bensonj

In Movies International #7, a special Horror Fantasy issue, dated January 1969, there's a special feature on this film, including stills of several scenes and a production photo with lights, 35 mm camera, and technical crew. This feature had to have been prepared, say, two months earlier at the latest, suggesting that the film was made in 1968. Yet IMDb lists the release date as May 1973, four-and-a-half years later! What happened? Was this such a bomb that it was put on the shelf for over four years? Is IMDb's release date wrong? Were the 1968 stills and production shot just faked for publicity purposes and the film actually made later? (I doubt this last since, in the 1969 article, Gozzi, Dassin, and Lockhart are in the stills, and Luntz is mentioned as director; it seems unlikely all would still be available four years later.)

Just another "lost" film... no IMDb user or external reviews, no Plot, key words, etc. Six votes, all from non-US users (who saw it when it came out?). Gozzi's last film in a short career.

James Quandt's strident narration of the "video essay" that accompanies the Criterion release of THE FACE OF ANOTHER complains about the reception the film received in the United States on its initial release. He quotes the critics of the time: "extravagantly chic," "arch," "abstruse," "hermetic," "slavishly symbolic," and "more grotesque than emotionally compelling." Stop right there! These critics knew what they were talking about.

The film combines several hoary and not particularly profound narrative contrivances. Here's a man attempting to seduce his wife, pretending to be another person--this was old when THE GUARDSMAN first went on stage and has been done countless times. Then there's the classic mad scientist, presented with very little nuance, delving into Things that Man Was Not Meant to Know. Related to this is that the story is only able to exist by grossly underestimating man's ability to adapt to the unknown. (An example is the 1952 science fiction story "Mother" by Alfred Coppel in which astronauts all return insane when confronted with the vastness of space.) These primitive tropes are shamelessly built on a simple narrative situation that is completely unable to carry them: a man with a disfigured face getting facial reconstruction. This happens all the time, so what's to "not meant to know"? If all this isn't enough, Teshigahara tacks on an unrelated, completely separate set of characters in their own undeveloped narrative that even Quandt thinks doesn't work. The dialogue by author/screenwriter Kobo Abe is risible, sounding like something out of a grade-B forties horror film.

To disguise the paucity of the film's narrative, Teshigahara has tricked it up with what Quandt admiringly calls "its arsenal of visual innovation: freeze-frames, defamiliarizing close-ups, wild zooms, wash-away wipes, X-rayed imagery, stuttered editing, surrealist tropes, swish pans, jump cuts, rear projection, montaged stills, edge framing, and canted, fragmented, and otherwise stylized compositions." These arty-farty gimmicks (and more) are, of course, hardly "innovations." They were endemic in the early sixties. Their extensive use seems a vain attempt to disguise the film's shallow content. Quandt also sees great significance in the many repetitions in the film: I see only repetition.

But even that is not the film's worst problem. Teshigahara often seems like a still photographer lost in a form that requires narrative structure. His inability to develop a sustained narrative makes the film seem far longer than its already-long two hours plus. Things happen, but the film doesn't really progress. The end result is little more than a compendium of tricks and narrative scraps borrowed from others.

This is sometimes compared to THE THIRD MAN or ODD MAN OUT, but it reminded me of Ophuls' THE RECKLESS MOMENT, because Mason plays almost exactly the same character: a guy with a seedy past who gets mixed up with the heroine for criminal reasons but who sort of falls in love with her, shows his honorable colors, and winds up saving her at the expense of his life. And Mason played it almost exactly the same way (except for the accent). In the four years between 1949 (THE THIRD MAN) and 1953, the whole world changed. In 1949, the Russians giving Valli a hard time about her passport seemed just a part of all the horrors and discomforts of the immediate postwar experience. Here, the Cold War is full blown, a permanent condition, and it overpowers the film. There's nothing here that remotely matches Trevor Howard's deep, world-weary, mordant cynicism, or the maturity of Valli's character, brought about by living in the complex and appalling world of Europe at the end of WW II. Much of this film is flatly photographed, and the spy stuff that makes up the plot seems shallow and contrived, not remotely in the same league as Graham Greene's THIRD MAN screenplay. The Bloom character is a bit too naive, and the characters of Knef, her husband and the spy fighter are stick figures. Though it's entertaining enough in a minor way, it can only be described as a disappointment.