Wednesday, July 25, 2018

A STOLEN FACE 1952 (KIT PARKER FILMS)

A strange film from the early days of Hammer.

A successful but very lonely Dr. Phillip Ritter (Paul Henreid) takes a vacation and stays at a small English inn. There he meets the incredibly beautiful Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott) who is a pianist. They spend a week together and Ritter finds himself hopelessly in love with Alice.

One day Alice disappears and Ritter tracks her down and finds she is getting married as soon as her concert tour is over. Ritter is heartbroken but returns to his work as a plastic surgeon. He is assigned to help a disfigured woman named Lily Conover and over time he changes her face to that of Alice.

Ritter is so infatuated with Lily that he marries her and attempts to reform her of her criminal ways. In the meantime Alice and her fiancee have split and now Alice seeks to find Phillip, because she really loves him.

While Alice seeks out Phillip, we find that Phillip is having trouble with and very drunken and bitter Lily. Her behavior gets worse and worse and begins dragging Phillip down with her. Things get out of control even more when Lily finds that Alice is looking to hook up with Phillip again. The final confrontation in a train is very well handled.

You can see by these early works that Fisher had a good grip on the directing chores, something that would be very handy in the coming Hammer horror years. It's always fun to see some of the British actors in early roles before they made names for themselves in horror. One of the other cast members in this film is Andre Morell, who later starred in such fair as "Plague Of The Zombies" and "The Reptile" for Hammer as well as the United Artists film "The Giant Behemoth".

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