Face Value

“We didn’t need dialogue! We had faces!”

      - Gloria Swanson (as Norma Desmond) in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)

They Had Faces Then is the title of a classic, long out-of-print book by film historians John Springer and Jack Hamilton, featuring thousands of portraits of actresses of the 1930s, from Hollywood icons to the underrated and obscure. Of course, leading men had faces then as well. The lucky few whose smooth-skinned, Adonis-like features flickered across the Moviehouse screen in the ‘30s had names then, too: Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy; even the so-called “character leads,” Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, had faces that were idolized and envied.

It’s faces of another sort, however, that interest us in the Moviehouse: the extraordinary, the disfigured, and the scarred, both on-screen and behind the screen. The mysterious allure of imperfection has probably been best dramatized in the numerous film versions of the1909 novel The Phantom of the Opera. French author Gaston Leroux originally attributed the title character’s noseless, lipless, cadaverous face with sunken eyes, wisps of hair, and yellowed flesh to a deformity from birth, exploited in freak shows in youth as a self-described living corpse, “built up with death from head to foot.”

 

The faces of the Phantom of the Opera (from the top,
left to right): Lon Chaney in 1925; Claude Rains in 1943;
Herbert Lom in 1962; Herbert Lom (again) as a Phantom-
like character in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1971;
William Finley in "Phantom of the Paradise" in 1974;
Robert Englund in 1989; Julian Sands in 1998;
Gerard Butler in 2004

When silent movie star Lon Chaney starred in 1925’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” Hollywood’s “Man of a Thousand Faces” adhered faithfully to the novel’s concept of birth-related deformities, while subsequent screen versions had the character’s disfigurement caused by etching acid or fire. In the 1989 film adaptation starring Robert Englund (best known as fire-scarred serial killer Freddy Krueger in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films), the Phantom, disfigured by the Devil after selling his soul, sews patches of human skin onto his face as a mask. In writer-director Brian De Palma’s campy 1974 update, “Phantom of the Paradise”(which also tosses in elements from The Picture of Dorian Gray and the legend of Faust), the title character’s face is sandwiched in a hot record press.

Faces of Fire

The 1953 thriller "House of Wax" bears more than a passing resemblance to the "Phantom of the Opera" movies. It could almost be titled "The Phantom of the Wax Museum" in its story of a gifted sculptor, horribly disfigured in a museum fire, who, masking his true identity, opens a new exhibit of wax-covered murder victims.

"House of Wax," directed by Andre de Toth, revived the career of Vincent Price, who had been relegated to playing secondary, often sympathetic characters for years, and launched the actor's rebirth as the Merchant of Menace.

"House of Wax" gave Charles Bronson (center) an early role in his career. Credited
as Charles Buchinsky (his real name), he portrayed Vincent Price's mute assistant,
appropriately named Igor. Actress Phyllis Kirk, cast as the film's damsel in distress,
once said she had "no fond memories" of working with Charles.

The first color 3-D feature film to come out of a major Hollywood studio, "House of Wax was ironically directed by a man blind in one eye and unable to appreciate the three-dimensional effects. Vincent Price later recalled that de Toth "really was the wrong director for 3-D. He'd go to the rushes and say, 'Why is everybody so excited about this?' It didn't mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller."

In 1959, James Whitmore, a venerable character actor whose nearly 60-year screen career included an Oscar nomination for his performance as a grizzled platoon sergeant in 1949’s “Battleground” (hands down the best movie ever made about the Battle of the Bulge) and a memorable portrayal of the prison librarian in 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption,” starred in “Face of Fire” (1959) as a beloved handyman named Monk who rescues a child from a burning building and is hailed as a hero only as long as the townspeople assume he perished in the blaze. Alive but hideously disfigured by the flames, Monk is subsequently feared and shunned in the community. The local doctor (Cameron Mitchell) whose son was the rescued child becomes a pariah himself when he continues to care for the injured man.

 

James Whitmore portrays the badly burned handyman in "Face of Fire."

