STOLEN FACE is an early production from Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher, the team who would later unleash CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and (HORROR OF) DRACULA upon an ill-prepared world. Like Fisher’s first film for Hammer, THE FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE (a tedious tale about creating artificial life of the female variety), the 1952 movie looks forward somewhat to the horror films he would make his name with in a few years, and like the earlier movie it’s a somewhat dreary affair that takes forever to get going.
Paul Henreid (blacklisted in the States but still fairly popular with audiences) is hard-working, philanthropic plastic surgeon Paul Ritter. This being a Hammer noir, Ritter is not only kind-hearted (Jekyll-style, he is first encountered restoring movement to a child) he also nurses a crackpot theory: that many hardened criminals are really acting out the frustrations caused by suffering some facial disfigurement. He’s obviously seen A WOMAN’S FACE, either with Ingrid Bergman or Joan Crawford, and it’s deeply impressed him.
Like a lot of B pictures (FIRST MAN INTO SPACEis a classic example), STOLEN F starts the action before anything’s due to happen and just sort of drifts around hoping some promising line of narrative development will suggest itself. The real master of the premature opening at Hammer was Michael Carreras, idiot son of the founder Sir James, who would later run the company into the ground in the ’70s. He begins CREATURES THE WORLD FORGOT with his central characters being born, and then just kinda follows them around as they grow up, on the assumption that sooner or later something interesting is more or less bound to happen, it being the Stone Age and all. (This assessment proves over-optimistic.)
As STOLEN FACE ambles aimlessly through its first thirty minutes, Paul (so relaxed, it’s a pleasure to spend time with this actor), meets Lizabeth Scott, treating for a head cold when he’s on holiday and falling for her. But Liz is already engaged to vacuous plot function André Morell (a fine, authoritative performer, hopelessly miscast as loverboy) so she gives Ritter the elbow, leaving him to assuage his desire by sculpting a scar-faced cockney kleptomaniac into an exact replica of his lost love, and marrying her. Oh dear.
This at least justifies the title, and gives the film it’s weirdest pleasure: the buzz of hearing Mary Mackenzie’s cockney guttersnipe dialogue emerge from the lips of a classy Hollywood star.
The holiday romance doesn’t seem QUITE intense enough to justify this bizarre, VERTIGO-like course of action, but one is relieved that at least something is happening. Before you know it, Ritter is attempting to mould his new wife’s personality as he did her physog, and she’s bridling at his controlling behaviour and starting back to her felonious ways.
Anyway, Morrell gives Liz the heave-ho and she hastens back to Henreid, only to learn the peculiar truth: she’s mildly disappointed. “Oh Paul,” she remarks. This doesn’t seem to quite meet the dramatic needs of the scenario. The Scott duplicate goes from bad to worse and is sort-of accidentally chucked out of a moving train. The emergency cord is pulled and various British Rail personnel gather round the corpse to offer their expert views. “Must’ve been a pretty girl,” and “At least she’ll never know what it is to go through life disfigured,” they observe, as Paul and the unusually forgiving original Liz walk off down the tracks, arm in arm.
What a deeply conservative film! When Ritter goes off the deep end and starts trying to transform a captive subject into his lost love, without telling her, we expect tragic consequences — for HIM. But his actions, while destroying his victim, don’t rebound upon him at all. The only conclusions to be drawn are that cockney criminals are just no good, and that a woman is better dead than disfigured. This would be bad enough as a message, but since 90% of the story is concerned with Henreid, whose psychological drama never resolves itself at all, the film is both reactionary and incoherent. This wouldn’t be the last time the inherent conservatism of Hammer Films would come oozing to the surface in an unpleasant way. Comparing the film to VERTIGO is a fascinating exercise in narrative construction — one film takes the least dramatic and satisfying route, while the other drags its characters through admittedly improbable story developments, but undeniably pushes them to breaking point — and beyond.
(Weirdly enough, for a film concerned with duplication, the copy of STOLEN F which I got my mitts on refused to be duped. The VHS tape held two off-air recordings, a later Hammer horror called THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH, and SF, but while the first film yielded readily to my DVD recorder, the second firmly resisted, and the recorder flashed up a sign saying “You May Not Record This, You Bad Boy.”)
