Chapter 24
In June 1960 at the Edinburgh Film Festival, seven members of the viewing audience fainted during a screening of Eyes Without a Face (1959), which the British censor had passed uncut with an “X” classification after months of deliberation. Vilified by the critics and hesitantly given a limited showing at art-house and independent theaters, the film caused further outrage when more faintings, and even vomitings, were reported in the press. On the Continent, Georges Franju’s audacious (and misunderstood) movie that kick-started the revisionist surgical horror sub-genre suffered minor cuts. However, the biggest insult of all made to what is now regarded as the pinnacle of European New- Wave medical/mad surgeon cinema was reserved for its American release. Cut by six minutes, re-edited, dubbed and lumbered with the crass title of The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, Franju’s masterwork was finally issued by producer William Shelton and Lopert Pictures in 1962, double billed with The Manster (aka The Split). In doing this, Shelton was pandering to the drive-in, sensation-seeking brigade rather than a discerning clientele who would appreciate the movie for what it really was. It is only in recent years that the uncut print of Eyes Without a Face has become available on the market, while its bastardized American cousin has quite rightly vanished without trace. But what are the major deviations, if any, between the two versions, apart from that inappropriate title change? [Note: Although listed in some quarters as a 1960 production, Eyes Without a Face was completed and copyrighted in 1959, hence the inclusion of Franju’s landmark horror picture in this book.]
The mask is one of horror cinema’s most potent images, dating right back to the early years of cinema; in Eyes Without a Face, it has never been more effectively used as an object of beauty and innocence hiding something truly terrible underneath. And that something terrible are Edith Scob’s features. Destroyed in a car crash in which her father, surgeon Pierre Brasseur, was the driver, Scob (the actress possessed a fragile, gamine allure) wears a porcelain mask to veil her horrific facial injuries, wandering restlessly through her father’s rambling mansion, an ethereal figure whose luminous eyes reveal her inner turmoil. It is said that the eyes mirror the soul, and that is most certainly the case here; Scob’s expressive eyes are a key factor in the production, as significant as her iconic mask (“My face frightens me. And my mask terrifies me even more.”)
Clad in black, one-time French glamour queen Alida Valli loiters in the shadows, stalking homeless young girls and taking them back to Brasseur’s house in her Citroen. Once there, they are rendered unconscious and used for skin grafts in an attempt to remodel Scob’s ravaged face. Brasseur had also operated on Valli in the past, giving her a new face, so she owes him a debt of gratitude as well as being in love with him. The moment when Scob, without mask, approaches her strapped-down tissue donor demonstrates horror cinema at its most bone-chillingly brilliant. Scob warily circles the laboratory (you can almost smell the ether and feel the cold), studies the equipment and the comatose victim, walks to a mirror and removes her mask. The mask is left on a cushion, but we, the audience, are not allowed a glimpse of Scob’s disfigurement. Franju shoots the actress from behind, only the back of her head in camera as she makes her steady way to the operating table. She stares down at the girl, her long, delicate fingers cautiously stroking the unblemished skin, soon to be her skin. The girl comes to, looks up at Scob and emits a single piercing scream. Scob slowly backs away like a wounded animal, out of focus, her ulcerated face vaguely visible, the guard dogs barking furiously, adding to the sweaty tension — we are finally permitted to see what the unfortunate girl has seen. With Maurice Jarre’s eerie musical tones a muted, malevolent undercurrent, this one galvanizing scene alone promotes Franju’s bold enterprise to everlasting status.
Franju’s authoritative control of his subject matter is masterful in directorial pizzazz: his expert use of light, shade and pace; the reverential, lingering close-ups of Scob’s haunting, doll-like mask and her radiant face after the operation; the five-minute tissue graft performed in one unflinching take (not for the faint-hearted!); the sterile laboratory and the three central characters — Brasseur, stern, clinical, totally focused; Valli keeping her emotions in check, a relentless procurer of young women, eager to please her icy lover and the wonderful Scob, childlike, a lost soul caught up in a wretched chain of events where no solution exists. Ably assisting Franju was respected cameraman Eugen Shufftan, bathing the picture in glacial monochrome imagery, while noted composer Maurice Jarre’s Gallic score must surely rank as one of cinema’s top-10 horror soundtracks, a lyrical, nursery rhyme leitmotif that jangles insidiously throughout and embeds itself in the mind.
It cannot be stressed how vital Jarre’s musical arrangements are to Eyes Without a Face, particularly in the scenes involving Scob. As her slim figure, clothed in high-necked dress, drifts from one room to another, the unblinking eyes behind the mask taking in all that is happening, Jarre’s score perfectly complements her every move, adding poignancy here, a menacing note there. Scob seems to inhabit a Grimm’s fairytale world, divorced from the grisly business of restoring her good looks, curling herself up in a fetal position during bouts of depression. Great movie composers can flesh out a character as well as a director can, and Eyes Without a Face is a case in point. Both Jarre and Franju created a tragic female persona that audiences could identify with, and the composer’s part in this must never be underestimated.
