Anyways, before I went on my TCM vs. AMC rant, I was going to talk about the three cool flicks I've had the pleasure of watching recently. They are all black and white films.

The first is Eyes without a Face [Les Yeux sans visage], a French film from 1960. I've heard about this one mostly from Billy Idol's song of the same name. I knew the title of the song came from some weird French film and I always wanted to check it out. The story is about a girl whose face is disfigured in a car accident. Her father is a plastic surgeon who keeps kidnapping unsuspecting young girls, with the help of his assistant, only to surgically remove their faces so he can transplant them to his daughter. But the operations always end in failure. It's very much ahead of it's time, but I'm sure it had much more of an impact in 1960 than it does today. Still, it's a pretty creepy, haunting film. The girl looks freaky with her mask on. They show a fair amount of the transplant operation. And it's just too fucking weird to think of these young girls being put to sleep and then waking up with bandages on their heads because their faces have been removed! It reminds me somewhat of the movie Les Diabolique. Not sure why, different stories, although they're both French "horror" movies in black & white from the same period. And good movies, too.

The next movie I watched was The Face of Another [Tanin no kao], a Japanese film from 1966. Although I liked Eyes without a Face, I thought this film was even better. Holy crap, it's weird! This guy gets in an industrial accident that disfigures his face. He wears bandages all the time and his wife treats him differently now that he's a freak! He gets a doctor to manufacture a life-like mask that he can wear in public, and incidentally appear as a different person. The guy is weird, the doctor is even stranger and they don't seem to like each other. The doctor keeps talking about how the mask is going to take over his personality and the guy is like "Man, why don't you just shut the fuck up and leave me alone?"

I don't want to post too many spoilers, but he does try out the mask on his wife to see if she recognizes him. There is also a parallel storyline about a disfigured girl that you think is going to intersect with the main storyline, but it never does. This movie was filmed in a real "arty" way with some shots that seem completely disconnected from the story they were telling and other shots freezing into stills with no movement. And they did some shit with the sound, where when the doctor is having a private conversation with his patient, all the ambient sound fades away for awhile, and then comes back when the conversation is over. I could go on and on, there is so much weird shit in this movie, but it never distracts from the story. In fact, it kind of adds to the eeriness of the piece. The endings of both stories get pretty out there too. I definitely recommend this movie, it's a bizarre, overlooked gem. Oh yeah, it has a brief scene of nudity, a woman's breasts. This surprised me, I didn't think TCM was allowed to show any nudity at all. And then there was the scene with the girl and her brother...

The last, but certainly not the least, movie I watched was The Face behind the Mask, an American movie from 1941. Peter Lorre stars as Janos, an immigrant who comes to New York to start a new life. He's a really nice guy, but shortly after getting to the big apple, he gets stuck in a fire at his hotel and is severely disfigured. Unable to get a job because of his uglyfication, he is driven to suicide, only to be befriended by a small time crook, Dinky. They become friends and eventually partners in crime, with Janos as the boss of a small gang of crooks. But after meeting a blind girl, he has a turn of heart and tries to give up his life of crime and go straight. Oh yeah, he gets a mask so people can be in his presence without being horrifically repulsed.

This picture wasn't as intense or weird as the other two, but it was still pretty cool. Peter Lorre was really good, as well as the guy who played Dinky, George E. Stone. The story was somewhat contrived at times, but it moved along at a brisk pace and came to an interesting, if not predictable, end. It does some unusual things for pictures of the time, like sympathetic criminals. And an innocent person gets blown up. Altogether, a pretty good movie.