I’ve previously sung the praises of the New-York Ghost, a fine and free periodical to which I occasionally contribute my word sculptures. This week saw the annual film special explode all over us like John Cassavetes at the end of THE FURY, under the guest editorship of B. Kite, but cheeky gremlins prevented the appearance of this fine material by Christoph Hubert. I’ve never met the man, but Hubert is known to Mr. Kite as “The Austrian Cairns,” and fears have been expressed that if we should ever come face to face Space-Time would implode, or something. My doppelganger’s suppressed meisterwerk is here appended for your amazement and edification, and to encourage y’all to check out the Ghost.
FEVER-DREAM DOUBLE FEATURES
As befits the year, I’ve seen lots of great works from all corners of film history (most mindblowing masterwork almost unheard of - Niemandsland, from 1931, by Victor Trivas, who as The Head, a quickly ordered, and weakly dubbed, cheap DVD of his last film Die Nackte und der Satan proved, is overripe for rediscovery). But three times the movie experience was so outstanding it instantly conjured an out-of-mind conjunction with other films. These were my fever-dream double features of the year:
Cuban Story (Victor Pahlen, 1959) - also known as The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution, a haphazard, poverty-row kind-of-documentary on the fall of Batista, kind of narrated by „firsthand witness” Errol Flynn (who was around to shoot an introduction, but obviously not to dub his alleged voice-over, which sounds slightly British - and radiates an intriguing sense of erosion of authenticity onto the entire enterprise). Screams for a double bill with its ideological and aesthetic opposite: Mikhail Kalatazov’s excessive Soy Cuba.
Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954) - especially after the Peter Jackson juggernaut it was nice to discover they once did make intriguing films about the little people, plus this is clearly the ultimate expression of Minnelli’s aesthetic credo, gaudy studio schizophrenia and all. What is most unexpected about it, though, is when it turns out good ol’ Luis Bunuel clearly just stole its nightmarish New York nightclub finale for his Simon of the Desert. Makes for instructive comparison.
Mondo Topless (Russ Meyer, 1966). First five minutes are a (literally, thanks to Mr. Auteur) screaming tour of San Francisco, jumping on any sexual pun possible. Then Russ gives us a crazed series of girl shaking booty with even more crazed voice-over (both by him and the subjects), plus shots of transistor radios to diegetically justify the music. A masterpiece already, then, not least because of Meyer’s montage mannerisms, which are always at least as inspired as anything by his contempo Godard. But (despite a few detours to Europe, thank you readily available archive material) as an exploration of San Francisco this is even better - as good as contemporary maverick filmmaker James Benning’s experimental studies of the American landscape, but more lively. And, I swear, it includes that shot of the bay and the bridge, so a pairing with Vertigo should make this the apex of obsessive double features. Better yet, make it a fever trauma triple feature and screen Mondo Topless once before and after the Hitchcock for more intense (in every sense) scrutiny, after all it’s only half as long.
— Christoph Huber
If C.H. doesn’t mind, I’d like to run with the Fever Dream Double Feature idea in future, and welcome submissions from Shadowplayers everywhere.
One of the hallmarks of the really great filmmakers, like Alfred Hitchcock and his titles designer Saul Bass, is that they will go right to the edge of absurdity at times, trusting the audience not to laugh, and assuming that some idiot like me isn’t going to come along and RUIN THE PLEASURE OF A GREAT FILM for you with some Stupid Joke that you will henceforth be forcibly reminded of whenever you attempt to enjoy one of the greatest pictures ever made.
In the SECONDS it’s taken me to cross the room from the window, a Savage Hail Storm has metamorphosed into Endless Descending Curtains of Soft Snow! I truly suspect the dire hand of Ming the Merciless is behind this.
Be that as it may, I mentioned way back that my partner’s brother was staying with us and a trip to see the reissue of Hammer Films’ DRACULA was planned. I’d like to explain how that turned out.
Roddy, who has learning difficulties, loves old horror movies, and his particular obsession is with Christopher Lee’s Dracula, so upon learning that the film happened to be screening during his visit, we made haste to tell him of this happy coincidence.
The circumstances that led him to take a massive overdose of laxatives in order to avoid seeing his favourite movie will require some background explanation.
The particular thing Roddy has is called Williams Syndrome, and we’ve often called him the Poster Boy for that particular non-inherited genetic condition. So many of the things about him that one assumes are personal quirks, turn out to be basic symptoms (in spite of this, it took forty years for him to be officially diagnosed with the condition, not that it made much difference really). Among the symptoms — phobias. Roddy has always been uncomfortable with stairs and especially escalators, but what we didn’t realise was how markedly this had increased since his last visit.
