Great DVD of a 1960 Horror Film that is Still Very Unsettling: Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face"

"Les yeux sans visage" (Eyes without a Face, 1960) has some very conventional scifi/horror elements, including a mad scientist/surgeon, a secret operating theater, and a set of hounds. In one of the excellent bonus features on the Criterion disc, director Georges Franju recalls that he was supposed to make a horror film with "no sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudity because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market, and no animal slaughter because of the English market."

Although there is one (very!) grisly scene with blood in the middle of the movie, Franju rose to the challenge with the aid of writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Norcejac, who had managed the same feat in writing "Diabolique" for Henri-Georges Clouzot. (They also wrote the basis for Hitchcock's "Vertigo" before "Eyes," but that was not a horror film and was not recognized as a masterpiece at the time.)

Both the female leads recall (to me anyway) figures in Jean Cocteau movies (and Franju had made a great, though little-known-in-America movie of Cocteau's WWI novel Thomas, l'imposteur). Alida Valli (star of "The Third Man" and "Senso," she died a few months ago) seems cut from the same cloth as María Cesares's Death in Cocteau's "Orphée"; Edith Sco--as Christiane--provides great evidence for my recurrent claim that screen acting is done with the eyes (the veritable title role). Not to neglect body language, particularly hers at the end of the movie. Dialogue is of little importance. The images in "Eyes without a Face" are almost everything.

Although I admire the skill of the moviemaking the story--which plays with the structure of the Frankenstein story with a real daughter being the site of a physician's creativity/hubris--and, especially the surgery, creeps me out. I know that that is what a horror movie is supposed to do, and "Eyes" haunts my nightmares, while most horror movies bore me. The attempt to repair damage to one's child (the surgeon was driving when an accident seared Christiane's face) and the lengths to which parents will go--lengths far beyond what the child may want--makes for an interesting drama, and the final release is quite satisfying.

I found the Criterion DVD bonus feature on the writing duo of Boileau and Norcejac totally fascinating. The Criterion disc has a superb image transfer. It also includes the even more horrifying and earlier (1950) Franju documentary on a slaughterhouse "Le sanges bes bêtes" (Whew! Without any narration--let alone any exhortations--the images herein must have turned some carnivores into vegetarians! I found them gruesome and I have survived as a carnivore having gone through a slaughterhouse) and some interview footage of Franju (from which I quoted above).