Raymond Durgnat's late sixties film criticism identified the relationship between 'poetry and pulp' that presented pop entertainments like Batman and This Island Earth as work important to the culture, and he celebrated George Franju's unique Eyes Without a Face as the pinnacle of the horror film, graduated from exploitation fumblings to a clear poetic expression. As there's almost no other horror film with a similar impact, Les Yeux sans Visage is easily described.

It's slow and deliberate. The visuals present an orderly world of a doctor completely above suspicion, conducting his atrocious work secure from detection. Paris and environs are overcast and foggy. Leafless trees dominate grey skies. The police go about their business with sincere goodwill, but are ineffective.

The villains are mysterious and banal at the same time. Like the workaday monsters of the concentration camps or the butchers of Blood of the Beasts (Franju's groundbreaking docu short subject, included here as an extra), Dr. Génessier and his devoted assistant Louise don't profess mad theories or rationalize what they're doing. They kidnap, mutilate and murder innocent young girls, work that to them is deplorable but necessary. Génessier isn't a mad doctor; he's that kind of doctor so impressed with himself that he's too proud to admit an error. He loves his daughter and does show care for his patients, but his real love is his own achievement in surgical heterografts - the transplanting of organs or tissue from one person to another. In a way he's like H.G. Wells' Dr. Moreau in that he clearly considers himself and his science above morality and the law. But Genessier's wealth and respectability - he's an intimidatingly closed-off man - allow him to do what he pleases without running away to a mad lab on a remote island. Génessier sounds like Genesis and suggests the Frankenstein cliché of the doctor who aspires to usurp God's domain. Génessier is haughty, domineering and utterly convinced of the rightness of his actions.

Louise is even a bigger mystery. She's the doctor's assistant and probably his lover. As described by Durgnat, her doglike devotion is suggested by her pearl necklace which hides a scar, the only evidence that Génessier has changed her face. We don't know why Louise was given a new face, and we don't know if Louise was always Louise. What happened to Génessier's wife, who has not been dead for long? Is Louise's gratitude out of pure love for her surgeon-lover, or did he change her identity to avoid some unpleasant crime? Louise shows signs of anxiety with the doctor but puts up a flawless facade with the daughter Christiane. She's devoted to both of them, even as she has no problem trapping helpless female victims and imprisoning them in a dungeon.

Edith Scob's Christiane is the soul and the center of the film. The music seems to follow her perception of being in a velvet nightmare, a delicate accompaniment as she glides like a phantom through the brick corridors of her father's mad surgery. Christiane indeed haunts the house of Génessier; with another girl buried in her stead, it's as if she no longer exists. The mirrors have been blacked over and she spends her time visiting the caged dogs used in her father's heterograft experiments, every once and awhile sneaking a phone call to hear the voice of her fiancée Jacques.

Christiane's appearance is purposely stylized to resemble artwork by Jean Cocteau. Her 'face' is a neutral mask without eyebrows, a dead mannequin's face through which stare Scob's maddened eyes. Her hair is brushed around the mask. She walks and moves with exaggerated grace, an image augmented by her housecoat with its upturned collar and short sleeves. It's unnerving to see her walk slowly down a dark brick hallway, while Génessier's tortured dogs howl from offscreen.

Critics in 1959 were probably most offended by Eyes Without a Face because it refuses to make moral judgments. Louise and Genessier pay for their crimes but it doesn't seem enough to balance the suffering they've caused. Their utter disregard for the basic rights of others is monstrous. Génessier's paternal authority - he's the father, the respect figure, the punisher - holds the family in line. But the horror of it all turns the 'mother' into a severe denial case, and the daughter goes quietly insane. Christiane is the innocent victim, and the guilty recipient of a future bought with the blood of other, true innocents.

The real horror is in the film's aesthetics. The carefully controlled settings and Christiane's phantom appearance are genuinely haunting and invest the thriller with the 'controlled anarchy' of the Feuillade serials. Génessier's house is hidden deep in a mysterious-looking wood. The secret surgery is perhaps the old facility before the modern clinic was built, a tile-and-concrete bunker laced with piping and filled with chrome tables and instruments. Rolling steel doors separate rooms. The spooky brickyard morgue in Paris lies alongside a sad railway that with a little imagination might be carrying souls from one world to the next.

