Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • Eyes Without a Face

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Les yeux sans visage

    Georges Franju (1960)

    The French appetite for la culture and la couture has an alchemical power here, transforming a crudely gripping horror scenario into a work of visual art.  (The film’s title on its original release in the US, in 1962, was The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus.) The story – from a book by Jean Redon, who co-wrote the screenplay – belongs to the mad/megalomaniac scientist genre, in this case an admired and highly successful medic, Génessier.  The clinic he runs seems to cater for all-comers but reconstructive surgery is Génessier’s particular specialty.  We learn this from his first appearance, giving a public lecture on ‘heterografting’ – which moves into restoring-youthful-looks territory – to a largely elderly and understandably eager audience.  Back at his clinic, on the outskirts of Paris, Génessier is trying to reconstruct the face of his once beautiful daughter Christiane, whose facial tissue was destroyed in a car accident:  only her eyes remain.  His acolyte Louise, indebted to Génessier for restoring her face at some point in their backstory, prowls the Parisian streets on the lookout for pretty young women to lure to the clinic.  There they are drugged, put on the operating table and have their face removed for grafting onto Christiane’s – before the rest of them is disposed of by Louise.   Génessier also keeps for experimental purposes, in the bowels of the clinic, an assortment of large dogs, barking and yelping in their cages.

    The tone and transience of human flesh are obviously at the heart of Les yeux sans visage and the visual scheme of the film (photographed by Eugen Schüfftan) is preoccupied with the texture of surfaces – the shining metalwork of cars, the women’s clothes (the gowns are by Givenchy), dark water – and with chiaroscuro effects.  When Christiane dons her mask and moves round the rooms of the clinic, the physical effect is extraordinary.  She’s a mannequin come to life but a sinuous, wraithlike mannequin.  On her first visit to the dogs, a Great Dane stands on his hind legs and Christiane puts her face close to his.  It’s like Beauty and the Beast but, with our knowing what’s beneath her mask, with the traditional roles both retained and reversed.

    I know I’m no good at following plots but either I really did lose this one about twenty minutes from the end or it’s very clumsy (or possibly both).  The plot synopsis on Wikipedia may not be infallible either but it doesn’t say anything to suggest that the storytelling at this particular point is anything like as sophisticated as the filmmaking:

    ‘Inspector Parot asks a young woman named Paulette Mérodon to help investigate by checking herself into Génessier’s clinic. After being declared healthy, Paulette leaves for Paris and is promptly picked up by Louise, who delivers her to Dr Génessier’s secret lab.’

    I couldn’t understand why Génessier, once he’d got a prospective victim like Paulette into the clinic, would so easily release her – then go to the trouble of having her picked up again.  (The way the pick-up is staged, it’s hard to tell whether Louise has been lying in wait for Paulette or if this is a chance encounter.)  I didn’t follow either why the police, knowing the risky situation they’d put Paulette in, were so careless about keeping an eye on her.

    Franju nevertheless orchestrates very skilfully the beautiful, realistic and horrific elements in the material.  The conventionally horrific moments (the glimpse behind Christiane’s mask, the revenge of the dogs) are few but the deeply disturbing basis of the story and the realistic parts of the picture – and its mesmerising beauty – are such an arresting combination that you’re very soon, and remain, in suspense.   The operation to remove the face of one of the victims is clinically detailed and objective.  The scenes of normal life going on in the centre of Paris not far from the clinic become nearly as uncomfortable to watch as the events in the house of horrors, through simple juxtaposition with these.  You recognise Pierre Brasseur’s beautiful voice immediately as the camera moves from outside to inside the lecture theatre where Génessier is holding forth but Brasseur throughout the film keeps in check his theatrical flair.  He plays the doctor’s hideous obsession very straight and deprives you of the safe distance that you might have (and welcome) if Génessier were laughable.

    Brasseur is so impressively believable that Alida Valli’s vivid creepiness as Louise is almost light relief, especially given the unsurprising sexual overtones of the role – which is conceived and played in traditional predatory lesbian terms.  Even so, Valli manages to produce something vocally and visually distinctive.  Her deep-voiced, heavily accented French stands out.  Its false quality goes with the face we know to be artificial;   a barricade of pearls conceals the surgical scar on her throat; her raincoat is superbly, seductively sinister.  The cast also includes Edith Scob (the ethereal Christiane), François Guérin (her fiancé and Génessier’s innocent colleague at the clinic), Béatrice Altariba (the young woman who narrowly escapes the face lift), Juliette Mayniel (one who’s not so lucky) and Alexandre Rignault (Inspector Parot).   The fine score – alternating a delicate, melancholy waltz (associated with Christiane) and a hideously jaunty merry-go-round melody – is by Maurice Jarre.

