Roger Ebert (1942 - 2013)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 4, 2013

When I was a college student in the late 1970s, spending 3 to 4 nights per week in a darkened movie theater, no film critic made more sense that Roger Ebert. Because I was a movie person, and not a TV person, Sneak Previews with Siskel & Ebert was just about the only show on TV that mattered.

Ebert had his finger on the pulse of what mattered to a lover of popular culture and the kind of genre fiction that grew out of the pulps and cheap paperback original novels — he gave thumbs up to science fiction movies, noir detective thrillers and Westerns. While Ebert was good on artsy films too, what I liked about Ebert is that he saw the value in over-the-top exploitation films and a lot of pure schlock.

Not that he gave good reviews to trash. For a thumbs up, it had to be good, creative schlock. But Siskel never "got" those films, and therefore he couldn't be trusted; while he was endearing — he bought John Travolta's white suit from Saturday Night Fever for his personal collection, for instance — he just didn't have his finger on the pulse of pop culture in the movies. Ebert loved Taxi Driver, while Siskel looked upon it with suspicion. Leonard Maltin trashed Taxi Driver too, in his film guide — he and Siskel just didn't "get" it.

Roger Ebert was reliable. Some have called him a populist critic. I'm not sure if that is his appeal or not. All I know is that I came to trust him to recommend more great movies to me. His book series "The Great Movies" is something of a bible. I was thrilled to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in there. So I took his advice and rented Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which I had never seen before buying his book. I'm still working through the books to find the indispensable films I missed the first time around.

Ebert's legend will grow. Pulitzer Prize winner. Film critic who actually once wrote a screenplay for a film. Cancer survivor who didn't let a truly devastating cancer surgery outcome get him down, despite the loss of his jaw and his speech. I don't know if they have screenings in Heaven or not, but I sure hope so for Roger's sake. After all, he's used to taking in 500 films per year, since 1967.  

In which Dr. D. watches the 1910s Oz Films (with Video)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

April 2, 2013​

Editor’s Note: Last week we took a look at the earliest films based on L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. This week we continue with a roundup of the films of the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, Baum’s own company.

One reason the Oz Film Manufacturing Company’s films are of historical significance stems from Baum’s association with Louis F. Gottschalk, the composer (not to be confused with the famous Louis Moreau Gottschalk, to whom he was related). Baum and Gottschalk collaborated on a stage play The Tik-Tok Man of Oz in 1913, for which Gottschalk contributed the music.

The show played well in Los Angeles, but it was deemed too expensive to take to Broadway.  After that, and with a desire to get into the movies (feature length films had been around since 1906), Baum and Gottschalk collaborated on the Oz Film Company with Baum serving as President and Gottschalk as vice president. Gottschalk contributed film scores, and consequently the Oz films had the earliest original feature film scores. Music had always been in the movies—the Lumiere Brothers had a pianist at their first exhibitions of films in 1895 — but the standard was to use cue sheets rather than full, written-out scores.  

In contrast, the Oz Company sent out scores with their films for the house musicians to use in accompanying the movie.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914)

Running about an hour, this 1914 film is a hybrid of material from the first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and new material which Baum later used as the basis for his 1915 entry The Scarecrow of Oz. It is fun to see a scene from the first book that didn’t make it into the 1939 movie — the scene where the Scarecrow’s raft pole gets stuck in the mud in the river and he ends up clinging to a pole out in the middle of the water. In the book, Dorothy persuades a stork to fly out and lift the Scarecrow to safety. In the movie, however, a giant crow does the job.  They don’t hit it off at first, one being a crow and the other being a scarecrow, but after a short tussle, they end up doing a little dance together, which is actually a very funny bit.

Other than rehashing scenes from the beloved 1900 book to draw in the audience for the new material, Dorothy doesn’t have much to do in this movie. The central plot revolves around a bad king who is unhappy that his daughter has fallen in love with a low-born gardener’s boy. The king enlists the help of a witch to freeze his daughter’s heart so that she will be immune to love. The witch does the deed for money, and she furthers the job by turning the princess’s suitor into a kangaroo.

