derrickneal-98015
This is an artsy horror film from France made in 1960. A surgeon and his apprentice abduct women off the streets and then perform a facial surgery to graft their skin on a woman they have kept imprisoned. Saying anything more would be doing disservice to the film but here is what I can say: This is a haunting film full of intense atmosphere right from the location and setting to the method by which most actors enact their characters. The music also adds to the surreal nature and if such films with surrealistic images and intense atmosphere (which take preceding over plot or character) than this should be a must watch on your list.
david_m_schwartz
This beautifully filmed and uniquely scored gem will haunt you. The combination of plausible story line and shocking (for the time period) imagery makes for a disturbing experience. The 1995 digital remaster of the original black and white print brings the quality up to modern standards. Unlike many French works from this era, the pacing is relatively brisk, though not at all like today's jump cut mania.
Hitchcoc
A doctor is responsible for the disfigurement of his daughter, due to his carelessness behind the wheel. He sets about trying to graft facial skin from young women to bring her back. The film is, on the one hand, a horror movie about his ghoulish behavior. He is obsessed with continuing these efforts. He has an accomplice, a woman, who has been promised the same surgery. But this is a much deeper film. It has to do with the horrors of disfigurement and the inability to accept that the person is still just that. There is an incredible scene with some dogs that are kept. They are loving and care not for how one looks. Beautiful filmmaking that rises above the simple genre.
Scarecrow-88
A surgical genius (also a physician of a successful hospital) and his assistant secretly abduct, drug, and take the faces of certain girls who have specific characteristics similar to a girl considered vanished by the police after a horrific car wreck that mangled her face. This girl is the surgeon's daughter, and he was the reason the wreck happened in the first place. Feeling a strong guilt for "ruining" his daughter's face, it drives him to use his own "grafting techniques" in the hopes of giving her a new face, at the cost of other girls who look like her. When a victim's body turns up in the Sienne (dumped there by the assistant), the surgeon claims it is his daughter, providing him room to continue his work unabated. When one kidnapped girl's face is removed (a Swedish girl visiting Paris in the hopes of making something of herself), there's hope that this will be the success that has eluded the surgeon; when the victim jumps out of a window as it appeared she would never escape without further harm, once again the police are confronted with the idea of a serial killer. A third woman, similar to the two other victims, caught shoplifting, is essentially blackmailed by the police to help them catch the killer; the detail of a pearl necklace by a witness (friend of the window-leaping Swedish girl) initiates an eye on the assistant of the surgeon (who wears the necklace to hide her neck scar; she herself was a facially-scarred patient that had successful repairs by the surgeon, explaining her devotion to him).The white mask and glassy eyes, and how Christiane (Edith Scob) has movements of a spectre, very mannequin like in appearance, nearly a lost soul due to all she has endured (pops responsible for taking the faces of girls unapologetically; the flesh not taking to her face and staying healthy without deterioration; having to hole up in the home, not allowed to leave), her character and look is very iconic, very distinctive and memorable. The final act (with irony in regards to her father's face, and how the release of dogs and pigeons mirrors her own newfound freedom), where it is Christiane who stops the killers, her father (Pierre Brasseur) and his assistant, Louise (Alida Valli; Senso), not the police, is fitting. Edna's chapter is just heart-breaking. The image series where the flesh of the "replacement face" taken from Edna for Christiane itself is unsuccessful further emphasizes just why the poor girl is driven into madness. She is in her own personal hell that gradually affects her mental wellbeing, causing a decline that erupts at the end. A surgery of Edna is shown in some grisly detail; matter-of-fact and coldly detached from how horrible it is, the surgeon commits totally to the process. The opening drive by Louise with a dead body in her car's back seat, intently focused on finding just the right "dumping ground" is quite an unsettling beginning due to how business-as-usual it feels…as if a routine that Louise has done before. Score is at times whimsical almost as preparing us for a Buster Keaton silent comedy, quite unexpected when compared to what scene it is applied to is actually developing before us. Valli's devotion to Brasseur is one of the disturbing details that proves that a repaired face could be perhaps a fair trade for helping to dispose of bodies. The surgeon's stone-faced, clinical behavior and ability to cut himself off from his misdeeds shows that no matter what crimes he commits, his grafting expertise for his daughter takes precedence over a few lives taken.
