feelings about it, despite what Louise told Genessier about her being hopeful. When Louise comments that she looks "angelic," Christiane says, "I don't know about that. When I look in a mirror, I feel I'm looking at someone who looks like me, but seems to come from the beyond." She's also not happy about having to start a new life and identity, and is unsure about the situation involving Jacques. Then, worst of all, her body rejects the new face, forcing her to go back to the mask.

Sinking all the more into depression and melancholia, Christiane, again, calls Jacques and, this time, speaks his name. Louise, however, interrupts the call and tells her that what she just did was horribly reckless. Christiane says, "I know. The dead should keep quiet. Then, let me be dead for good. I can't stand it anymore. I don't dare look at myself. I can't touch my face for fear of feeling the furrows and crevices in my skin. It feels like rubber." Louise, like before, tries to make her have

confidence in her father, but she has no faith left, as she feels now that she's nothing more than another guinea pig for him. She begs Louise to help her in committing suicide, which she will have none of, and her father later attempts another heterograft. But, when Christiane is left alone with the would-be subject and she awakens and begins crying out of fear, she decides she's had enough. She sets the girl free, kills Louise by stabbing her in the neck, releases the dogs, which maul her father to death, and, carrying a dove that was held in a cage in the kennel, walks off into the woods outside the villa.

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum from Christiane is Louise (Alida Valli), Prof. Genessier's secretary and assistant who has an undying loyalty to him, as he was able to successfully repair damage inflicted upon her face. She's willing to do anything for him, including luring young women to his villa so he can remove their faces and graft them onto Christiane's, a grisly procedure that she actively assists him in. What makes Louise all the more disturbing a character is that, unlike the cold and detached Genessier, she does see the girls used in the surgeries as living people and is charged with looking after one following the operation. She's very nervous about disposing of their bodies when they've died and, when the funeral is held for the girl whom Genessier passed off as Christiane, Louise becomes very unsettled by the whole thing, especially when Genessier takes the wreath into the crypt, with her fretting and complaining about it leading him into one of his few angry outbursts. Despite this, she never wavers in her devotion to the professor, seeing him as a brilliant miracle-worker, and tries to instill that same faith in Christiane, to whom she acts as a surrogate mother. Even after two such procedures fail, Louise assures Christiane that her father will get it right, but Christiane has no confidence in the man who caused her disfigurement to begin with. This causes friction between them, as Louise can't stand to hear Christiane denounce Genessier or his abilities, insisting that the accident wasn't his fault and admonishing her for suggesting that he'll just keep using her as a human subject in his experiments. She also tries to keep her from contacting the outside, interrupting her second phone call to Jacques, and in interfering with the procedures, leading Christiane to stab her in the throat with a scalpel, much to her shock.

Jacques Vernon (Francois Guerin), Christiane's fiance, is completely unaware of the horrible things Genessier, whom he works with at the clinic, has done and believes Christiane to be dead. His devastation over this is added to when Christiane begins calling him but refuses to say anything, until she quietly speaks his name. Recognizing her voice, Jacques reports it to Inspector Parot (Alexandre Rignault), who was present when Genessier identified the fished out body at and is

now investigating the disappearance of several young women with similar physical features. Hearing that a friend of one of the women described her meeting a woman with a pearl choker, Jacques becomes suspicious, given that it makes him think of Louise. He begins working with the police to see if his hunch is right, with the police sending a young woman booked for shoplifting to the clinic as a patient. Jacques is charged with looking after her but, in the end, all he and the police do is provide Genessier with another potential victim, as he quickly declares there's nothing wrong with the girl and releases her, after which she's abducted by Louise and taken to the villa. Upon hearing of her release, Parot checks to see if the girl made it safely back to Paris and, when he learns she didn't, he and another inspector speak with Genessier at the clinic. Little do they know that, in calling him over, they save the girl's life, as Genessier was just about to begin the operation when Louise informed him of the police's call. However, when he tells them that he instructed the girl be released and confirms she was, they leave the clinic, along with Jacques, who apologizes for giving them a "bum lead."