The witch is not unlike W.W. Denslow’s illustration.  To me, she looks like a bag lady with an eyepatch using her umbrella as a walking stick.  After having her heart frozen, the princess wanders around in a daze for most of the movie.  In this version, the Wizard of Oz actually performs real magic, although he isn’t found in any Emerald City. He seems to be an itinerant wizard, wandering the countryside in a wagon pulled by another of Baum’s endearing creations, the Saw-horse, who is some animated logs that function as a horse.  The Wizard amusingly cans the witch in a large can labeled “Preserved Sandwitches,” then blacks out parts of the label until it says “Preserved Witch,” then shrinks the can.  Dorothy and her companions storm the bad king’s castle and somehow emerge victorious, probably because the Scarecrow, while shot full of arrows, does not have a vulnerability to arrows. The bad king is ousted, the scarecrow is crowned king, the Wizard (in exchange for releasing the witch from her can) convinces the witch to release her spell on the princess and change the gardener’s boy back to a human, and the ending is fairy-tale happy.

While Baum was a true storyteller for children, and his new books were annual Christmas presents to a generation of them, this film strikes me as rather intense for young children. There is a scene where the witch sets upon the helpless Scarecrow and savagely plucks out all his straw, leaving him limp and lifeless. The way his head flops around when he is just an empty fabric is gut-wrenching to see after such a violent attack.  Dorothy and the others get him stuffed again in short order, and pretty soon he is reanimated to his usual jovial, loose-limbed self.  In another scene, the tin woodsman decapitates the witch with his axe. She is left sitting on his castle steps desperately proving the empty space above her neck with her hands. Again, the situation is resolved when she finds her head and sticks it back on. I suspect Baum’s intent was to make the film cut across age barriers and appeal to adults and children. What success he had achieved with his stage shows had been on the part of adult ticket buyers and attendees, so not a bad thought. The concept of a family picture hadn’t developed yet in 1914, so unfortunately Baum was a few decades too early to enjoy the success in film that would later come to Walt Disney.

One last tidbit of information that took a little digging to discover: the character of Button-Bright in this film (a little girl with amnesia for her past who Dorothy’s entourage discovers sitting in the road playing jacks) was played by one Mildred Harris, who married the 29 year-old Charlie Chaplin when she was 17. She left that relationship and embarked on an affair with the Prince of Wales. She is the one who introduced Edward, Prince of Wales, to Wallis Simpson, and the rest is history. I find it interesting that Ms. Harris assisted in overthrowing one king in the fantasy-land of Oz, and then later contributed to events that led to the abdication of the throne by a king of the real world.

The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914)

This charming fairy tale is only peripherally an Oz story, as it takes place in the lands of Noland and Ix, which are part of the greater fairyland universe of countries neighboring Oz in L. Frank Baum’s novels. The basis for the story is Baum’s 1905 novel Queen Zixi of Ix, which was a personal favorite of the author among his works. Queen Zixi was not originally an Oz story, but sometime between 1905 and the 5th Oz book (The Road to Oz, 1909), Baum figured out that Noland and Ix are neighboring countries, along with the Forest of Burzee (which figures in Queen Zixi and Baum’s 1902 novel, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.)

There is much to like here, but the movie disappoints, because you wish it had been made later in time with more modern technology. Especially regrettable are the animal scenes with people dressed up in animal costumes. One of the main characters is a donkey, and he is kind of endearing. In fact, the donkey could well be a prototype of the Eddie Murphy character in the Shrek movies. But while the rest of the movie is a romantic fairy tale that works well for adults, the animals in The Magic Cloak seem like they are targeted at a preschool audience, as if they are refugees from a storytime puppet show. The story involves a magic cloak that is woven by the fairies and grants each bearer one wish, only not if it is stolen. Queen Zixi is over 600 years old and has been the victim of a spell which keeps her perpetually 16, but she is forced to carry a mirror that reveals her true age.  This bothers her, presumably because she is so vain that she would like to look at herself in the mirror to see how pretty she is, but she can’t, because all she ever sees is an ancient hag. She conspires to obtain the magic cloak so that she can wish away the spell of the mirror, but when she finally steals it, it doesn’t work because it has been stolen.  She discards the cloak, and a scavenging woman picks it up and commences to sell a piece of it to a sailor who wants it for a tie. When the kingdom is threatened, and the cloak is needed to make wishes upon to repel the invaders, it has to be found and reassembled. Finally, the fairies take it back because they have discovered that ordinary mortals don’t use the magic wisely. But such a summary does not do justice to the story — there is a lot more in the book, and even in the movie.

