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EYES WITHOUT A FACE
This famous 1959 film by Georges Franju opened in this country on double bills in a dubbed version called “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus,” but it’s perhaps the most austerely elegant horror film ever made. Franju called it “a poetic fantasy,” and it’s a symbolist attack on the ethics of scientists. Though in its way it’s as simpleminded as the usual romantic young poet’s denunciations of war or commerce, it has a vague, floating, lyric sense of dread which goes beyond the simpler effects of horror movies that don’t make intellectual claims. Franju’s approach is almost as purified and as mystic as Bresson’s. The story is about a surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) who, in systematic experiments, removes the faces of beautiful young kidnapped women and tries to graft them onto the ruined head of his daughter (Edith Scob). He keeps failing, the girls are destroyed, yet he persists, in a terrible parody of the scientific method. The film is both bizarrely sophisticated (with Alida Valli as the mad surgeon’s mistress, doing the kidnapping in a black leather coat) and ridiculously naïve (in its plot elements). With Juliette Mayniel as Edna, François Guérin as Jacques, and Claude Brasseur as the Inspector. The cinematography is by the great Eugen Schüfftan; the music is by Maurice Jarre; the superb gowns are by Givenchy. In French.—Pauline Kael (Film Forum; Oct. 31-Nov. 4.)