Sat 17 Jan 2015
A Movie Review by Jonathan Lewis: STOLEN FACE (1952).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[19] Comments
STOLEN FACE. Hammer Films, UK, 1952. Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott, André Morell, Mary Mackenzie, John Wood, Susan Stephen. Director: Terence Fisher.
An English thriller with an unmistakably Gothic sensibility, Hammer Films’ Stolen Face stars Paul Henreid as Dr. Philip Ritter, an eminent but lonely physician, a plastic surgeon who believes that his scalpel will lead him down a path of happiness. Lizabeth Scott, in a dual role, portrays Alice Brent, an American pianist with whom Ritter (Henreid) falls in love and the facially reconstructed Lily Conover (Mary Mackenzie), a recidivist criminal.
Directed by Terence Fisher, Stolen Face is a story of love, loss, and madness. When Ritter he learns Alice has supposedly chosen David (André Morell) over him, he is heartbroken and despondent.
Enter the scalpel. Dr. Ritter is part of an experimental program at a local prison in which he reconstructs the faces of habitual criminals, sociopathic lowlifes. Give them a new face, a prettier face, a less ugly face and maybe, just maybe they won’t resort to a life of crime.
If he can’t have the real Alice (Scott), Dr. Ritter will have a simulacrum. He chooses the grotesquely scarred Lily Conover as his target, for she will benefit from his surgery. But the price is that she will have a stolen face — Alice’s face.
But Dr. Ritter isn’t done just yet. He ups the ante in his Frankenstein game. Not only does he give Lily Conover Alice’s face. He marries her. And let me tell you. It’s a rough marriage, for despite the new outward appearance Lily (now portrayed by Scott) goes back to her old ways, shoplifting, drinking, and chasing men. It’s all enough to put a murderous rage into Dr. Ritter.
The final scenes of the film could be categorized as noir. There’s a train hurdling through the night, a death, and a tragic ending for one of the main characters.
All told, Stolen Face is quirky little British thriller, a journey through a man’s descent into despair. It may be a journey where you pretty much know where you’re going from the outset, but it’s still an enjoyable ride.
January 18th, 2015 at 12:29 am
Reminds me of those movies where Vincent Price or somebody, always spends evenings in his living room–dressed in a tuxedo every weeknight–playing the pipe organ–with a candelabra–gazing with burning eyes up at an oil painting of a dead wife.
January 18th, 2015 at 1:00 am
This is one of Lizabeth Scott’s movies I have never seen. I don’t know how that happened, but since I have the box set of Hammer noir films, I can easily do something about it.
January 18th, 2015 at 1:06 am
She had that unusually ‘husky’ voice, as I recall. Her trademark. I think she was still appearing in films as late as the early 1970s, eh? In Europe? Very striking-looking woman. She looked like an older Ursula Andress, somewhat in her later career. Her most memorable role (for me) was some film with Van Heflin. Can’t recall title.
January 18th, 2015 at 2:18 am
Feliks,
The Van Heflin film is THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS with Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas.
This one is also known as THE SCAR I believe, the plot a little like A WOMAN’S FACE.
January 18th, 2015 at 2:28 am
Ah yah. Thank ye. That’s a pretty famous movie. For some reason I never assemble it all in my mind: the storyline with Douglas & Stanwyck & Heflin seems one side of the film; and the storyline with Scott and Heflin seems unrelated somehow. In my memory they settled into place as two separate flicks. I thought that Scott/Heflin had starred in something much more obscure together. ‘Martha Ivers’–so remarkable in the way that Kirk Douglas (usually so intense) plays a mild-mannered, milquetoast-type. Was that his very first role? I recall some scrap of trivia about how Kirk Douglas started off his career working in a men;s clothing store when he was ‘discovered’. He sure didn’t remain in ‘mousy’ roles. What a physique that guy had. he and Lancaster both, which made them fun to watch together. I very much enjoy Kirk Douglas in a role much later in his career when he actually chose–again–to play a wimp. A TV movie(?) with Jean Seberg called, ‘Mousy’. His character is so timid he can’t stand the sight of blood.
January 18th, 2015 at 2:40 am
p.s. and he pulls it off! He was good enough as an actor that he could go out on a limb like that –utterly against type–and stay there without any trouble
January 18th, 2015 at 3:01 am
There’s a Vincent Price movie, part of the Roger Corman Poe Cycle, called THE TOMB OF LIGEIA in which a female actress plays two characters; there is also THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES which I reviewed here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=27524
January 18th, 2015 at 3:10 am
BTW: the regular reviewers who contribute to this blog are simply astounding. Who are these guys? Fine writers, succinct and engaging reviews (as above, by J. Lewis); and always purveying new discoveries to readers here. Huge command of lore. Big props to MysteryFile!
January 18th, 2015 at 7:05 am
“The Scar” is a different movie, with Henreid giving himself the facial deformity. Lizabeth Scott was out of the movies by the mid fifties, returning in the Michael Caine “Pulp”.She’s still around. Henreid would’ve made a great Dr. Frankenstein, once Hammer got into horror full time.