While you only see the aftermath of the ordeal Genessier's first victim went through, those of the two he follows up with are shown in all their horrific detail. The one who gets it the worst is Edna Gruber (Juliette Mayniel), a young Swiss college student who's on her own in Paris, looking for a room, allowing Louise to swoop in, befriend her, and then drive her out to the villa with the promise of one. Upon arrival, Edna becomes spooked at how isolated the place is and also by

Genessier himself who, despite being polite enough, makes her uncomfortable with his insistence on pouring her a drink and telling her it's no rush, while Louise insists she must see the room before she makes a decision. She's promptly chloroformed and carried down into Genessier's secret operating room, where she later momentarily awakens to see Christiane hovering over her, without her mask. Her face is removed and grafted onto Christiane's, while Edna herself is kept prisoner, as Genessier tries to decide what to do with her. With her head totally bandaged, Edna manages to knock Louise out and attempts to escape, only to fall to her death out an upstairs window. Genessier and Louise then dispose of her body by burying it underneath the crypt where their first victim is interred as Christiane. During the third act, we're also introduced to Paulette Merodon (Beatrice Altariba), a young and somewhat ditzy shoplifter who, in order to avoid prison, agrees to cooperate with the police by bleaching her hair blonder and checking herself into Genessier's clinic. Because she's not sick, it doesn't take long for Genessier to ask her to be released, leading to her being abducted by Louise on her way out. However, unlike Edna, Paulette manages to escape unscathed when, while the police speak with Genessier at the clinic, Christiane cuts her bonds and sets her free.

You can see the influence of Georges Franju's previous documentary work on the film's look and presentation, even when what you're seeing is either really strange or, in some cases, downright ghastly. First off, the cinematography by Eugen Schufftan is of a very stark black-and-white, not unlike that of a documentary of the period, with deep blacks making for very noirish nighttime scenes and grays that are accentuated by the overcast, winter setting and many clinical environments. There's not much in the way of

stylish camera movement or images to be found, as things are shot in a manner where the camera is an objective, non-intrusive observer, although it always makes sure not to show us Christiane's unmasked face, save for that one shot, and never lets us get a good look at photos of her before the accident. This cinematic sort of realism is maintained even in the surreal, yet strangely beautiful and poetic, scenes of the masked Christiane being cared for by Louise, her wandering around the virtually white interiors of

the villa, wishing for the freedom the one painting depicts, and in the dinner scene between Christiane, her father, and Louise, which, when you think about it, is equivalent to a mad scientist having dinner with his own creations. Shortly after that scene, Prof. Genessier confesses to Louise that he knows he's failed in his skin-grafting, as Christiane's body is rejecting the new face. And then, in a sequence that's right out of an old science film, we're hit with a montage of shots of

Christiane's face deteriorating over a period of days, as Genessier's voice dispassionately describes what we're seeing as "spots of pigmentation," "small, subcutaneous nodules," "necrosis of the graft tissue," and, "ulceration," fancy, scientific terms that do not do justice to the raw hideousness of what you're looking at, not unlike the way Franju treated the idea of the slaughterhouse in his Blood of the Beasts documentary.

It's funny, although Franju admitted to not caring for Les Diaboliques (regardless of the fact that he hired the authors of that original book to pen the screenplay for this film), I feel that Eyes Without A Face does have some tonal and visual similarities. We have another film that takes place during a cold and wet French winter, with gray, overcast days that seem positively miserable and very dark, murky-looking nighttime exterior scenes acting as a backdrop for a story of despair, murder, and unspeakable horror. However, I feel that Eyes

has much more troubling and affecting undertones to it, as we're talking about innocent young women being stalked and abducted by an ordinary-looking, even seemingly friendly woman, and then taken to a man who, despite his good intentions, cuts off and removes their faces in order to make his daughter look like the beauty she once was, while they're imprisoned and ultimately tossed away like used commodities. Just as troubling is seeing Christiane stuck in this private hell of hers,

