A blank faced killer is preying for young women.A detective wants to catch him.He has nightmare visions about elusive stalker.Very dream-like and atmospheric horror movie from Mexico with extremely moody prologue.The funeral procession with coffins,blank face of the mysterious figure in the fog and a lone detective sitting on the bench.My copy of "El Hombre Sin Rostro" is in Spanish,so most of the plot went beyond me.The dream sequences are genuinely spooky and creative,the acting is spot-on and the cinematography is elegant.I wish I could see "El Hombre Sin Rostro" with English subtitles.But maybe I should stop being lazy and finally learn Spanish.7 blank faces out of 10.
Add a Review
-
HumanoidOfFlesh25 January 2011
-
chris-810-7456738 December 2011A Mexican psycho-killer film before psycho-killer era... there is a man (maybe a killer) obsessed with his mother, like Psycho (1960)... there is a masked killer hunting women, like those filmed by Mario Bava's giallo in 1960s... but this is a 1950 movie. The script make it a very interesting and tense movie, also Jorge Stahl's cinematography works fine, with some touches of expressionism in the set design and the classical light/shadow use of the film-noir. Arturo De Córdova did a great job, playing a character he did tenths of times, a refined man with a dark side that eventually arise and possesses him completely. Even when Juan Bustillo Oro is barely remembered, this film is a proof of how unfaithful is that poor attention to his work in modern decades.
-
ingridtl20 June 2005This is a wonderful film of suspense, is about a detective that is obsessed to catch a murderer of women in the city of Mexico. This detective had bad dreams in which he sees women with no face, dancing and spelling bad words about him, but he thinks the dreams are associate with his obsession for catch the killer. Consulting a friend, who is psychiatrist, he tries to found the cause of his nightmares and his obsession about the red color into them; this is the reference of the title "A man with no face". The end is a surprise. The writer had the opportunity to consult a very famous psychiatrist of the city of Mexico to endow his work of more credibility.
-
Many Mexican movies made in "La Epoca De Oro" are like Hollywood seen in a fun house mirror, distorted reflections of trends dominating the films of it's uber-influential neighbor to the north. The impact of Hollywood's Film Noir cycle in the late 1940s was particularly strong and is even said to have spawned the Mexican "cabaretera" genre of the early 1950s. Veteran director Juan Bustillo Oro's THE FACELESS MAN takes the topical popularity of psychoanalysis in Hollywood Film Noir where no one would dare go until a decade later:
After a Dali-esque dream sequence, the film opens like DOUBLE INDEMNITY with a dazed city coroner stumbling to his office in the middle of the night to confess murder. Flashbacks relate the story of Juan Carlos Lozano (handsome heartthrob Arturo De Córdova), a deeply troubled police detective agonizing over his inability to catch a serial sex killer who likes to mutilate his victims. Haunted by his fear of failure and recurring nightmares, Juan Carlos gets psychoanalyzed by his good friend the coroner where it's revealed he was dominated by a monstrous mother who won't let go, even after death...
THE FACELESS MAN is a suspense-filled examination of a tortured human psyche and has all the appropriate trope (a shadowy nightworld, tormented voice-over narration, trenchcoats & fedoras, flashbacks, and best of all, revealing and surreal dream sequences) needed to explore dark psycho- sexual themes that wouldn't be seen on American screens until Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO a decade later. An incredible find way ahead of its time. -
BandSAboutMovies1 July 2020Juan Carlos isn't a great hero. He's been infantilized by his mother and is going through therapy, which would probably a novel idea in the macho culture of Mexico, much less today. In his dreams, he can see the serial killer that has been haunting the city, quite literally The Man Without A Face that the title refers to.
A decade later, Hitchcock's Psycho would feature a plot with similar beats to this film. In much the same way, another of director Juan Bustillo Oro's films, Dos Monjes, predated Kurosawa's Rashomon and features the same narrative idea of showing the same event from divergent points of view.t also features a faceless killer 14 years before Mario Bava would bring Blood and Black Lace to the screen (that said, The Blank started appearing in the Dick Tracy newspaper strip in 1937 and probably influenced the look of this film as well).
While not the fastest-paced movie you'll ever see, this film is worth watching for its mix of three decades before David Lynch surrealism, German expressionism fog and angles, and a film noir storyline moved to Mexico. There's not another movie that looks and feels like this one.