Stolen Face (Hammer Films, Exclusive Films, Lippert Films, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 27) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episode in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies, a 1952 Hammer/Lippert co-production called Stolen Face based on the then-current idea that a person might turn to crime because they were physically deformed, and therefore they could be rehabilitated through plastic surgery that would make them attractive and therefore end the ongoing traumas that had turned them “bad.” We’d already seen this premise explored in films like Lew Landers’s 1935 The Raven (which starred Boris Karloff as a hardened criminal and Bela Lugosi as a plastic surgeon; when Karloff comes to Lugosi and pleads for an operation that will make him good-looking and thereby end his criminal career, Lugosi double-crosses him, makes him even uglier, and uses him as an instrument of revenge) and a quite remarkable Columbia “B” from 1936, The Man Who Lived Twice, which cast Ralph Bellamy as a hardened criminal and Thurston Hall as the plastic surgeon who operates on him and ultimately hires him as his assistant, to the point where he becomes a licensed M.D. himself. It was directed by Harry Lachman but Lew Landers returned to the premise in 1953 for a remake, Man in the Dark, shot in 3-D but not released that way, with Edmond O’Brien as the transformed crook and Dayton Lummis as the surgeon who helps him. I posted on the original (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-man-who-lived-twice-columbia-1936.html) and called it “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in reverse.” Eddie Muller’s intro compared the film to the two versions of A Woman’s Face (the Swedish one with Ingrid Bergman in 1938 and the U.S. remake with Joan Crawford in 1941) and also to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though he pointed out that it was made not only six years before Hitchcock’s classic but two years before the French writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote D’Entre les Morts (the title is usually given in English as The Living and the Dead but its literal meaning is From Amongst the Dead), on which Vertigo was based. (They deliberately crafted the story hoping that Hitchcock would buy the movie rights.)

Directed by Terence Fisher from an original story by Alexander Paal and Steven Vas, adapted into a screenplay by Martin Berkeley and Richard H. Landau, Stolen Face was one of the Lippert-Hammer co-productions in which Hammer supplied the studio space, production infrastructure, and supporting cast, while Lippert came up with American stars to boost the films’ commercial potential in the U.S. In this case the “American” stars (in quotes because one of them was not U.S.-born) were Paul Henried and Lizabeth Scott. At the time Henried was being blacklisted – or, more accurately, greylisted – because he’d participated in the 1948 protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations of alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood (he could still get roles, but only for independent producers). The protests had also included major stars and directors like Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston, but somehow their careers emerged relatively unscathed while Henried’s didn’t. (It puts an interesting spin on his role in Casablanca that Henried played Victor Laszlo in real life as well.) Lizabeth Scott was, shall we say, a “protégée” of producer Hal Wallis, who discovered her after he left Warner Bros. and became an in-house independent at Paramount. Stolen Face casts Henried as plastic surgeon Dr. Philip Ritter, who’s become so famous that an older woman, Lady Millicent Harringay (Everley Gregg), beseeches him for an operation to make her more attractive to her younger fiancé and even offers him 1,000 pounds for it, only he tells her flat-out that she’s waited too long. Lizabeth Scott plays two roles, American concert pianist Alice Brent and Cockney guttersnipe Lily Conover. When Ritter’s medical partner, Dr. John Wilson (John Wood), tells him he’s burning himself out and needs a vacation, Ritter takes a week off at a seaside resort. He rents a room from a pub owner and there meets Alice, who’s recuperating from a cold in the adjoining room. Ritter writes her a note saying she needs two aspirins and a bottle of whiskey, and ultimately they meet, drink together, smoke together (Muller noted the sheer amount of smoking Ritter does in this movie, especially for a doctor – though throughout Hollywood’s classic era doctors smoked like chimneys – and suggested Henried had become famous for smoking after the famous smoking scene with Bette Davis in Now, Voyager), and finally fall in love. This is a complication she doesn’t need in her life because she’s about to embark on a concert tour of Europe under the guidance of her manager David (André Morell in his first of nine films for Hammer, of which the most famous is the 1959 The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which he played Dr. Watson to Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes), who’s also her fiancé.

Turned down by Alice, Ritter decides to make Lily Conover, whom he’s met as a volunteer doing complimentary plastic surgery on prison inmates, into Alice’s image and marry her. Ritter soon learns that his makeover of Lily into the spitting image of Alice (she’d been badly burned on her face during a German Blitz raid on London in World War II) hasn’t changed her moral character at all. She’s still a thief and Ritter has to shell out his own money to pay for the items she’s stolen. What’s more, she uses Ritter’s palatial home to throw wild parties for herself and her friends, including her scapegrace boyfriend Pete Snipe (Terence O’Regan). There’s a neat scene in which Ritter takes Lily to an opera, which bores her, and Lily takes him to a jazz club, whose band is headlined by tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott (who later opened a jazz club of his own in London), and he’s bored. Just then Alice – ya remember Alice? – returns from her concert tour. She tells Ritter that she didn’t marry David after all and now wants him, only Lily is totally unwilling to divorce him. Ritter announces to Alice that he’s going to move from London to Plymouth, but Lily follows him and crashes his compartment on the train, which [spoiler alert!] turns into a deus ex machina as Alice and Lily confront each other on the train until Lily falls to her death via a loose door on the train car. The police find Lily’s dead body with her face horribly disfigured (ah, the irony!) and Ritter and Alice are free to get together. (One wonders how Ritter got away with it, because I was expecting a more cynical ending in which the cops become convinced he murdered Lily to get rid of her so he could be with Alice.) The big problem with Stolen Face is the casting of the leads: Paul Henried is O.K. as a stuck-up surgeon with a God complex but he’d played that sort of character far better four years earlier in a much more credibly noir movie, Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar (in which he was the super-surgeon who remodeled himself). Lizabeth Scott is pretty much hopeless; as Alice Brent she gets the hauteur right but little else, though I give her a lot of credit for having learned her way around the piano keys enough to synchronize credibly with the pre-recordings by Bronwyn Jones (a pianist I’ve been unable to find out any information about online; she’s not listed in the Fanfare archive and her only credit on imdb.com is this one). But her attempt at a Cockney accent as Lily is pretty terrible, and quite frankly this would have been a much better film if Hammer and Lippert had given the female lead(s) to Barbara Payton, who was so stunning in previous Hammer-Lippert co-productions like Four Sided Triangle and Bad Blonde.