Vertigogo
By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan
Stolen Face (1952)
Directed by Terence Fisher
Aw damnit, it seems like these last few weeks we’ve had nothing but “almosts” in the Noir Scoire, film after film that came close to being great noir but then making some huge misstep in tone or focus that screws them out of a decent score. Now here we go again with Stolen Face, which comes awfully close to being a sick little precursor to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: the tale of a man molding a woman to be the thing he wants.
That man would be Dr. Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid), a plastic surgeon who has dedicated himself to a noble cause. He performs corrective surgeries on criminals with the idea that, given a more attractive face, people do better in the world and do not need to resort to crime. It might sound a bit fey or even oversimplified, but it’s actually a well-documented and supported idea, and has been put to good use in reality. This is a human truth for which we are hardwired: we react better to prettier people. Oh sure, we can overcome this prejudice and we do, but that’s not really the point here. Generally, a facial deformity can make life very difficult.
So Ritter’s work is not some silly old-style movie nonsense. What might be nonsense is the drastic perfection of his technique, which can turn a badly scarred woman into a dead ringer for Lizabeth Scott. I’m not sure that’s possible, ever, anywhere, but hey. We have to allow for a bit of dramatic license.
The problem arises when Ritter takes a much-needed vacation and meets beautiful concert pianist Alice Brent (Scott) at the lodge where he is staying. They have a whirlwind romance and fall madly in love with each other, but the entire time she insists that their relationship cannot last beyond the vacation, and once she leaves to go on tour, it is over between them. There’s a good reason for this: she’s already engaged to someone else. She neglects to mention that to Ritter until it’s rather too late. Would have been decent of her to mention it right off the bat, you know. Like, “Hi, I’m Alice, and I’m already engaged, so make with the pervert face if you like, but this is going to be a fling and nothing more.”
Anyway Ritter returns to his job all heartbroken, pretty certain that he’s not going to get over his concert pianist whom he’s known for like maybe two weeks, though I’ll grant you that Lizabeth Scott is hot enough to inspire a certain level of obsession. So Ritter does what any lunatic would do. He makes his own Alice.
Lily Conover, a young woman who was badly scarred in the London bombings of WWII, is in prison for various petty crimes. Ritter agreed to operate on her face before he went on vacation. Now he’s back and he thinks, “Well what the heck, here’s a blank canvas, let’s go for it.” Over the course of several surgeries he turns her into Lizabeth Scott. Nice. Guy could make a fortune, turning people into other people. And as if that’s not enough, he also offers to marry Lily and show her how to live like a real lady. He dresses her like Alice, and gets her hair done like Alice’s hair, and then assumes that life is going to continue with his ready-made Alice.
Of course he’s an idiot, and it serves him right. Lily is not much interested in being Alice. She’s more interested in having fun with her husband’s money and her gorgeous new face, which she likes to take out on a spin every night. Soon she has most of her old criminal-element friends hanging out at Ritter’s mansion. She’s shoplifting jewelry and furs. She’s not interested in the opera, she wants to go to jazz clubs. Or, in other words, she’s being herself and has no desire to be someone else just because Ritter is an obsessive jackass.
The misstep this movie takes is in making Lily the villain. Are we honestly supposed to feel sorry for Ritter? Apparently so. I was truly hoping that he’d get his comeuppance in a big bad way. I thought it might happen when the real Alice Brent, winding up her European tour, breaks things off with her fiancé and goes running back to Ritter. What should happen is that Alice gets one look at Lily and says, “O-kay, that’s about ten times more crazy than I care to entertain,” and then walks right back out the door.
But no. No, somebody putting this story together decided that Alice should be more like, “Oh poor Ritter, he must have really loved me, and now look at what this awful woman is doing to him.” Then she and Paul set about trying to extricate him from his sham of a marriage. Lily isn’t interested in freeing him (I don’t know why not, imagine the settlement she could get!). The missteps made so far could be corrected with a really gnarly, heartless plot about Alice and Ritter trying to murder Lily or replace Lily with Alice or something, but again, no. Don’t hold your breath.
