Eyes Without a Face

Titles mean everything in this business. As The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, this 1960 French chiller was double-billed with The Manster. But as Les Yeux Sans Visage, it receives the full Criterion treatment. And deserves it.

It's a testament to director Georges Franju's skill that he can take the most lurid of horror movie premises -- a deranged surgeon kidnaps young women, removes the skin from their faces, and grafts it onto the daughter he accidentally disfigured -- and infuse it with elegiac beauty. It's an equal tribute to his nerve that he's willing to toss that poetry out the window for a surgery sequence worthy of Extreme Makeover that ranks as one of the most disturbing in cinema. The understated elegance of the rest of the film only magnifies its impact.

From the first moments, when a woman's body is found with "a large open wound where the face should be," to a gruesome ending tinged with grace, Franju's film never falters. It concentrates on excruciating details: the number of stairs needed to reach the next landing, the sound a corpse makes as it's dropped into a grave.

Franju cleverly conceals the emotional content. The surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) manages to convince himself that he's motivated by love when guilt is plainly driving him, while his daughter (Edith Scob) drifts wraithlike around his home, her ruined face concealed behind an angelic mask. It's a Cocteau film directed by Hitchcock with an injection of Herschell Gordon Lewis, and it's consistently riveting.

Criterion's transfer gives the black-and-white photography a rich luster, and Maurice Jarre's spooky carnival music has never sounded more menacing
A 1982 interview with Franju - which appears to be taken from the French equivalent of Creature Feature -- showcases the director's mordant wit.

There are also excerpts from a 1985 documentary on the film's screenwriters, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the team responsible for so many legendary thrillers (Diabolique, Vertigo). Even the customary selection of set photos are worth a look, as they provide close-up glimpses of the film's extraordinary make-up effects.

The featured extra is the most bizarre: the director's 1949 short subject Blood of the Beasts. This expressionistic look at the slaughterhouses of Paris combines dreamlike imagery and narration with staggeringly graphic footage of animals being butchered. It's a truly haunting piece of work that presages Franju's approach to Eyes Without a Face.

Expect this disc, one of Criterion's finest recent releases, to become an All Hallow's Eve staple. -- Vince Keenan