Film Review
A middle-aged man falls obsessively in love with a stunningly beautiful
woman and ends up trying to fashion another woman in her image when she
mysteriously disappears from his life... Doesn't that sound like
the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's
Vertigo (1958)? It is
also a fair résumé of a lesser-known noir B-movie made by
the British film company Hammer six years previously, a film that
prefigures not only Hitchcock's haunting study in identity but also the
entire series of Frankenstein films that Hammer would make from
The Curse of Frankenstein
(1957) onwards. With its creepy premise, eerily evocative of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there is a
subtly Gothic feel to
Stolen Face
that almost earns it a place in Hammer's series of Gothic horror
films. It's probably the most disturbing of the films that the
company made which sits (just) outside its massive horror portfolio.
Terence Fisher, the man who directed the earliest and arguably best entries
in Hammer's run of Gothic horrors, is well-suited to direct what is
effectively a mid-20th century reworking of Frankenstein. This is
Fisher's third film for Hammer, coming straight after two other
commendable noir offerings:
The Last
Page (1952) and
Wings of
Danger (1952). Already, he was shaping up to be the
company's most dependable director, someone with a natural flair for
taking a completely implausible narrative and somehow turning it into
an atmospheric and compelling piece of cinema. Eight years before
Georges Franju's
Les Yeux sans visage (1960)
Fisher succeeds in making perfectly respectable plastic surgeons appear like something out of your worst
nightmare, and the idea of having your face completely remoulded is one
that he plays with to chilling effect.
Paul Henreid is a surprising name to see headlining a low-budget
British thriller of this era. For the actor who had featured in
some of the classic American movies of the 1940s -
Now,
Voyager (1942),
Casablanca (1942),
Deception
(1946) - it must have been a comedown to clock on at Hammer's Riverside
Studios in Hammersmith, to play the lead in a film that had as much
chance of posterity as a Chelsea bun. Yet, just as his popularity
was on the decline, Henreid was improving as an actor - in
Stolen Face he gives what is surely
one of his best performances. If Peter Cushing had not been
around to play Dr Frankenstein for Hammer a few years hence, Henreid
would have been a fair substitute, judging by his portrayal in this
film of a manically driven scientist who is both charming and sinister,
in a nice, friendly Dr Crippen sort of way. Is this the man you
would like to see standing at your bedroom door in the early hours of
the morning with a bottle of scotch in one hand, and a bottle of
aspirin in the other? I don't think so. If you need late
night room service in an out-of-the-way hotel, you'd be better off
calling for Norman Bates.
Like Henreid, Lizabeth Scott also seems to have been given something of
a Lazarus-like revival by Hammer. In the challenging dual role
offered by
Stolen Face, the
actress sparkles as she had rarely done before, bringing a startling
reality to both of her characters. You wonder how one actress
could offer up two such completely different personalities in the same
film, the fragile concert pianist who is more sensually alluring than
Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall combined having naught but an uncanny
physical resemblance to the coarse specimen of East End nastiness that
Henreid, in his folly, ends up marrying. At one point, Henreid
looks as if he is reprising his earlier role in
Of Human Bondage (1946), with
Scott's more evil persona giving him the full Mildred Rogers
treatment. Surely I am not alone in spotting the similarities
with Robert Siodmak's
The Dark Mirror (1946)...
In common with practically all of Hammer's attempts at film noir this
one is an obvious hodgepodge of recycled ideas which somehow has the
illusion of originality whilst, at the same time, filling your head
with so much
déjà vu
that it is fit to burst. And this was Hammer's Achilles'
heel - the quality of its scripts.
Stolen Face may be fun to watch but
if you analyse it too closely it falls apart faster and more
spectacularly than a self-assembly wardrobe. The characters are
broad-brush archetypes, the plot is unconvincing and for the most part
downright illogical. And as for that quaint idiosyncrasy of
Hammer's horror films, of always ending the film at least five minutes
too soon, that's also to be found in
Stolen
Face, and we can guess why. No screenwriter on the planet
would want to have the job of tidying up all the loose ends that
are left dangling once the kill-the-bitch denouement has been got out
of the way. Does Dr Ritter get indicted and hanged for the murder
of his wife? What is the coroner to make of the fact that
Ritter's wife is the exact double of the 'other woman' on the
train? Will the 'other woman' give up her career and start over
with Dr Ritter, or will Dr Ritter immediately set about manufacturing a harem made up
entirely of identical copies of his ideal woman? Or does Dr
Ritter simply write up his fantastic story as a novel, the film rights
of which he can then sell to Alfred Hitchcock? Alas, we shall
never know the answers to
any
of these questions, except possibly the Hitchcock one...
© James Travers 2014
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Next Terence Fisher film:
The Last Page (1952)