Her Face was Her Fortune:
Changing Women’s Fates and Faces in
Three Classic Films
In
Sunset Boulevard (1950), Norma
Desmond contends that silent movie stars “didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” Indeed, motion pictures have
been obsessed with faces from the very beginning, particularly the faces of
women who, like the celebrated Helen of Troy, have launched a thousand films
with their alluring looks, from Lillian Gish and Gloria Swanson to Lauren
Bacall and Marilyn Monroe. Inevitably, however, the cinematic obsession with
such beauty also provokes an irresistible urge toward distortion and
destruction. Women’s disfigurement has long been a popular trope in film, going
at least as far back as the infamous eye-cutting scene in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) and the gruesome
mutilation of the villainess in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). Aside from its shock value, disfigurement is a
particularly effective cinematic symbol because the audience can literally see
the ways in which appearance and identity inform one another, but for women the
idea of facial disfigurement is particularly powerful because of cultural
pressures that emphasize women’s beauty as their most important asset.
In
both literature and film, this theme merges with more complicated gender issues
because the creator and/or destroyer of female beauty is typically male. In
some films, male characters wreck women’s faces as a way of establishing
dominance, either over the woman herself or over others who witness the act. We
might think of Lee Marvin scalding Gloria Grahame’s face with hot coffee in The Big Heat (1953) or the infamous Coke
bottle scene in The Long Goodbye
(1973). At other times, however, men assume dominance over nature itself by trying
to repair female faces that have already been destroyed. Today, I will consider
three classic films in which disfigured women are remade by male surgeons, with
varying results: George Cukor’s Joan Crawford melodrama, A Woman’s Face (1941), Terence Fisher’s Hammer noir, Stolen Face (1952), and Georges Franju’s
intellectual French horror film, Eyes
without a Face (1960). Each of these films belongs to a different genre,
but all three demonstrate a subtle relationship with influential stories of
masculine creation, particularly Frankenstein
and the Pygmalion myth. Men “play God” by altering the faces of female
characters, but each film reveals that the women are more than mere creatures,
and their own choices help to change or seal their fates in the aftermath of
the surgeons’ efforts.
A Woman’s Face
was originally made in Sweden in 1938, with Ingrid Bergman in the starring
role, but the 1941 Hollywood remake with Joan Crawford is better known and more
widely available today. Crawford plays Anna Holm, a woman who suffered facial
burns as a child because of her drunken father and who has grown up to be a
career criminal because her disfigurement bars her access to more respectable
employment. Her life changes when she meets a plastic surgeon who repairs her
features, thus giving her a chance to start her life anew. Unfortunately, Anna
has already fallen under the spell of another man, who urges her to use her new
identity to help him commit murder.
As
a women’s picture, A Woman’s Face
focuses on the emotional struggles of Crawford’s heroine, who is at first
embittered by her disfigurement and lashes out at the world because of its
rejection of her. When Torsten Barring, played by the sinister Conrad Veidt,
first makes love to Anna, he does so because he thinks that her scarred face
reflects a similarly twisted soul within. Barring likes the monstrous Anna
because he believes they are birds of a feather, and it certainly seems
plausible that Anna might allow her spirit to be irreparably corrupted in
exchange for something like love. The noble-minded but unhappily married Dr.
Segert, played by Melvyn Douglas, pulls Anna in the opposite direction by
giving her a new face that he hopes her soul will grow to match. Of course,
like any good Pygmalion, the doctor falls in love with his creation, although
his sense of integrity prevents him from acting on his passion out of deference
to his unfaithful wife.
Throughout
the film, Anna is overtly conscious of her own role as Segert’s creation.
Intelligent and well-read, she repeatedly connects her situation with that of
Frankenstein’s monster and the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea; she worries that
the doctor’s interference will only yield “a beautiful monster with no heart,”
as opposed to the psychic transformation that Segert hopes for and eventually
gets. Other aspects of the film further the comparisons, particularly with
Frankenstein’s monster: Anna is shown to be afraid of fire, and her ultimate
test involves her ability to harm a small child. At the end of the picture,
when Anna says, “I want to belong to the human race,” she echoes the unrealized
desire of Mary Shelley’s creature, but she enjoys a happier fate herself
because her creator, Dr. Segert, never heartlessly rejects or abandons her.
