As usual with well acknowledged film masterpieces, as this French
art-horror, countless of cinéastes and cinephiles has written
academic texts
and reviews about it. In the enclosed Booklet there are a couple of
these texts/essays and i couldn't add anything to these learned writings,
so
i will keep it short. The Film is a horror masterpiece, atmospheric
and well acted from Alida Valli and Pierre
Brasseur but .... it's the scenes with
young unexperienced actress Edith Scob that gives the film it's poetic
qualities, her wanderings through the big house, like an elf, observing
things and wearing her white facial mask as protection from seing
her damaged face in a reflection. Edith Scob is ethereal
to behold.
The film starts with Alida Valli riding in her car
during a dark and rainy night, and she has got a dead body in her
back-seat which she dumps in
the river. Alida Valli is always slightly unpleasant to me (i'm sorry
Alida, if your spirit reads this) because some 17-18 years later she
scared me
stiff as Ms. Tanner in Dario Argento's Suspiria (another horror masterpiece)
and her smile starts to get disturbing here, to be right-out hideous
in Suspiria. But she's a great actress and she's very fine here as
Louisa, the assistant to the Professor and surgeon Genessier (Brasseur)
and it's
her job to find and to abduct suitable women to steal from. For the
professor to make Face-Off's from, stealing their faces and grafting
it on his
daughter's destroyed face. He fails again and again but he's sure
he will succeed finally, but he's a murderer though and very, very
unlikeable.
The Booklet included with this BFI edition
Yes, Les Yeux sans Visage is an icon of a horror movie
and the undisputed Mother of all Crazed Facial Surgery Doctor movies,
even though there may be some earlier horror on this subject (crazed
doctors and surgeons has always been popular in the genre).
Jesús Franco made his version Gritos en la
Noche (The Awful Dr. Orlof /L 'Horrible Docteur Orlof) in 1962, which
was pretty good
to be a Jess movie, and a sleazier re-make of this in 1988 with Faceless
(Les Predateurs de la Nuit) and with ex-pornstar Brigitte
Lahaie in Alida Valli's role as faithful assistant and Helmut Berger
as the surgeon.
This film has a great haunting ending i will never
forget. Claude Sautet, another great french director
and one of my favourite directors
with films as Les choses de la Vie and Un Mauvais fils (Rötägget
den svenska titlen), co-scripted the film and was assistant director
and he would very soon make an impression with his second feature
film, the 1960 hard-boiled gangster classic Classe tous risques
The BFI blu-ray of Les Yeux sans Visage is presented
in High Definition 1.66:1 original ratio with a french audio PCM mono
2.0 with
english subtitles, black & white (i haven't seen the BFI edition
DVD version of the film but the sames specs with no HD i guess)
Extras: 2 short films - 1. Monsieur and Madame Curie (1953, 14 minutes)
and 2. La Premiere nuit (1958, 20 minutes),
Les Fleurs maladives de Georges Franju (a 50 min overview of Georges
Franju's career made in 2009 by Pierre-Henri Gibert),
an Audio Commentary by Tim Lucas, For Her Eyes Only
- an interview with Edith Scob french with english subs, 17 minutes,
2014)
...................................................................................................................................
...................................................................................................................................
The Old US Criterion DVD edition
Had a restored transfer, in widescreen 1.66:1, mono
french audio with english subtitles, black & white and extras
a booklet with text,
Franju's famous short Le Sang des bétes (Blood of the Beasts,
1949, 22 min, black & white, french audio with english subtitles,
a short archive interview with Franju about Le Sang des bétes
(from the TV series Cinéma des notre temps, 1977, 2 mins 50
secs),
an excerpt from an 1982 interview with Franju (5 minutes), interview
with script writer, trailers and a stills gallery