imprisoned by her own father as he obsessively tries to right a wrong he himself caused, while she languishes in sorrow, resentment, and isolation, completely deprived of the friends and fiance she once had, as well as missing an identity of her own. Franju's description of this film being about anguish was very accurate, and unlike Henri-Georges Clouzot, who sprinkled some humor throughout the dark tale he told, we get virtually no levity whatsoever here, with both Christiane's fiance and the police failing to uncover the horrors that Genessier is up to just down the road from his own clinic, leading to a poetic but very bittersweet ending.

Unlike Les Diaboliques, there's not as much decay or grime in the settings here. While it opens with Louise dumping a body into the freezing Seine River, off its muddy, rain-soaked bank, and shortly after that, we have a scene at the cold, clinical morgue (the Institut Medico-Legal, which was also used in Les Diaboliques), where Genessier identifies the body from the river as Christiane, most of the really uncomfortable settings are the exteriors in Paris, mainly for how they give off the sense of what a cold and dreary winter it is, and

also from the cemetery where Christiane's supposed funeral is held. Other than that, we spend some time in a big, fancy convention hall at the beginning, with Genessier giving a lecture, and while you wouldn't want to be there if you could help it, his clinic looks like a pretty clean, sanitary place. But the main setting of his villa out in the countryside is where we get a real representation of the dichotomy of his upper-class respectability and reputation contrasting with the atrocities he's committing behind closed doors. The villa itself

(the exterior of which is the Chateau de Mr. d'Allemagne in Hauts-de-Seine) is an enormous, three-story mansion, isolated in the French countryside, which initially looks rather typical on the inside, with its lovely sitting room, dining room, and study, but the higher up the floors you go, the more it comes off as very fairy tale-like with how white it becomes, especially in the area where Christiane lives. Speaking of which, like a princess in a tower, Christiane's room is at the

highest point of the villa, at the top of a smaller, isolated staircase beyond the landing at the top of the enormous, winding one that leads to the second floor. Her room is just as white as her housecoat and mask, with a fireplace all its own, a sofa rather than an actual bed, and, most symbolically, some doves kept in a cage. The landing in front of her room leads into a small hallway with doors on either side, with one of them opening up to what looks like a storage room full of items from Christiane's youth, such as a small dress on a hanger, some dolls and toys, a harp up against the wall, and a crib.

However, it's down in the lower section, beyond the garage, where Genessier keeps his darkest secrets. Behind a locker in the back of the garage is a secret panel that leads down into a corridor with brick walls, stopping at a large, rolling metal door that opens to reveal a surgical room/laboratory, where Genessier performs his heterograft operations and experiments on the dogs he holds captive. The corridor that leads down to this room also has a metal door in its left wall that leads to a small cell, with just a cot, a small table beside it,

and a sink, which is where Edna is kept after the operation. And going back to the dogs, at the back of the surgical room is a door that leads to the kennel, which is a long, narrow room with small, confined cages lining either side of it. Their barks can be heard when in the garage or just outside, as there's another entrance to the kennel through a corridor in the back that opens up to the grounds. The sound adds to the already eerie ambience of how isolated this place is, which Greta picks up on when she's first brought out there. Also, the idea that the kennel is just beyond the operating room and Genessier performs his experiments on the dogs on the same table as his heterograft subjects is skin-crawling, as you know that can't be sanitary.