January 18th, 2015 at 8:40 am
David in comment #4 mentions that STOLEN FACE may also be known as THE SCAR. But THE SCAR is another movie starring Paul Henreid and Joan Bennett. Made in 1948 it is a classic film noir that one reference book even names as the best film noir. It’s also known as HOLLOW TRIUMPH.
January 18th, 2015 at 1:39 pm
STOLEN FACE is a nifty little movie and as you say it nicely combines noir and gothic elements. I think it’s the best of the 1950s Hammer noirs.
January 18th, 2015 at 1:46 pm
Henreid would have indeed made a good Dr. Frankenstein. Actually when you look at the photo of him (above), you can almost imagine him morphing into a younger Peter Cushing
January 18th, 2015 at 2:30 pm
Hammer actually made two films on the lost love recreated theme. The Fourth Side Of The Triangle, has a rejected scientist literally creating an exact duplicate. While a great fanboy fantasy, even in the movies these things don’t turn out well. Both films predate Vertigo.
January 18th, 2015 at 5:39 pm
I don’t know when the recreating your lost love theme was first used. In part at least it dates back to the Pygmalian myth of the man who creates the perfect woman and then can’t control her. Though there are no doubles the theme is used in THE LOST MOMENT where Susan Hayward is almost driven mad as they try to convince her she’s the reincarnation of a long dead woman.
This specific version may have been a new twist, in other versions the original is usually only seen in portraits. It’s even implied in REBECCA and JANE EYRIE where the mousy quiet young women fear the hero can’t love them because they can’t compare to the original who turns out of have been a terror or mad. It’s very much a classical Gothic theme, almost the doppleganger idea.
It’s also part of Poe’s ‘William Wilson.”
It has some basis in fact, both the Anastasia impersonation and the infamous Tichborne claimant where people were trained or brainwashed into impersonating or believing they were the true heirs to great fortunes.
Oddly enough this is the Frankenstein myth since Henreid is playing God to some extent.
What makes this and VERTIGO new is that both films throw off the gothic trappings and tell the tale in a more modern and realistic venue, though STOLEN FACE not as brilliantly as the Hitchcock film. Still there is a good deal of the Gothic in both films.
January 18th, 2015 at 7:32 pm
In LAURA and VERTIGO, neither woman can live up to her original, mythologized self. But the detective in each film is so obsessed that the “real” version is more than sufficient. For decades Hitchcock tried to film Barrie’s play “Mary Rose”, about an older man who comes back to his female fixation as a much younger person. Got so bad in his later years that the studio contractually forbade him from going near it.
January 18th, 2015 at 8:04 pm
What studio forbade Hitchcock coming back to any story?
January 18th, 2015 at 8:11 pm
Universal in the ’60’s, which controlled his choices. Had him fire Bernard Herrmann, and vetoed a “new wave” film he planned called KALEIDOSCOPE.
January 18th, 2015 at 9:24 pm
Kaleidoscope was filmed by Jack Smight for Warners, and whether or not the studio, in this case Universal had approval of that which they financed, no one speaks to serious talent in the manner you have presented. Or, in fact to anyone. In Hitch’s case we have to bear in mind all the unsuccessful films he had done for Universal, so…
January 18th, 2015 at 10:39 pm
I don’t think the Jack Smight film (and not a very good one, in my opinion) had anything to do with the Hitchcock project. Here’s a link that says more about the latter:
http://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Kaleidoscope
Here’s a link to Bill’s original reference to MARY ROSE as a never finished Hitchcock project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unproduced_Hitchcock_projects#Mary_Rose_.281964.29
where it says
“Hitchcock had long desired to turn J. M. Barrie’s 1920 play Mary Rose into a film. In 1964, after working together on Marnie, Hitchcock asked Jay Presson Allen to adapt the play into a screenplay. Hitchcock would later tell interviewers that his contract with Universal allowed him to make any film, so long as the budget was under $3 million, and so long as it was not Mary Rose. Whether or not this was actually true, Lew Wasserman was not keen on the project, though Hitchcock never gave up hope of one day filming it.”
and here’s a link to Barrie’s play MARY ROSE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rose_%28play%29
which describes the story thusly:
“It tells the fictional story of a girl who vanishes twice. As a child, Mary Rose’s father takes her to a remote Scottish island. While she is briefly out of her father’s sight, Mary Rose vanishes. The entire island is searched exhaustively. Twenty-one days later, Mary Rose reappears as mysteriously as she disappeared … but she shows no effects of having been gone for three weeks, and she has no knowledge of any gap or missing time.
“Years later, as a young wife and mother, the adult Mary Rose persuades her husband to take her to the same island. Again she vanishes: this time for a period of decades. When she is found again, she is not a single day older and has no awareness of the passage of time. In the interim, her son has grown to adulthood and is now physically older than his mother.”
At which point, the discussion having gone too far afield, in my opinion, I’ll cut it off, unless we can get back on track, talking about STOLEN FACE.
Thanks, guys!