Face Value: The Rhetoric of Facial Disfigurement in American Film and Popular Culture, 1917–1927

Abstract

The return of facially disfigured men from the trenches of World War One occasioned a muted public reaction in the US. However, this article will show that burgeoning discourses concerning plastic surgery in the US also generated a significant reaction in the popular press, and that these were reflected, too, in several feature films dealing with facial surgery on disfigured veterans. Though several of these films depicted miraculous transformations occasioned by the surgeons, Robert Florey’s 1927 film, Face Value, focused on an American veteran with facial scarring that could not be repaired. The article will argue that this film drew strongly upon the increasingly prominent public presence of the gueules cassées in the US during 1926 and 1927. Depicting gueules cassées and their facial injuries prominently in several scenes, the film brought to attention difficult questions concerning the futures of such men, which the US media had hitherto rarely addressed.

Keywords:

• Disfigurement
• Cinema
• Veterans
• Hollywood
• Plastic surgery
• Robert Florey
• Face
• World War I

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Brian Taves for his helpful responses concerning Robert Florey and for the use of frame stills from Face Value. This film is available for viewing at the Library of Congress.

Notes

1 For an account of the painstaking application of make-up in this picture, see ‘Movie Facts and Fancies,’ Boston Daily Globe (25 Nov 1922), p. 12.

2 The American Film Institute Catalogue lists a series of sixteen movies with plastic surgery themes between 1922 and 1930.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joe Kember

Notes on contributor

Joe Kember is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Exeter, UK. His research concerns nineteenth century media, early and silent cinema, with particular interests in visual depictions of the human face in this period.