We’d heard some of the stories: Roddy had wandered in front of an oncoming bus and been yelled at by the driver, and he’d had a fall, but we hadn’t grasped how this had affected his behaviour.
On the day of the DRACULA trip, Roddy suddenly came down with galloping diarrhoea, which was particularly problematic since he has trouble getting around. Put simply, he’s seriously overweight (when you can’t read and you’re phobic about going out, you entertain yourself by sitting on the couch and feeding your face). He couldn’t make it to the bathroom (just at the end of the hall) in time and he was getting “the squits” every FIVE MINUTES.
We called emergency helplines and got him a hospital appointment, since this was pretty extreme and unmanageable. At this point we were secretly praying they’d take him off our hands, stick him in a bed with a big nappy on, and keep him until Christmas Day.
Anyhow they didn’t, but Roddy quite enjoyed his trip to the hospital. (Imagine how much he’d have enjoyed the movie!) The doc thought he probably had a virus — we didn’t discover the half-drained bottle of Lactulose until the day of his departure (four days later). Needless to say, a trip to the cinema was out of the question, even in diapers.
It was all kind of depressing. I sympathise with Roddy’s phobias (my partner/his sister has suffered acute agoraphobia), especially as Williams Syndrome carries as another symptom a loss of depth perception. Since Roddy is too bulbous to see his own feet, looking down from his eye sockets all one would see is a slow-moving circumference with the ground some incalculable distance below: no wonder stairs are difficult.
And there’s a horrible pathos in Roddy’s Dracula obsession: he wants to be the tall dark and handsome stranger who has a mysterious power over buxom blondes. My desire to be Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn or James Coburn is pretty pathetic too (I’d be lucky to attain the condition of, say, Paul Giamatti), but it doesn’t haunt me to the same degree, and it isn’t as cruelly WRONG. Only a very sick author would invent a character who wants to be a 6′4′ hypnotic vampire when he is a 5′ 0′ obese man with learning difficulties. Apart from anything else, Dracula is a character who rather famously makes his entrance by gliding down a flight of stairs!
Chuck Jones said that he dreamt of being Bugs Bunny but always awoke as Daffy Duck. Roddy, concordantly, dreams of being Dracula but awakens as the Frankenstein Monster: but with one pleasing difference. Williams Syndrome is sometimes called “cocktail-party syndrome”, and its “suffererers” are blessed with very good social skills — Roddy can really Work The Room. Is his Syndrome perhaps named after ROBIN Williams?
Anyhow, that was our Christmas.
Upside: we are full of hope that he’s going to lose weight and conquer his phobias, at least somewhat, this year.
This is CLARIMONDE, a short film I directed mumblety years ago.
I thought it might be fun to ‘fess up to the various things I stole in making it. Whether this is instructive or interesting to anybody else, I have no idea. It might serve as a useful insight into the creative process, or that part of it that’s not so much creative as felonious.
First stolen item: the story, THE SPIDER by Hanns Heinz Ewers, also author of THE ALRAUNE, filmed with Brigitte Helm. Ewers was a queer sort of fellow: an early member of the Nazi Party, he also believed that Jews made the best Germans. He fell out of favour, unsurprisingly, and died as an un-person. So I figured there was no copyright to worry about… apologies if I was wrong!
The title sequence. The text is kind of illegible, which I regret. But I liked the idea of using SPACE: 1999 type lettering seemingly for no reason. It broadens out the confusion about when the hell this story is set.
The way each title appears below the one before is lifted from a couple of Richard Lester films: he does it in PETULIA and JUGGERNAUT and I always thought it looked really nice. (I’m always telling my students, “That’s NOT a good enough reason!”)
The artwork which we slowly zoom into is sort of influenced by VERTIGO’s titles. I happened to know a really gifted cartoonist, Garry Marshall, now an award-winning animator, so I drafted him in. (Filmmakers’ rule #1: exploit your acquaintances!)
