MOVIES : A ‘Face’ You Won’t Forget : A stunning new print of Georges Franju’s 1959 horror tale gives this model of discreet terror a well-deserved facelift. Creepy rarely gets this good.

From its expressive title to its brilliant, unsettling images, “Les Yeux Sans Visage” (Eyes Without a Face) is a film to haunt your dreams. One of the least known of the classic horror movies of world cinema, this model of insinuating, understated terror is being revived in a stunning new 35 mm print for only three nights (Tuesday through Thursday) at the Nuart in West Los Angeles. It would be a pity to miss it.

Directed by Georges Franju, “Les Yeux” was first released in 1959, but its pulp subject matter and disturbing imagery led many European critics to dismiss it, a situation it shared with Michael Powell’s equally bizarre 1960 “Peeping Tom.” In the United States, its fate couldn’t have been more ignoble: It was dubbed and released under the improbable title of “The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.”

Though this film and 1963’s “Judex” have a small but passionate following, Georges Franju, who died in 1987, remains one of France’s underappreciated directors. The co-founder, along with the better-known Henri Langlois, of the Cinematheque Francais, Franju worked for years as a director of documentary shorts, including the slaughterhouse-themed “La Sange des Betes,” that earned him the respect of the younger filmmakers of the French New Wave.

“Les Yeux Sans Visage” was only Franju’s second feature, made when he was 47, and, he explained to an interviewer, it was filmed under a series of restrictions. “I was told, ‘No sacrilege because of the Spanish market, no nudes because of the Italian market, no blood because of the French market and no martyrized animals because of the English market.’ And I was supposed to be making a horror film!”

A surrealist who believed with compatriot Jean Cocteau that “the more you touch on mystery, the more important it is to be realistic,” Franju’s ability overcame all obstacles. “What is artificial ages badly and quickly,” he wrote. “Dream, poetry, the unknown must all emerge out of reality itself. The whole of cinema is documentary, even the most poetic. What pleases is what is terrible, gentle and poetic.”

Certainly those adjectives fit the story of “Les Yeux,” adapted by several writers, including first assistant director and future director Claude Sautet, from a novel by Jean Redon that sounds in outline like a completely conventional horror item.

A young woman, her eyes untouched but the rest of her face “a vast open wound,” has disappeared from a clinic where she was taken after a terrible automobile accident. Meanwhile her father, the celebrated Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur, more impassive than he was in “Children of Paradise”), lectures on the future possibilities of the heterograft, the transplanting of living tissue from one human being to another.

It turns out that the doctor’s ideas are more than theoretical. Helped by his assistant Louise (“The Third Man’s” Alida Valli), this brilliant madman has been kidnapping young women in Paris, removing the skin from their faces and attempting a transplant on the visage of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), whom he has hidden away in the attic of his chateau. How the relentless doctor (who experiments on dogs in his spare time), the devoted Louise and most of all Christiane cope with the effects of his horrific experimentation is the frame this singular film is built on.

Despite its gruesome plot, one of the hallmarks of “Les Yeux” is the austerity with which it’s made, how little that is blatantly horrific Eugen Shufftan’s exceptional but discreet black-and-white camera work allows us to see. The reason, Franju explained, is that he envisioned “Les Yeux” as “an anguish film. It’s a quieter mood than horror . . . more internal, more penetrating. It’s horror in homeopathic doses.”

In part because of this delicacy, Franju and Shufftan’s remarkable gift for the visual makes “Les Yeux” the spookiest of movies, filled with elegant and poetic images that express longing, terror and despair. Aided by Maurice Jarre’s unsettling music, everything that appears on screen, from the doctor’s shiny black Citroen to Christiane’s angelic Givenchy outfits to the film’s final image, one of the most unforgettable ever created, is meticulously calculated to create unease.

The film’s most classic horror scene is an unflinching look at one of the doctor’s blasphemous face-peeling operations. Though in terms of blood and special effects the sequence is pristine, even artificial, by today’s dubious standards, it remains disturbing enough to make the skin crawl far into the night.

Even more psychologically unsettling are the sequences that show Christiane floating around the chateau like a dispossessed ghost. Over her ravaged face she wears one of Franju’s most telling inspirations, a clinging thin plastic mask with holes cut out for her untouched eyes, a mask both expressionless and expressive that creates the powerful sense of poignancy and loss that is the film’s most impressive achievement.

With visuals whose power words can only hint at, “Les Yeux Sans Visage” has been a hidden pleasure few Americans have been able to experience. Given the vagaries of film exhibition and the uncertainty of the foreign revival market, it is little less than a miracle that a new print of this strange and wonderful creation has appeared, and the chance to see it again on the big screen it cries out for may never happen again. If you miss it this time around, there will likely be no catching up.

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“Eyes Without a Face,” Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tuesday-Thursday, 4:30, 7 and 9:30 p.m. $7.50; $4.25 for senior citizens and children. (310) 478-6379.