The Face that Wouldn’t Die

Eyes Without a Face (1960) has been on our queue as a Long or Short Wait for a while. It finally showed up, which is good, I guess.

It starts with a Alida Valli, a striking looking older woman driving through the dark countryside. In the black and white photography, her headlights in the night give the opening a very film noir feel. She stops and dumps a body in the river.

Later, Dr. Pierre Brasseur is giving a lecture to a society crowd on grafting. He is cold, sad and intense, probably because his daughter has been missing. When the police find the body from the river, he identifies it as his daughter - even though her face has been surgically removed.

The reason soon becomes clear. He walks up the long series of stairways in his ornate mansion to the attic room where he has hidden his daughter, Edith Scob. Her face was ruined in an accident, and now  she wears a rigid, expressionless mask that only shows her eyes. He has been trying to graft a new face onto her, using girls supplied by Valli. She hates being hidden way, but accepts it - she wouldn’t want her fiancé to see her deformed face.

So far, this is very atmospheric.

When Valli goes out to find another girl, it becomes tense. But when they drug her and begin operating, it is positively gruesome. Part SPOILER, part WARNING - He cuts her face off in a very graphic scene that I had to watch through my fingers.

This is very much a mad scientist plot, complete with beautiful daughter and deformed assistant. Valli is faithful to him because he fixed her face with a graft. The house and the secret laboratory is filled with frenzied barking of the dogs that he uses for his experiments, another very hard to take detail.

I won’t give away the ending, except to say that it ends happily for these doggies. Also, the fiancé is almost entirely useless.