The opening shot. Hitchcock again, I was wowed by the massive amount of information gathered by the camera exploring Jimmy Stewart’s apartment at the start of REAR WINDOW, so this is my poor man’s version. The iris-out was achieved in-camera, with a borrowed lighting iris gaffer-taped to the matte box (Gaffer Tape, and not The Force, is what binds the universe together, at least in film and TV). We had no tracks so the camera pulls back on a wheeled tripod as the guy on the floor making the curtains billow backwards-somersaults out the way and cinematographer/operator/grip has to step gingerly over one tripod leg while maintaining a steady movement and panning 180º so the track away from the window becomes a track in on the door handle.
I read an interview with George Cukor where he said something like ”I’m not one of those directors who tracks in on door handles,” and I thought, “Well *I* *AM*!”)
The door handle in the film is now on my front door.
Just as the shot was ending the film ran out! I liked the way that looked, so I kept it in. Scorsese did the same at the end of LAST TEMPTATION, but I wasn’t consciously emulating him on this shot, I just got lucky.
When our protag, psychic detective Anthony Flear, enters, the way his face is revealed by his lowering hat is a direct steal from Alec Guinness’ first appearance in THE LADYKILLERS, a film I should write more about later. Flear is played by Colin McLaren, a genius writer who later won a BAFTA and now, like your friend and humble narrator, spends most of his time writing screenplays that don’t get made. It’s important work.
(Actually, it looks like one of Colin’s is finally happening, and it’s the follow-up to RED ROAD. But his version will be funnier.)
Colin had just made a short film with Sarah Gavron, for which he’d been paid in coal. I paid him in spurious money, since he owed me some but we couldn’t agree how much, so it seemed the best policy to make that his fee rather than let it get in the way of a beautiful friendship.
Colin wears my old National Health specs a la Harry Palmer.
The floorboards of this room are actually made of BROWN PAPER.
The use of diary entries: TAXI DRIVER, I guess.
The camera’s tracking and zip-panning about: GOODFELLAS, I think.
The three victims pictured: a film student, the composer’s sister (in drag as Ringo Starr) and a harmonica-playing cartoonist. The theme of gender-swapping is oddly Prophetic since the production designer is a man now, but at the time we made this, I could have sworn he was a woman.
Our makeup artist has since worked on all the HARRY POTTER films, and transformed Jude Law in the recent SLEUTH. His work here was mostly done with tissue paper and liquid latex. The corpses wore ping pong ball eyes with pinholes in. The transvestite corpse wore only one eye because the tunnel-vision made her claustrophobic.
All this tracking around — I just got into it! On my previous films it had been too much work to move the camera, and we’d been habitually behind schedule struggling to finish. here, because it’s a studio film, suddenly there was time to make things more interesting. In all the previous movies, the shots I achieved were compromised versions of the storyboard — on this one, they were enhanced versions.
Peter Greenaway once said, “I don’t move the camera much because that would tend to increase audience involvement,” and I thought, “Well *I* *WILL*!”
Some things were just spontaneous, wild choices, like the camera gradually tilting diagonally, or pulling out of focus on the phone (influenced by an ad for Cadbury’s Flake, I think). I would say to Kenneth Simpson, who was shooting it, “This shot seems a bit normal. What can we do to weird it up?” If you have Just Enough time, you can pause for a nanosecond when a shot is ready and think about whether there’s anything you can do to improve it. The falling leaves at the end of THE THIRD MAN came about that way: two men up ladders with sacks of dead leaves they’d gathered a minute before.
The first clip ends with my fake time-lapse, which required the help of the entire crew. One person was turning the clock hands from behind while another dimmed the lights and another pair physically lowered a biggish light outside the window to simulate a setting sun.
BTW, the building seen across the street is a quarter-scale model in long shots. In Clarimonde’s closer shots it’s actually the same window Colin is at, dressed differently. So the actors are never actually looking at each other at all.
The second clip begins with some out-of-focus stuff that I should have retaken, but I couldn’t afford to. It would’ve been nice if it had gone into focus when he puts his specs on though. I’m not too keen on the dream sequence. The words which the corpses mouth, out-of-synch, are the same words divined by Flear earlier, and they sort of make a warning, but it’s not very clear or well-done. Should have just cut this scene.
Somebody once said they thought the way Clarimonde slides her finger along the window sill was “erotic”, which pleased me. “I can do erotic!”
When she catches the fly I used both takes, so we get a nice flurry of action. I like that it’s not too obvious that she catches it TWICE. When Flear opens his hand to show her, we pull back through the window without breaking it (because, duh, there’s no glass in it), a swipe from CITIZEN KANE.