Although
the plot upholds the idea of the male surgeon as a successful shaper of fates
and faces, Anna’s own awareness of her role as a symbolic, mythic figure gives
her agency and makes this a woman’s story about her own transformation rather
than a man’s story about transforming a woman. Crawford’s protagonist is
complex and dynamic, far more than either an ugly or a pretty face. Even before
her operation, she is presented to the audience as a deeply flawed but still
sympathetic character, the kind of role that Crawford excelled at playing. She
yearns for acceptance and love, and as she receives them she transforms into a
better, more balanced person. Her new face allows her to get close to a child
for the first time, and this relationship awakens her long-dormant maternal
feelings, leading her to rebel against Torsten’s plans, even though he was the
first person to accept her in spite of her disfigurement. In the climactic
scenes, Anna proves her ability to make difficult decisions and take action. No
mere clay in the potter’s hand, she has a powerful personality whether or not
she has a beautiful face. Dr. Segert does not create her identity as much as he
liberates it, and perhaps this is why the operation is ultimately a success.
The
doctor’s efforts yield less sanguine results in Stolen Face, a 1952 noir picture from Hammer Films. Paul Henreid
stars as the plastic surgeon, Dr. Philip Ritter, who remakes a female convict’s
face to match that of a beautiful concert pianist with whom the doctor has
become romantically obsessed. Initially played by Mary Mackenzie, Lily agrees
to the operation because she naïvely believes that “any change would be an
improvement.” Both the post-surgery convict, Lily, and the pianist, Alice, are
played by Lizabeth Scott, but their physical resemblance masks their very
different personalities. Having already married his creation, Dr. Ritter soon
discovers that his best efforts to remake Lily into another Alice are doomed to
fail, and his situation becomes even more problematic when the real Alice
returns.
Unlike
Dr. Segert in A Woman’s Face, Dr.
Ritter really does end up creating “a beautiful monster, ” although Lily’s
problem might be too much heart rather than too little. She trusts the doctor
to make her life better, but he presumptuously decides that her identity is as
malleable and disposable as her original face. Ritter’s transformation into
another Victor Frankenstein doesn’t happen overnight. At first, his intentions
are honorable; we see him working in a women’s prison even before he meets the
alluring Alice. The doctor believes that disfigured women become criminals
because of the psychological damage inflicted by their deformities, and a
prison official initially confirms this opinion when he says that only one of
Ritter’s patients has returned to crime after her operation and release. Ritter
first meets Lily during this more altruistic phase of his efforts; badly
scarred during the Blitz, Lily seems unhappy but not necessarily evil, and she
lights up at the doctor’s offered hope for the new life that a new face can
bring. Unfortunately, Ritter becomes smitten with Alice before he returns to
operate on Lily, and by then his motivations have become corrupted by his
desire to create a duplicate of the woman he lost by forcing Lily to take her
place. Not surprisingly, Lily eventually rebels against this transformation,
returning to a life of crime and making Ritter’s life miserable.
Stolen Face
puts the conventional themes of film noir – obsession, fatalism, and betrayal -
to good use in its exploration of the male creator’s doomed effort to control
his creation. Ritter’s obsession with Alice twists his personality and his
perspective, leading him to tempt fate by trying to transform Lily into Alice’s
double, but Ritter betrays Lily’s faith in him by doing so, and Lily then
betrays Ritter in return. Like Victor Frankenstein, Ritter comes to hate the
thing that he has made, but Lily, like the monster, is more sinned against than
sinning. Ritter, the noir anti-hero, is the character who makes a fatal
mistake, believing that he can treat a living human being like a mound of
sculptor’s clay, ignoring the very different personality that already exists
beneath the changeable face. Ritter fails to understand, until it is too late,
that his power to transform the face does not include the power to transform
the person. He does not see Lily as an individual at all. When he tells his
partner that he plans to marry Lily, Ritter says, “If I don’t believe in my
work, what can I believe in?” Lily is not the woman he loves; she is his
“work,” and she quickly realizes that he has no interest in her real self. “Why
don’t you stop trying to make me something I’m not?” she asks him, sick of his
control over her clothes, her hair, and her behavior. Like James Stewart’s
Scottie in the later and more celebrated 1958 Hitchcock film, Vertigo, Ritter thinks women are
interchangeable, malleable, and passive beings without any will or agency of
their own. In both films, this mistake proves fatal, although not for the
person who actually makes it.
In
both Stolen Face and Vertigo, the created woman ultimately
becomes the victim of her creator, unwillingly sacrificed on the altar of his
ego. Like Kim Novak’s Judy Barton, Lily is doomed by a man’s attempts to
control her face and her fate; at the end of the picture she falls from a
moving train and is killed, while Ritter lives to be reunited with the far too
forgiving Alice. This conclusion echoes the end of the 1931 film adaptation of Frankenstein rather than the end of
Shelley’s original novel; for poetic justice and the ends of true noir fatalism
to be served, Ritter ought certainly to have paid with his life, as well. The
last spoken line of the picture is an ironic parting shot: “Well, at least
she’ll never know what it is to go through life disfigured,” a bystander says
as Lily’s mangled corpse lies beside the railroad track. The comment implies
that disfigurement is the worst fate a woman can suffer, but the preceding
story has shown only too well that Lily would have been much better off if she
had never met Philip Ritter. She might have lived with a scarred face, but she
cannot live with a stolen one.
