User Reviews

This is a British film marketed as a Film Noir movie, though I could see very little about the film that reminded me of this genre. Now this isn't bad and I'm not complaining--after all, I did give the movie a 7. It just doesn't have the tough dialog, moody lighting and camera work as well as the tough subject matter a true Noir film would have.

You might also be a bit surprised to see that it was made by Hammer Studios AND was directed by Terence Fisher--a man and studio known for horror films. Well, there is no sign of Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing in this one as it's just an interesting romantic drama--the type film you would have been more likely to see in the earlier days of the studio.

Paul Henreid and Lizabeth Scott star in this interesting film. However, if you do decide to watch it, try to suspend your sense of disbelief, as the film has a plot that couldn't possibly happen in real life! Henreid is a very skilled plastic surgeon whose mission in life is to correct facial deformities in criminals. He reasons that given a new face, they can't help but have a more positive attitude towards society and live a crime-free new life. However, he's so dedicated to his work that he's exhausted and is ordered to take a much-needed vacation. There, he meets the girl of his dreams, Lizabeth Scott. They are very much in love but she has some secret. Before finally telling him, she disappears and Henreid is disconsolate.

Now here's where it gets really tough to swallow. Henreid's next surgery is a weird one, as he deliberately makes this habitual criminal look exactly like Scott! Now making her with some similarity is believable, but to be the exact twin was just plain silly. They can't do that today and they certainly couldn't have done it in 1952! Despite Henreid's belief that this lady will become a good person and a good wife, after marrying her she turns out to be a hard-living kleptomaniac--with no desire for redemption. Now at this point it even gets weirder--Scott shows up and both she and Henreid want to marry--but he's stuck with the criminal wife. What happens next you'll need to see for yourself.

The plot, though silly, was still very watchable and cool. I really liked every moment but also assure you that the film never really goes the Noir route--especially the ending.

By the way, one reviewer went on about how he hated Ms. Scott. While she was never one of my favorites, I really think this film was a wonderful showcase for her--letting her play two totally different characters--one a criminal with an English accent and the other a sophisticated American concert pianist. She did a very good job and the film, for its budget, was very good.

STOLEN FACE is a surprisingly intriguing little British thriller of 1952. It comes from Hammer Films and is directed by the superlative Terence Fisher, one of the studio's very best talents. The plot feels like an intriguing precursor to that of EYES WITHOUT A FACE, involving a dedicated plastic surgeon who decides to help out a scarred criminal woman by giving her a new face - that of one of his own lost loves. He ends up marrying the 'new woman', but there's a somewhat obvious twist in store and things get very dark indeed. Although an obviously low budget film and rather slow-paced story, this one kept my interest throughout. The scientific aspects of the story are better utilised than in something like Hammer's FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE, while Paul Henreid is a sympathetic lead. Best of all is Lizabeth Scott, who reminded me a little of Shirley Eaton, doing very well in a double role and convincing as both characters. The drama is high in the first half and gives way to some compelling suspense in the second, as well as a great climax.

When famed plastic surgeon Dr. Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) is visited by a wealthy aging client, he refuses to service her, knowing that her advanced years and already damaged skin would make surgery pointless. He instead prefers the type of surgery necessary to either improve one's life (as in the case of his youthful poor client he has no problem in waiting for payment from) or the embittered career criminal damaged during the war who has psychologically been damaged as well. Lily Conover (Mary Mackenzie) is a woman so embittered by her scarred face that getting out of prison is only a temporary reprieve for, and a return to her life of crime is only a matter of time. He decides to take on her case as he falls in love with the beautiful Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott), a gentle renowned concert pianist he treats for a bad cold while she is on hiatus from a world tour. When Alice leaves him to continue her tour, he is so broken up by her departure that he utilizes her facial structure to re-make Lily into her image, certain that beauty will change her criminal ways. But you can't turn a rhinestone into a ruby, and after Phillip marries her, he discovers the unfortunate truth, just as Alice returns....

