Review: Eyes Without a Face (1960)

There is an interesting story behind Georges Franju's 1960 horror film Eyes Without a Face. Reportedly, he was asked once during an interview what he felt was the scariest film he had ever seen. He responded not with a title to a horror film, or any film at all for that matter, but instead stated that the most chilling thing he ever saw was actually a medical video in which a man was having a brain tumor removed. Though the footage was obviously very graphic, he said that it was not the explicitness of the video that stuck with him, but the fact that the man was awake. Though he was severely doped up and more than likely unable to feel anything, Franju said that the image of the man, who held a smile on his face for just about the entire operation, was terrifying to him, and served as an inspiration to this movie.

Unfortunately, the end result is bland; an attempt at high-art disguised as horror.

As is usually the case with horror films, the plot is very simple to follow: Pierre Brasseur plays Doctor Genessier, a brilliant surgeon who was involved in a horrible automobile accident with his daughter, Christiane. As a result, her face is horribly disfigured to the point that her own father forces her to wear a mask. The mask is white and featureless, and it quickly becomes apparent that its use is both for the good of the father, who does not wish to see his daughter in that state, and the daughter herself, who is appalled by her damaged looks (at one point even claiming that it was her father's fault, as he was behind the wheel at the time of the crash).

However, Doctor Genessier feels that his daughter still has some hope. As the film opens, you see, he is giving a lecture to medical students about how the transfer of living tissue from one person to another is the future of medicine, and he has since gone on to perfect that technique. So, with the help of his assistant Louise, they lure blonde-haired and blue-eyed women to the Genessier household, where they perform surgeries, removing their victims' faces and then grafting them on to Christiane's. Despite the fact a good number (read: all) of the surgeries fail, and despite Christiane losing faith in her father's ability to "heal" her, Doctor Genessier refuses to give up.

But he is running out of time: Two local investigators start to notice as the failed surgeries start to mount and as the body count steadily grows. To make matters worse for the poor doctor, Christiane takes pity on one of her father's unwitting patients and releases her. All this leads up to a cop-out of an ending that forcefully ends the movie on a positive note, where there were no such things before, and if there is one thing that I cannot stand, it is having a horrible movie end on a horrible note.

Eyes Without a Face is a rather horrible horror film. It was widely panned upon its release (so much so that the writer for The Spectator, a long-running British magazine, was almost fired for writing a positive review), but has since gained a rather large following for "true fans" of horror cinema (even though I consider myself one for the genre itself, but not for this film), with some even going so far as to insinuate that it is one of the scariest horror films ever made. I found no such horror, no such intensity within even a single frame. The mask itself is rather creepy upon its first viewing, but it just becomes another part of the film as poor Christiane is forced to wear the thing for roughly two-thirds of the entire picture. And don't even get me started on the movie's embarrassingly awful score, that sounds exactly like it was the inspiration for the theme in Curb Your Enthusiasm; needless to say, it completely removes any chance this film has of being even the slightest bit scary.

Though they may be hard to pick out, the film is not without its successes, and one has to look no further than its rather feeble 88-minute runtime to find what is perhaps its strongest, even if roughly ten of that consists of nothing more than characters walking from room to room within the doctor's large (and of course, foreboding) mansion. It was almost as if Franju was worried that the audience would not be able to tell the house was so large from its massive exterior shots that he felt he had to prove it, and prove it he does: On no fewer than three occasions, characters walk from the upstairs hallway, through several rooms and into the garage with no interruptions. For a movie that is already short on suspense and interest, these sequences are absolutely maddening.

I must also put some focus on the once-controversial surgery scene, which depicts the mad surgeon, in some rather graphic detail, cutting and eventually peeling the face off one of his victims. While this sequence still maintains some of its effectiveness, it is rather tame by today's standards, the camera opting to linger around too long before a fade so as to ruin the effect. The ending also features a rather good example of early make-up effects, the face of a character ripped to shreds with an eye hanging out. Of course, I will not reveal who or why, but it is pulled off rather well, and still manages to look good even when viewed today.

But surgery scenes aside, Eyes Without a Face is a terribly dull waste of time; a horror film with very little in the way of shocks, and nothing in the way of scares. If there's one word that should never describe a film from this genre, no matter how bad it may be, it's "boring". But that's unfortunately the perfect word to describe a film every bit as lifeless as Doctor Genessier's poor victims.

Reportedly, one critic stated upon its initial release that Eyes Without a Face was "in a minor genre and quite unworthy of his (Franju's) abilities." Franju responded by saying that the film was his attempt to get that "minor genre" to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, the end result is nothing more than a huge step in the wrong direction.

Rating: * 1/2 (out of 4)