Mad Love **** (1934, Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy) – Classic Movie Review 3111

Peter Lorre gives a superbly creepy performance as the mad surgeon Doctor Gogol in the enjoyable 1934 second film of Maurice Renard’s novel The Hands of Orlac.

Director Karl Freund’s 1934 MGM horror movie classic Mad Love stars Peter Lorre in a thoroughly intriguing, involving and enjoyable second film of the celebrated Maurice Renard novel Les Mains D’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac). It was previously filmed as a silent in Germany as The Hands of Orlac [Orlacs Hände] in 1924 with Conrad Veidt as Orlac.

This time Lorre gives a superbly creepy performance as the mad surgeon Doctor Gogol, in love with delicious stage actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) in Paris. He agrees to operate on the mutilated hands of her piano-playing concert pianist husband Stephen (Colin Clive), badly crushed in a train accident, replacing them with the hands of a knife-throwing lunatic, executed murderer Rollo (Edward Brophy).

Mad Love is a  very satisfying slab of Gothic horror lifted by the stylish and stylised direction from famed cameraman Freund, the gleaming black and white cinematography of Chester A Lyons and Gregg Toland, and the scene-stealing, breathless, gruesome turn from shaven-scalped Lorre in only his second English-language film (after Hitchcock’s 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much).

Also in the cast are Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty, Cora Sue Collins, Frank Darien, Billy Gilbert, Sarah Padden, Rolfe Sedan, Charles Trowbridge, Clarence Wilson, Ian Wolfe, Otto Hoffman, Robert Emmett Keane, Murray Kinnell and Rollo Lloyd.

Isabel Jewell is named as a star on the poster, but her scenes as Marianne were deleted. Harold Huber, George Davis, Billy Dooley and Leo White also had their appearances cut out.

The screenplay by Florence Crewe-Jones, Guy Endore, P J Wolfson and John L Balderston is taken from the famous novel The Hands of Orlac (Les Mains D’Orlac) by Maurice Renard and remade under that title in 1960 as The Hands of Orlac and again as the low-budget Hands of a Stranger in 1962, directed by Newt Arnold.

Also Body Parts (1991) draws on Renard’s story, plus The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), The Crawling Hand (1963), The Hand (1981) directed by Oliver Stone, and Les Mains de Roxana (2012).

The titles are painted on a glass window, broken when a fist smashes through it.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3111

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