User Reviews

Actually felt the frustration of John Gregson's character and didn't have an idea of the end until the last 10 minutes and still it surprised. A lot of "darlings" and "proper" English, being that age, and meaningful looks between the characters. Being in black & white only adds to the "depressed" feeling that nobody can help the main character and his attempts to help himself are excruciating. It's difficult to write 10 lines without containing a spoiler, so I might waffle a bit, but the characters played by Mai Zatterling and dear old Michael Denison are despicable. I'm surprised I've never seen this film before and will probably watch it again in the future. If it were in French with subtitles it would probably be labelled a masterpiece!

A businessman called Richard Hammond (John Gregson) is visited by his wife Christiane (Mia Zetterling) at his factory who asks for a divorce. That same day Hammond is blinded as a result of an accident in his workshop and his wife backs down on her decision vowing to take care of him. Richard's layabout brother Max (John Ireland) appears asking for money and his business partner David Merton (Michael Denison) seems keen to take over the day to day running of the business completely. Prior to the accident, Merton was worried because his partner was insistent on his company funding the Apollo bulb project entirely by themselves despite warnings from the bank and offers from a rival firm to put financial backing into it. It risked bankrupting them completely. When the Hammonds go to their Cornish summer house for a holiday, they are joined by David and Max and Richard starts to suspect that his wife and business partner are plotting to drive him insane before murdering him. However, his blindness means that he is very vulnerable and it is even harder for him to prove his suspicions against them...

A long missed British psychological thriller with a plot that promises to be a real nail biter, but somehow fails to connect with our nerves throughout the first half of the picture. The concept of a vulnerable blind man being tricked into believing that he is losing his mind is a good one and the screenplay by Ephraim Kogan and John Tully from a novel by Pierre Boileau (the guy who wrote the novel upon which Hitchcock's Vertigo was based) allows for a number of twists and turns that really should pile on the suspense. For example, Gregson's attempts to find his way around what he believes to be his holiday home in Cornwall - in reality, Christiane and David have transported him to a similar property in France in order to get him away from any contact with anybody he knows and making it easier to murder him without suspicion - and discovering that things are not in their proper places such as wall sockets not being in the place they should be when he goes to plug in his electric razor and the peach trees he once planted in the gardens are not in the place he remembers them. Then, later, he is lead to believe that his brother has died and he gets his chauffeur to drive him to the cemetery so that he can visit the grave and finds his own name carved on the headstone. Yet, director David Eady is unable to get a performance from his leading man that conveys the sense of paranoia, self doubt and helplessness of his character for it to ignite and the build up is sadly rather flat and lifeless.

However, the film does pick up speed and resource in an exciting last reel when Gregson escapes from the house and runs helplessly through the woods at night. The suspense increases when he comes to a railroad crossing and the barriers come down trapping him and he only narrowly avoids being run over by a train. Ken Hodges' b/w camera-work works wonders in these scenes. He awakes at a hospital where he finds that the doctor and nurse attending to him are French and they do not believe his story about Christiane and David's elaborate plot to drive him out of his mind before killing him so that they can get control of his money believing him to be mad. They send for his wife to come and take him home despite his protestations and he is immediately put back into dire peril. The climax, it has to be said, carries a genuine charge of fear and there is little sense of relief either. So, despite a slow start, Faces In The Dark is nonetheless well worth the watch.

Discussing French Film Noir with the very generous IMDber dbdumonteil,I asked about adaptations of novelists Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac,due to the three that I've seen (Eyes Without A Face,Vertigo and Diabolique) being absolute classics. Catching me by surprise, dbdumonteil told me about a British Film Noir adaptation. Gathering up titles for my birthday viewing,I was thrilled to find it on Ebay £2.50!,which led to me unmasking the faces in the dark.

The plot:

Completely absorbed in his work, businessmen Richard Hammond puts his eyes on inventing a new light-bulb in his factory. Trying out a prototype, Hammond gets caught in an explosion which permanently blinds him. Fearing that he might go mad,Hammond is told by the Dr that he must trust his long suffering wife Christiane and "loyal" friend/co-worker David Merton to take care of him. Returning to his country home, Hammond is horrified to find himself constantly needing to be "corrected" by Christiane that things have not been moved around in the house. Standing outside,light begins to enter Hammond's blind vision when he smells pine trees,despite no pine trees having ever been near his house.

View on the film:

Unmasking this near-forgotten title, Renown present a sparkling transfer,with the dialogue and Mikis Theodorakis's off-beat wah-wah score being clear,and there only being a few specs of dirt on the images of the dark.

Ridding Hammond of his sight in the first 5 minutes (!) of this Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac adaptation,the screenplay by Ephraim Kogan & John Tully cuts a lean and mean British Film Noir. Changing sight of the original novel limiting the pov to the darkness of Hammond's mind,the writers brilliantly retain the isolation Noir spirit,with sharp-tooth inner monologues bringing to light the mad darkness Hammond is trapped in,and the echoes of doubt he now has of those out of sight. Playfully nodding to the French to English transfer,the writers hit a fantastic ambiguous note for Hammond's friends and family, shining in the clipped exchanges Christine has with her husband,which carry (some) element of care with a decayed frustration over Hammond's blindness to other points of view.