This isn't one of the all-time great film noir, but you can't help but be riveted by the transition of Lily from Mackenzie into Scott. Even her voice all of a sudden changes into that of the sweet Alice (abliet with cockney accent) and it is truly amusing to watch her continue her life of crime even though she really has no reason to. I guess the film is saying that a sow's ear will never become a silk purse, even if it is lined with gold. Trashy she was, and trashy she remains, using her new-found beauty for free love even as she holds onto her abused husband. Scott does utilize a fairly convincing cockney accent as she takes over the role, and there is no denial of who is Lily and who is Alice as their differences in fashion-wear is more obvious. Henreid, who had a similar film ("Hollow Triumph") several years before, shows a variety of emotions as he realizes what a mistake he made and why there is a rule that you never become involved with a patient. This film will never resemble reality, but it is certainly engrossing.

I've now watched three of the Hammer noirs that were recently released on DVD and while each is okay, there's nothing very memorable about any of them. That's precisely how I feel about Stolen Face – it's a decent watch, but it's nothing I would go out of my way to see again. While Paul Henreid gives a nice performance and Terence Fisher's direction is solid, the screenplay really lets them down. There just aren't any surprises. It's all nicely done, but I've seen it before. And if you haven't seen it, you can probably predict the film's outcome with a great deal of success. It's about as subtle as a hammer (pun intended) to the head. My enjoyment of the film isn't helped any by the presence of Lizabeth Scott. I've only seen her in two movies that I can name off the top of my head (this one and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers) and that's two too many. I can't stand the woman!

One interesting aspect of Stolen Face is the interjection of little elements horror/sci-fi. After all, this is Hammer and this is Terence Fisher. It somehow seems appropriate.

From Terence Fisher pre fantastic Hammer period, I have seen nothing, except a dynamic "To the public danger" about boozing driving. I found "A stolen face" with Lizabeth Scott whom I admire. It's a very weird melodrama about a plastic surgeon (Paul Heinreind) who falls in love with a brilliant concerto pianist (Lizabeth Scott), they have a wonderful romance, but she quits him as she's already engaged. The surgeon desperately decides to operate a young woman in jail with her face badly injured by modeling her face with the pianist's face. Operation succeeds, but the surgeon discovers the true nature of this woman from jail, she's a kleptomaniac. Here begins hell for the surgeon.

Interesting early Fisher with some good points. I just loved the romance of Lizabeth Scott and Paul Heinreid at the beginning, they match wonderfully. And what a surprise to discover Lizabeth Scott as a cockney kleptomaniac, a real fancy character, I reckon it's very unusual in her career. And there are yet some strange sequences showing Terence Fisher was attracted by fantastic.

Terence Fisher started directing in 1948, and while some of his early films have their merits (particularly "So Long at the Fair" with Dirk Bogarde and Jean Simmons) his fame rests on the string of low-budget but generally classy horror films he made for Hammer between 1957 and 1974. This film was one of several he made for that company before that run, and given the title, and the fact that Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon, you might hope that this is a British precursor to Georges Franju's classic "Eyes Without a Face." No chance: instead it's a rather ridiculous melodrama. Henreid is forced by bad weather to seek refuge in a country pub, and there he meets and falls for a concert pianist (Lizabeth Scott.) She leads a sing-sing in the pub, banging away on the old joanna , as concert pianists love to do. He then returns to London and she goes off on a concert tour arranged by her manager and fiancé Andre Morell. Henreid has undertaken, presumably pro bono, to rebuild the face of habitual criminal Lily (Mary Mackenzie) who's about to be released from Holloway and whose disfigurement in the Blitz has left her embittered. The idea is that the operation will somehow reform her. Scott tells Henreid she's going to marry Morell, so Henreid does what any sensible plastic surgeon would do: he gives Lily Scott's face and marries her. His attempt to civilise and reform her fails miserably. She's bored by opera, drinks heavily with her old crowd and he has to pay for the expensive items she shop-lifts. Then Scott turns up (Morell having understood that she loves another) and the scene is set for disaster. The leads are unexciting but adequate, and Fisher's direction is as competent as you'd expect, but the sheer silliness of the story defeats them.