As David J. Skal mentioned in his writing on the film that appears in the booklet which comes with the Criterion Collection release, it's almost a cruel joke that, when Jules Borkon hired Franju to direct Eyes Without A Face, he gave him the stipulations that there wasn't to be too much blood, that Prof. Genessier couldn't be depicted as a mad scientist, and there was to be no animal torture, as all three of those elements are part of the original novel. I've described how he managed to get around one of them but, given what we do see in the film, it's a

miracle that Borkon didn't feel the need to pull in the reins more or that it was cleared by various European censors. While we only get a brief glimpse of Genessier having cut some fur and maybe even some flesh off of a dog, that alone should've been enough to get Franju in hot water, as was the very implication of how badly the professor treats the dogs in general. And as for the "not too much blood" restriction, he still managed to get away with some very horrific and realistic-

looking images, chief among them the infamous face removal scene, which is said to have caused numerous audience members in various countries to faint. That's something I really have to applaud the film for: the makeup effects, especially in that scene but also in general, are fantastic and, aided by his documentary experience, look so real.

Although one of those stipulations was meant to keep the movie from upsetting German censors by drawing any comparisons to the experiments of the Nazis, the film has still been viewed as an attack on the regime and their ideology. Although he's not depicted as raving mad, Prof. Genessier is still seen as an embodiment of how the Nazis were able to appeal to the public, particularly the wealthy and the elite, while committing horrific atrocities and experiments behind the scenes. The fact that the women he abducts for his operations are of a lower

station, with one being a college student, and a foreigner, looking for a room, and another a shoplifter, who's used as a guinea pig by the police even before she's abducted by Genessier, is viewed as an analogy of how the Nazis believed they had natural rights over other classes and people and, thus, could prey upon them without any consequence. As I mentioned earlier, Genessier is very dismissive of them as human beings, not only disposing of them like trash but even lying to the

police and the father of his first victim, keeping him from ever knowing the truth by passing her off as Christiane. Some have even said that the train that passes in front of Louise and Edna when they're driving to the villa could be seen as a reference to the death trains but I think that might be looking into things a bit too much.

Another reading of the film is that it's an attack on vanity and obsession with appearances. While Christiane does wish for a new face in place of the one that was destroyed, it's her father who's truly preoccupied with it, forcing her to wear an artificial face while he works endlessly to make his heterografts succeed. It's not just to fix what he himself did to Christiane but also for the future of plastic surgery, in general, tying back in with a scene near the beginning, where Genessier is giving a lecture about the age-old human hope of

"physical rejuvenation" and the heterograft, which earns him a loud round of applause. Before he leaves, he's eagerly congratulated by a pair of old women (likely dowagers, or widows with property and titles they owe to their late husbands), who are very excited at the prospects, with one commenting, "What a wonderful future you've shown us,"; to that, he responds, "The future, madame, is something we should have started on a long time ago." Also, you have the character of

Louise, who's so grateful to Genessier for having repaired her own damaged beauty that she's willing to abduct women and help him in his grisly operations. Even Paulette, while she's acting as bait at the clinic, asks Genessier is he's going to shave her head for one of the procedures he orders, to which he answers, "No. I hope not, anyway. That would be a shame."

Georges Franju definitely knew how to get you interested right from the beginning, as after the opening credits, which play over a continuous traveling shot of trees and hills passing by at night, accompanied by the score's most bizarre theme, you're introduced to Louise as she anxiously drives down a tree-lined road, wiping off her foggy windshield. When she goes around several curves, the camera focuses on the rear-view mirror, which she holds steady with her hand, as the figure of

someone wearing a hat in the backseat drifts into view. Another vehicle appears behind her and the sight of its headlights causes her a lot of a panic. It quickly becomes apparent why: when we get a close shot of the figure in the back, which is wearing both a hat and trench-coat, we can tell, from the slumped over manner in which it's sitting, that it's a corpse. Fortunately for Louise, the vehicle passes her on by when she pulls over for it and she continues driving, the body in the back slumping over all the more. She makes it to the Seine River and stops her car on its bank. She gets out, pulls the body from the backseat, drags it down to the water, and tosses it in near an aqua-duct.

