Here I go. I am about to write one of those reviews that gets me endless "Not Helpful" votes because I am about to dare to trash a film that so many hold in such high regard. If there was a "Film Snob Scale" I think I would be about a 7. In my imaginary scale, a 10 is the total snob. This is the guy who talks to you about Jodorowsky and Malick and would never deign to watch something common. A 1 on this scale likes the Adam Sandler movies on Netflix. Why am I making up imaginary scales and rambling on in this review? It's to give you some sense of where I am coming from here. I am not one with common tastes. I enjoy film. I enjoy movies that make me think. With all of that said, I think only the 10s on my snob scale will truly like this film. I think it benefits from "foreign film disease" (yes, I'm making stuff up again). This is a syndrome where a movie that would be considered "good" in English is escalated to the status of greatness because it is in a foreign language. This idea that somehow foreign film makers, and especially French film makers, inherently make better films.To begin with, the plot of this movie has existed since the dawn of the Poverty Row b-horror film. Whether the villain is interested in obtaining "parts" for his own self, his lover, his family member or anyone else, horror history is littered with the discarded body parts of some mad scientists plan to make someone whole again. So, in the void of anything creative in the plot, one has to ask if the plot we are given is done with anything the audience hasn't seen before. Has the director given us something new and profound. My answer to that is resoundingly "no".The majority of this movie is so understated as to border on boring. Critics and film snobs alike will want to regale you with diatribes about how this director was seeking a new kind of horror, an intellectual horror, blah blah blah. There is no emotion on anyone's face (except the victims and half the time they can't be bothered). Nothing really happens ever in this movie. Half the run time is slow, lingering shots of some characters' face, endlessly hanging there as if this creates tension or atmosphere. There is nothing to entertain, at all. That is the crux of my problem with the film. I am all for art. I want creativity. I want thought. BUT I WANT ENTERTAINMENT. I have to end the movie thinking "yeah, that was good". If it is good and it, also, gives me something artistic, that's what creates a great movie. If it ends and I have to go looking for things to praise like cinematography, camera angles, or directive style. If I need to have completed a four year degree in film studies from UCLA to "appreciate" the movie, then it's not a good movie. It fails at its' primary purpose, which is to entertain.In the end this is all sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a film snob's dream and a movie that the average joe will fall asleep on within 30 minutes. Unless you would consider yourself a "10" on the film snob scale, skip it.

Eyes Without A Face stars Pierre Brasseur as renowned French surgeon Docteur Génessier, who tries in vain to restore his daughter Christiane's beauty after a car-crash leaves her horribly disfigured. With the help of his devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli), the doctor abducts young women, grafting their faces onto Christiane, with little success.Highly regarded by many horror connoisseurs, director Georges Franju's macabre mad-scientist classic benefits from a truly cruel villain in Docteur Génessier, who not only mutilates innocent girls, but isn't above tormenting one victim's father (by denying him the right to his daughter's body at the morgue), and treating Christiane like a guinea pig in his experiments. Eyes Without A Face also features some impressive early gore (albeit in black and white), with the surgical removal of a girl's face shown in unflinching detail, and grisly deaths for Louise and Docteur Génessier, who ultimately receive poetic justice.For me, though, the film is just a little too lethargic to be a wholly satisfying experience, the 'haunting' scenes with Christiane in her smooth rubber mask a tad repetitive and a little too much time spent where nothing much of interest occurs. Overall, it's a reasonably entertaining piece, but not as great as its reputation would have one believe.

After a fellow IMDber recently mentioned the Peter Cushing film Corruption to me,I started to remember seeing ads for a BFI DVD/Blu- Ray of a title that I've been meaning to take a look at for years.With the October Horror Challenge taking place on the IMDb Horror board,I decided that it was time to finally unmask the face.The plot:Ever since causing a car crash that led to his daughter Christiane Génessier's face being disfigured,widow Dr. Génessier has been trying to repair the damage that he has done.Faking Christiane's death with help from his loyal assistant Louise, (whose face Génessier repaired,with the only sign of the surgery being a scar on the neck that Louise covers with a necklace) Génessier decides to keep Christiane in his house,and get her to wear a face mask,whilst he searches for a way to fix her face.Since the method worked for Louise, Génessier decides to repair Christiane's face by kidnapping similar looking women,and cutting their face off in order to graft it onto Christiane.Unlike Louise, Génessier finds his daughters body rejecting the new tissue,which leads to Louise & Génessier having to kidnap more women,in the hope of finding a "perfect match."As the police start to fear that they have a serial killer on the loose who is making similar looking women "disappear", Christiane decides to disobey her dad and call Jacques Vernon,who along with working at her dads hospital,is also Christiane's fiancé.Picking up the phone, Vernon discovers that Christiane is not as dead as Génessier led him to believe.View on the film:Before I get to the title,I have to praise the BFI for an extraordinary transfer,with there not being one spec of dirt on the print,and the soundtrack being presented with a shimmering clarity.Carefully balancing the blunt brutality of reality with a surreal flight of fantasy,director Georges Franju & cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan look back to the allegorical films made during the Occupation of France,by basing Génessier's operation room in a basement sunk deep in the darkest part of humanity,with the sterile appearance of the room,and the wearing of masks by the Génessier's completely dehumanises them,as none of them display the slightest sign of remorse from the dying screams of the "experiments"/patients.Opening with a body being dumped in a lake,Franju stubs the title with a brittle Film Noir atmosphere,with the long,lurking shadows covering Dr. Génessier with the stench of death,and the unflinching gaze at the horrifyingly (but impressively made) facial transplants.Giving the movie a precise touch of surrealism,Franju gives the title an underlying line of fantasy,with animals matching the behaviour of their owners,with Génessier dogs showing sheer brutality,whilst Christiane's doves break free into the world,and allow Christiane to symbolise her late mother.Keeping Christiane locked in a mask for most of their superb adaptation of Jean Redon's novel,the screenplay by Pierre Boileau/ Thomas Narcejac/ Jean Redon/ Claude Sautet & Pierre Gascar draw deep marks of Christiane's personality on the mask,by making Christiane's exchanges with her dad become increasingly blunt,as she starts to desire to break out of his cage.Holding back from releasing a facial operation on the screen for almost an hour,the writers cut a horrifically tense atmosphere into the title,thanks to Génessier and Louise kidnapping/murdering presented in a chilling,matter of fact manner.Limited to her blue eyes being the only facial feature visible, Edith Scob gives a brilliant performance as Christiane,whose fragility is expressed in Scob's petite walking manner,with Scob's stilted body movements unravelling the psychological breakdown that Christiane is experiencing.Showing no emotion during the facial operations, Pierre Brasseur gives an excellent performance as Dr. Génessier,with Brasseur giving Dr. Génessier a warm,wide smile that shows a real sense of care towards people,which turns into total darkness with the blink of an eye,as he looks into the eyes without a face.

