Movie Review: Mad Love (The Hands of Orlac) Karl Freund, 1935

With apologies to Russian literature, Peter Lorre is Dr. Gogol, a spooky sawbones obsessed with shock actress Yvonne’s nightly role of torturee in the Spanish Inquisition. Naturally, Yvonne is repulsed by the doctor’s baldness, affected mannerisms, sleepy eyes and Hungarian accent. But when her Chopin wannabe husband Orlac is mangled in a train wreck, she needs the master surgeon’s help to get Orlac tickling the ivories again. The purity of their love is established, since Yvonne thinks of no other reason to get her husband’s hands functional. The mad doctor comes through madly—by madly grafting a freshly-executed murderer’s mad hands onto Orlac. Madness. The hands take on a life of their own, Orlac stalks Yvonne, the sun doesn’t come up for three days, and the police race to solve the trail of murders.

This was Peter Lorre’s first Hollywood film. Playing a psychopath as only he can, there’s more than a trace of M in his performance. He plays perfectly the baby-faced boy-genius set adrift in a gnostically flawed cosmos of lust, deceit and rage. There’s “I, a poor peasant, have mastered science…why can’t I master love?!”, in the same tone as “Rick, they’re after me. You’ve got to help me!” from Casablanca. Like Anthony Hopkins and Alan Rickman, Lorre refrains from scenery-chewing, instead creeping us out by bringing class and excellent manners to crazies who can go off at any moment. Lorre’s reaction shots, especially, show a world-weary familiarity with all the sadism, masochism, voyeurism and blood-lust the Hayes Office smugly thought it had kept off the screen.

This movie can be hard to find, and even if you do, it may be on a scungy old VHS or in an expensive DVD box set. There are some cut-down and censored versions out there: the full runtime should be around 70 minutes. Look for it.

If you were going to take the story more seriously than you should, you could say it’s a dandy Frankenstein-inspired tale of mind-body dualism. So yeah, the body can be guilty of crimes, and the mind innocent, yet the two can't be punished separately. Dr. Frankenstein, the mind, creates a body whose actions cannot be controlled, fails to separate himself from it, and perishes. Outside of the Shelley-medical-industrial complex, this is the old demonic possession tale. I feel inspired to teach a class on horror literature and film: The Human Body Outta Control. Poe! Stephen King’s old short stories! H. P. Lovecraft! Pet Sematary! Scanners! Night of the Living Dead! The Exorcist! The Thing! The Fly! Further suggestions welcome.