Durgnat (always back to Durgnat) stresses the importance of textures in Eyes Without a Face. Genessier's sleek Citroen reflects everything like a mirror, while Louise's ugly smaller vehicle has a corrugated surface. Louise and Edna wear shiny plasticized mack raincoats. Christiane's mask is velvety and featureless, while her ravaged face (out of focus) looks like eroded and furrowed ground. Maurice Jarre's music has textures that can be felt, the jangling 'icy-black waltz' of Louise's stalking theme, and the impossibly gentle Christiane tune that seems to represent her lost identity.

Franju's star Pierre Brasseur (Children of Paradise) is imposingly cold as the doctor. Alida Valli, no longer the to-die-for beauty of The Paradine Case and The Third Man is a wicked woman with a demise modeled somewhat after that of Vera Clouzot in Les Diaboliques, a more conventional murder-mystery horror film from the same authors. Juliette Mayniel and Béatrice Altariba are the two intended victims, one who is sacrificed and the second who ... that's an unnecessary spoiler. Coincidentally the exact same structure was used for the next year's Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock. We'd have to conclude he was at least aware of the Franju film; his Vertigo is from a book by the same French thriller writers, Bouileau-Narcejac.

Criterion's new disc of Eyes Without a Face is a welcome addition to that high-end line of DVD releases. The film has been notoriously difficult to see; I first came upon it blind in Ivan Butler's The Horror Film and saw it two nights in a row at Harriet Diamond's Westwood midnight shows in 1973 or so. I saw it as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, a dubbed and trimmed version that dropped a couple of scenes including Dr. Genessier's kind examination of a boy with an unexplained neurological dysfunction. Two crude Sinister Cinema tapes and one fuzzy laserdisc later, we finally come to the Criterion version, a nigh-perfect enhanced transfer that shows Eugen Shuftan's full range of B&W grays. The sound is also far sharper, with Maurice Jarre's amazing score appearing in greater detail; the held violin notes in the title scenes now seem to cut like knives, and the echoey sound of dogs barking in Genessier's horror chamber is unnerving.

The fascinating Franju was not a widely publicized figure and I've only seen four of his films. Therese Desqueyroux and especially Judex were marvelous, and seem to spring visually from the same Feuillade-Cocteau gene pool even though their subject matter is radically different. His Judex is one of the most poetic things I've ever seen and I hope it can find its way to DVD.

Included on this disc is Franju's notorious short subject The Blood of Beasts, a sly documentary about two Paris slaughterhouses that made his reputation as a shocking filmmaker. Anyone who eats meat needs to see this; on a literal level it rubs our complacent noses in the daily carnage that supports our way of life. On the other hand, Franju's completely neutral point of view again abstains from presenting a direct message, allowing the reality presented to bring forth suppressed thoughts. As with Eyes Without a Face, the reduction of mass killing into a mundane and orderly routine conjures nightmare visions of concentration camps, if only because our mental tendency is to compartmentalize similar horrors together.

The disc has a couple of short Franju interviews that repeat some of the same stories he already gave in print. One of them is given on a demeaning 'mad lab' TV set with bubbling colored liquids and a costumed horror host. Better is a 'two authors at home' short subject called Grandfathers of Crime about the genial gallic thriller team of Boileau-Narcejac. Of special interest to horror fans are a wide selection of international ad artwork and the beautiful stills that accompanied the original release.

The neatly designed insert features two short essays by Patrick McGrath and the esteemed David Kalat. There can't be enough written about this movie. The disc was produced by Curtis Tsui. Just as some genre fans were disappointed a few months ago to discover that the almost sedate thrills of Mill of the Stone Women didn't add up to a contemporary action-packed horror film experience, there will doubtlessly be many curious fans who will check out Eyes Without a Face and ask what the big deal is. The deliberately paced film concerns itself with contemplating horror more than dishing it out by the bucketful. But viewers tired of cookie-cutter horror films, who respond to magical masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast will be amply rewarded here. Part of the appeal for Savant of Eyes Without a Face was the inability to see it in a decent version for so many years, but it's far, far too good to be just a cult film.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Eyes Without a Face rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Franju short film The Blood of Beasts, tv interviews, artwork and stills, Trailers, essays.
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: October 3, 2004