Stolen Face (1952)
Directed by Terence Fisher

Film Review

A middle-aged man falls obsessively in love with a stunningly beautiful woman and ends up trying to fashion another woman in her image when she mysteriously disappears from his life...  Doesn't that sound like the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)?  It is also a fair résumé of a lesser-known noir B-movie made by the British film company Hammer six years previously, a film that prefigures not only Hitchcock's haunting study in identity but also the entire series of Frankenstein films that Hammer would make from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) onwards.  With its creepy premise, eerily evocative of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there is a subtly Gothic feel to Stolen Face that almost earns it a place in Hammer's series of Gothic horror films.  It's probably the most disturbing of the films that the company made which sits (just) outside its massive horror portfolio.

Terence Fisher, the man who directed the earliest and arguably best entries in Hammer's run of Gothic horrors, is well-suited to direct what is effectively a mid-20th century reworking of Frankenstein.  This is Fisher's third film for Hammer, coming straight after two other commendable noir offerings: The Last Page (1952) and Wings of Danger (1952).  Already, he was shaping up to be the company's most dependable director, someone with a natural flair for taking a completely implausible narrative and somehow turning it into an atmospheric and compelling piece of cinema.  Eight years before Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans visage (1960) Fisher succeeds in making perfectly respectable plastic surgeons appear like something out of your worst nightmare, and the idea of having your face completely remoulded is one that he plays with to chilling effect.

Paul Henreid is a surprising name to see headlining a low-budget British thriller of this era.  For the actor who had featured in some of the classic American movies of the 1940s - Now, Voyager (1942), Casablanca (1942), Deception (1946) - it must have been a comedown to clock on at Hammer's Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, to play the lead in a film that had as much chance of posterity as a Chelsea bun.  Yet, just as his popularity was on the decline, Henreid was improving as an actor - in Stolen Face he gives what is surely one of his best performances.  If Peter Cushing had not been around to play Dr Frankenstein for Hammer a few years hence, Henreid would have been a fair substitute, judging by his portrayal in this film of a manically driven scientist who is both charming and sinister, in a nice, friendly Dr Crippen sort of way.  Is this the man you would like to see standing at your bedroom door in the early hours of the morning with a bottle of scotch in one hand, and a bottle of aspirin in the other?  I don't think so.  If you need late night room service in an out-of-the-way hotel, you'd be better off calling for Norman Bates.

Like Henreid, Lizabeth Scott also seems to have been given something of a Lazarus-like revival by Hammer.  In the challenging dual role offered by Stolen Face, the actress sparkles as she had rarely done before, bringing a startling reality to both of her characters.  You wonder how one actress could offer up two such completely different personalities in the same film, the fragile concert pianist who is more sensually alluring than Veronica Lake and Lauren Bacall combined having naught but an uncanny physical resemblance to the coarse specimen of East End nastiness that Henreid, in his folly, ends up marrying.  At one point, Henreid looks as if he is reprising his earlier role in Of Human Bondage (1946), with Scott's more evil persona giving him the full Mildred Rogers treatment.  Surely I am not alone in spotting the similarities with Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946)...

In common with practically all of Hammer's attempts at film noir this one is an obvious hodgepodge of recycled ideas which somehow has the illusion of originality whilst, at the same time, filling your head with so much déjà vu that it is fit to burst.  And this was Hammer's Achilles' heel - the quality of its scripts.  Stolen Face may be fun to watch but if you analyse it too closely it falls apart faster and more spectacularly than a self-assembly wardrobe.  The characters are broad-brush archetypes, the plot is unconvincing and for the most part downright illogical.  And as for that quaint idiosyncrasy of Hammer's horror films, of always ending the film at least five minutes too soon, that's also to be found in Stolen Face, and we can guess why.  No screenwriter on the planet would want to have the job of tidying up all the loose ends that are left dangling once the kill-the-bitch denouement has been got out of the way.  Does Dr Ritter get indicted and hanged for the murder of his wife?   What is the coroner to make of the fact that Ritter's wife is the exact double of the 'other woman' on the train?  Will the 'other woman' give up her career and start over with Dr Ritter, or will Dr Ritter immediately set about manufacturing a harem made up entirely of identical copies of his ideal woman?  Or does Dr Ritter simply write up his fantastic story as a novel, the film rights of which he can then sell to Alfred Hitchcock?   Alas, we shall never know the answers to any of these questions, except possibly the Hitchcock one...

Film Synopsis

Dr Philip Ritter is a leading plastic surgeon who believes that by giving hardened criminals a new face he can radically change their behaviour.  He hopes that his latest subject, the violent criminal Lily Conover, will prove his theory correct when he corrects a facial disfigurement.  Before he performs the operation, Ritter takes the advice of his colleague and sets off for a short break in the country.  Staying at a country inn, he makes the acquaintance of a beautiful woman named Alice Brent.  Within a few days, Ritter and Alice have fallen madly in love and the week ends with the surgeon making a proposal of marriage.  The next day, Alice has disappeared, returning to the man she has promised to marry as she resumes her busy career as a concert pianist.  Troubled by Alice's apparent rejection of him, Ritter returns to London and sets about giving Lily Conover the makeover she had always dreamed of.  It so happens that Lily ends up looking exactly like Alice Brent.  By marrying the transformed Lily, Ritter believes he can make her a reformed character.  He could not be more wrong...