Stolen Faces
Cinema is an art of faces, almost a religion of faces: on screen they loom above us, vast as a mother’s face must appear to an infant. We can get lost in them. The deepest thrill the movies offer may be the opportunity to gaze at human faces longer and with more unabashed, lover-like intimacy than real life regularly allows. Most often, of course, we gaze at beautiful faces, though cinema has its share of beloved gargoyles, mugs with “character” rather than symmetry. But the uncanny power of faces onscreen also anchors films about disfigurement and facial transformations, about masks and scars and plastic surgery. These stories summon all the fears and taboos, desires and unresolved questions swirling around the human face. Do faces reveal or conceal a person’s true nature? Can changing someone’s face change their soul?
Deformity is a staple of horror films, of course, from classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Raven (in which the hideously afflicted man played by Boris Karloff muses, “Maybe if a man looks ugly, he does ugly things”) to surgical shockers such as Eyes Without a Face. But plot twists involving faces that are damaged or corrected, masked or changed, turn up with surprising frequency in film noir as well, where they are related to themes of identity theft, amnesia, desperate attempts to shed the past or recover the past. One of the grim proverbs of noir is that you can’t escape yourself. There are no fresh starts, no second chances. But noir also demonstrates the instability of identity, the way character can be corrupted, and stories about facial transformations harbor a nebulous fear that there is in the end no fixed self. If noir is pessimistic about the possibility of change, it is at the same time haunted by fear of change—fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.
The Truth of Masks
Two films about men who literally lose their faces take the full measure of the resulting ostracism and crushing isolation—and what men will do to escape it. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is based on a Kobo Abe novel about a scientist named Okuyama who has been literally defaced by a chemical accident. We never see what he used to look like; he spends half the film swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, ferocious black eyes glinting through slits. Obsessed with people’s reactions to his appearance, he lashes out bitterly, insisting that all his social ties have been severed, including his conjugal ties with his wife. She tries to convince him that it’s all in his head and that her feelings haven’t changed, but her revulsion when he makes an abrupt sexual advance convinces him that she’s lying.
Okuyama believes that a life-like mask will restore his relationship with his wife and his connection to society. He has evidently not seen The Face Behind the Mask (1941), a terrific B noir in which Peter Lorre stars as Johnny Szabo, who is hideously scarred in a fire. This tragedy and the ensuing cruelty of strangers transform him from a sweet, Chaplin-esque immigrant to a bitter criminal mastermind, even after he dons a powder-white mask that gives him a sad, creepy ghost of his former face—more Lorre than Lorre. The mask is merely a flimsy patch on the horrible visage that spiritually scars Johnny, and though it enables him to marry a sweet and loving (and perhaps near-sighted) woman, it can’t reverse the corrosion of his character.
The doctor who makes a far more sophisticated mask for Okuyama does so because the project fascinates him as a psychological and philosophical experiment. He speculates about what the world would be like if everyone wore a mask: morality would not exist, he argues, since people would feel no responsibility for the actions of their alternate identities. (His theory seems to be borne out by the consequences of internet anonymity.) Unlike the one Johnny Szabo wears, here the mask bears no resemblance to Okuyama’s original looks, and the doctor believes the new face will change his patient’s personality, turning him into someone else.
When the mask is fitted, it turns out to be the face of Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the most striking and plastic pans in cinema history. With only a little help from a fake mole, dark glasses, and a bizarre fringe of beard, Nakadai succeeds in making his own features look eerily synthetic, as though they don’t belong to him. Sitting in a crowded beer hall on his first masked outing in public, he creates a palpable sense of unease, keeping his features unnaturally still as though unsure of their mobility, touching his skin gingerly to explore its alien surface. As he gradually grows more comfortable and revels in the freedom of his new face, the doctor tells him, “It’s not the beer that’s made you drunk, it’s the mask.”
Abe’s novel contains a scene in which the protagonist goes to an exhibit of Noh masks, highly stylized crystallizations of stock characters and emotions. In Noh, as in other traditional forms of theater that use masks, the actor is present on stage but vanishes into another physical being—men play women, young men play old men, gods, and ghosts. In cinema, actors impersonate other characters using their own faces—usually without even the heavy layer of makeup worn on western stages. Movie actors are pretending to be people they’re not, yet if we judge their performances good it means we believe what we see in their faces. When an actor’s real face plays the part of a mask, like Lorre’s or Nakadai’s, this strange inversion—the real impersonating the artificial—has a uniquely disconcerting effect.
At the heart of this disturbing film lurks a horror that changing the skin can indeed change the soul. Okuyama tries to hold onto his identity, insisting, “I am who I am, I can’t change,” but the doctor insists he is “a new man,” with “no records, no past.” In covering his scar tissue with a smooth, artificial skin he eradicates his own experience, and with it his humanity. The doctor turns out to be right when he predicts that the mask will have a mind of its own. Suddenly endowed with sleek good looks, Okuyama buys flashy suits and sets out to seduce his own wife. When he succeeds easily, he is outraged, only to have her reveal that she knew who he was all along. After she leaves him in disgust he descends into madness and random violence. He has become the opposite of the Invisible Man: a visible shell with nothing inside
Okuyama’s story is interwoven with a subplot about a radiation-scarred girl from Nagasaki, whose social isolation drives her to incest and suicide. Lovely from one side, repellent from the other, she looks very much like the protagonist of A Woman’s Face. Ingrid Bergman starred in the Swedish original, but Joan Crawford is ideally cast in the 1941 Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor. Half beautiful and half grotesque, half hard-boiled and half vulnerable, Anna Holm spells out what was usually inchoate in Crawford’s paradoxical presence. A childhood fire has left her with a gnarled scar on one side of her face, like a black diseased root growing across her cheek and distorting her eye and mouth. Crawford makes us feel Anna’s agonizing humiliation when people look at her, which spurs her compulsive mannerisms of turning her head aside, lifting her hand to her cheek, or pulling her hair down.