If
Dr. Ritter steals one woman’s face for another in a more benign way, then the
plastic surgeon in Eyes without a Face
does so in a much more horrific fashion. The 1960 film from French director
Georges Franju follows the efforts of Dr. Génessier, played by Pierre Brasseur,
to create a new face for his tragically disfigured daughter by cutting the
faces off of other young women and grafting them onto his daughter’s mutilated features.
Christiane, the daughter, is played by the lovely Edith Scob, but throughout
most of the film her wrecked face remains hidden behind a disturbingly
featureless mask. The doctor is assisted in his work by Louise, a devoted nurse
played by Alida Valli, who traps and kidnaps the girls needed for the surgeon’s
repeated attempts to make his only child beautiful again.
Franju
plunges the altered face plot into the territory of fully realized horror, a
genre shift that highlights the story’s affinity with Frankenstein even more clearly. The male surgeon’s transgressive,
godlike act of remaking the woman’s face becomes even more disturbing when he
is willing to sacrifice other innocent women in order to achieve his goal.
Génessier’s obsession with his own surgical work has crossed the threshold into
madness, but this doctor has more cause to be unhinged than the others because
he is directly responsible for his daughter’s disfigurement. Having accidentally
become the destroyer of his own daughter’s beauty, Génessier is determined to
restore it to her, even at the cost of the numerous young women who become his
surgical victims. He seems not to realize that he only continues acts of
destruction, becoming more and more a monster himself. His experiments include
grafts on a huge pack of dogs kept caged in the lower recesses of his compound,
and Christiane recognizes the affinity between herself and the howling
prisoners on whom her father operates again and again. The dogs’ relentless
noise evokes both the cries of the damned in Hell and the clamoring of Fate
waiting to catch up with the presumptuous surgeon.
Both
of the earlier films offer the audience a good look at the disfigured woman
before her transformation but draw a veil over the actual surgical process,
while Eyes Without a Face does
exactly the opposite. We catch only the briefest glimpse of Christiane’s ruined
features, although a secondhand account of her accident suggests the full
horror of her experience. Instead, the film’s great moment of shock and horror
comes with a graphic depiction of the removal of another young woman’s face, a
scene that reportedly caused audience members at the film’s debut to faint in
droves. While the other two films offer demure bandage removal scenes that
emphasize successful restoration, Franju’s picture overwhelms the viewer with
the terrible destructive power of the surgeon’s work. We don’t see Dr. Segert
and Dr. Ritter operate on their patients’ faces, although on some level we must
realize that they cut, sculpt, stitch, and shape in a rather similar fashion.
Franju, whose other films lay bare the horrors of the slaughterhouse and the
insane asylum, grants us no reprieve from this ugly fact. The operation scene
goes on, slowly and horribly, until all our hope of not seeing it happen has
been lost. Génessier commits the act partly out of an obsessive masculine
desire for control and partly out of guilt and love for his own disfigured
child, but the camera forces us to see the destruction of the innocent girl who
is his victim. Robbed of her face and her individuality, she eventually dies,
and her blood is clearly on Génessier’s hands. In the meantime, the surgeon
grafts the stolen face onto Christiane, but the dead girl’s sacrifice provides
only a temporary restoration. When we finally see Edith Scob’s pretty features,
they are disturbingly connected in our minds with the scene of mutilation and
horror we have already been forced to witness. Beauty itself has become
horrific.
Although
she is not as erudite as Anna Holm, Christiane turns out to be all too
conscious of the implications of her situation, and, like Lily, she eventually
rebels against the masculine creator who seeks to control her destiny. Early in
the film, Christiane confesses to Louise that while she is afraid of her face,
she fears her shapeless mask even more. Her father has given her the mask and
the commandment to wear it, presumably because he cannot bear to look at Christiane’s
disfigured features. His guilt tortures him as much as her deformity, but
Christiane, who is not guilty, feels less desire to hide from herself. Her
father has pretended that Christiane is dead, using one of his faceless victims
as a double for her corpse, and he has cut her off from the world, including
the man she loves. She is literally a prisoner in her own home, hidden away,
carefully controlled, as caged as the dogs in the secret kennels below. Even
when she enjoys a brief return to beauty, her father controls her, telling her
to smile, “but not too much.” Worst of all, her father’s monstrous acts
implicate her in their horror because she wears the faces of the dead and mutilated
girls, and she realizes that he will go on subjecting her and them to his
operations forever. As her case is more extreme than Lily’s, so
her rebellion is more violent. Determined to put an end to her own confinement
and the suffering of her father’s victims, Christiane liberates the most
recently kidnapped girl, murders Louise, and sets loose the pack of mutilated
dogs. As Christiane, ghostly in white, floats through the final scenes, the
dogs take their revenge on their tormentor. Having brought about her father’s
destruction, the faceless girl vanishes into the darkness, much like the
creature at the end of Shelley’s Frankenstein.
