Hitchcock, Gallic Style

Eyes Without a Face - Pic courtesy of Lux Films

by Trebor Snillor
This was a long holiday weekend and it gave me time to watch some excellent TV shows. I finished off my binge of Orange is the New Black and will just say they exceeded all my expectations. I also watched two movies in the HuluPlus “Criterion Collection” which were formidable. Each of these movies were considered bold and cutting edge, each in a different way, when they were made. Both are black and white with subtitles -- things that might otherwise send me running the other way. But I was entranced by each movie within minutes of pressing the play button.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE

This movie was made in Paris, 1960. The French country manor, new Citroen automobile and avant garde fashions all make the movie visually compelling. The elegant setting calls to mind Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. Eyes tells the macabre tale of a brilliant plastic surgeon -- one whose 20-something daughter has been badly injured in a car accident. He has a renowned talent for doing skin grafts and he attempts several operations to fix his daughter’s face. What we come to realize (it took me a while with subtitles) is the horrific thing the doctor is doing to procure skin donors. The movie has eerie music and light play which lend it a dreamlike quality. Edith Scob, playing the daughter, bears a resemblance to Mia Farrow. Her slight, pale presence lends a beautiful, ghostly quality to all her scenes.

DIABOLIQUE

In this 1954 movie, a woman conspires with her husband’s mistress to murder him -- he apparently has been a brutal cad to both women. (How very French to treat a mistress so matter-of-factly).. The women drug him, then drown him in a bathtub. They dump his corpse in a pool only to find two days later the body has been removed! The movie has a twist the likes of which was later seen in Vertigo or Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. I didn't figure out the plot conundrum until the movie was nearly over.

Diabolique gives us Simone Signoret as the mistress and she is a beautiful standout. There is an exquisite change of place and time. We see an antique Renault truck, a small, squalid apartment still with a lavish sink and ornate bathtub. We see a post-war Europe which still listened to radio and lived in 4-story walk ups. The incidentals of the period are as fascinating as the plot line itself.

Both of these movies channel Alfred Hitchcock -- in fact he might wish he’d made them himself. Both feature beautiful blonde women (a Hitchcock fetish), powerful musical scores and spellbinding cinematography. They have lavish backdrops and frequent scene changes -- things which also made Hitchcock’s movies as visually engaging as a travelogue or a fashion show. My two years of high school French actually came in handy -- I followed a tiny percentage of the dialog without the subtitles.

These two movies, as well as several others are available virtually for “free” on HuluPlus (@ $9/month unlimited viewing).. If you can break free of preconceptions about foreign films or old films, these movies are remarkable.

THIS WEEK AWAY FROM TV

I have a frantic week approaching. I’ll be on call for a new software system at our designated command center. I’ll be moving from a private cubicle to an open “collaborative” table at work. And I’ll be getting a large, complicated sprinkler system installed. All this in one week -- it may be more of a nail biter than the movies I just described.

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