A London plastic surgeon called Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) falls in love with American concert pianist Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott) while on holiday in rural England. However, Alice is already engaged to be married to the well-to-do David (Andre Morell). Devastated, Ritter returns to London and is called upon to perform a charitable operation on a disfigured convict called Lily (Mary Mackenzie), whose face he recreates in Alice's image. Ritter then marries Lily thinking that her new face will cure her criminal tendencies, but this results in disastrous circumstances.

Before Hammer and director Terence Fisher reinvigorated the horror genre with their colour remakes of Frankenstein and Dracula, their main source of output was b-features, most of which were in the crime thriller genre and often featured American stars who were past their prime to bolster international sales. In Stolen Face, ex-1940's stars Paul Henreid and Lizabeth Scott were hired. Scott came to prominence after she appeared alongside Kirk Douglas in "The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers" (1946) and later Humphrey Bogart in "Dead Reckoning" (1947). The latter part saw her being compared to Lauren Bacall. However, by the 1950's, good parts worthy of her talents were proving difficult to come by and she made few films from there on. Henreid had appeared in such Hollywood milestones as "Casablanca" (1942) before he faded from the public eye.

Stolen Face is a very interesting film in that it marks a notable point for both Hammer and Fisher (here making his third picture for the company). The plot hints at some of the themes that they would focus on in their subsequent horror films. For instance, the premise of the surgeon transforming the disfigured girl into a beauty was exploited in more detail in the sublime "Frankenstein Created Woman" (1967). In this film Baron Frankenstein and his assistant cured Christina Kleeve's disfigurement but also transfered the soul of her lover (wrongly executed for murder) into her body. The result was a archetypal blonde beauty and seductress who then proceeded to seduce and kill the men who sent her boyfriend to the guillotine. The difference between Stolen Face and "Frankenstein Created Woman" is that the former was only treated as a domestic melodrama and had little to give conviction to it's absurdness, but the latter had a genuine Gothic fairy tale quality that transcended the daftness of the plot. There are also echoes of "The Revenge Of Frankenstein" (1958) in that both Philip Ritter and Baron Frankenstein both did charity work as well as running their own surgeries. And it was through this charity work that they acquired the raw materials for their own ends. It is also interesting to compare the two characters in that both Ritter and Frankenstein (although from different societies) believed that they could both create the perfect human being in their own way, but as in both cases something went drastically wrong. For instance, in "The Revenge Of Frankenstein", the creature became a disfigured dwarf although the Baron performed the operation on his hunchback assistant as a favour and for his own misguided reasons. The same applies to Ritter as he took pity on Lily's disfigurement and at the same time did it for his own ends. Another similarity is that both doctors were both so obsessed with what they were doing to understand the terrible consequences that would result.

In conclusion, Stolen Face can be seen as a run of the mill medical melodrama, but for those who have followed Hammer's output from the very beginning, it is possible to see that it paved the way for Hammer to do better things within a decade or so after this was made. The film also supports the theory that when a subject met with Fisher's approval, he would give the film all he had to give to it. Yet when he disliked a subject such as the science fiction film "Night Of The Big Heat" (1967), everything was indifferently done. Stolen Face is by no means a perfect film as Henreid is miscast as Dr Ritter and Andre Morell is rather uncomfortable as Alice Brent's boyfriend David. However, Lizabeth Scott is remarkable as once the operation scene is over, she is playing both Lily and Alice and it surprised everyone that she managed to put on a very acceptable cockney accent. The film is rather a routine affair, but it isn't possible to dismiss it as it is one of the very few films of Hammer's early output to show signs of the company's future. However, if Hammer hadn't gone on to do better things, Stolen Face wouldn't have warranted the reassessment that it's getting today let alone a reissue on DVD.

Emma Matzo was born in Scranton, PA but became Lizabeth Scott in New York City, becoming a stage actress and the understudy for Tallulah Bankhead - actually, she was given the role just to keep Bankhead in line and she was treated horribly; Broadway legend claims that Bankhead was victimized by Scott, who was the basis for Eve Harrington of All About Eve - and then was championed by Hal Wallis as she made her way to Hollywood.