The plot will instead be tied up in a too- convenient, cheap and ridiculous finale that spoils everything. Lucky for the loving couple, Lily is a sloppy drunk and I guess the police just aren’t even going to ask questions about how she managed to stumble out of a moving train to her Paul Henried stars as Kevin Spacey in this year’s feel-good death. I could easily see film, Kevin Spacey, Plastic Surgeon. this movie called a thriller or even a horror movie with a bit of tweaking, yet its components don’t even add up that much. Maybe the creators simply didn’t have time to flesh out the story, or they couldn’t pick a genre.
Let’s see what the Noir Scoire has in store for this oddity:
Our anti-hero: Philip Ritter, plastic surgeon and obsessed stalker. His is a role more suited for a horror movie, when you think about it. A plastic surgeon who turns a woman into the girl of his dreams? That’s thriller material, but it could work for film noir in the right hands. These are the wrong hands. Philip Ritter doesn’t have the requisite fatal flaw of a good noir anti-hero because he’s a stuck- up lunatic who has some serious damn issues with women, and what’s worse, he never really learns his lesson. 4/10
As Played by: Paul Henreid, and it’s not his fault that this is a crap character. The performance itself is really not the issue but the script. I figure Henreid was doing about the best he could, and even though nobody comes out and say, “You f***ed up, asshole,” to the deluded Ritter, Henreid at least has the guy looking ashamed of himself for being a tool. 8/10
The femme fatale: Well, I guess the femme fatale is meant to be Lily, the woman who is turned into the Alice Brent lookalike. Lily is supposed to be a small-time convict who takes advantage of the doctor who made her beautiful and married her to boot. We, however, think this is a pantload of hooey. Lily is being held to a standard of which she’s not even aware, and is the victim of a very strange man. I felt sorrier for her character than anyone else in the film, unless it was poor stupid Alice, who pretends like she’s okay with the whole mess. 6/10
As played by: Lizabeth Scott. I don’t know if I entirely believe the Cockney accent, but it’s better than I expected. Scott is one of my favorite actresses and I have trouble faulting her for anything. Like Henreid, she’s just playing a confusing character(s). If nothing else, she’s always a pleasure to watch. 8/10
The villain: It’s supposed to be Lily. It’s not Lily. It’s Ritter. He’s the sick twist who tried to make himself a wife from scratch. Alfred Hitchcock made this plot into one of the most highly-regarded films in the world, but in this case, nobody seems willing to admit that Ritter is the one who needs help. He’s not held responsible for his actions and he is not punished. He is the villain but the movie doesn’t seem aware of that fact, and we’re going to have to take off some points for that. 7/10 As played by: Paul Henreid, still probably baffled as to what the hell is his character’s deal. Anyway we’re going to give him the same points as before. 8/10
The crime: There is no heinous crime per se, just a lot of bad decisions and morally questionable acts. Lily is a career criminal who engages in small-time crap like shoplifting and public displays of fun. Ritter is a doctor who abuses his power and does the mashed-potato all over his ethics when he turns Lily into the spitting image of the woman he really wants. 7/10
The location: The location doesn’t help us either. We’re at a romantic lodge, we’re in Ritter’s spacious home, we’re touring Europe with Alice Brent. There is precious little about the film that feels like back-alley loneliness. The finale does take place on a moving train, which is a pretty classic noir location, so we have to give it a wee bit of credit for that. 4/10
The mood: Much like the villain of the piece, we have a pervading mood of horror that the movie itself doesn’t seem aware of at all. It’s like everybody made a pact that “Hey, this isn’t some sick twisted guy fantasy after all!” and went about making the movie as if cutting a paperdoll out of a real girl isn’t totally Silence of the Lambs. The mood of the movie is ominous, creepy, and doomed – until it fails to doom anybody but the one who doesn’t really deserve it. 7/10
The sex factor: Weird and wrong, which may be pretty close to what noir is ideally. But hey, if Alice is okay with Ritter’s recreating her face on the body of a convict, marrying the convict, having sex with the convict, and then seeking a way to rid himself of the convict once it’s clear that he can have the real Alice again, then who are we to judge? Oh, wait . . . 8/10
Overall Noir Scoire: 67%