During the dance, we used a simple matte to block out the top of Clarimonde’s window, since I was worried the studio lighting rig might show up. Just a black piece of tape in front of the lens. So when C raises her hand to mime a toast, her hand kind of disappears…
I’m pleased with the theatrical lighting change on Flear’s face. Had I seen DETOUR at this point? Or A CANTERBURY TALE?
The curtains billowing open is played in reverse: we weighted the curtain ends and THREW them at poor Althea, who caught them.
The spider shadow puppet was designed by my flatmate, who later went schizo and started stalking the critic and documentarist Mark Cousins.
The vertical mouth is a straight Freudian vagina dentata. A lot of horror films play with this image and I thought it would be fun to do it fairly blatantly. Poor Althea had her mouth glued shut and couldn’t help but inhale the fumes through her nose. She communicated in Post-It notes, which were apparently quite obscene, and mostly detailing how she’d like to avenge herself upon me.
The policeman on the phone is voiced by awesome genius Ken Campbell, who recorded his role in the green room at the Traverse Theatre during a break in a six-hour performance he was giving of his legendary “bald” Trilogy. Diamond geezer.
I like the idea that when Flear tries to resist, we get the only handheld shot, but revert back to “tracking” when Clarimonde takes control again.
Believe it or not, the visual rhyme of the doorknob and Flear’s hand wasn’t planned at all. Fortune favours the prepared mind.
The next two shots don’t show Colin’s face because he was late that morning.
Colin sat in the corner hemmed in by alarm clocks was one of the first images I got reading the short story. Vaguely inspired by the guy in prison in CALIGARI.
Clarimonde gets the old-style movie lighting, a patch of light that just hits her eyes. Selective Moonlight.
Colin at the window with his hand raised is pure NOSFERATU. We decided right then to make it rain and rigged up some tubing… we’d seen the clip from IN COLD BLOOD which they excerpt in the documentary VISIONS OF LIGHT, where the light filters through the rainfall onto Robert Blake’s face… this may have come about through me asking the cameraman, “What have you always wanted to do?”
The fast Psychological Track-Ins on the victims and Flear: this comes from a combination of MILLER’S CROSSING and Sam Raimi. I was interested by the sense of violence the moving camera can have. Now I say that for violence in camera movement the real king is Andrei Zulawski.
The spinning wheel shot was done at the end of the shoot, after we’d taken the set apart but I didn’t want to stop filming, I was enjoying it too much… I figured I could use the shot somewhere…
Craning up (actually raising the camera on the tripod’s pneumatic riser) to reveal the noose: some of you may have spotted where I pinched this from. Thanks to Maestro Leone for a really terrific, funny shot.
Colin rides towards his death on the tripod itself, a foot atop each wheel, discretely hanging onto its neck. Inspired by Cocteau, probably:
The POV track thru the noose was another idea that came to me as I read the story for the first time.
Clarimonde’s voice-over comes from a different short story altogether, another fictional CLARIMONDE from Theophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoreuse, translated by the great Lafcadio Hearn.
The kiss: REAR WINDOW again. The zoom into the eye doesn’t really work. But the repeat of the opening shot is something I’m fond of. My heads of department all did a great job on this movie, considering we had no money and the heads of department generally were the departments.
Even though it’s made of cardboard and string, I like this film best of all my stuff apart from CRY FOR BOBO. If I can defend the plundering at all, it would be by saying that while I lifted general style and atmospherics from German Expressionism and noir, the specific things were often swiped from more unexpected sources, like comedies and spaghetti westerns, so that they hopefully get transformed somewhat in the process — stealing becomes an imaginative act.
We were talking about that moment in VERTIGO where Jimmy Stewart (in Britain we call him JAMES) is trying to get Kim Novak to change her hairdo, the better to resemble his dead love, and he cries out, “Judy, please — it can’t matter to YOU!”
Me: Always gets a knowing laugh from women. Not a bad laugh, just a shocked one.
B. Kite: It’s rare to see a base human response put so succinctly. In that it’s a bit like Daffy Duck’s great “I’m not like other people — pain hurts me.”
And that meeting of minds seems worth a blog entry in itself!
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FILM | Tagged: A Stolen Face, Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, Mary Mackenzie, Terence Fisher, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Vertigo | 
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