In a picture of so much depth, the three standout scenes are the aforementioned girl-in-lab segment; the skin graft operation, as cool and matter-of-fact as the man performing it and the unforgettable climax. Stabbing Valli in the throat with a scalpel, Scob turns the ferocious dogs loose on her father in an act of perverse rebellion, of release, of failure, of pity for the victims (the audience is left to draw its own conclusions). As the dogs rip their master to shreds, she almost floats into the night like a specter, white doves wheeling in the air, one perched on her shoulder as Jarre’s musical cadences reach a crescendo. A powerfully poetic and moving last act with no real resolution — but there wasn’t supposed to be one.
Eyes Without a Face may indeed, along with Hitchcock’s Psycho, be the precursor to the slasher genre that was to come. It spawned a rash of surgical-horror dramas of some renown, The Awful Doctor Orlof and Seddok, Son of Satan being two important examples. But its violence isn’t gratuitous, although it does carry an air of morbidity. The movie owes a great deal to the old Universal Karloff and Lugosi flicks of the ’30s and ’40s, with a nod in the direction of the great Jean Cocteau, while remaining individual and influential in its own right. It was a film way ahead of its time and could so easily have been made today. It is a film which horror lovers will repeatedly savor, to acknowledge Franju’s sheer virtuosity and technique and to marvel at Scob’s never-to-be-forgotten performance as the piteous girl trapped in a medical nightmare.
Where, then, and why does The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus go so drastically wrong? How did it manage to comprehensively tarnish a work of such repute? Many foreign films, before and after, have been inexpertly altered to suit English and American audiences so, preposterous title notwithstanding, Faustus in that respect follows a well-trodden path: Poor dubbing replacing subtitles, characters’ names Anglicized/ Americanized and drastic editing leading to jumps in continuity. But Shelton and Lopert were tinkering with a textbook classic here, not any old run-of-the-mill production. Their one major faux pas was in the misuse (or abuse) of Maurice Jarre’s soundtrack, as we shall discover. That, more than anything else, is the main reason for Faustus’ undoing. First, let’s cover the cuts. Faustus is 84 minutes long compared to Eyes’ 90 minutes. Those missing six minutes occur principally in the opening credits, shorn by 70 seconds (the original’s credits run just over two minutes), the skin graft operating scene, heavily edited from five-and-a-half minutes to a little over two (the original take was considered too strong) and the sequence showing Brasseur torn apart by the dogs. The sight of the surgeon’s mangled face has been edited out, a fatal omission as Franju, in incorporating this crucial shot, was reflecting upon Scob’s own ruined features, subtly ramming home the point of the daughter’s redress. A few minor trims en route contribute to the remainder of the cuts, although the disturbing montage of four photographs capturing the gradual deterioration in Scob’s unsuccessful facial graft survives the American cut. The dubbing is blighted with the usual translation problems of lips not matching words, but give Faustus its due, it sticks pretty closely to the original and concise French script, with one or two silly digressions chucked in to pander to the non- European customer.
But in rearranging and unnecessarily cranking up the volume of Jarre’s hypnotic score to suit their own objectives, the American distributors calamitously messed up the picture’s natural flow, solid proof that the fine artistic meld between director and composer, if interfered with, can upset a film’s equilibrium and damage the narrative drive. Because of the truncated credits, Jarre’s title theme, a macabre fairground-type melody, comes straight in at the middle section and is therefore incomplete. This middle section is then applied rather harshly into the opening minutes that show Valli disposing of a corpse, and the score has a tendency to be overused in areas that, in the original, remain silent. Silence works wonders in building atmosphere, as Franju was fully aware. Too much music, however exceptional that music may be, can spoil the mood, which it does constantly in Faustus, to the movie’s detriment. What’s more, additional, dissonant sounds can be heard, notably when Brasseur and Valli leave the funeral and arrive at the surgeon’s house. Who was responsible for this? Not Jarre, that’s for certain. The careful pacing seems to fall apart with this unwarranted meddling, diminishing the original’s standing and giving it a ragged appearance; Eyes, in its Faustus guise, has been relegated to just one more badly dubbed foreign exercise in sleaze and sadism. Yes, Franju’s startling images remain more or less intact, but they don’t marry with Jarre’s music as they do so magnificently in the original cut. And remember, Jarre won an Oscar for his work on Lawrence of Arabia — he, above all others, didn’t deserve Shelton crucifying his score to such a disastrous effect.
So steer clear of The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. It is not worthy of your consideration. Mingling Gothic values, medical science fiction, unethical surgery and the contrast between beauty and ugliness into a complex whole, Franju’s uncut Eyes Without a Face is an out-and-out classic, the director’s big statement that rewards time and time again on so many levels. And when Scob, after her operation, gazes at the camera with those huge eyes and says wistfully, “When I look into a mirror, I feel I’m seeing someone who looks like me, returning from far away,” your heart will melt. How many horror films can induce that feeling in a viewer?