Knowing what she's done but not yet why makes it creepy to see Louise roaming the streets of Paris, following after two young women when they come out of a building and cross the street. She backs off when the two of them meet up with a guy, pretending to look through some books outside of a store, when the one girl and the guy leave. They pass Louise from behind, mentioning that the other girl is looking for a room, which clearly gives her an idea. After that is when we learn the truth about

Christiane and get a hint of what her father is up to and what Louise's involvement is. This makes watching her slowly but surely move in on Edna quite terrifying, especially since she comes off as a friendly stranger who's trying to help. She formally introduces herself to Edna while she's waiting in line at the movie theater, telling her that she has an extra ticket and the person she was supposed to go with didn't show up. Edna more than happily accepts the spare ticket and the two of them are

able to skip the line. Not too long afterward, Edna meets up with Louise at a small cafe near the Eiffel Tower, where Louise tells her that she's found a room for her and offers to drive her to the location that night to let her have a look at it. They begin their drive later that afternoon and Edna slowly but surely begins to grow concerned when they drive farther and farther and then leave the city limits. They arrive at Prof. Genessier's villa that night and when they pull into the front and get out, Edna is clearly unnerved by how far out in the woods they

are, as well as by how creepy the place looks in the dark and with the constant sound of the barking dogs. She asks how many dogs there are but Louise merely comments that she'll be well-protected. She leads Edna to the door and when they walk inside, they find Genessier there, waiting for them. They're introduced and Genessier offers Edna some Port wine, which she turns down, as she doesn't want to stay there for too long. The professor, telling her there's no rush, goes to get the bottle, and offers to show her the room, though Edna, by

this point, is rather uncomfortable and she says she'll have to think it over. She talks with Louise about how living in the suburbs isn't convenient for her, while, behind her back, Genessier quickly hides something in his pocket. Edna says she doesn't want to get back to Paris too late and that she'll let Louise know of her decision the next day. Louise, however, answers that would be too late, as Genessier comes up behind where Edna is sitting at the end of the couch and pours some Port into a glass on the coffee table in front of her. Then, he makes his move, swinging his other hand around and putting a cloth coated with chloroform over her face. She screams and struggles briefly, but quickly passes out.

Genessier, after throwing the cloth into the fireplace, and Louise carry Edna out of the sitting room. Unbeknownst to them, Christiane is watching from the second floor landing and quietly and cautiously slips downstairs after them. She watches them carry her through the door that leads out to the garage and, once out there, Louise opens the secret panel leading to the surgical room. As they carry her down there, Christiane enters the garage and hides behind the car when they come

back out. They stand in the doorway, with Genessier telling Louise, "I'll start after dinner. This time, I must try removing a larger section. In one piece. Not in sections." They then head back into the house and Christiane, in turn, makes her way down to the surgical room. Opening the door, she sees Edna strapped onto one of the operating tables. She glances at her for a bit, then walks to the door in the back that leads into the kennel. When she turns on the light, the already barking

dogs become even louder in their excitement. Christiane shushes them before they attract attention and then walks over and embraces a Great Dane as he stands up through the opening in the top of his cage. She gives a smaller dog some attention, then does the same for another, larger dog as he stands up in his cage, before going back to the door. Shushing them again, she turns the light out and closes the door behind her. Back in the surgical room, Christiane walks over to Edna again, switching on the light on the wall next to

her. She walks over to a mirror above a sink and removes her mask as she looks into the glass. With her face now uncovered, she walks back over to Edna and puts her hands above her face, grasping at it, and then resting them on top of it. Edna gradually comes to and sits up and screams at the sight of the mangled face looking back at her. Christiane slowly backs away from her, out of the light, as the dogs bark and howl in the kennel.

