You won't be disappointed!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Fantastic!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

When his proposal of marriage to American pianist Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott) is rejected, successful plastic surgeon Dr Philip Ritter (Paul Henried) uses his skill with a scalpel to turn scarred, psychotic, habitual thief Lily Conovor (Mary Mackenzie) into the spitting image of his beloved and marries her instead; but as the saying goes, beauty is only skin deep, and despite her angelic looks Lily is still a hard-living slag on the inside and soon returns to her old ways, fraternising with her friends from the criminal community. So far, so far fetched, but matters get even more complicated for Phil when Alice comes back to him, having changed her mind about marriage...With its themes of vanity, obsession and madness, early Hammer production Stolen Face could be seen as a precursor to the French classic Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) or the wonderfully deviant Corruption (1968), as well as an indicator of the darker direction that the studio would eventually take; unfortunately, the film is neither stylish nor sleazy like the aforementioned titles, instead occupying mediocre melodramatic potboiler territory, and despite solid direction from Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher and a decent cast (Scott does particularly well in her dual role, convincingly pulling off a Cockney accent), it all makes for a rather unmemorable experience. The ending is particularly dumb, with all manner of contrivances resulting in a predictably happy ending for Alice and the good doctor.

Lizabeth Scott has "A Stolen Face" and also has the face that was stolen in this 1952 film also starring Paul Henreid and directed by Terence Fisher. Scott plays a beautiful concert pianist, Alice Brent, who meets Dr. Philip Ritter (Henreid), a plastic surgeon, while he's on vacation. They fall in love, but she leaves suddenly. She's involved with her manager and rather than confront the situation, she just takes off.Devastated, Ritter returns to his practice, part of which is done at a prison where he reconstructs patients' injured or deformed faces to help them rehabilitate and live better, crime-free lives. One such patient is Lily Conover (Mary Mackenzie), a thief whose face is disfigured on one side. Ritter makes her over to look like Alice Brent and marries her. Lily, however, can't quite rehabilitate. She feels stifled by the doctor's lifestyle and starts stealing and hanging with her old crowd. Then Alice Brent decides she can't marry her manager and pays Philip a visit.This film could be considered a camp classic - the story is, but the performances are quite good. Until he returns from vacation, Dr. Ritter is a fine doctor, totally professional and generous. A bad love affair makes him into an obsessed whacko who makes over a thief into the woman he loves and marries her. Go figure. And I agree with one of the comments here - why Alice Brent didn't cut and run when she realized what he did defies imagination.Scott is older here than in her big noir days but is radiant and beautiful in both roles. She's more animated than in other films and pulls off the Cockney nicely. The only strange thing there was that when the makeover was complete, Lily suddenly had Alice's very distinctive husky voice.Henried gives a good performance in an impossible role. How do you play a warm, normal, hardworking man who does a complete turnaround with no indication in the script as to where it came from, no tendencies beforehand, no grasping obsession during the affair - and suddenly a patient goes under the knife and emerges Lizabeth Scott. Only in Hollywood. I wouldn't have it any other way.

I've now watched three of the Hammer noirs that were recently released on DVD and while each is okay, there's nothing very memorable about any of them. That's precisely how I feel about Stolen Face – it's a decent watch, but it's nothing I would go out of my way to see again. While Paul Henreid gives a nice performance and Terence Fisher's direction is solid, the screenplay really lets them down. There just aren't any surprises. It's all nicely done, but I've seen it before. And if you haven't seen it, you can probably predict the film's outcome with a great deal of success. It's about as subtle as a hammer (pun intended) to the head. My enjoyment of the film isn't helped any by the presence of Lizabeth Scott. I've only seen her in two movies that I can name off the top of my head (this one and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers) and that's two too many. I can't stand the woman! One interesting aspect of Stolen Face is the interjection of little elements horror/sci-fi. After all, this is Hammer and this is Terence Fisher. It somehow seems appropriate.

A London plastic surgeon called Philip Ritter (Paul Henreid) falls in love with American concert pianist Alice Brent (Lizabeth Scott) while on holiday in rural England. However, Alice is already engaged to be married to the well-to-do David (Andre Morell). Devastated, Ritter returns to London and is called upon to perform a charitable operation on a disfigured convict called Lily (Mary Mackenzie), whose face he recreates in Alice's image. Ritter then marries Lily thinking that her new face will cure her criminal tendencies, but this results in disastrous circumstances.Before Hammer and director Terence Fisher reinvigorated the horror genre with their colour remakes of Frankenstein and Dracula, their main source of output was b-features, most of which were in the crime thriller genre and often featured American stars who were past their prime to bolster international sales. In Stolen Face, ex-1940's stars Paul Henreid and Lizabeth Scott were hired. Scott came to prominence after she appeared alongside Kirk Douglas in "The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers" (1946) and later Humphrey Bogart in "Dead Reckoning" (1947). The latter part saw her being compared to Lauren Bacall. However, by the 1950's, good parts worthy of her talents were proving difficult to come by and she made few films from there on. Henreid had appeared in such Hollywood milestones as "Casablanca" (1942) before he faded from the public eye.Stolen Face is a very interesting film in that it marks a notable point for both Hammer and Fisher (here making his third picture for the company). The plot hints at some of the themes that they would focus on in their subsequent horror films. For instance, the premise of the surgeon transforming the disfigured girl into a beauty was exploited in more detail in the sublime "Frankenstein Created Woman" (1967). In this film Baron Frankenstein and his assistant cured Christina Kleeve's disfigurement but also transfered the soul of her lover (wrongly executed for murder) into her body. The result was a archetypal blonde beauty and seductress who then proceeded to seduce and kill the men who sent her boyfriend to the guillotine. The difference between Stolen Face and "Frankenstein Created Woman" is that the former was only treated as a domestic melodrama and had little to give conviction to it's absurdness, but the latter had a genuine Gothic fairy tale quality that transcended the daftness of the plot. There are also echoes of "The Revenge Of Frankenstein" (1958) in that both Philip Ritter and Baron Frankenstein both did charity work as well as running their own surgeries. And it was through this charity work that they acquired the raw materials for their own ends. It is also interesting to compare the two characters in that both Ritter and Frankenstein (although from different societies) believed that they could both create the perfect human being in their own way, but as in both cases something went drastically wrong. For instance, in "The Revenge Of Frankenstein", the creature became a disfigured dwarf although the Baron performed the operation on his hunchback assistant as a favour and for his own misguided reasons. The same applies to Ritter as he took pity on Lily's disfigurement and at the same time did it for his own ends. Another similarity is that both doctors were both so obsessed with what they were doing to understand the terrible consequences that would result.In conclusion, Stolen Face can be seen as a run of the mill medical melodrama, but for those who have followed Hammer's output from the very beginning, it is possible to see that it paved the way for Hammer to do better things within a decade or so after this was made. The film also supports the theory that when a subject met with Fisher's approval, he would give the film all he had to give to it. Yet when he disliked a subject such as the science fiction film "Night Of The Big Heat" (1967), everything was indifferently done. Stolen Face is by no means a perfect film as Henreid is miscast as Dr Ritter and Andre Morell is rather uncomfortable as Alice Brent's boyfriend David. However, Lizabeth Scott is remarkable as once the operation scene is over, she is playing both Lily and Alice and it surprised everyone that she managed to put on a very acceptable cockney accent. The film is rather a routine affair, but it isn't possible to dismiss it as it is one of the very few films of Hammer's early output to show signs of the company's future. However, if Hammer hadn't gone on to do better things, Stolen Face wouldn't have warranted the reassessment that it's getting today let alone a reissue on DVD.