Karl Freund (1935)

Mad Love is based on Maurice Renard’s 1920 horror story Les mains d’Orlac in which the title character, a virtuoso pianist, following an accident that ruins his hands, receives the transplanted hands of a murderer.  These hands have a life of their own and turn Orlac into a killer too.  Renard’s novel was first adapted for the screen in 1924, when Conrad Veidt starred in the Austrian silent movie Orlacs Hände, directed by Robert Wiene.  In this second adaptation, Orlac becomes a supporting character:  the film’s protagonist is the doctor who performs the transplant.  The story was rewritten (the screenplay is by John L Balderston and Guy Endore) as a vehicle for Peter Lorre, whose Hollywood debut this was, and Mad Love is clearly designed to capitalise on his sinister oddness, which had come to international attention in M (1931).  Lorre was only thirty-one when he made Mad Love but, as Dr Gogol, he looks much older.  And ghastly:  his moon face is so large that it’s not just his exophthalmic eyes that appear swollen but his whole head.  (I saw the film in a BFI double bill with The Face Behind the Mask, which Lorre made six years later and in which he seems much younger.)   When Orlac’s actress wife Yvonne (Frances Drake), whom Gogol adores, tells him that she can’t reciprocate his feelings because she loves her husband, she adds, ‘Besides, there’s something about you …’  This is putting it very mildly.

Karl Freund was best known as a cinematographer – of Metropolis (1927) and, after emigrating to work in Hollywood, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and, later in the decade, The Good Earth (1937), for which Freund won an Oscar.  According to IMDB, he didn’t direct again after Mad Love and it’s not hard to see why.  Although entertaining enough, the film is disorienting in the early stages only because it’s disjointed and it turns into an increasingly crude horror movie.  (Pauline Kael doesn’t rate it although she notes the picture’s influence on the look of Citizen Kane – Gregg Toland was one of the cinematographers on Mad Love – and the physical resemblance between Lorre and Orson Welles made up as the older Charles Foster Kane.)   Putting the Lorre character at the centre means that the material is not so much reshaped as misshapen.  With Orlac in a secondary role (just as well in that Colin Clive’s acting is extremely ropy), the horror of the supernatural hands is reduced too.  The murderer Rollo – who is executed and whose hands Dr Gogol transplants – is, as played by Edwin Brophy, one of a small minority of the dramatis personae who seems agreeable, even normal.  Karl Freund doesn’t suggest either that Gogol knows what Orlac’s manual inheritance will lead to and that he sees this as a way of possessing Yvonne.

The character of the doctor is confusing:  he’s introduced as a gifted paediatrician and a genius of reconstructive surgery.  There’s no evidence that his work with children and war casualties is anything but benign – yet his suspiciously exotic surname and Lorre’s screen persona make him worryingly bizarre from the start.  Lorre is so evidently extraordinary that he obliterates any sense of Gogol’s being crazed into malignity and there’s nothing tragic about the doctor’s obsession with Yvonne.  His mad love is, throughout, illustrated in creepy ways. (Gogol buys from the theatre where Yvonne’s been appearing in a play a waxwork figure of her, which he keeps in his otherwise lonely rooms.)  Peter Lorre has nothing like the opportunities he was given, and that he seized, in M  to confront the audience with the murderer’s passion for the evil he was doing.  With Henry Kolker as a préfet, Ted Healy as an American reporter, Ian Wolfe as Orlac’s stepfather (and even worse than Colin Clive), May Beatty as Gogol’s drunken housekeeper.

3 September 2014