The movie is a simplified version of the book, which is (based on a reading of the plot summary) quite an epic fantasy for a fairy tale.  There are many scenes in the silent film that beg for a modern remake. The scene of the fairies weaving the cloak. A scene where the witches take off flying on their brooms. The scenes where the Rolly Rogues (think malevolent mountain-top beach-ball-shaped people) roll down the hills to conquer the city of Noland and then roll back up the hills when they finally get chased out of town.

There are many whimsical moments in this story, but many of them are buried by the primitive filmmaking technology and the fact that it was still 15 years before talking films. L. Frank Baum’s vision was clearly beyond his capabilities at the time. Like so much of his work in the theater and cinema, he was ahead of his time.

I long for a modern filmmaker, someone who is sensitive to the concept of fantasy in the movies, to revisit Queen Zixi of Ix.  Done right, retaining the comic elements of the story, treating it with the same respect as a Grimm or an Andersen fairy story, this could be a huge hit.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)

This was the first of the Oz Film Manufacturing Company’s productions. It fared poorly on initial release, so the other films ran into distribution problems, which contributed to the demise of the company. To my taste, The Patchwork Girl of Oz is the least successful of the three 1914 Oz films. The original screenplay by L. Frank Baum was turned into his novel of the same name, however, and the material works much better as a book. The book is charming, and the first edition is a wonderful piece of art. The John R. Neill illustrations make Baum’s whimsical ideas jump off the page.  The film suffers from black and white. The book, by contrast, revels in color.

The film is marred by an overbearing grotesqueness. Every clever idea in the story becomes grotesque on screen. All the characters are either falling all over the place or wobbly kneed or just hideous. The central plot involves a magician who invents a “powder of life” which animates a life-sized ragdoll girl, while at the same time another of his magical concoctions turns three of the characters into lifeless statues. The magician and a Munchkin boy named Ojo set out to find the ingredients for a potion to turn the statue people back to life. Those ingredients include the water from a mysterious Dark Well, three hairs from a creature called the Woozy, and a six-leaved clover.  Various complications ensue, not the least of which is that it is illegal in Oz to pick a six-leafed clover, so all the characters are hauled before Ozma, the Queen, for judgement.

The Woozy is a weird geometrical animal whose modern equivalent is probably Nickelodeon’s Wubbzy (is it any coincidence the names are so similar?). The Woozy is a clever invention and looks in the movie just about how John R. Neill draws him in the book.  There are also some nice stop-motion animation sequences, such as the auto-assembly of The Patchwork Girl and the table that sets itself in The Magic House.

But aside from the Woozy and some clever effects, the other fantastical elements in the film fall flat. While Baum’s odd fantasy societies work in the book, they come off as scary and grotesque in the movie. The Hoppers in the book each have one leg, but in the movie they look like people with both legs tied together.  When the Magician and the Patchwork Girl encounter them, they set out to cut off one of the Magician’s legs because only one-legged hoppers are allowed in their land.  The Patchwork Girl persuades them to cut one of her legs off instead, so we watch aghast while they hold her down and amputate.  The story makes it lighter than it sounds by having the Magician forthwith reattach her leg while out of sight of the Hoppers.  But the whole amputation motif comes off as disturbing.

