Last night I watched Terence Fisher’s STOLEN FACE (1952), just released on 4K/Blu-ray by Hammer. It looks fine - absolutely fine, but nothing extraordinary - yet what stands out about the film is how it interlinks with other films thematically. In this story, an eminent plastic surgeon falls in love with a woman already betrothed and decides to pursue happiness with a badly-scarred, criminally-minded patient to whom he gives the face of his lost love.
This notion of a man grooming a woman to replace a lost love naturally takes us back (or rather, forward) to Hitchcock’s VERTIGO (1958), but - in a much more rewarding and interesting way, to Fisher’s own FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE (1953), THE MUMMY (1959) and its reincarnation angle, FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967), and arguably even THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1961), which somewhat inverts the formula by splitting the man/lover into his own criminal opposite in hopes of regaining the love of a straying wife. I daresay this must be the most insistent theme to be found in Fisher’s work and we can even follow the thread deeper into the two versions of Barbara Shelley found in DRACULA - PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965) or the pathetic bifurcated monster in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969). I watched the video extras, which touch on VERTIGO and other crime pictures involving plastic surgery subplots, but overlook how this theme is stressed in much of Fisher’s other work. I’ve yet to listen to the two commentaries included, so I hope they’ll find and explore this important vein of thought and discussion.
Another thing: in Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ otherwise very interesting essay, she refers repeatedly to the Paul Henreid’s character’s “sexual obsession,” but I see nothing sexual in his portrayal. I can understand how a modern viewer could watch the film and think that his giving Lizabeth Scott’s face to another woman was a way of getting into her pants, but Fisher never depicts his reasoning as anything more primal than a “romantic” obsession. Henreid has dreams of what his life might have been with the original of Scott, but anything concerning his sex life with either woman is glossed over in the manner of the period the film was shot. It’s important to remember that audiences of 1952 were not as bombarded by sex in the media as they would start to become in the 1960s. Sexual realities had no place in cinema, especially in what might be considered “women’s films,” and I personally find a more female (than male) basis in STOLEN FACE, perhaps because it involves two women and one man, and because Henried’s protagonist is depicted as a somewhat isolated romantic without much worldly experience, not as a prowling sexual pragmatist.
If we look at the film in this way, it is easier to accept Henreid’s behavior, because a romantic fantasy is unrealistic by definition and we can clearly see where the roadster of realism takes the wrong exit. A sexual obsession is more dangerous because it’s rooted in reality, and we can’t see how it grew to such extremes because the film could not go there. I see Henreid’s obsession as one of Fisher’s many “failed experiment” tragedies; it takes a step too far, but there is a road back. (The last image in the story, if I saw it correctly, actually frames this road back next to a train literally stalled outside a tunnel.) VERTIGO, on the other hand, takes a step beyond even the book on which it was based, to show us a protagonist who is actually sick, and it leaves us (and him) hanging, cutting off before he can decide whether or not to seek help.
STOLEN FACE is now available from Hammer (and other outlets like Amazon and Diabolik DVD) as a region-free 4K/Blu-ray double disc set with numerous extras and a 116-page illustrated booklet of essays.
(C) 2026 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
