ON THE FIFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Mad Love (1935), starring Peter Lorre as a deranged surgeon whose obsession with a Grand Guignol actress drives him to frame her husband for murder. He decides to accomplish this by the rather circuitous route of transplanting a knife-throwing killer’s hands onto the husband’s wrists and then manipulating him through the power of hypnotic suggestion while wearing metal gauntlets and a sinister neck brace.
This is a wonderful piece of 30’s gothic horror that strings together a series of delicious nuggets. These include: the aforementioned Grand Guignol’s melodramatic staging of a medieval torture scene with a maiden tied to a wheel of fortune; a wax replica of the actress that the mad doctor smuggles into his study, hoping it will come to life like Pygmalion’s Galatea; lush dream sequences accomplished through match-cut dissolves; an execution by guillotine preceded by some gallows humor from the ambivalent convict; and German expressionist influenced interiors with jutting shadows. Of course, the main draw is the inimitably creepy Peter Lorre, who is allowed to let loose in monologues ranging from sorrowful longing to diabolical scheming to insane raving. Much more than the film noir roles he is better known for, Lorre here really earns his status as one of the top horror icons.
The overall narrative is a little too reliant on coincidence, and it meanders in places, but the high quality of the sights along the way make up for the patchy road getting to them. The conceit of a pair of hands that belonged to a killer and take on a mind of their own once removed was adopted from the 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac, and it would go on to reappear as a trope in many other works, including The Beast with Five Fingers (1946, also starring Lorre), Hands of a Stranger (1962), The Crawling Hand (1963), The Hand (1981), and Body Parts (1991).
It might seem like kind of a silly idea, but it’s inspired at least in part by a real phenomenon called alien hand syndrome. This occurs when a neurological disorder causes a person to lose conscious control over her hand. The hand often needs to be restrained when she can no longer prevent it from attempting to harm herself or others.
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