There is another society call the Tottenhots, who look like a group of African tribesmen living like a prairie dog town. The movie does not do anything with the Tottenhots, just hits us with this brief, creepy image.  Worse yet is a society called the Horners who look like a bunch of middle aged guys in robes with their hair tied up in huge spiked horns.  They hold their bellies, which look like they all have baby bumps, while they laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I had to look in the book to see that they are “The Joking Horners,” which set my mind at ease a bit, because they just seem demented in the movie. In the book, the joke is that the Horners’ jokes aren’t very funny. The Horners acknowledge that it spoils a joke to have to explain it, but then they proceed to explain their jokes. A talking picture might have helped to make the Horner funnier, because this movie just makes them look sinister and demented.   

The movie ends with the Scarecrow hooking up with the Patchwork Girl. It is intended as a touching scene, these two floppy misfits finding mutual love. If they weren’t so grotesque, like most everything else in this movie, maybe their love could have saved this mess. Alas, it doesn’t work out that way. Paramount dropped their distribution of the Oz films based on the poor performance of this one. With different distribution, they got a little play in 1917 with some modest success, but it was still almost 25 years before Hollywood would get behind Oz and give it the A-list treatment.

Other Trips to Oz: Before MGM, There was Selig Polyscope and Cow-Sized Toto (W/Video)

​Still from the 1910 Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Via the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

March 28, 2013

The MGM movie musical version of The Wizard Oz is so firmly rooted in our popular culture as an incomparable movie classic that is difficult to conceive of other versions of the story on screen. But, in addition to recent entries such as Oz the Great and Powerful this year and 1985’s Return to Oz, there were actual several Oz films made before the iconic 1939 film.

With its publication in 1900, Oz had been in the public conscience for almost 40 years before the MGM musical. Oz has always had a life outside the children’s book that started the craze and its sequels. L. Frank Baum traded on his experience as an actor and playwright to produce an Oz drama very early after the 1900 publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  However, he had trouble finding anybody to stage the work. The show was finally picked up by Chicago director Julian Mitchell with the caveat that he could change the show as he saw fit.

Mitchell turned Oz into a musical extravaganza with a radically different, more adult plot than the book. It ran from 1902 to 1909 and made a fortune. It was on Broadway starting in 1903. The show made Baum rich, far beyond what he could make from the books alone.

The first Oz movies were Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio Plays, an unusual multimedia production combining live actors, hand tinted magic lantern slides and film, which ran in 1908.  Unfortunately, the production, in which Baum heavily invested and starred in himself as the Wizard and narrator, went bankrupt and closed before it could finish its projected run.  It was very popular wherever it went, but the production costs were too expensive to allow for a profit to be made. The films were done in conjunction with the Selig Polyscope Company, the first film studio in southern California, which made movies from 1896 to 1918, starting in Chicago and then moving to the Los Angeles area. The Selig Polyscope Company also made the earliest surviving Oz film, their 1910 film, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The 1910 movie seems to draw on the stage musical tradition more than being based on the book, because the characters keep breaking into dance and there are several scenes with chorus lines of dancing girls that add nothing to the story. It is not a very coherent fantasy story, because Dorothy actually finds the scarecrow in Kansas before they ever get to Oz, and he inexplicably comes to life while still in Kansas. They get blown to Oz, along with a couple people dressed in cow suits, taking refuge from the cyclone in a haystack.

Toto starts out looking a lot like the 1939 Toto, but Glinda the Good Witch changes him into a more efficient protector of Dorothy by magically making him almost as big as the lion, so Toto spends most of the movie not as a terrier, but as a person in a silly dog suit.

The Wizard is portrayed as being held prisoner in Oz and forced to serve as King by a character named Momba the Witch, and all he wants to do is return to Omaha in his balloon, which he finally does later in the movie.  

Dorothy destroys the Witch with a pail of water, just like the story we all know, except that instead of melting, she just sort of vaporizes — I guess it was an easier special effect to pull off.  Dorothy refuses the crown of Oz and it is given to the Scarecrow.

A 1933 Technicolor cartoon exists, this time retitled — like the movie The Wizard of Oz, with the “wonderful” left out. L. Frank Baum’s eldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, had some involvement in the production of this animated short feature. The innovation of starting with the Kansas scenes in black and white and transforming to color when the characters arrive in Oz began with this film.