What follows is a scene that I was not prepared for at all when I first watched the film, even if it is the most famous scene. Like he did with the butchery in the slaughterhouse in Blood of the Beasts, Franju shoots this ghastly sequence in a dispassionate, detached manner akin to a documentary, with occasional close-ups of Genessier and Louise's faces for dramatic fact. You see just about every... single... grisly step in this operation. Louise puts Prof. Genessier's mask on for him, as he puts on his

gloves, and, walking over to where Edna lies unconscious, he has Louise give him a pencil. He uses it to draw the outline of where he's to cut, from the left temple, down and around the cheek, to the jawbone, stopping right beneath the middle of the chin. Glancing at Christiane, who's also unconscious nearby, moaning in her sleep, he does the same on the other side of Edna's face. He has Louise hand him a scalpel and he cuts along the lines, tracing them both in the same manner in

which he drew them, while Louise wipes away the excess blood. Once that's done, he has Louise wipe off his sweaty brow, then has her give him back the pencil, which he now uses to draw circles around the eyes. He uses the scalpel to cut out the flesh around the eyes (the one part of this grisly operation we're spared from seeing), then proceeds to cut and push further under the skin with forceps and clamp each one on the edge of the face. He does this again and again, using numerous pairs, until finally, he says, "Here we go," and they

slowly but cleanly lift Edna's face right off. Even though I'm somebody who loves the vivid color goriness of the Hammer Frankenstein movies, with all their instances of wince-inducing surgery and organ transplants, I was really cringing and my skin was crawling at the sight of this. I was not expecting it to be this gruesome or realistic-looking, and the notion that the poor girl was unknowingly lured into this, had no idea it was happening in the moment, and would later wake up with her entire face missing made it all more horrifying to contemplate.

Some time later, Louise wheels a cart of instruments into Edna's cell, as she apparently sleeps on her cot, her face bandaged up. But, unbeknownst to Louise, Edna is putting on an act, and when she has her back turned, she hits her over the head with a bottle, knocking her unconscious. Edna then runs out and down the corridor, finding her way into the garage. She runs to the door and attempts to lift open it, only to see the headlights from Genessier's car stream under it as he pulls up outside. Edna runs inside the house, as Genessier

opens up the garage door. Louise, having regained consciousness, walks in and tells him what's happened. He then runs after Edna, as she heads upstairs and finds herself on the second floor. She runs through a door, hearing Genessier following her up, and climbs the stairs leading to the floor where Christiane's room is. She bypasses her bedroom and goes down the corridor across from it, where Genessier follows her. He suddenly hears her scream and runs to one of the rooms. He finds the window open and look out to see Edna lying

dead near the villa's front steps. Later that night, Genessier and Louise drive out to the cemetery and take Edna's body inside the gate. Genessier carries the body over to the tomb where the first girl was buried, leans her up against its side, grabs a pick-axe, unlocks the door leading into the tomb, and starts smashing at the floor with the axe. The sound of it badly unnerves Louise, who covers her ears, when the sound is drowned out by the engine of a plane passing overhead. Genessier manages to remove one of the sections of the tomb's floor and, as a clock tower chimes nearby, he drags Edna's corpse inside and dumps her down into the hole.

Later, after Edna's face is rejected by Christiane's body, and she calls up Jacques and speaks to him, the third act starts to unfold as he goes to Inspector Parot about the phone call and learns that one of Edna's friends described her meeting a woman wearing a pearl choker. The film cuts to a short scene of Louise once again roaming Paris, searching for potential subjects for another operation. After that, we get the scene where the police talk Paulette Merodon into bleaching her hair blonder and checking herself into Genessier's

clinic. The professor himself meets Paulette shortly after she's been admitted, as she claims to go through periods of migraines. He orders several procedures done, including an electroencephalogram, then goes to another ward and examines a kid, asking him how many fingers he's holding up. The boy initially answers three to both, even though Genessier was holding up four the first time, and when he holds up three for the second, the boy changes his answer to two. Through it all, Genessier is shown to be very

patient and even affectionate towards the boy, reassuring his mother after the exam that there is hope for him. But, when he and Jacques both leave the ward, their unspoken but shared prognosis doesn't seem as optimistic. Genessier walks in on a nurse giving Paulette the electroencephalogram and, as he gets in close to have a good look at her face, appears to take an interest in her. He asks the nurse to bring the chart when it's finished and goes to his office, where Jacques is. He tells him there

