Crew
Director – Claude Mulot, Screenplay – Jean Larriaga, Claude Mulot & Edgar Oppenheimer, Photography – Roger Fellous, Music – Jean-Pierre Dorsay. Production Company – Transatlantic Production.
Cast
Philippe Lemaire (Frederic Lansac), Anny Duperey (Anne Lansac), Howard Vernon (Professor Hugo Romer), Olivia Robin (Barbara), Roberto (Igor), Johnny Cacao (Olaf), Elisabeth Teissier (Moira), Michelle Perello (Agnes), Valerie Boisgel (Catherine), Gerard Huart (Wilfried), Jacques Seiler (Inspector Dorsay)
Plot
The artist Frederic Lansac meets Anne and becomes entranced, abandoning his girlfriend Moira for her. He and Anne marry but an aggrieved Moira turns up at the ceremony, causing Anne to fall into the fire where she is hideously burned. Frederic announces that Anne has died and retreats to his family chateau, becoming a recluse. There he keeps Anne in a wheelchair, tended by two imbecilic dwarf servants Igor and Olaf. Frederic then discovers that Hugo Romer, the man he has hired to run his botanical centre, is a former surgeon who was sent to prison following a botched operation. He blackmails Romer with the knowledge that he is conducting blackmarket operations and forces him to do something to restore Anne’s face. Romer determines that the only way that Anne’s face can be restored is by a full facial graft from another woman – but to do so would mean having to kill the donor. Frederic and Romer then set about to find the perfect woman for the operation.
The Blood Rose was the second film from French director Claude Mulot (1942-86). Mulot made a handful of other films but then a couple of years later began to specialise in making adult films. Only two of Mulot’s other films are of genre interest as far as I can ascertain with Programmed for Pleasure (1981) about a sex android and the erotic horror Knife Under the Throat (1986). The latter would be Mulot’s last film – he died in a swimming accident four months after the film’s release. The Blood Rose was not widely seen when it came out but makes for interesting rediscovery.
At first glance, The Blood Rose seems to be homaging Eyes Without a Face (1959), the French horror classic that defined the theme of the Mad Surgeon. In that film, surgeon Pierre Brasseur abducts women so as to conduct a facial transplant replacement for his disfigured daughter. The Blood Rose has artist Philippe Lemaire similarly searching for the perfect woman to use as a transplant for his disfigured wife Anny Duperey. As the surgeon, the film casts Howard Vernon – another homage in that Vernon played the title role in Jess Franco’s The Awful Dr Orloff (1962) and sequels, which were an exploitation copycat of Eyes Without a Face.
I would have no problem classifying The Blood Rose as a Mad Surgeon film and one homaging Eyes Without a Face but for one small thing – we never actually see the surgeon conducting any operation. The film is certainly about the plans to find the right woman and preparations for the operation but there is one twist at the end where this doesn’t happen and no surgery is performed. Instead, the thrust of the film lies in the blackmailing of professor Howard Vernon, then Vernon and Philippe Lemaire then searching for the right woman as donor, plus assorted scenes where the disfigured wife and dwarfs kill or pursue people.
In this regard, The Blood Rose is a film that plants its feet squarely in the Continental Gothic. There are all manner of Gothic plot devices – the lord of the manor with the hideously disfigured wife (whose face we never see – just point-of-view shots – until right at the end); two imbecilic dwarf servants who later rape one of the girls, killing her; and such lurid plot devices as a plant with poisonous spikes, which the disfigured wife uses to get rid of her husband’s mistress by asking her to water them.
Claude Mulot makes an interesting film pictorially. The film is shot at a rustic chateau – one that looks in a state of half-abandon with a roofless abbey in the grounds. (the actual locations were Chateau Royal, Duvivier and the Chateau d’Auneau). There is a dream-like scene in the middle where Michelle Perello drifts through the grounds holding a candle, kissing the buried body of the murdered woman, which causes her to come back to life, before the woman and dwarfs ominously close in on her like zombies. Or other scenes of pure Gothic with Olivia Robin in nightgown walking through the halls and out into the mist-covered grounds holding a candelabra.
Trailer here