Writer-director Albert Band, a Paris-born American filmmaker, had previously directed the low-budget cult favorite “I Bury the Living” (1958), featuring Richard Boone as a cemetery caretaker who discovers he has a supernatural power over life and death depending on his use of black or white push pins on a graveyard map. (Band’s son, Charles Band, became an independent movie mogul in his own right as head of Empire Pictures and Full Moon Features, cranking out the “Re-Animator,” “Ghoulies,” “Trancers,” and “Puppet Master” series of films.)

“Face of Fire” was based on the 1898 novella The Monster by Stephen Crane (best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage). In Crane’s story, a treatise on fear, isolation, and prejudice in a small town, the main character is a black coachman. The writer may have been inspired by the 1892 lynching of an African American named Robert Lewis, allegedly for assaulting a white woman, in Crane’s childhood home of Port Jervis, New York. Crane’s brother, William, allegedly tried to intervene in the incident.

In the hands of Albert Band, “Face of Fire” remains a modestly told fable about the fickle fragility of human nature and the foibles of mob mentality, themes that recur in two other depictions of fire-tortured souls.

 

Peter Lorre contemplates his fate in "The Face Behind the Mask."

If Edgar Allan Poe had been able create one individual to depict his restlessly haunted characters, he would have come up with Peter Lorre, the Hungarian-born actor with the soulful eyes and inimitable voice who first made an indelible impression on screen as a serial killer who preys on little girls in 1931’s “M.” In 1941, Lorre starred in “The Face Behind the Mask,” portraying a skilled watchmaker newly immigrated to New York City. Hideously scarred in a boarding house fire and dejected by prospective employers, he resorts to joining a gang of criminals, utilizing his talent for disabling alarms. Hoping to earn enough money for a realistic latex mask, he becomes involved in an ill-fated relationship with a blind woman. Spoiler alert: Everybody in this bleak film noir dies.

Two years before she won the Best Actress Oscar for her benchmark performance as Sally Bowles in 1972’s “Cabaret,” Liza Minnelli portrayed a young woman whose face has been scarred by battery acid in “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon,” produced and directed by Hollywood’s notorious “enfant terrible,” Otto Preminger.

Recovering from her injuries, Minnelli’s fragile character forges a precarious bond with an epileptic (played by Ken Howard, TV’s future “The White Shadow” and longtime Screen Actors Guild president) and a gay paraplegic (portrayed by stage director Robert Moore, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1984).

 

Robert Moore, Ken Howard, and Liza Minnelli play a trio
of misfits in "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon."

Critic Leonard Maltin lauded “Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon” for its “moments of comedy, melodrama, compassion expertly blended by Preminger in one of his best films,” while Roger Ebert noted, “It succeeds…in making human entertainment out of a rather unlikely story.”

During the shooting of “Junie Moon,” Minnelli’s mother, Judy Garland, died, and some accounts cite that as an inspiration for Liza’s emotional performance on screen. A tearful Minnelli would later declare that she would never again work with the “tyrannical” Preminger.

 

In Cannes to promote her movie, Liza Minnelli appears to
have forgiven director Otto Preminger's tyranny.

Minnelli’s scarred appearance was the handiwork of makeup artist Charles H. Schram, who, three decades earlier, worked with Liza’s mother on “The Wizard of Oz.”

Mel Gibson’s first feature film as a director was 1993’s “The Man Without a Face,” in which he portrayed a former teacher and free-lance illustrator with a mysterious past that left his chest and part of his face disfigured in an automobile accident fire. Residing as a recluse on island off Maine and nicknamed “Hammerhead” by the locals, the painter reluctantly agrees to tutor a boy from a dysfunctional family. The boy is competently portrayed by then-13-year-old Nick Stahl (best known for playing John Connor in “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”). The two become friends, until unfounded rumors of pedophilia force the tutor’s exile from the community.

 

Mel Gibson shares a scene with Nick Stahl in "The Man Without a Face."

Author Isabelle Holland’s original novel’s critical rebuking of homophobia was glossed over in the screen version. The book implied that the tutor molests the student, but Mel Gibson chose to omit that element in order to, in his words, “say something more positive.” At a time when everyone liked Gibson, Roger Ebert praised his nuanced performance as “not a caricature, not a softy, not pathetic, but fiercely sure of what is right and wrong.”                                                                                                                             

Richard Lynch is moments away from getting Chuck Norrised in "Invasion U.S.A."

