Cinematical

"Mr [Peter] Lorre, with every physical handicap, can convince you of the goodness, the starved tenderness, of his vice-entangled souls. Those marbly pupils in the pasty spherical face are like the eye-pieces of a microscope, through which you can see laid flat on the slide the entangled mind of a man: love and lust, nobility and perversity, hatred of itself and despair, jumping out of the jelly." That's how novelist Graham Greene put it; Charlie Chaplin made it easier: "Lorre is the best actor alive." This was in 1935, and Lorre had just made his first American film. Karl Freund's Mad Love, less than 70 minute long, is now out on the recently released six-film Hollywood Legends of Horror pack; some other Halloween goodies bundled in include Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire, and the quite unsettling Devil Doll, starring Lionel Barrymore.

Mad Love is the prize in the collection. It's a bewildering story, beginning at Paris's "Le Theatre du Horreurs": Obviously Le Theatre du Grand Guignol of Montmarte. (Since the namesake Guignol is a puppet, Jigsaw's merry adventures in Saw III are all the more in this Parisian theater's tradition of staging torture, mutilation and grisly death.) The genius surgeon Gogol (Lorre) is also the worst kind of fanboy, lurking at every show. With his huge bald head, framed with a rich fur collar, he looks like a lecherous wingless vulture. Roosting with the rest of the gorehounds at Le Theatre, he waits for the performance of the woman he loves.
Yvonne (Francis Drake) stars in a little skit about a royal adultress put to the rack and branded with a hot iron. The episode's plot is something like the hinted-at fate of the lady in Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" ("I gave commands, then all smiles stopped..."). While Browning may seem deep-dish for a horror movie, the decadent spirit lives in Mad Love; its motto, "Each man kills the thing he loves," comes from Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." And Gogol's growing lunacy is connected to the Greek legend of Pygmalion and Galatea, of a man so in love with his sculpture of a girl that it comes to life. Gogol cackles over the myth since he has a life-sized wax statue of Yvonne adorning his living room.

Weary of being a scream queen, the actress Yvonne is about to marry a noted concert pianist named Orlac (Colin "Dr. Frankenstein" Clive). However, his train has a terrible collision, and Orlac's hands are crushed. As a favor to the woman he's been stalking, Gogol grafts the hands of a recently executed murderer named Rollo on to Orlac's arms. The donor, Rollo, (Edward Brophy) was a circus knife-thrower who killed his father with a dagger. The operation is a success, barely. Medical bills bankrupt the young couple, and Orlac's career as a pianist is ruined. When Orlac's well-off father refuses to help him with money, Orlac impulsively throws a knife at him ... but could this gesture have been the work of the evil hands themselves?

To reinforce the possibility in the neurotic Orlac's mind, Gogol masquerades as the dead Rollo. Costumed with chromed mechanical hands, and a hideous leather neck harness, Gogol is an apparition that no one forgets easily. Horror movie fans will take it on faith that an evil transplant has a life of its own; which is why the Hands of Orlac story has been done again, and again. A scholarly round-up by Kinoeye's Ruth Goldberg notes the various versions, except the one she neglects, the satire, "My Bloody Hand" on SCTV.

Mad Love is the best, because of the way Lorre fleshes the bizarre fable out. All the characters are pawns of Dr. Orlac's will to power, but the bulb-headed-yet-dapper physician can't heal himself from rampaging egomania. And since I've dropped so many literary anticedents for this movie, here's one last one: Madame Bovary. "I, a poor peasant, have conquered science," Gogol says, but he is just as ruined by cheap romance as was Emma Bovary. When he leaves the skeptical, rational world for the deranged plays at Le Theatre des Horreurs, it's another case of bad fiction destroying a strong, useful man. And Mad Love insists on the goodness of Gogol ... can you name another mad doctor in the history of cinema who persists in healing crippled children for free?

The best horror depends on a sense of tragedy, of the squandering of great possibilities by fate or madness. Mad Love lays on some really creaky comic relief by Stoogemaster Ted Healy, playing an annoying Yankee reporter. And there's some tedious drunk-comedy about Gogol's maid and her pet cockatoo. Pauline Kael argued once that the screaming cockatoo and Lorre's bald makeup were scarfed up for the scenes of the elderly Kane in Citizen Kane. It's a stretch, but then again the master cinematographer of Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland, worked on Mad Love's deep-focus photography. Despite the would-be comic relief, it's Lorre who creates the best comic moments. He smirks at the fools around him, arching an eyebrow when observing a valuable jewel on the hand of a lady who is pleading poverty. The movie is small and short, but Lorre gives one huge performance. Note his combination of impassivity and smothered pleasure as he enjoys a ringside seat at the guillotine; hear his ape-like chuckle, see his moon-face glowing in a sliver of shadow, as he watches his favorite actress being put to a fiery branding iron.
Real movie lovers can understands Gogol's mad love, because they share it. Who doesn't have the yearning for connection with the actors and actresses, as we lurk in the multiplex? If we don't have life-sized statues of our favorites to swoon over, some of us have a cardboard stand-up or two. If not everyone goes as far as the cracked egghead Gogol, the possibility of going too far is there in every serious film fan, just waiting for the right trigger. Watch yourselves. And happy Halloween.