Unfortunately, since the film was produced without proper licensing from the Technicolor Corporation, a lawsuit blocked the release of the film in color. This animated short has the usual 1930’s animation preoccupations with silly antics performed by animals and sight gags in general.  It is only marginally related to the Wizard of Oz books. The cyclone in Kansas is depicted convincingly. Then, Dorothy and Toto fall out of the sky and land on the Scarecrow, bringing him to life. The Tin Man is reanimated with some oil. Toto is not very lovable, kind of a Disney-esque Pluto-like character. The Cowardly Lion is noticeably absent. The Wizard is rather macabre and malevolent-appearing, but all he really does when they catch up with him is perform a bunch of magic tricks, and then the film is over.

After the magic tricks start, there is no resemblance to any Wizard of Oz plot-line. The film has a few clever sight gags, such as 1930’s animated films revel in, such as the moment when the scarecrow tips his hat and a flock of crows flies out.     

When the Broadway and traveling musical version of Oz ended at the end of the decade, L. Frank Baum found himself with a tighter money situation again around 1910.  He had been over-wintering at the Hotel del Coronado since about 1903, but in 1910 he settled in southern California in what became Hollywood.  Even though the Fairylogue and Radio Plays had lost him lots of money, he was determined to bring Oz to the movies.  Toward that end, he started the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, an independent film studio, in 1914.  The company made three Oz films but, while the films were critically well received, there were financial problems, and the company folded in 1915.

We’ll take a look at the Oz Film Manufacturing company’s films in our next post.

Oz the Great and Powerful: Good, not great. We liked the China Doll

​Via Disney

​By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

March 12, 2013

Oz was always too big for L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel.

Baum himself enjoyed years of success thanks to the traveling musical show based on his work, replete with dancing girls and romantic subplots that were intended more for adults than for children. The 1939 MGM film masterpiece transformed Oz by giving the picaresque tale of Dorothy’s adventures a villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, who had only been a minor nuisance for the one short chapter in the original book. And Broadway gave the Witch a back-story in Wicked.

But now, we have a new back-story. Oz TG&P gives us the Wicked Witch as a woman scorned after a romantic tryst with none other than. . .you guessed it, the Wizard. Hell hath no fury. Wicked gave us a Witch who was an outcast because “it’s not easy being green.”  But Oz TG&P ups the ante on sheer witchiness, because she’s got something to be really mad about this time, and something the droves of teens in the audience can sink their teeth into. This witch’s problem is that she gave it up too easily to the man from Kansas, a wizard unready for romantic commitment, and now she’s regretting her hastiness. She’s gone from green at love to green with a flying broomstick.  

The Wizard, a hapless cad from Kansas, charlatan magician and con man, finds himself in Oz by way of tornado while trying to flee his romantic and other entanglements in Kansas. But instead of escaping such things, he finds himself smack dab in the middle of a three-way witch fight. There is a fair bit of magic, with the good witch Glinda making bubbles, and the two baddies throwing fireballs and Emperor-of-the-Galaxy-style green lightning. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like this was really just a chick flick with magical trappings, a film about three sisters fighting over a dude who is afraid to commit, only he grows up in the course of the story to recognize which sister is worthy of his affection, and in the end he is ready to settle down and start a family with her, only in this case he is settling down to rule the country of Oz from a throne in the Emerald City and the family is one little china doll who needs new parents.  

Speaking of the china doll, Oz TG&P does have a few treats for fans of the Baum books.  The china town was in Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” but it was left out of the 1939 movie. It is charming to see it show up in the new movie. The flying monkeys were in the book too, but they were only evil because the Wicked Witch had control of the wishing cap that forced them to grant her three wishes. After they escaped the thrall of the Wicked Witch, they were good monkeys. Oz TG&P features one of those good monkeys, presumably in the days before the Wicked Witch of the West gets control of his kinfolk.  