In real life, character actor Richard Lynch’s distinctively scarred appearance made him a much sought-after villain in more than 100 movies and television programs from the early 1970s up to his death at age 72 in 2012. The scars stemmed from a 1967 incident in New York City’s Central Park when, under the influence of LSD, he set himself on fire. Some reports interpreted the act of self-immolation as a protest against the Vietnam War. In fact, Lynch, a promising actor at the time, had just performed a successful screen test for a major studio, which he decided to celebrate by dropping acid, soaking his clothes in gasoline, and lighting a match. He rolled in the grass in an attempt to smother the flames and was hospitalized with burns covering his face and more than 70 percent of his body.

“I was a fool,” Lynch said in a 1971 interview. “It was drugs. It was a combination of things. My father was an alcoholic, and he died in a tragic way. I was on all kinds of drugs. I pumped every kind of drug into myself.” He spent a year in recovery, promising himself, “I’m going to beat it. I’m going to beat it all.”

Richard Lynch began training at The Actors Studio and made his feature film debut in the 1973 road movie “Scarecrow” (pictured above) portraying a prison farm inmate who befriends, then assaults Al Pacino before getting his clock cleaned by Gene Hackman.

 

Richard Lynch once said, "I've always felt like a
thoroughbred without the proper track to run on."

Depending on whom one chooses to believe, the singularly startling visage of legendary screen bad guy Jack Palance – the deep-set, piercing eyes, angular cheekbones, and reptilian jawline – were said to have been a result of reconstructive surgery for injuries suffered while bailing out of a burning B-24 bomber on a training flight over Arizona during World War II.

In his first movie, "Panic in the Streets," a film noir directed in 1950 by Elia Kazan,
Jack Palance portrays a plague-carrying gangster. The screen newcomer became so
absorbed in his role that he purportedly continued to rough up his flunky, played by
Zero Mostel (pictured above, with Palance), off-camera and used a real gun instead of
a rubber prop to pistol-whip costar Richard Widmark. Widmark recalled Palance as
"the toughest guy I ever met" and "the only actor I've ever been physically afraid of."

The son of Ukranian immigrants, Jack Palance worked in Pennsylvania coal mines before becoming a professional heavyweight boxer in the late 1930s, purportedly compiling 15 consecutive victories with a dozen knockouts. He later said, “You must be nuts to get your head beat in for $200.” So, already brandishing rugged features from too many beatings in the ring, Palance enlisted in the U.S. Air Force.

Some accounts say Palance was wounded in combat during the war, which resulted in his variously receiving (again, depending on which sources one reads) the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the Good Conduct Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. It was, however, the account of the fiery bailout in Arizona that was most often repeated, including in several film reference works. Upon his death in 2006, obituaries quoted the actor as saying, “Studio press agents make up anything they want to, and reporters go along with it. One flack created the legend that I had been blown up in an air crash during the war, and my face had to be put back together by way of plastic surgery. If it is a bionic face, why didn’t they do a better job of it?” He would say, “I’m amazed people read this crap about us – about me most of all.

Of course, it should be noted that in his later years, Jack Palance went out of his way to nurture a persona as a cantankerous curmudgeon, telling reporters, “Most of the stuff I do is garbage,” deriding directors as unworthy of “directing traffic,” and claiming he never watched his own movies.

Jack Palance's strikingly angular, almost reptilian features were well suited
for his starring role in the 1973 TV movie "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

Brute Men

As a young man, Rondo Hatton worked as a sportswriter for a Tampa newspaper. He served under Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing in the Pancho Villa Expedition of 1916, a failed attempt to capture the Mexican revolutionary after he raided Columbus, New Mexico. (Famed general-to-be George S. Patton was Pershing’s personal aide on the expedition.) Serving in France during World War I, Hatton was exposed to poison gas, hospitalized and subsequently medically discharged from the service. After the war, he returned to working as a newspaper reporter, but he started developing physical symptoms of acromegaly, a disorder of the pituitary gland that progressively deforms the bones of the head, hands, and feet.

