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.

Thanksgiving in Toronto

For the second year running, I spent the Thanksgiving weekend in Toronto with my good friends. They have what Kim Jong-Il really wants: the World’s greatest turkey recipe. To wit, Napa Valley turkey (no, this is not bad red wine). They’ve been roasting and basting and invasively taking the temperature of this bubblyjock every year for twelve years now. How good was it? Let me count the ways: tender, briny, juicy, salty, gamy. This year I realized that even the night of the dinner is part of the recipe, leading up to the morning-after delicacy of perfect turkey sandwichvana. The key is to stuff as many peas as you can into the sandwich. Really, it’s the peas.

Otherwise, just good times in the T-Dot. The right mix of sentimentality and shuddering over undergrad days. Everyone in Montréal talks smack about Toronto whether they’ve lived there or not. This is starting to get my goat. Toronto's a great town. There’s a lot to be said for:

1) drivers who look out for signs so at least they know what laws they’re breaking.

2) vestigial courtesy.

3) superior public transportation.

4) this West Germanic way people have of expressing themselves. It reminded me of Frisian.

5) fine outposts of the coming Revolution like the Communist Daughter on Dundas St. They understand that party members need refreshment.

So lay off Toronto. Face it, if your career were going anywhere, you’d be there too. What? You won’t be a sell-out? I don’t see anyone making you an offer. I didn’t know you had anything besides self-deceptive principles to sell. You procrasturbating loser. As if you could make Toronto rent. This is the big city. Even the bums are big-city bums. They have more pride than mangy Montréal sans-abris...more pride than you. You’ve always nurtured a secret love for the Leafs. You know where your deposits go. The symbolism of the CN Tower can’t be homophobically snorted away. Even now, as you read, your eyelids are getting heavier…and heavier…you have a hankering for a double-double and Boston Cream and edible oil product…they’ll help you work that 60-hour week…that’s right…you’re soaring over the hick towns…shedding upon them your Milquetoast days and ways...you’re already in Toronto...now your sense of inferiority can be less geographical and more purely personal.

Confessions of a Boho Cinemaniac: Nothin’ Beats My Local Art Moviehouse (Take That, Becardiganed Bourgeois Idolaters of Box Office!)

When I’ve had my fill of pixilated airborne snakes and pirate sideburns, I make my way to the humble little picture house in my neighbourhood. I duck in, buy popcorn from the Tammy Faye look-alike who’s always smoking, and sit back to enjoy a good flick. I find I don’t even need to bring a date to enjoy myself.

With only one screen, the Cinéma de L’Amour will never have the greenbacks to serve up Box Office dynamite. Instead, their programmers scour the independent and foreign circuits (especially, it would seem, France and the Czech Republic) to bring me reels you’ll never see at your suburban, quiet-desperation, Starbucks-sipping Cineplex.

As a regular, I’m welcomed by name. The other kinoscenti are local eminentoes: landlords, professional chess kibitzers, and Portuguese men in their fifties who tend to keep their bulky coats and dark sunglasses on until the film starts. These guys are so into it that they won’t even sit next to you while watching. You can see them nodding furiously in recognition of the director’s auteurial savvy. And they’re not about to be distracted by their bladders—hence the frequent bathroom breaks. Afterwards, I’ve tried to get the odd filmlovers’ discussion going in the lobby, but I guess they feel I’m a little wet behind the ears yet to have anything worthwhile to add. Nevertheless! Amid the intense, anticipatory silence, it’s clear what the “L’Amour” is all about: the love of good cinéma.

I’m aware that independent film is more “hard-hitting” than the usual Hollywood fare. In fact, if you watch attentively, you’ll start to notice that through subtle editing and lighting effects, the love scenes tend to be more liberal. Hey, I’m sorry, but the beamer-driving, median-income-earning stout burghers are just going to have to deal with it. There will always be snivelling Babbitts to take offense at this kind of direct, no-nonsense art. These guys just don’t get irony. Take last week’s third of a quadruple-bill: Sgt. Pecker’s Lonely Hearts Club Gangbang, an uncompromising, scathing, satirical, hyphenated-adjective look back at 1960’s popular culture. But for the prude-shtapo, it was just a clichéd love story of the old boy-meets-girl-and-girl-and-girl variety. Well, all I can do is quote promoter Bobby the Brain Heenan, when he said of the sport of professional wrestling (no link to L’Amour should be inferred), “For those who get it, no explanation necessary; for those who don’t, no explanation will do.”

