Brilliant surgeon Dr Gogol is in 'mad love' with actress Yvonne Orlac. Night after night he watches her performance in a Grand Guignol production where he almost passes out with ecstasy during her torture scenes. Clearly insane, Gogol's final decent into madness is exacerbated by the news that Yvonne is retiring from acting to tour with her genius pianist husband Stephen.
Gogol's evenings are spent lamenting his loss with a waxwork replica of the actress; regaling it with declarations of love and piano sonatas.
When Stephen Orlacs hands are severed in a train smash, Yvonne goes to Gogol for help. Gogol acquires the hands of a recently executed maniac and grafts them on to the stricken musician with questionable success. What Stephen now lacks in musical dexterity is more than made up for by a murderous rage and deadly knife throwing abilities. After a row with his father, Stephen is blamed for murdering him. Gogol seizes his chance to frame Stephen and vent his 'mad love'.
An almost forgotten classic, Mad Love is a creaky expressionist chiller based on Maurice Renard's 'Les Main D'Orlac' (The Hands of Orlac) and was directed by shadow-miester Karl Freund who later went on to direct The Mummy and lens 'greatest movie ever made 'Citizen Kane.
Mad Love is a fairytale of the darkest timbre, but its main thrust about creepy limb transplants is totally derailed by Lorre's murderously 'lost in love' Dr Gogol. With his baby smooth skin and bulging eyes Gogol is a bizarre arrangement of ping pong balls and reptilian charm. His whining whispery voice seems to slither around you until it finds a suitable opening in your clothing or worse your skin! Mad Love was Lorre's first major role in the states having established himself in Germany with the Fritz Lang classic 'M'. Here Lorre turns in an early example of his unhinged outsider shtick and although he acts everybody else off the screen it's no great stretch when you consider that here he's playing opposite the likes of 'Frankenstein's Colin Clive who, as always, displayed more ham than Fray Bentos.
Mad Love is a Tim Burton film before there was Tim Burton. The scene in which Gogol disguises himself as the resurrected killer in surgical braces and artificial limbs to convince Stephen that he's responsible for his father's murder is as jarring an image of abject revulsion ever committed to celluloid the diabolical offspring of Humpty Dumpty and Edward Scissor Hands.
During a film course I attended in Brighton a few years ago legendary film maker Jack Cardiff related the tale of Peter Lorre's 'dying' on the set of a film he was directing and then suddenly coming back to life and asking for directions for the nearest bar whilst being given his last rites. Lorre's life was a litany of persecution, (a Hungarian Jew he had to flee the holocaust) typecasting (forever tagged as the worlds greatest 'Peter Lorre type' actor) and morphine addiction. Whatever the source of Lorre's demons, it can't ever be said that he didn't make those demons work for him. Mad Love alone is testament to that.
Gogol's evenings are spent lamenting his loss with a waxwork replica of the actress; regaling it with declarations of love and piano sonatas.
When Stephen Orlacs hands are severed in a train smash, Yvonne goes to Gogol for help. Gogol acquires the hands of a recently executed maniac and grafts them on to the stricken musician with questionable success. What Stephen now lacks in musical dexterity is more than made up for by a murderous rage and deadly knife throwing abilities. After a row with his father, Stephen is blamed for murdering him. Gogol seizes his chance to frame Stephen and vent his 'mad love'.
An almost forgotten classic, Mad Love is a creaky expressionist chiller based on Maurice Renard's 'Les Main D'Orlac' (The Hands of Orlac) and was directed by shadow-miester Karl Freund who later went on to direct The Mummy and lens 'greatest movie ever made 'Citizen Kane.
Mad Love is a fairytale of the darkest timbre, but its main thrust about creepy limb transplants is totally derailed by Lorre's murderously 'lost in love' Dr Gogol. With his baby smooth skin and bulging eyes Gogol is a bizarre arrangement of ping pong balls and reptilian charm. His whining whispery voice seems to slither around you until it finds a suitable opening in your clothing or worse your skin! Mad Love was Lorre's first major role in the states having established himself in Germany with the Fritz Lang classic 'M'. Here Lorre turns in an early example of his unhinged outsider shtick and although he acts everybody else off the screen it's no great stretch when you consider that here he's playing opposite the likes of 'Frankenstein's Colin Clive who, as always, displayed more ham than Fray Bentos.
Mad Love is a Tim Burton film before there was Tim Burton. The scene in which Gogol disguises himself as the resurrected killer in surgical braces and artificial limbs to convince Stephen that he's responsible for his father's murder is as jarring an image of abject revulsion ever committed to celluloid the diabolical offspring of Humpty Dumpty and Edward Scissor Hands.
During a film course I attended in Brighton a few years ago legendary film maker Jack Cardiff related the tale of Peter Lorre's 'dying' on the set of a film he was directing and then suddenly coming back to life and asking for directions for the nearest bar whilst being given his last rites. Lorre's life was a litany of persecution, (a Hungarian Jew he had to flee the holocaust) typecasting (forever tagged as the worlds greatest 'Peter Lorre type' actor) and morphine addiction. Whatever the source of Lorre's demons, it can't ever be said that he didn't make those demons work for him. Mad Love alone is testament to that.