Rondo Hatton plays The Hoxton Creeper in "The Pearl of Death."

As fate would have it, Hatton’s worsening disfigurement brought him to the attention of filmmakers. In Hollywood, he was often cast in bit roles, including a man who loses an “Ugly Man” contest to Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo in 1939’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and a member of the lynch mob in 1943’s “The Ox-Bow Incident.” His breakthrough role was “The Hoxton Creeper” in the 1944 Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Pearl of Death,” starring Basil Rathbone, after which Universal Pictures cast him as “The Creeper” in what the studio hoped would be a series of horror films. In 1946, however, the 51-year-old Hatton succumbed to a heart attack, and Universal’s “House of Horrors” and “The Brute Man” were released posthumously.

By all accounts, Rondo Hatton, who had been voted the most handsome boy in his class at a Tampa high school (pictured above), was a sensitive man who was doubtlessly frustrated over being exploited by Hollywood, but he felt obligated to his contract. As if adding insult to injury, in 1944, a “Poverty Row” studio cranked out a B-movie titled “The Monster Maker” (pictured below) about a mad scientist who injects a famed concert pianist with a serum that induces acromegaly.

Acromegaly has affected, to lesser or greater extents, a number of notable personalities, including professional wrestler Andre the Giant (best known as Fezzik in “The Princess Bride”), Richard Kiel (best known as the steel-toothed assassin “Jaws” in a pair of James Bond films starring Roger Moore), Paul Benedict (best known as the British neighbor, Harry Bentley, on the CBS sitcom “The Jeffersons”), and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

In 1981, British actor John Hurt (pictured above, with Anthony Hopkins) received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his starring role in “The Elephant Man,” a biographical film inspired by the brief life of Joseph Merrick (called John in the movie), a severely deformed Londoner who died at the age of 27 in 1890. The exact cause of Merrick’s severe deformities remains unclear, although he might have suffered from a combination of a tumor disorder and a congenital disorder that causes skin overgrowth and anomalous bone development.

The extensive makeup for the movie, directed by David Lynch and executive produced by Mel Brooks, was based on casts from Merrick’s body under the supervision of Christopher Tucker, who created the original prosthetics for Michael Crawford in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “The Phantom of the Opera.”

The real-life Joseph Merrick posed for this portrait.

In the play “The Elephant Man,” written in 1977 by Bernard Pomerance, the role of Merrick is traditionally played without prosthetic makeup. Actors including Bruce Davison, David Bowie, Mark Hamill, and Bradley Cooiper depicted the deformity through physical posturing, leaving Merrick’s appearance to the imagination of the audience.

In 1985, Peter Bogdanovich directed “Mask,” based on the all too short life of Roy “Rocky” Dennis, a California teenager afflicted with craniodiaphyseal dyaplasia, also known as CCD (or lionitis), a bone disorder that causes calcium to build up in the skull that forces the face out of shape. CCD, a rare disease that affects one in every 220 million births, severely reduces life expectancy.

(Left) Rusty (Cher) comforts her son, Rocky (Eric Stoltz) in a scene from "Mask";
(right) the real-llife Rocky Dennis was only 16 when he died in 1978.

Roger Ebert praised “Mask” as “a wonderful movie, a story of high spirits and hope and courage.” The critic singled out Cher for making the role of “Rusty” Dennis, Rocky’s fiercely empowering biker mom, “one of the most interesting movie characters in a long time.” Although Cher and director Peter Bogdanovich were often contentious on the set, this was a period when she established herself as an actress of remarkable note, from 1982’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” to an Academy Award-nominated performance in 1983’s “Silkwood” to her Oscar-winning role in 1987’s “Moonstruck.”

Before Eric Stoltz was cast in the demanding role of the teenaged Rocky Dennis, other actors under consideration allegedly included 21-year-old Rob Lowe and 30-year-old Kevin Costner, whose breakout film, “Silverado,” would be released four months after “Mask” in 1985. It was also in 1985 that Stoltz was replaced by Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly after four weeks of filming “Back to the Future.”