But I’m troubled by all the empty seats I always see around me at the Cinéma de L’Amour. I’d like them to be filled with local families instead of butter stains. Sad to say, a time may come when the playbill reads “Fermé” instead of “I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team.” I don’t want to see the theatre go out of business or be prostituted into an acting school or frenchie community centre. Come on so-called Canada Council for the Arts, we need these outposts of independent culture. I’m calling on my readers to make a difference here. Hey, it’s only $4 to get in, and they have a new feature every week. So grab a ticket and I’ll see you there. Just don’t sit next to me.

An Open Letter to Wal-Mart:

Mailed to:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Bentonville, Arkansas, USA 72716-8611

September 25, 2006

Dear Wal-Mart:

I have taken up space in these pages defending you against the demented charges of the liberal cancer. Whether you were aware of my efforts, I don’t know. I saw that it was beneath you to reply to those lumpen, as it would have been to thank me for horsewhipping them. You have real work to do. As for them, they may carry on their witch hunts against the successful. I shall stand by you on principle.

Or so I thought. Today I took a trip to the South Shore of Montréal to exchange my Ontario driver’s license for a Québec one. Next to what you would call the DMV, shone the aluminum siding of one of your outlets. In the parking lot, associates in Québecois true blue vests tapped their cigarettes into the ashtrays provided. They were so focused on their next challenge that their faces looked almost blank. Just like you, they have work to do. I hadn’t planned to, but I decided to go in, elbows out, and hunt for bargains. You see, I’d never actually visited one of your stores.

I expected a wide selection of lowish to moderate quality goods at unbeatable prices. Even your rabid detractors grant you that much. So I set out in search of toothpaste, cleaning products, breakfast cereal, pens, etc. OK, so you don’t carry Allenbury’s soap, or the Pentel pens I like, or my brand of garbage bags, or a few other things. I guess it wasn’t my day. You’d get that stuff in for me next month. But what really got me was that among the stuff you did have, your prices were higher than my neighbourhood markets (Segal’s and Sakaris).

Now, the fame of Segal’s may not have spread quite as far as Bentonville. Those who know Segal’s Grocery know that it’s a special place—the prices are phenomenal and it’s deservedly famous. But these guys have to pay St. Laurent rent, and they have one zillionth the floor space of a Wal-Mart, and they have a skeleton staff, and they’re killing you. Sakaris prices are more normal, but I found comparisons not in your favour. Thirty cents more for a box of Cheerios means something to a coupon-clipping Scot. Everywhere I turned in Wal-Mart, everything was comically shoddy or overpriced. There was almost noone else there. The muzak was awful. I stopped humming. The muzak stopped. There was no muzak. I had to get out.

Asphyxiating, I grabbed a family-sized bottle of Pine-Sol and checked out. Back in the lot, I read the label: Poison, Do Not Swallow. Why had I bought this product I’d never bought before? I had floor cleaner at home. I sweated freely. The grizzled Wal-Mart associates, puffing away, looked me over. They seemed to say, Well bub, are you gonna do it? We all used to teach like you. But none of us had the guts to do it.

Curses and derision on you Wal-Mart, and bad luck to you. Your prices aren’t the lowest. You’re a sham and a shame. You suck. You have no reason to exist. You’re the thing that should not be. You're a fleck of sand in God's eye. You’re a symptom of the post-modern whatchamacallit. You’re stealing my oxygen. You killed Socrates. You make my students play violent video games. You make people like me into incoherent, ranting liberals.

Sirs: I don’t intend to take my business to Wal-Mart any longer.

Yours very truly,

DT

From the Poland Files: He Did It for La Patrie

After work one day, we went to Mózg, the town art bar. Mózg means Brain, or A Brain, or even The Brain. It was spacious and comfortably pretentious: black velvet curtains hung on the walls, grotty sofas, beer-stained canvases for sale. The clientele were mainly young men with ponytails and glasses who wanted to discuss politics, and lovely girls who didn’t. At Mózg you could buy 40 kinds of vodka, and two kinds of beer—both of which went down like razors. Behind a mesh of chickenwire, there was a girl drilling the anti-theft devices out of cassettes and selling them.

Steve got in the first round of beers. We English teachers shuffled to our corner sofa and got down to another night of ETT (English Teacher Talk, or shop talk. The acronym was based on the pedagogical concept of TTT—Teacher Talking Time. Both TTT and ETT were supposed to be minimized to create nurturing space for the emergence of a real conversation.)

Kieran complained about his students. Sarah complained about her students. Steve, fiddling with his earring, complained about his students. I started to tell them about a great book I was reading, interrupting myself to complain about my students. Everyone drank furiously—this was going to be a long night.