doesn't seem to be anything wrong with Paulette, when a nurse comes in and reports that a patient is hemorrhaging. He sends Jacques to take care of it and, as he's left alone in his office, removes his glasses and appears to be having mixed feelings about performing another heterograph. The nurse comes in and gives him the graph. Looking over it, he finds nothing wrong and orders for Paulette to be discharged that night. In the next scene, Paulette, on her way out, has the nurse at the front desk call her parents in Paris to tell them she's coming home. She's then told where to find the bus and heads out beyond the clinic's gates and starts down the road. That's when Louise pulls up beside her and offers her a ride, which she gladly accepts.

Two scenes later, and Genessier has Paulette down in his surgical room, drawing the outline around her face. Before he can start the actual surgery, Louise comes in and tells him there are two men at the clinic who wish to speak with him. At first, Genessier tells her to tell them they need to come back the next day, but she comes up and whispers something in his ear that prompts to remove his mask and gloves. The two of them walk out and we then see why Louise whispered to him: Christiane is in the room. Her father walks over to the clinic

and speaks with Inspector Parot and another detective about Paulette, confirming that she was dismissed earlier and left. Both detectives and Jacques, convinced that he was mistaken about his hunch, leave the grounds. At that moment, Paulette awakens from being chloroformed and, finding herself strapped to an operating table in a strange laboratory, panics and cries out of fear. Christiane watches as she cries and futilely struggles and, shaking her head, walks over to her left side. The sight of her in her mask frightens her all the more,

and when she picks up a scalpel, Paulette screams in terror. However, Christiane cuts one of the straps, when she hears the sound of someone coming downstairs. She readies the scalpel to defend herself, as Louise enters the room. She approaches her, telling her to put the scalpel down, and then grabs her shoulders, ordering her again, only for Christiane to stab her in the throat. Shocked at what just happened, Louise staggers into a corner, asking, "Why?", and tears stream out

of her eyes as she slumps down to the floor and expires. Christiane ignores Paulette as she gets off the table and escapes the room, walking through the door into the kennel. One by one, she lets the dogs out of their cages and they head for the corridor in the back that leads outside. At that moment, Genessier returns to the villa, when he hears the sounds of the barking and snarling dogs behind the door leading into the corridor. He opens the door and is immediately attached by the

the German shepherd he'd recently acquired and cut into. The dog clamps onto his arm and, in their struggle, Genessier falls to the ground, where the dog proceeds to bite onto and shake his leg. The other dogs come running and join the German shepherd in his attack, swarming and tearing into the doctor, as he futilely tries to fight them off. Meanwhile, Christiane lets loose some doves kept in a large cage in the back of the kennel, with one of them landing on her left shoulder. Looking at the now deserted kennel, she walks out into the night, passing the body of her father, whose face has been mutilated, with the doves, carrying one of them in her hand.

While I like the payback that Prof. Genessier receives, with the ultimate revenge being his own face getting ripped to pieces, and those final shots of Christiane walking off into the woods with the doves is quite poetic and a nice payoff to the image in the painting she looked at so longingly before, I'm still a bit shocked at how quick the climax goes down. First off, it's surprising how, after so much time spent with them, the police detectives and Jacques don't uncover what Genessier is up to or rescue Paulette themselves but, rather, leave the

premises, none the wiser. Then, while that's going on, Christiane ups and decides that she can't take this anymore and lets Paulette go, kills Louise, and sets free the dogs, who take their own revenge against Genessier. Again, I like that the doctor gets his comeuppance, and the dogs killing him is just as satisfying as if Christiane had done it herself, as they were his prisoners and guinea pigs for his cruel experiments just as much as she was, but it felt like the entire thing escalated rather quickly.

