Honorable Mention
It has always seemed strange to me that Peter Lorre, who had a long career of playing interesting and often sinister characters, somehow got labelled as a horror icon later in his career, in movies like The Raven, or that episode of Route 66 he did with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr.
And yet this classic 1935 film is probably the only time he played an iconic horror role before he became a horror icon.
Oh, well. It’s probably Roger Corman’s fault.
But you have to admit that his Dr. Gogol is one of the all-time great mad scientists, not just of the first horror cycle of the Thirties, but of horror films in general. Gogol is a strange little man, obsessed with the girl, Yvonne, he sees tortured every night in the Grand Guignol theater. He is an absolutely brilliant surgeon who loves his work, his patients and even little children, who has dedicated himself to trying to alleviate the suffering of others.
Mind you, Yvonne, is married to the famous concert pianist Stephen Orlac, and she’s more than a little disturbed by Dr. Gogol’s ardor.
Plus, he is seriously creepy.
But this doesn’t stop Yvonne from asking for his help when Orlac’s hands are crushed in a train accident. Gogol says there is nothing he can do and plans to amputate, but he finds that he can’t refuse her pleading, so he decides on something far more radical and experimental. He gets the corpse of an American knife murderer, Rollo (played by the ever-welcome Edward Brophy, who specialized in slightly comic tough guys), and transplants his hands onto Orlac.
Without telling Orlac that he actually gave him a new pair of hands.
As you’d expect, this does not end up well. Orlac knows there’s something wrong with his hands — they do not look or feel like his hands, and he suddenly acquires a knack for throwing knives.
And when Orlac comes to him with these problems and reacts in horror to the truth, Gogol sets out on a new, mad plan to win Yvonne for himself…
Right around this time, MGM made a handful of sound horror films, starting with Freaks in 1932. They had their eye on the success of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, and the four (or six, depending on how you choose to count them) are all more or less classics, with production values as good as the films coming out of Universal.
Then, just as suddenly, they stopped making horror films, only returning to the genre again in 1941 with a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (and The Portrait of Dorian Gray in 1945, if you count that one as a full-fledged horror film).
With nothing to follow until 1960, and Village of the Damned. But that’s another story.
I suppose MGM’s horror films just weren’t successful enough, although that doesn’t entirely explain what happened. Clearly there was still a market for horror films out there, as you had all the Poverty Row studios hard at work making them well into the next decade. While I’m not sure how well Universal’s films from the second and third horror cycles actually fared at the theaters, they still were a moneymaker for the studio because they made them on far tighter budgets.
Whatever the case, MGM made a flashy entrance into the genre, and then left it just as suddenly.
And when you compare it to the other horror films of the era, Mad Love is a standout. There is a nice, expressionist quality to the film, which shows in the entire design of the production and not just the sets: yes, we have the strange facade of the Gran Guignol theater, with its devil’s head; we have Gogol’s surprisingly spacious apartment house, with high ceilings in his room, and strange, low beams supporting the roof in his laboratory; but we also have the eerie robed figures and torture equipment of the theatre, we have the creepy presence of Yvonne’s wax figure in Gogol’s apartment, and most of all Gogol’s shaved head and very foreign looking clothes. But it is its finest moment is one of the greatest triumphs of Thirties Hollywood expressionism, when Orlac has an eerie encounter with the dead murderer, Rollo, in a bravura scene which combines iconic costume design, incredible cinematography and a stunning performance from Peter Lorre.
I also have to admit that I love Gogol’s descent into madness at the end of the film. He knows he has gone mad, but is thoroughly enjoying it. It is a remarkably fine performance from Lorre in what had to be a very demanding role, as he has to be sympathetic and a bit sad early on — and yet project something a deeply unsettling at the same time. However, his performance is even more remarkable when you remember that this was only his second American film, that he’d come to fame only four years earlier in Fritz Lang’s M (and had appeared in only two prior films).
While there are a few other familiar faces in the film, including Colin Clive as Orlac, Keye Luke (Charlie Chan’s Number One Son) as Gogol’s assistant at the Hospital, and Billy Gilbert, of all people, doing a brief cameo as an obsessive autograph hunter, the other real star of the film was behind the camera: it was the last of the handful of films directed by the legendary German Cinematographer Karl Freund (which included The Mummy and work on Dracula), and he brings a beautiful, Expressionist look and feel to the film. It’s the only one of MGM’s four horror films Todd Browning did not direct, and it is mildly amusing that they brought in yet another director from Universal for the job.
I’ve seen several film versions of the story, The Hands of Orlac: it started out as a French novel, but has been filmed over and over again since the silent era. Mad Love is by far the best of these.
Not because it is particularly faithful to the original. In fact, I have serious doubts about how much came from the book and how much they invented. Although it is hard to say because I haven’t read the book and there are major plot differences between all the various filmed versions.
But what makes it better than the others is its weird sense of style, its potent images, Peter Lorre’s performance, and all the creepy details (like that wax dummy).
It’s not the best horror film that followed Dracula, but it is a remarkable and memorable one.
And I doubt if you will forget Rollo’s return from the dead anytime soon…
rivets on the poster 
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