CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

morrison-dylan-fan 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.

droopyherby FACES IN THE DARK is a rather forgotten film in the British noir genre. The movie is a bit slow but totally worth hanging in there - the TWIST is quite staggering & very well done (no surprise it is based on a book by the writing team that also wrote the novels that VERTIGO, LES DIABOLIQUES and EYES WITHOUT A FACE were based on). John Gregson is very good as the rich successful man who is blinded in an industry accident. He is angry at the world with his fate and slowly begins to worry that he is losing his mind. Is he just paranoid or is his "loving" wife too good to be true? I watched this with a few friends and we all thoroughly enjoyed it.

dbdumonteil 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)

mb014f2908 I finally got to watch this film on a scratchy DVD from a VHS copy bought off ebay- so the sound quality was muted at times, but i've tried to see it for years and failed. It is a good taut little thriller, on a moderate budget but well acted (everyone is suitably mysterious and two-faced) though John Gregson had to work very hard to convince as the tough, unpleasant workaholic boss (he just looks too affable). His dilemma, after an accident blinds him, gave me a few empathetic shivers and that dilemma is what kept my attention right through to the unexpected ending. There are some genuinely creepy moments,and an initially unsympathetic main character makes headway in conjuring our sympathy.Enjoyable and should be better known.