Spraying the dark mist of the original novel across the screen,director David Eady and cinematographer Ken Hodges turn Hammond's upper-crust country house into a Noir maze,via ever winding ultra-stylish shadows guarding Hammond from seeing the darkest events taking place. Largely staying away from any Gothic "monster" lighting for Hammond, Eady looks into his burnt eyes with coiled close-ups stabbing the pompous outlook he had on life,with a new Noir loner grasp from Hammond to catch an eyeful of the true feelings of those around him. Joined by an elegant, thoughtful Mai Zetterling as Christiane, John Gregson gives a fantastic performance as Hammond,thanks to Gregson punching Hammond's narrow bitterness with a gradual Film Noir fear of lies coming from the faces in the dark.

I have always thought that "Les Visages De L'Ombre" was Boileau-Narcejac's best novel,even Superior,in several respects to the more celebrated "Celle Qui N'Etait Plus" (which Clouzot rewrote as "Les Diaboliques" ) and to "D'Entre Les Morts " (transferred to the screen by Hitchcock as "Vertigo".Much to my surprise,this movie was never released in France,at a time when their novels were extremely popular over here :in the late fifties and sixties,there was "Les Louves" (Saslavski,1957),"Meurtres En 45 Tours "(Etienne Périer,1960 from "A Cœur Perdu" )"Maldonne" (Sergio Gobbi ,1969) and "Maléfices" (Henri Decoin,1962,starring Juliette Greco,which is never to be found:however,given the quality of the book,it must possess considerable appeal for fans of Boileau-Narcejac's style.)

These books are,par excellence,"the novel of the victim" ,and the victim is always a man;women are all femme fatale in these works which some may find misogynist ."Les Visages De L'Ombre" ,as an user already pointed out,is a cruel story :so hard and so desperate was the ending that the editors asked their winning team to sweeten it ,to make it more moral:they did not ,but anyway are their other detective stories so optimistic?

Among all these murder mysteries ,"Les Visages De L'Ombre " is the hardest to transfer to the screen:when you read it,you live the whole story through a blind man's eyes,so to speak.You do not know what Christiane and David (Hubert in the book) feel ;in the last part of the movie,the actors are compelled to overplay,whereas in the book,the characters remain "neutral" ,even kind .The suspense is increased tenfold.

David Eady made the best of the novel:he certainly could not direct a movie with a central character surrounded by fog and smoke and darkness.His actors direction is faultless,particularly John Ireland as Maxime ,the unfortunate hero's brother.He made Christianne's lover an amateur painter ,which is a good way of introducing the peach tree episode.

By and large ,except for the final ,in which the screenwriters did what Boileau-Narcejac's editors urged them to do before their book was released ,the screenplay is faithful like a dog to the initial story . The scene in the cemetery ,which scared me to death when I read the book for the first time,is skillfully filmed :Richard's fingers touching the cross and discovering the awful truth compares favorably with Clouzot's and Hitchcock's best frightening moments ;on the other hand,Richard's desperate escape in the country is too short :this is perhaps,however,the only moment when Eady could recreate Richard's plight ,alone in the darkest night and losing his bearings ,and the trick of the level crossing -not from the book- does not make up for it.

It was an arduous task :I do not think a remake would do the novel justice or else it would have to be an avant-garde thriller with one character and darkness.But I would recommend it to all Boileau-Narcejac's buffs in my country.

NB:There's also a German MTV version "Gesichte Des Schattens" .(1984)

An ambitious businessman expects a lot of himself. He also expects a lot of others, meaning that not everybody is enchanted by his approach to life. One day his own tendency to push things to the limit leads to a serious accident : he gets blinded and shocked by an explosion in his own research and development laboratory. Everything indicates that those nearest and dearest to him do their best to guide him back to normalcy, but is this really the case ?

A strong, taut thriller based on a novel by the famous Boileau-Narcejac duo of authors. There's a certain disciplined restraint about the movie, which keeps it from sliding into melodrama and adds to its overall impact. The beautifully ironical ending is unforgettable.

Note the small episode where the blind man, released from hospital, wanders through his house and notices the presence of his pet cat. Glad to meet an old friend, he strokes and kisses the cat - until discovering, with stunned repulsion, that he's holding a whole different animal. It's a seriously scary scene - and a poignant one, too.

Very watchable indeed.

Am not sure the plot holds up in this film which seems all atmosphere and does have some good scenes but it doesn't really hold together and the ending is most unsatisfactory. The idea of the house substitution is gimmicky and doesn't really make sense. The movie does look good with excellent cinematography from Ken Hodges and has an interesting music score by Mikis Theodorakis, those two elements being the best things about the film. John Gregson as the gaslighted Richard Hammond overplays the gruff and grouchy and makes the character unsympathetic to the extent that one is not invested in his peril. John Ireland as his unlikely brother and Michael Denison as his business partner are wasted in their roles. Only Mai Zetterling as the unfaithful wife Christiane stands out in the cast. Worth watching but not a classic.