The film makes him into a new character named Finley who becomes the Wizard’s valet of sorts.  He makes for an endearing addition to the story, dressed in a bellhop uniform that is very similar to some of the pictures of the monkeys in W. W. Denslow’s original illustrations for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”  

True Oz fans may bristle at the departures from Baum’s vision (in the book, for instance, the china people freeze into statuettes when they leave their village, but in the movie the china girl stays animated after leaving home to go on the voyage.) But, overall this version of Oz is a fair representation of what the Oz books were all about. They are certainly no farther from the Oz vision than some of L. Frank Baum’s own spin-offs of his fantasy world, like the Oz musical or the films from 1914.  

The main failing of Oz TG&P is really not anything that you can blame on this film or its makers.  The main failing is simply that it isn’t a timeless classic. But how can you top or even match a film like the 1939 Wizard of Oz where every moment of that film, every visual, every line of dialogue has become iconic?  Simply put, you can’t. As for me, I’m just happy that Disney has pulled off a qualified success a couple times now in the Oz arena, and in both instances was reasonably respectable to the source material.  

I refer, of course, to the 1985 Return to Oz which did a nice job of folding the second two L. Frank Baum Oz books into one movie. 

Finally, a comment on the 3-D. Oz TG&P was made for 3-D, not retrofitted after the fact for 3-D.  Starting with the old-fashioned stereoscope style title sequences and on into colorful Oz, this film’s 3-D absolutely pops. Go see it in IMAX 3-D, if at all possible. A little technology goes a long way toward making this less than timeless film a little more of an experience.  

The Wizard, all smoke and mirrors, the man behind the curtain, can relate.  

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Oz the Great and Powerful

Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Sam Raimi

Featuring:  James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams. . .

Film: Eyes Without a Face, the French 'Psycho'

A great source the masterpieces of world cinema is The Criterion Collection.  “Eyes Without a Face” is featured as #260 in the series.  Also featured on the disc is Franju’s utterly shocking and utterly realistic 1949 documentary about the slaughterhouses of Paris, “The Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des Betes)”  The film draws more on fantastic elements, while the documentary is appallingly real in every respect, even fantastically real.  It’s an interesting contrast in works within one director’s output and back to back on one DVD.  

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 12, 2013

Editor’s Note: Every few weeks, we plan to review important or overlooked films from world cinema, specifically ones relate

d to the popular lit genres of science fiction, mystery, suspense, detective, love, romance, western, and others.

The library’s collection covers the gamut of film history from the 1890s to the present day, but we’ll start in the middle. Our first film is from the 1950s — director Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face from 1959. 

In many ways, Eyes Without a Face is the French Psycho. 

Quite independently of each other, Hitchcock and Franju arrived at the same kind of film, in the same year.  Both films draw on pulp crime and film noir influences. They both feature psychologically tormented protagonists. They both capitalize on the ability of black-and-white to convey terror in a subtler and more mythic way than color ever could. And in both films, there is a series of graphic murders or attempted murders of young, beautiful women. 

There are three main characters in the movie, while the rest of the supporting cast are either victims or associates and police who run around in circles not managing to solve the mystery of the young women’s disappearances. Dr. Génessier (played stiffly but effectively by Pierre Brasseur) has accidentally caused the disfigurement of his daughter’s face in a motor vehicle wreck.  He has been doing organ transplantation experiments on dogs, and when the action of the film commences, he has just botched an attempt to transplant the face onto his daughter of an innocent girl he has kidnapped and killed in order to harvest the transplantable face, the “heterograft.” 

His assistant in the lab and his lure for the girls is his loyal hench-woman, Louise (played by Alida Valli). The daughter, Christiane, is the waif-like ingénue who fuels this drama.  Seen mostly wearing a white mask and having very few lines, she offers up the most memorable images in the film. The role was the career peak of actress Edith Scob, and she is unforgettable, even though you only see her real face in a succession of very short scenes when one of the heterografts (briefly) succeeds. She is an elfin beauty. Much of the power written into her role comes from the contrast between the icy emotionlessness of her masked and the few moments of emotion we get to see with her unmasked. In one affecting scene, she cries with teardrops running down the mask, and in another series of scenes we see the vacant despair in her eyes as her facial transplant fails. 

