6. Dr Génessier - Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960)
Dr Génessier buries his daughter Christiane whose body was found by a roadside. Or does he? The real Christiane is alive but seriously disfigured following a car accident. She floats about the place with an eerie featureless mask to hide her disfigurement, Her demented father and his assistant go out looking for young girls to bring back home, cut off their faces and transplant them onto Christiane's face. They inevitably fail to change her appearance. With the police snooping about, Christiane gets fed up, stabs her father's assistant in the neck and releases the dogs upon her father, and then floats off into the wounds - carrying a dove. Directed with flair by Georges Franju, and with Pierre Brasseur giving a marvellous performance as Dr Génessier. The mad doctor element in the film was turned down due to fears it would upset the Germans. Génessier is a very accomplished man but he has been driven to insanity due to his daughter's unfortunate injuries. This propels him to kidnap women who resemble his daughter in her pre-accident state. Once their faces have been removed, they are disposed off pretty quickly. And the surgery always fails. The villainy of the doctor is very clever, very understandable and placed within a believable context. The obligatory assistant is a fine looking woman - not a hunchbacked ghoul à la Franco's similarly themed Gritos en la Noche. All the same, thank goodness Génessier is a surgeon and a professor - not a General Practitioner in your vicinity. He is a tortured mad man.