I'm glad they didn't drag things out longer than was necessary, allowing the movie to come in at a nice 90 minutes, but I expected there to be more of a final confrontation, maybe with Christiane facing her father, confronting him with all the horrible things he's done and totally renouncing him before siccing the dogs on him. But no, instead, Paulette has escaped and will likely contact the police, Genessier has been mauled to death, and Christiane walks off into the woods, free but with her ultimate fate unknown. And that's another thing: I wasn't expecting it to conclude with so many loose ends, not just with Christiane but whether Jacques ever learned the truth and if Paulette alerted the police to what was going on.

The music score was composed by Maurice Jarre, who'd scored Head Against the Wall for Georges Franju and would go on to score his next two films (as well as have a decades-long career where he worked with a number of notable filmmakers on many famous movies). Music is used sparingly in Eyes Without A Face, with long, long instances of silence, but when the score does pop in, it's very memorable. There are two major leitmotifs throughout the film: one is a bizarre, twisted carnival-like piece that plays over the opening credits and becomes the theme for Louise whenever she's stalking potential victims, while the other is a gentle, poignant lilt used for Christiane, often heard whenever she's wandering around the house in her mask and when she, for a brief moment, has a new face. Both motifs vary in how they're orchestrated, sometimes sounding faster or slower, loud or rather soft, with my favorite variation being a swelling version of Christiane's theme that ends the film as she walks off into the woods. They also make up 98% of the score, with there being only two other instances of different music. The scene where Christiane looks at Edna down in the surgical room is scored with an eerie, plinking sort of piece, accompanied by strange and freakish sounds, with a brief bit of her motif when she removes her mask and walks over to Edna, and a build-up to a more traditional instance of horror music as she puts her hands over her face, only for it to abruptly cut off when Edna awakens and screams at the sight of her. And when Genessier later sees that Edna has died by falling out of one of the top floor windows, we're hit with a loud "dong!" sound and bombarded repeatedly with harsh notes as the film cuts from the shot of her dead body to a close-up of her bandaged face, her lifeless eyes looking out beyond them. Also, while it's not really score, Christiane's introduction and her obvious despair is contrasted with a light, upbeat piece of music that's playing over her radio.

Eyes Without A Face didn't get released in America until 1962, and though its distributor, Lopert Pictures, is said to have recognized its artistic merits, they still gave it the lurid title of The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus (and no, they didn't rename Prof. Genessier as such) and put it out on a double-bill with The Manster (which I haven't seen at this point but have heard is pretty bad). The film was released almost fully intact, although the heterograft scene was severely cut (you still see some of its really gross moments) and they also removed the scene between Genessier and the little boy, likely because it humanized him a bit too much. It was dubbed into English and the dubbing is pretty fair, with the voices all being appropriate for their characters, especially those who voiced Genessier and Christiane, but when Louise is fatally stabbed at the end, her dub actor uttered a very flat, "Why did you do that?" They didn't mess with Maurice Jarre's music score but they did also add in a few extra moments of music. When Genessier and Louise leave the cemetery after the funeral, they put in this slow plucking bit of music that doesn't fit, but when they carry Edna down to the surgical room, they put in a subtle, eerie overture that, while fair, doesn't make it more effective than it was when it was without music. The original French version was finally released in America in 2003 and, since then, this is the version that's in circulation. For those who are curious, though, at the time I wrote this, The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus could be viewed on Dailymotion, but in very poor picture quality.

Like Les Diaboliques, Eyes Without A Face is a shining example of French horror cinema, with great acting, direction, and cinematography, a memorable setting and locations, a memorably bizarre music score, and a very well-told and unsettling story that has a simultaneous poetic/grisly nature about it. But, it has to be stressed that this isn't a movie for the squeamish or easily unnerved, as not only is the subject matter horrific but it also pulls no punches in visualizing it, with the heterograft scene being especially gruesome and hard to watch, and the dark, somber tone, with no humor, may turn off some viewers. Also, the ending, while satisfying, can come off as rather rushed and open-ended to some, but, overall, this is one that's not to be missed by those who are interested.