This picture has the look and feel of an American made Forties or Fifties horror flick but it's actually a French film made in 1960 and directed by Georges Franju. I don't know what single word might best describe it, but the one that immediately comes to mind is creepy. Everything about the picture tends to horrify the viewer, established with the opening scene as we see the images of passing skeletal trees against a sky of night time darkness. We learn that a middle aged woman (Alida Valli) is on her way to dispose of a body in a nearby river, another failed experiment at the hands of a gifted surgeon named Genessier (Pierre Brasseur). From there, things take an even more frightening turn, as the story explores Genessier's obsession to restore the face of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car crash for which he was responsible.

The story uses some of that pseudo-scientific babble I love to come across in these types of films, that stuff about a 'heterograft', whereby radiation is a requirement to biologically modify a host body to receive a donor transplant. Because radiation is too intense in the required dosage, exsanguination is deemed the next best available strategy for the type of procedure explained by Professor Genessier to his attentive audience. Funny, but none of that was going on when the good professor got down to the real nitty gritty of his work on daughter Christiane (Edith Scob).

You know, it's hard to describe, but there was something of an ethereal beauty in both the masked and newly engineered face of Christiane following the operation. Didn't you think for a moment that the new face of Christiane would be that of victim Edna Gruber (Juliette Mayniel)? Instead, you had this beautiful face appear, rather astonishingly to convey success for the questionable transplant operation. It's best described by the professor - "There's something angelic about you now" in a cautious appraisal of his daughter's beauty. However things take a disastrous turn as the operation proves fruitless; the girl's body rejects the new face and the mask is required once again.

But you know what I found to be truly outrageous? What was with that police scheme to insert Paulette Merodon (Beatrice Altariba) into the professor's den of horror? There didn't seem to be any control in place to monitor the girl's movements, and she could have been another goner in the doctor's twisted scheme of things.

Well I don't know if modern day viewers of a young age would be affected by the story as much as I was. I think the real terror for them would be watching Christiane use that ancient contraption known as a dial telephone. And then, as if to totally confuse the present day techie, boyfriend Jacques has to answer the phone without benefit of caller ID. Oh, the horror!

Well in any event, I thought this film was a genuine creepfest, heartily recommended to genre fans, particularly as I mentioned earlier, to fans of classic horror films of the Forties and Fifties where the mad scientist reigns. In iconic fashion, the evil doctor gets his in the end here, as we learn the answer to that age old question - who let the dogs out?

Georges Franju's version of a mad scientist trying to play God tells about a brilliant but controlling and obsessive doctor who is trying to restore the face of his own beloved daughter that was horribly disfigured in a car accident caused by his reckless driving. He requires tissues of recently deceased young women that look like his daughter and he is not going to wait for them to die in an accident - he creates the accidents with help of his loyal secretary/nurse/lover/former patient Louise (Alida Valli of "The Third Man") who kidnaps the unsuspecting girls and brings them to the secluded mansion in one of Paris's suburbs where Doctor Génessier is ready to perform the fascinating and horrifying surgeries.

"Eyes without a Face" is a very impressive, classy picture that has inspired many later horror movies. The music by Maurice Jarr adds to the uneasy and creepy atmosphere - it makes you feel like on the never-stopping ominous merry-go-round and you can't get off it.

This is a pretty good horror-suspense film--with a definite bent toward suspense instead of horror. In many ways it's like an old Hollywood B-movie horror film made in France years later with a more artistic and subdued bent. The influence of such films as THE RETURN OF DR. X and other earlier films is very definitely present, but the mood is somehow different.

A seemingly normal facial surgeon is desperate to replace his daughter's missing face--partly because he loves her so and partly because he blames himself for her plight, since her face got ripped off in an accident where he was speeding. To do so, he and his assistant kidnap young ladies and surgically graft their faces onto the daughter. The problem (other than the fact they are murdering people) is that these transplants keep being rejected and must ultimately be removed.

The acting is okay (neither bad nor especially compelling--since the script doesn't give them much chance to show off their acting skill). But the rest of the film (direction, cinematography, writing, etc.) is very good. Overall, while I am not quite as impressed by this film as the average IMDb reviewer, it was good and pretty watchable. HOWEVER, many will not want to see it because of the rather disgusting subject matter and because of one pretty realistic scene where they remove the face from a lady. This is NOT a film for kids or the squeamish.