An insane surgeon's obsession with an actress leads him to replace her wounded pianist husband's hands with the hands of a knife murderer--hands which still have the urge to throw knives.
Peter Lorre Frances Drake Colin Clive Ted Healy Isabel Jewell Sara Haden Edward Brophy Henry Kolker Keye Luke May Beatty Ian Wolfe Edward Lippy Frank Darien Murray Kinnell Rollo Lloyd Charles Trowbridge Nell Craig Robert Emmett Keane Agostino Borgato Billy Gilbert Hooper Atchley Maurice Brierre Julie Carter Harvey Clark Michael Mark Alphonse Ethier Matty Roubert Otto Hoffman Cora Sue Collins Show All…
Las manos de Orlac, The Mad Doctor of Paris, The Hands of Orlac, Orlacs Hände, Les mains d'Orlac, Amore folle, Çılgın Aşk, 疯狂之爱
USANR
USA
He's just lucky that he got knife-throwing hands, instead of, say, public masturbating hands.
Awesome—no denying this is must see pulpy creepy fun... Lorre is on another level here.
75
Peter Lorre has never been creepier than in this Karl Freund-directed, Gregg Toland-DP shocker. A mad scientist tale with operatic modes of jealousy.
this is a wickedly perverse and bold film. i knew i’d be in love when a clenched fist hurled through an icy window with the cast credits scrawled on it. part of the pleasure is purely aesthetic. peter lorre’s bulbous, roaming, yearning eyes. frances drake’s cascading hair and silken dresses. but really it comes down to karl freund’s work as a director. what piqued my interest with watching this film was keeping in mind freund’s work as a cinematographer with german expressionist masterworks like “the last laugh” and “metropolis”. you can see the echoes of this history in the consuming shadows that drape the surfaces and faces of the film. here shadows don’t just consume but flutter, grow, deepen, and…
peter lorre was 5'3"
Impossible?
Impossible.
Napoleon said that word is not French!
Leave it to Peter Lorre to be the iconic bad man with huge pathos. Instead of feeling for the Orlacs we are left somehow feeling bad for and aching with a mad doctor. The perverse man struggles with his inner demons at the impasse of unrequited love, unable to get out of his dark corner of loneliness. The consequences are devastating and manifest Lorre as a tragic anti-hero, simultaneously the catalyst of the good and bad and what consequences come staggering forth.
Karl Freund paints gothic horror with greasy, oil-black shadows canvassing the walls. The foreshadowing is grand with images of hands and knives. The rest of the composition is simple but powerfully…
1st Karl Freund (followed by The Mummy)
Took until the rewatch started with the Everett Sloan parody (finally restored in the Blu-Ray) to realise where the comedy is coming from in Mad Love; it’s ferociously riffing on the Universal horror’s baroque sadism, right down to the presence of Grand Guignol, that bastion of artistic cruelty. It’s not camp, mind, a la Whale’s film of the same year. Here, all those torture chambers, simian injections and brain transplants stretching credulity to breaking point in MGM’s luxurious house of horrors and delivered with a po-straight face. Science has truly gone too far in this tale of metacarpal misadventures. That Colin Clive, Frankenstein himself, plays the now-supporting role of Orlac only underlines the…
what a beauty. when it wasn't being funny this really scared my soft lil heart, if i'd seen it in 1935 i probably would have died
Leave it to Peter Lorre to make me realize just how creepy the Pygmalion–Galatea myth is. He gives a delicious twist on the mad scientist trope and the worst seduction line of all time: “I, a poor peasant, have conquered science. Why can’t I conquer love. Don’t you understand? You must be mine!” (Also hat tip to whoever decided to name Lorre’s Dr Gogol after my favorite Russian author.)
Colin Clive, who’d been used to doing the chopping and sewing as Dr Frankenstein, gets the tables turned on him as pianist who receives a transplant of murderous hands from Lorre (though I’m not sure who botched Frances Drake’s eyebrow transplants from a much larger head.)
Karl Freund’s hybrid DNA of German Expressionism (Metropolis) and Universal Horror (Dracula, The Mummy) plus Gregg Toland’s cinematography results in a delightfully stylized gothic aesthetic and atmosphere.
“Every night I’ve watched you.”
The Hands of Orlac goes fully talkie in Karl Freund’s theater-of-the-macabre, Mad Love. Peter Lorre as the obsessed Dr. Gogol, bald head and aggressive kisses, ranting about Pygmalion and Galatea, is wonderfully “queer people"; both a sweet surgeon and a menacing psychopath. Drinks from the same circus trough as The Unknown, with knife throwing murderers and a fascination with the horror of hands. Ending a little too abrupt, but it still feels like a minor triumph this was even allowed to be made in the newly Hays Coded ‘35, with its insinuation of necrophilia, head transplants and that terrifying image of the disguised doctor.
"Each man kills the thing he loves."
The classic story of Orlac, the concert pianist with the hands of a killer! Freund tightens the original with a vigorous, pulpy flow, filling the screen with Lorre's discomfiting charisma. Campy zooms and subtle camera trickery set this apart from many of it's peers. It's the macabre as a thrill ride.
There’s a moment where Bald Peter Lorre looks down the eye of the camera and I’m pretty sure I felt him pierce right through nine decades and into my still wavering soul. Captured not unlike a great starlet, in floods of moonlight and soft focus, the great Gregg Toland forces the looming figure of our good doc to really pop against Expressionistic shadows and darkened sets. At once, exemplifying his pain and highlighting a grotesque figure for all to see.
Lorre digs deep to pull off this character that is one on hand, bordering on the edge of obsessive, creepy insanity and the other, strangely sympathetic. Menace and pathos all in the same multi-thousand yard stare. We see a man,…