Also perfectly cast is Conrad Veidt as the elegant, sinister Torsten Baring. Veidt went from German Expressionist horror—playing the goth heartthrob Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the grotesquely disfigured yet weirdly alluring hero of The Man Who Laughs—to an unexpected late-career run as a sexy leading man in cloak-and-dagger films such as The Spy in Black and Contraband. When Anna turns her head defiantly to reveal her scar, Torsten gazes at her with a gleam of excitement, even of perverse attraction. She is confused and touched by his kindness and gallantry, helplessly trying to hide her sensitivity beneath a tough façade. Her broken-up, uncertain expressions when he gives her flowers or kisses her hand count as some of the most delicate acting Crawford ever did. Anna assumes that Torsten, the penniless scion of a rich family, must want her to do some dirty work, and she turns out to be right, but he also genuinely appreciates the proud, bitter, lonely woman who faces down her miserable lot through sheer strength of will.
People are horrible to Anna, nastily mocking her wounded vanity and her attempts to look nice. “The world was against me,” she says, “All right, I’d be against it.” She has found the perfect outlet, blackmailing pretty women who commit adultery. In one of the film’s best scenes, the spoiled and kittenish wife she is threatening retaliates by shining a lamp in Anna’s face and laughing at her. Anna leaps at the woman and starts hitting her over and over, forehand and backhand, in an ecstasy of hatred. This savagely satisfying moment is derailed by the film’s first grossly contrived plot twist, as the encounter is interrupted by the woman’s husband, who happens to be a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting facial scars. He offers to operate on Anna, and once the bandages are removed, in a scene orchestrated for maximum suspense, an absurdly flawless face is revealed.
The doctor (Melvyn Douglas) calls her both his Galatea and his Frankenstein: he views her as his creation, but isn’t sure if she’s an ideal woman or an unholy monster, “a beautiful face with no heart.” Her dilemma is ultimately which man to please, whose approval to seek: the doctor who believes her character should be corrected now that her face is, or Torsten, who wants her to kill the young nephew who stands between him and the family estate. This overwrought turn is never plausible; it is always obvious that Anna is no child murderer. What is believable is her erotic thrall to Torsten, the first man who has ever shown an interest in her. Crawford is at her most unguarded in these moments of trembling desire; Cukor remarked on how “the nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became.” He speculated that the camera was her true lover.
Anna undergoes months of pain and uncertainty for the chance of being beautiful for Torsten, and there is a marvelous shot of her gazing at herself in a mirror as she prepares to surprise him with her new face, brimming with hard proud joy. But he winds up lamenting the surgery that has turned her into “a mere woman, soft and warm and full of love,” he sneers. “I thought you were something different—strong, exciting, not dull, mediocre, safe.” In this same speech, Torsten reveals himself as a cartoonish fascist megalomaniac, which fits in with the film’s slide into silly, flimsily scripted melodrama, but sadly obscures the radical spark of what he’s saying. Anna’s character is shaped by the way she looks, or rather by the way she is looked at by men; the disappointingly conventional ending sides with the man who equates flawless beauty with moral goodness, and against the one man who was able to see something fine—a “hard, shining brightness,” in a woman’s damaged and imperfect face.
A Stolen Face (1952) follows a similar premise, much less effectively, and reaches the opposite conclusion. Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon who operates on female criminals with disfiguring scars, convinced that once they look normal they will become contented law-abiding citizens. He gets carried away, however, sculpting one patient into a dead ringer for his lost love (Lizabeth Scott plays both the original and the copy) and marrying her. His attempt to play Pygmalion backfires, since the vulgar, mean-spirited and untrustworthy ex-con is unchanged by her new appearance: she is indeed “a beautiful face without a heart.” That is a succinct definition of the femme fatale, a type Lizabeth Scott often played and one that embodies a fascination with the deceptiveness of feminine beauty. In The Big Heat (1953), it is only when Debbie (Glora Grahame) has her pretty face rearranged by a pot of scalding coffee that she abandons her cynical self-interest to become an avenging angel, fearlessly punishing the corrupt who hide their greed behind a genteel façade. She has nothing left to lose; pulling a gun from her mink coat and plugging the woman she recognizes as her evil “sister,” the disfigured Debbie asserts her freedom: “I never felt better in my life.”
Blessings in Disguise
Sometimes, people are only too happy to lose their faces. Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), the protagonist of the superb, underappreciated drama Nora Prentiss (1947), sees the bright side when his face is horribly burned in a car crash. He has already faked his own death, sending another man’s corpse over a cliff in a burning car. In a neat bit of poetic irony, by crashing his own car he has completed the process of destroying his identity, and no longer needs to fear he’ll be recognized. Losing his face is a blessing in disguise—or rather, a blessing of disguise. But the disfigurement is also a visual representation of the corruption of his character: his face changes to reflect his downward metamorphosis with almost Dorian Gray-like precision.