The filmmakers thought the performance by Eric Stoltz (pictured above, with
Christopher Lloyd) was "terrifically dramatic" but too humorless for "Back to
the Future." Besides, Stoltz had difficulty riding a skateboard. Re-shooting his
scenes with Michael J. Fox added $3 million to the movie's $14 million budget.

Eric Stoltz spent so much time in his burdensome makeup for “Mask” that he was virtually unrecognizable at the production’s wrap party. More recently, Stoltz starred as Daniel Greystone in the 2009 “Battlestar Galactica” prequel series “Caprica” before moving behind the camera as a prolific director, with several episodes of “Glee” and “Madame Secretary” to his credit.

Blemished Pasts

Probably the most prevalent scars borne by actors are the pockmarks remaining from teenage acne. It goes without saying that the blemishes of adolescence are a cruel rite of passage for countless youths, but the pitted aftermaths are mercilessly amplified across a 30 by 70-foot multiplex screen.

There’s no denying that acne-scarred visages have actually enhanced the screen presence of a number of actor, including…

(From the top, left to right) Robert Davi, Edward James Olmos, Ray Liotta,
Danny Trejo, John Vernon, James Woods

These days, Proactiv struck gold when they roped in celebrities the likes of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Adam Levine, and Avril Lavigne as spokespeople for its acne skin are treatments, a far cry from the good old days when Dick Clark and Wolfman Jack peddled Clearisil on “American Bandstand.”

In 1976, when Chevy Chase left the Not Ready for Prime Time Players after the first season of “Saturday Night Live” to pursue a movie career, he left behind a cast that generally was glad he was gone, using words such as “scumbag” and “asshole” to describe him. For the second season, Bill Murray joined the show as, more or less, a replacement for Chase.

Bill Murray (center) is welcomed to "Saturday Night Live" by the Not Ready for
Prime Time Players Jane Curtin, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman,
and Dan Aykroyd.

Chevy Chase returned to guest-host “SNL” in 1978. After a long week of rehearsals rife with snarky exchanges and snubs between Chase and Murray – Murray implied that Chase couldn’t satisfy his wife in bed, Chase compared Murray’s acne-scarred face to the surface of the moon - they actually came to blows minutes before the program aired. After they were pulled apart, Murray called Chase a “medium talent.” A couple of years later, when Chase again hosted “SNL,” the two meekly reconciled in a duet of “I Write the Songs.”

In the 1980 hit comedy “Caddyshack,” the famed scene with Chevy Chase and Bill Murray (“Cannonball!”) wasn’t in the original script. It was added when director Harold Ramis realized that film’s two biggest box-office draws hadn’t been in a scene together. The three wrote the scene together over lunch. By all accounts, Murray and Chase were professional and polite towards each other on the set, but this would be the only time the two appeared together in a movie.

Incidentally, after hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 1997, Chevy Chase was banned for life because of his verbal abuse of the cast and crew. Johnny Carson once said of Chase, “He couldn’t ad lib a fart after a baked bean dinner.” But we digress.

There’s this neat little scene in 1988’s “Scrooged,” an unevenly comedic updating of A Christmas Carol starring Bill Murray, when three denizens of a homeless shelter are convinced Murray’s character is actor Richard Burton, who, like Murray, bore the facial scars of adolescent acne, and press him to deliver one of his Shakespearean soliloquy. Murray rattles off a hilarious litany of Burton-esque gibberish, culminating with, “I swear by thee, I foreswear!”

Anne Ramsey (best known for the title role in "Throw Momma from the Train")
shares a tender moment with "Dick Burton" in "Scrooged."

Throughout his storied, tumultuous life, Richard Burton was often self-conscious of his acne-scarred face. He was equally embarrassed by the remnants of acne across his back.

In his diary, Burton recalled a 1972 encounter with Paul Newman. Burton described Newman as “a famous and very distinguished man” and “a real actor.” Burton envied the “extraordinarily youthful looking” Newman, “with a complexion so peaches and cream that at first I thought he had makeup on.”

Burton wrote in his diary, “I would hate to look like him. I did once, before acne re-mapped my face, and I hated it. I abhor mere prettiness.”