In the final moments of the film, when she finally takes action to stop the horrific events unfolding around her, she moves like an expressionless avenging angel, without saying a word, without being able to grimace or crack a smile through her mask.  Earlier in the film, we are shown a painting of her, when she had a face, with a white bird perched on her finger, reminiscent of Snow White. In the final frame of the film she is shown surrounded by white birds, still in her mask, but finally emotionally free from its bondage.

Both Eyes Without a Face and Psycho are disturbing works and would have been considered bloody and shocking in their day. But, while the bloodiness is no longer their main fascination, there is still a lot left to fascinate about each film. In fact, the chief impression one is left with after viewing Eyes Without a Face is its haunting imagery. Franju painstakingly sets up the kind of moments that live on as still frames in your memory: Dr. Génessier lifting the heterograft off the face of his victim; Christiane freeing the tortured dogs; and always that emotionless white mask with two holes for the faceless girl’s eyes. 

One leaves the film feeling disturbed, but it takes a while to figure out why. Maybe it’s just that a story like this has no heroes.  Pierre Boileau, of the writing team Boileau-Narcejac who wrote the adapted screenplay, explains that they were intent on creating a new kind of crime story.  The old mold for crime stories involved a mystery that was then solved by a clever detective, and the emphasis was on the cleverness and intricacies of the crime plot and its solution.  In this new type of story, the police can’t and don’t figure out the mystery. Boileau-Narcejac were responsible for either the novel basis or the screenplay for a triumvirate of masterpieces in the late 1950’s, all psychological suspense stories: Clouzot’s Diabolique, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Franju’s Eyes Without a Face.  These are quirky, disturbing stories, more about aberrant psychology than about solving mystery puzzles. 

As for moral ambiguity, how can one imagine a trio of persons more conflicted than the ones in this film? Dr. Génessier is motivated by love for his daughter, but he has no qualms about sacrificing innocent girls for their faces in order to save her. But there is a part of him that is still a caring physician.  One scene depicts him caring for a child in the hospital and, out of concern, concealing the gravity of his disease from the boy’s mother.  He acknowledges that he must succeed in his quest to perform a successful facial transplant, because he knows how much he has crossed the line by sacrificing innocent lives. And yet, his greed to achieve scientific conquest and his love for his daughter have become so obsessive that he goes right on torturing dogs and killing young women.

Likewise, the doctor’s assistant Louise is driven by blind love and devotion to the doctor, to the point where she is oblivious to the evils she is committing.  She is grateful that Dr. Génessier successfully reconstructed her damaged face, and now she is apparently in love with him. She is so convinced that she is doing the right thing for the doctor and his daughter that when the daughter finally turns on her in the final moments of the movie, Louise’s wide-eyed expression of disbelief and confusion shows you how deeply her emotions have led her astray. 

Finally, the daughter, Christiane, is so desirous of a new face that she is willing to turn a blind eye to her father’s transgressions on her behalf. What haunts the audience is that her emotionless mask seems to have stolen her sense of morality. When she briefly gets a new face, she is at her coldest and cruelest, because she has stolen it from another girl.  The apotheosis of character development that caps this film is when Christiane manages to find her heart and soul, and her sense of moral purpose, after being forced back into the mask.  The film ends with a masked Christiane among the white birds, paralleling the Christiane of the painting earlier in the film holding a white dove.  She has regained her face, even as her father has failed to give her a successful heterograft. 

These characters aren’t your traditional crime story villains. There are no heroes solving puzzles, only unanswered questions. But isn’t that the way it is in actual crimes?  There is no Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Ellery Queen to wrap things up into a neat little explanation. And there is often no justice to be found. The children of Sandy Hook will go unavenged, and, likely, nobody will ever truly understand their killer’s motives.

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Eyes Without a Face (Le Yeux sans visage)

1959, in French with English subtitles

Directed by Georges Franju

Produced by Jules Borkon

Screenplay adaptation by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude      Sautet, from a novel by Jean Redon.

Music by Maurice Jarre.

Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Edith Scob