Alfred Hitchcock admitted that he’d been influenced by the gruesome bathtub sequences in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s great Les diaboliques (1955) when deciding on the splatter shower for Psycho (1960). Had Hitch taken a peek also at Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1959), a less well-known Gallic masterpiece of surrealist horror that anticipates Psycho in many significant ways?
Judge for yourself when it screens at the Brattle next Thursday, March 21. Stunted, pathetic Norman Bates, self-exiled in that hellhouse on the hill and under the thumb of his late mother forever, is there in the thin, fragile, bird-like Christiane (Edith Scob), who, locked away in a remote mansion, suffers, and withers, under the control of her sinister doctor dad, Professor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur). Norman is too weak to keep the Mrs. Bates within him from killing. Christiane sits by passively as her father commits, in her name, the most ghastly of murders.
And what is more Psycho-like than to follow a key character as he climbs up and up dark, winding stairs in a gothic mansion, with some unspeakable terror waiting for us at the top? In Eyes Without a Face, that’s when Génessier takes us to the room up in the rafters where his daughter lies mourning her botched life.
Christiane’s face, hidden shamefully under a ghost-white mask, has been scorched and mutilated in an auto accident that was caused, she says, by the recklessness of her father. 'He has to dominate everybody. He was driving like a maniac,' she says, though never to his face. Not that he will admit fault. Génessier, all hubris, is always right, and that includes the peculiar fate he’s chosen for Christiane. He’s sequestered her from the world and from her fiancé; everyone believes she’s dead. Instead, she becomes the human guinea pig for his unholy Frankensteinian experiments. As he lectures an enraptured bourgeois audience at the beginning of the movie, he’s on the cutting edge of the 'hetero-graft,' transporting human parts from one person to another.
This is 1959, long before heart transplants, cloning, and genetic engineering. Génessier’s pioneering methods (away from his admirers) are coarse and crude and ignore the ethics of medicine. He makes his loony, faithful assistant, Louise (The Third Man’s romantic lead, Alida Valli, a done-over distaff Ygor from the Frankenstein movies), lure pretty Parisian college girls to his suburban laboratory, where they’re drugged and tied down on an operating table. He traces where he wants to cut, forehead to chin, with a kind of magic marker. His skilled scalpel does the rest, carving out a new face for his daughter.
Film historians always cite Psycho as the work that upped the level of in-your-mug violence and bloodshed we’d be asked to tolerate in serious cinema. That’s because few people had been privy to, a year earlier, the ghoulish on-camera operation in Eyes Without a Face where a young woman’s skin is deftly removed in one piece.
I said serious cinema, and that’s certainly what you have from Franju, who in 1936 founded the Cinémathèque-Française with Henri Langlois and who was, during his life (1912-1987), a scholar of cinema and a devotee of Surrealism. Eyes Without a Face resonates with references to the German silent cinema of Murnau and Lang, to classic American horror flicks, and to Hitchcock. Génessier, cold and bearded, conjures Paul Lucas’s evil Dr. Hartz, whom Margaret Lockwood’s Iris wakes up to in The Lady Vanishes (1938).
What makes Eyes Without a Face so affecting is the grand poetry of the black-and-white imagery (by France’s master cinematographer, Eugen Schüfftan), the tender romanticism of Maurice Jarre’s score, and Franju’s compassion for his pale, trapped princess who pines for what is normal: marriage to her young doctor boyfriend and getting far away from dad. Has any adolescent been so terribly grounded? Franju’s heart goes out to Christiane as she sneaks a telephone call to her beau and listens to his frustrated voice at the other end: 'Who’s there?' If only she could answer back, 'Me! I love you, and I’m alive!'
Franju surely loved The Black Cat (1934), an odd, kitschy Universal horror by cultist Edgar G. Ulmer. Lucille Lund, who died last week at age 88, was sublime in the dual role of Boris Karloff’s dead spouse, floating mummified under glass, and, in Karloff’s bed, his wife’s teenage daughter with blond hair at almost Rapunzel length.
