In Plenty of Time for Halloween, a Splendid Print of a Classic Horror Movie

"Les yeux sans visage" (Eyes without a Face, 1960) has some very conventional scifi/horror elements, including a mad scientist/surgeon, a secret operating theater, and a set of hounds. In one of the excellent bonus features on the Criterion disc, director Georges Franju recalls that he was supposed to make a horror film with "no sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudity because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market, and no animal slaughter because of the English market."

Although there is one (very!) grisly scene with blood in the middle of the movie, Franju rose to the challenge with the aid of writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Norcejac, who had managed the same feat in writing "Diabolique" for Henri-Georges Clouzot. (They also wrote the basis for Hitchcock's "Vertigo" before "Eyes," but that was not a horror film and was not recognized as a masterpiece at the time.)

Both the female leads recall (to me anyway) figures in Jean Cocteau movies (and Franju had made a great, though little-known-in-America movie of Cocteau's WWI novel Thomas, l'imposteur. Alida Valli (star of "The Third Man" and "Senso," she died a few months ago) seems cut from the same cloth as María Cesares's Death in Cocteau's "Orphée"; Edith Sco-as Christiane-provides great evidence for my recurrent claim that screen acting is done with the eyes (the veritable title role). Not to neglect body language, particularly hers at the end of the movie. Dialogue is of little importance. The images in "Eyes without a Face" are almost everything.