A mysterious killer called The Wolf is responsible for several killings in Paris. A bank clerk who is suspected of robbery and murder tracks down the killer. The plot doesn't really hold together but if you want full-blooded melodrama this has it all; lecherous chevalier, misunderstood hero, mad scientist, lovely heroine and the eponymous malformed face at the window. It looks good with great sets, The Blind Rat tavern being particularly good and appropriate plangent music accompanies the mayhem. Very enjoyable.The lead is played by the unique Tod Slaughter and he outshines the rest of the cast. It depends of course on how you view a Slaughter performance. Some think it is silly and laughable but others (like myself) take great delight in the unparalleled ham of his acting. His characters are unashamedly villainous and his unbridled libido when near a pretty young woman seems startlingly daring for the time. His proper surname really was Slaughter. Considering the roles he played it was a definite case of nominative determinism.

A gruesome serial killer known as "The Face" is terrorizing Paris, and the police are baffled. When a bank is burglarized and an employee killed, wealthy citizen Tod Slaughter offers to help the owner if he can wed his lovely daughter. But she is in love with somebody else, so Slaughter schemes to get his rival out of the way. This leads to more mayhem and murder, and a surprising revelation (or not so surprising considering who the star is) brings this melodramatic tale of murder and mayhem to its conclusion.While there aren't really any major shocks here, the big surprise is the fact that this looks a lot higher budgeted than it probably was (especially for a Tod Slaughter/George King grand guignol), and some of the twists and turns the plot takes are made to come off as quite creepy. The actual face at the window is quite horrifying, and how it is utilized to terrorize its victims is quite ingenious in its macabre manner. Slaughter's villain is actually quite perverse in his obsession with the pretty heroine (Marjorie Taylor), manhandling her more obsessively than any of his previous film villains. It also has one of the creepier endings of any of Slaughter's other films, taking its villain down to the depths with the most ironic of assailants.

Tod Slaughter has to be one of the most reliably entertaining screen actors of the 30's. I've seen most of this guys films and he never disappoints. There's no doubt that his acting style is hammier than a hammy thing but there's nothing wrong with that surely? It takes considerable charisma and skill to overact as compellingly as Slaughter. This film follows a very similar narrative path to many of his other vehicles, i.e. Slaughter plays a rich pillar of the community who lives a double-life as an evil criminal, he lusts after a woman half his age who is not interested in him, so he sets about framing her fiancé with a crime he did not commit leaving the poor girl easy prey for him. Almost all his movies could be described thus. But it doesn't really seem to matter very much as Slaughter is always terrific as the leering cad and is easily the best thing about the films he stars in.Slaughter's films were all Victorian melodramas first and foremost but this one definitely moves into more definite horror and even science fiction territory. The monster who is the face of the title is an effective looking baddie although he doesn't really get to do much and his presence in the movie doesn't make an awful lot of sense. But not to worry because, as I mentioned earlier, this is Slaughter's film and he delivers the goods as usual.

Though you often read about the "quota quickies" made in Britain under a law that required a certain amount of screen time to be allotted to local product, you don't see many of them in America-- and for good reason: most were cranked out cheaply just to comply with the law, and are awful. In a few cases, however, the quota quickie laws provided opportunity for Britain's seemingly bottomless reserve of superior stage actors to be preserved on film-- that's why we have them to thank for Arthur Wontner's very fine Sherlock Holmes in some (not nearly as fine) Holmes movies, and it's also why we have a healthy collection of films starring the splendid ham Tod Slaughter, who toured for years as a ripsnorting baddie in authentic Victorian melodramas (such as Sweeney Todd) and transferred a number of them with minimal alteration to film. The Face at the Window is reportedly the highest-budgeted of Slaughter's films, and thus probably isn't technically a quota quickie at all, but it's still brought to the screen with the smell of fresh greasepaint straight from the provinces-- specifically the provinces circa 1895. Slaughter's larger than life performances give us as good a picture of what Victorian audiences ate up as the D'Oyly Carte company did of Gilbert and Sullivan's productions, because like them he was less reviving the old melodramas than carrying on their tradition intact. You may think you've seen people doing the Snidely Whiplash-style villain, and don't need to see them again, but you haven't lived until you've seen a seemingly sane and proper Slaughter dissolve in maniacal glee-- a-ha, ahahaha, ahahahahahahahahaha!