She became known as a hard-boiled woman, the kind who ruined men in film noir like I Walk Alone and Too Late for Tears. She also wasn't afraid to get involved with interesting people - nearly joining a cult started by Aldous Huxley, being friends with Ayn Rand, gaining an audience with the Dalai Lama - and not being reserved about it.

In 1954, she decided she'd had enough, saying "Out of the clear blue sky one morning, I woke and decided that I never wanted to make another film again. It was just a spark, I can't explain it." She was in three more movies - The Weapon, Loving You and Pulp - but went from being a huge star to being retired.

The Confidential article and lawsuit may have had a lot to do with that. That tabloid's published Howard Rushmore put together a story on her with no evidence. The article claimed that Scott's name was in a black book found when a house of prostitution got busted, as well as the fact that she was a lesbian. When she went to Cannes, it said, "In one jaunt to Europe, she headed straight for Paris and the left bank where she took up with Frede, the city's most notorious lesbian queen and the operator of a night club devoted exclusively to entertaining deviates like herself."

Frede's club was Carroll's, a cabaret that starred Earth Kitt. It was not an exclusively lesbian club. It was co-owned by Marlene Dietrich, which Confidential was using against her, claiming that she was also a lesbian. The lawsuit against the magazine was a mistrial. Another theory is that Scott had horrible stage fright. Either way, even though she did some acting on TV, she mostly took classes at USC from here on out.

Scott almost married an oil tycoon before he died suddenly. His will, which gave everything to her, was contested by the family and she lost the lawsuit in 1971. She also dated a ton of people - Van Johnson James Mason, Peter Lawford and Burt Bacharach are just a few - and devoted a lot of her later life to charity and friendship with stars like Michael Jackson.

As for Wallis, he never forgot their decade-plus affair. His last wife, Martha Hyer, urged him to write about her in his autobiography, as Wallis never fell out of love with Scott, watching her movies every single night.

Stolen Face stars Scott in two roles. She's concert pianist Alice Brent, who falls in love with plastic surgeon Dr. Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) in spite of being engaged to a man named David (André Morell). When he loses her, Ritter transforms his patient, Lily Conover (Mary Mackenzie before the operation) into a clone of Alice and attempts to change her from living a life of crime. They marry but she is soon bored; he tells her that she has everything a woman could want and she yells, "What, do you want me to be on my knees all the time thanking you?"

Supposedly based on a true story, this was directed by Terence Fisher. It's a fine thriller and really, if the worst you do all day is watch Lizabeth Scott look gorgeous, is it all that rough?

It's not on the same level as the best early 1950s Hammer films that I have seen such as "The Last Page" or "Mantrap" - both of which were also directed by Terence Fisher - but it's a good little thriller which packs quite a bit into its 70 minutes runtime. It concerns a plastic surgeon, Philip Ritter, who alters the appearance of a disfigured habitual criminal, Lily Conover, to recreate a beautiful woman, Alice Brent, with whom he had a brief but intense romance. It can be seen as a precursor to "Vertigo" as well as Fisher's later (and lesser) Hammer films "Four Sided Triangle" and "Frankenstein Created Woman", which cover similar territory from a sci-fi / horror perspective.

The film has a great leading man in the effortlessly classy and charismatic Austrian actor Paul Henreid. Best known for his supporting roles in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" and "Casablanca", he was the most high profile male Hollywood star to ever grace a Hammer film and the most high profile overall after Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine. Lizabeth Scott, who only died in January, is not a great actress but she is perfectly fine as Alice. When playing Lily, her voice is dubbed by the original actress Mary Mackenzie so I can't really gauge Scott's performance but Mackenzie is a much better actress.

It also features nice supporting roles from André Morell, my favourite Hammer leading man after Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in his first film for the studio and future "Dad's Army" star Arnold Ridley as well as a small appearance by Richard Wattis, who does not play a civil servant for once! This has nothing to do with my enjoyment of the film itself but I was a little disappointed that the John Wood in the film was not, contrary to what it said on both Wikipedia and IMDb, the Shakespearean actor who is best known for playing Stephen Falken in "WarGames".

Overall, this is by no means a Hammer classic but it's great fun.