    9 February 2009

  • The Lavender Hill Mob

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charles Crichton (1951)

    Improbable lawbreakers are a recurring feature of British comedies of the period – from Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) through The Ladykillers (1955) to The League of Gentlemen (1960).  The cut above criminals must eventually get their comeuppance – a poor reward for the entertainment they’ve provided but a corrective that acquits the film-makers of charges of moral irresponsibility (and the audience of being accomplices after the fact).  Thanks to the elegance and inventiveness of T E B Clarke’s Oscar-winning screenplay and the originality of Alec Guinness’s portrait of the mild-mannered clerk who masterminds a gold bullion robbery, The Lavender Hill Mob is one of the best of these films.   Ealing’s conservative affection for English temperament and social routine and its gentle mockery of authority are well balanced here.  I liked a sequence that seems to parody newsreel of the time, in which the putative viewers of a report about the bullion theft are assured that the police are on the verge of arresting the guilty men.  The audience watching The Lavender Hill Mob knows otherwise.

    Guinness plays Henry Holland who, for twenty years, has been responsible for overseeing the transport of bullion from a gold refinery to the Bank of England.  Guinness gives Holland a somewhat constricted gait – as if he were concealing something about his person, which indeed he is.   As his cunning plan develops and he’s face to face with gold, in whatever shape or form, Holland wears an almost idiotically serene and admiring smile.  His relationship with the precious metal is the love story of The Lavender Hill Mob – he wants to escape with riches and for them to start a new life together.  His chief partner in crime is a recently arrived lodger at the Lavender Hill boarding house where Holland lives.  This is Arthur Pendlebury, an artist manqué but also the owner of a foundry that makes holiday souvenirs, sold at home and abroad.  This pair are made for each other:  the stolen bullion is melted down at Pendlebury’s foundry and fashioned into Eiffel Tower paperweights.   Stanley Holloway as Pendlebury gives an unusually agreeable and easeful account of himself – neither the foghorn voice nor the nudges to the audience are in evidence.   The two authentic but very small-time crooks who support him and Guinness are played by Alfie Bass and the superb Sidney James.  The cast also includes Ronald Adam (Holland’s immediate boss), John Gregson (a police detective) and Sydney Tafler (a shady street vendor of paintings).  This isn’t a film with great roles for women but Edie Martin (the owner of the Lavender Hill digs) and Marjorie Fielding (a lodger there, who’s an American private-eye fiction fanatic) both register.  Alanna Boyce is the splendidly uncooperative schoolgirl who refuses to part with the Eiffel Tower she bought on a trip to Paris, even though she doesn’t know how much it’s really worth.

    This and some of the other Eiffel Towers are put on sale in Paris due to a linguistic misunderstanding between Pendlebury and one of the French buyers of his usual tat.  Pendlebury and Holland’s desperate efforts to retrieve the precious paperweights start with a dizzying sprint down the real Eiffel Tower; continue with a frantic, fruitless dash to Calais for the ferry to Dover; and culminate in a visit to an exhibition of police history and methods at Hendon Police College – at which point they become the pursued rather than the pursuers.  A complicated car chase ends with Pendlebury’s arrest and Holland’s swift departure from the scene.   All these sequences are staged by Charles Crichton with fine comic aplomb – they’re exciting as well as amusing (and finding yourself excited is part of the amusement).   When Holland makes his escape, Crichton puts Alec Guinness’s famous anonymity to good use.  He blends effortlessly into a crowd of bowler-hatted city workers and disappears into the underground.  As he later explains, instead of getting off at Charing Cross he heads straight for Rio de Janeiro.

    The film begins in a South American restaurant, where Holland sits with another Englishman, who smokes a big cigar and remarks how agreeable the country is.  As if to practise what he preaches, the man dispenses largesse in bank notes to various locals – the wife of a politician, a jockey and a strikingly beautiful girl, whose ten-second appearance is notable for the fact that she’s played by a young Audrey Hepburn.  Holland begins to tell his story to the man sitting next to him at table.  In the final scene, he concludes it and the two stand up, handcuffed.  They move towards the restaurant exit and Henry Holland’s extradition.  It’s a gracefully succinct ending.  Perhaps The Lavender Hill Mob has a rather self-satisfied tone but it has better reason than most to feel pleased with itself.

    9 April 2012

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