Thankfully, Will arrived, plunked himself down and told us about the time he used to be a parking valet in London and had had to drive an arch-criminal’s Harley the wrong way through the Dartford Tunnel to get it to an armored parking garage on time. He bobbed, he weaved, he ducked mirrors. Later he got a phial of poppers as a tip. We nodded appreciatively as he drained his glass. Will and his shoulder-length red hair were twenty years older than the rest of us. None of us had any real idea where they’d come from. One of the new teachers, too clever by half, began asking questions trying to pick holes in the story, but we shut him up quick. It was a great story, and we were glad to hear it. Will’s pasts were replete with sex, drugs, violence and John Bull outdrinking and overcoming all feeble gestures towards modernity. Like cartoons, there was no problem of guilt or neurosis. The dead were reassembled off-screen to turn up again with such energy that there was no time to ask questions. All there was to do in this town was drink or go to one of the two one-screen theatres to soak yourself in Hollywood’s more bankable reels. You took diversion where you could get it.

It was shaping up to be an unremarkable night, when a very large Polish man in jeans and a sweatshirt approached us. He had the #2 shaved head, jutting chin and heavy build that you only see on Polish men or professional boxers. He asked whether he might be permitted to sit down. We said sure. He sat down. He looked at us in turn. I tried to guess whether I came up to his shoulder. In a steady voice he said something in Polish that we didn’t understand. We swallowed hard. Then he said in good French:

“I overheard you speaking. Forgive my rudeness. I always enjoy speaking with foreigners because it’s the only real talk you get around here.” I got over my surprise to translate this for my friends. We were all surprised: English, German, Russian, maybe, but you just didn’t meet locals here who spoke French. His name was Grzegorz. He was indeed a local. Before Solidarity and the fall of communism he’d vamoosed to join up with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Those were his brothers, his real family. Those were men who acted like men. Once you’ve lived in the desert with men and drunk under the desert moon and fried and eaten snakes together and practiced garroting each other, you’re brothers.

Following our approach with Will, we egged him on and asked him all kinds of fool questions about secret missions and death and glory. He clammed up and half turned away, telling us that he knew we thought he was a dog. No, we told him, you’re no dog. Tell us more about Tunisia. No, he said, it’s no use, to you I’ll always be a dog, a dirty dog. Not at all, we said, winking to each other, how can we show you you could never be a low-down dirty dog to us?

He said we could look at his tattoos, that would help. A couple of us demurred. But by now we were high on our own hilarity and really kinda curious so we said, OK, show us. He lifted his sweatshirt, turned away to reveal the kidney area of one side of his back. The swastika was black, turned 45º, about six inches across, scored into him with a blunt needle unlikely to have been held by any very sober hand. Kieran groaned. Sarah clapped a hand to her mouth. Grzegorz rolled up his sleeve to show us more. He had some cryptograms jotted across his bicep.

“I know you think I’m a racist dog,” he said. “But this says death to Jews and Muslims. We all got this one when we were initiated.” Well of course he did. Will tried to change the subject by asking about the fate of a bar he used to bounce at in Tunisia. The rest of us tried out cowardly excuses to ready ourselves for a cowardly back door sneak-out. When Grzegorz saw how antsy we were, he told us he hadn’t meant to offend us, and he was taking us all out for a steak dinner. We pointed out that it was past midnight and Polish restaurants close at eight. Besides, even though we were English teachers trained to live on beer, some of us had actually had dinner.

“You will come with me,” he said, in the same toneless French. “Taxis for everyone. I’m buying you all steak dinners.”

“Nowhere to go. Next time.”

“I know a woman in the country who’ll cook us all steak dinners.”

Yes, his plan was to tumble his poor aunt or sister-in-law out of bed, tie on her apron and make her cook for ten. Jesus. Did he really think she had a decade of fresh steaks and trimmings in the fridge? What did he really want with us? Just what bad habits had he picked up during those long Tunisian nights, staring up into the mad face of Orion? Was I going to be just another statistic—the latest English teacher turned gimp? Would we be pressed into his local chapter of the Legion and marched across the desert to garrote Semites indiscriminately? We were cowards. We knew this had ceased to be a time for politeness, but we went on declining as politely as we could. He would have none of it, we were leaving in five minutes for steak dinners. He got up to piss. We scrambled for the door and clattered down the stairs and through the alley to the silent street. The icy air burnt our lungs. Not far away we poured ourselves into taxis whose moustachioed, Sobieski-smoking drivers whisked us home.

The next day we could not agree whether from the street a voice had been heard booming out “I am not a dog! I am not a dog!” But sometimes since, bored with those who pass for lunatics these days, I like to think that I did hear it.