In
each of these three films, certain elements recur. In the first place, the
woman’s disfigurement is always, whether directly or indirectly, caused by men.
Both Anna and Christiane are mutilated because of their fathers’ carelessness,
while Lily is disfigured because of the Blitz, an instance of that most
masculine of all institutions, war. Each woman becomes the patient of a male
surgeon who wants to make her beautiful, the importance of which is so obvious
that none of the films really feels the need to discuss it much. Each woman is
also controlled by a man who wants to dictate her identity; for Anna, this man
is Torsten Barring, but for Lily and Christiane the surgeon proves to be the one
with an obsessive need for control. All three women rebel against the
controlling men, although for Lily this rebellion proves fatal. Anna and
Christiane both cause the deaths of the men who want to dominate them, thus
successfully punishing them for their presumption. Not one of the women is
willing to be a passive creature of her masculine creator.
The
creator’s recognition of the woman’s agency proves to be a deciding factor. Of
the three surgeons, only Dr. Segert is willing to let go of his patient and let
her make her own choices. While he hopes to change Anna’s fate by changing her
face, he does not control her decisions afterward, and his foil, Torsten, shows
the folly of trying to do so. Dr. Ritter’s obsessive attempts to control Lily
prove futile, although Dr. Génessier becomes the most extreme example, with the
most extreme consequences. The extent
and nature of the transformation also matters. The operation performed by Dr. Segert
is the least extensive; he merely repairs the damaged part of Anna’s face and
leaves the rest of it untouched. Joan Crawford plays the character both before
and after her surgery, and for the most part she looks the same. Dr. Ritter
oversteps his authority by completely changing Lily’s face, making her
unrecognizable even to herself. He tries to rewrite her identity entirely, and
the face that he gives her is already being worn by another woman. Ritter puts
Lily through extensive and totally unnecessary operations to get the result he
wants when a simple reconstruction of her real face would have served her much
better. The change is so extreme that two different actresses play the
character before and after her surgery. Dr. Génessier, the most experimental
surgeon of the group, repeatedly tries to force other women’s faces to fit
Christiane, ruining even more fates and faces in the process. His work is the
most destructive and the most extensive, and it’s also the only attempt that
fails from a surgical perspective.
All
three narratives have come a long way from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story,
“The Birthmark,” in which the presumptuous doctor removes his wife’s one facial
flaw only to have her expire on the table when the last trace of the mark
disappears. In that tale, the doctor pays for playing God, but the woman is
merely a passive victim of his hubris. Her individuality and her identity
vanish without a fight, and she becomes perfectly dead. Anna, Lily, and
Christiane survive transformations both good and bad, and each possesses a
powerful personal identity that struggles against oppressive masculine control.
Unfortunately, their insistence on their own identities doesn’t always end well
for the women. From a feminist perspective, the most backward film of the group
is Stolen Face, which punishes the
rebellious woman and actually rewards the presumptuous male. The picture’s
ending represents a miscarriage of justice of the worst sort, not even in
keeping with the conventions of its own genre. The melodramatic resolution of A Woman’s Face might strike some
thoughtful viewers as overly sentimental, but at least Anna makes her own
choice in the matter, and her identity as a woman who seeks and needs love is
established very early in the film. The horror film, Eyes without a Face, surprisingly proves to be the most feminist
take on the films’ common plot. Despite its graphic victimization of female
characters, Eyes without a Face is
ultimately a tale about Christiane’s self-liberation, her refusal to be shaped
and controlled by her father’s obsession and guilt. She will not be his
creature, and her rebellion brings about his destruction.
A Woman’s Face,
Stolen Face, and Eyes without a Face are just a few examples of the different ways
in which movies can address this common theme. Masculine films about facial
change and identity, including Dark
Passage (1947), Darkman (1990), and
Face/Off (1997), have their own
gendered concerns, but the three films discussed here show the ways in which
women, in particular, are perceived as being defined by their faces. In real
life as well as in fiction, women’s faces have all too often determined their
fortunes, no matter what their other qualities might be. As these films show,
men who seek to change women’s faces in order to control their fates do so at
their peril.
This essay was originally presented at the meeting of the Popular Culture Association in the South in 2011. No Works Cited entries are provided in order to discourage plagiarism of this material. This essay is the intellectual property of Jennifer C. Garlen and may only be used with proper citation and credit.