The opening of Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) shows a young woman named Louise (Alida Valli), the assistant to the brilliant, renowned surgeon Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), dumping a body in the river, who Dr. Génessier later identifies as his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Christiane's face was horribly disfigured following a car accident, and following her funeral, we realize she is still living under the care of her father, with a plain, white mask over her face. Her father, who owns his own clinic right next door to their home, is trying to restore the beauty of Christiane's face by sending his assistant to find and befriend young, attractive women so that they can be kidnapped, taken to his clinic, and stripped of their own face to be surgically placed on Christiane's. One day, Louise finds Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel), an attractive, young Parisian woman who looks to be a perfect match for Christiane. Upon drugging her and taking her back to Génessier's home, the process of stripping Edna of her face and applying it to Christiane's begins in a horribly gruesome way.From that premise alone, many potential viewers of Eyes Without a Face will be turned off and never look in the film's direction again. What they'll fail to see, however, is how remarkably beautiful of a film this is. Despite its grotesque premise, director Georges Franju keeps the film on a quiet scale, conducting everything in a softly poetic manner, relying on the essences provided by Eugen Schüfftan's black and white cinematography to carry the film. This atmosphere makes the film a decidedly artful venture, showcasing the lavish scenery and costume designs of those involved rather than making the film entirely about shock and awe.Admittedly, there is gruesomeness to be found in Eyes Without a Face, and the level in which it's employed is pretty strong, especially given the time period in which it was made. Franju handles the gore in a way that makes the film more about the process than the actual shock; with such a frightening and depraved premise, one expects the film to be filled to the brim with completely nonsensical ugliness and gross-out schtick. Thankfully, the driving force behind the film knows how he wants everything to be executed, and that's not in the way of bargain basement shock. Franju creates an impact that's potentially everlasting on the viewer, creating a film that's equal parts carefully-executed French drama and classic American monster movie.I liken Franju's film to an American monster film not only because of its atmosphere, but its buildup and execution. At only ninety-minutes, Eyes Without a Face is conservative in its narrative pacing and relatively slowburn in its structure. Franju hooks us early on by painting the picture of a clearly intelligent and thoughtful doctor, but one who is also not mentally stable. We then see Franju change gears to give his daughter's perspective on her treatment, living a now secret life confined to a white mask and her father's clinic, struggling to keep her own mental stability. Then we cut to Louise's manipulative, thankless task, and so on; Franju structures the film in layers, giving us suspense before providing us with an execution similar to a monster movie. We get a lot of tension before the instance we've been waiting for finally occurs, and through that, the same kind of emotions and feelings arise.Eyes Without a Face comes at the pivotal time in French cinema when a new wave was underway. The longstanding "tradition of quality," where older directors made films for an older crowd, reiterating common values and traditionalist principles, was being demolished by younger, more radical directors who were motivated by watching a great deal of subversive films from all over the world and wanted to profile the kind of ideas they beared and they felt. These ideas were often politically-charged (a great deal of the 1960's work of Jean-Luc Godard), autobiographical works (several early works of François Truffaut), and films that simply broke every convention in French cinema at the time (specifically Godard's Breathless). Franju previously was a documentarian, making films concerning Paris industry, one about a slaughterhouse and another about the modernization of the city. Eyes Without a Face was his first film to deviate from his forte, and what amounted as a result was a great deal of critical indecisiveness about what kind of path Franju was attempting to forge with this new direction. Despite all of the criticism he received, Franju responded quaintly, saying the purpose was to give simple genre films like this some credibility, showing that they can break new ground and give us something to talk about just as much as any documentary could.Eyes Without a Face is a masterclass of suspense and terror, and remains a revolutionary work of not only French horror, but French cinema in general.Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, and Juliette Mayniel. Directed by: Georges Franju.