Still Light: Peter Lorre's morbid contemplation in 'Mad Love'

This is my humble offering to the Contemplative Cinema Blogathon initiated by Harry Tuttle at Screenville.

I recently interviewed Tim Burton about adapting Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street to the screen, and he spoke a lot about using the intimacy of the cinematic view to internalize the story, as it were. Describing what he was going after, Burton evoked “that kind of old horror movie acting where it's kind of still.” “You know,” he continued, “some of my favorite moments [in Sweeney Todd] are just Johnny [Depp] looking out the window and just by not doing anything, conveying rage and sadness and loss. That is what I like in a movie, that to me is very exciting; that kind of Zen kind of acting, of being able to do something very still.” This all rang a bell with me, and so I chimed in: “It's like certain moments you find with, say, Peter Lorre in something like Mad Love when he's not doing anything, really…”

Burton jumped in before I finished the thought. “Absolutely. That film was one of our inspirations. And there's something so beautiful about that…”

There is indeed something very beautiful about the stillness of Peter Lorre’s performance in Mad Love, a 1935 adaptation of Maurice Renard’s novel The Hands of Orlac—which had been filmed once before, in 1924, by Robert Wiene in Germany and starring Conrad Veidt as the pianist whose hands are surgically replaced by those of a murderer. (Mad Love is available on DVD as part of Warner's superb Legends of Horror box set.)

In Mad Love (the final directorial effort of legendary cinematographer Karl Freund, who also did the mesmerizing 1932 The Mummy), the driven-to-madness pianist is second banana to an added character: Lorre’s Doctor Gogol, a brilliant surgeon who is obsessed with Yvonne, an actress in some approximation of Grand Guignol. Gogol comes to see her every night until her show closes. (“Gogol! Nasty, foreign-sounding name,” Yvonne’s wardrobe assistant notes of the actress’ biggest fan. Yvonne comes to his defense: “He cures deformed childrens and mutilated soldiers!”) He surreptitiously procures a wax dummy of Yvonne that he installs in his apartment and plays the organ for. And when she comes to him, desperate for his help after her husband’s hands have been crushed in a train wreck, secretly replaces the mangled hands with the intact ones of a newly-executed knife-throwing murderer. When none of this wins Yvonne’s love, when she rejects him with an admission that she finds him repulsive, he finally snaps—wouldn’t you?—and hatches a scheme to frame Orlac for murder.

Lorre’s performance—a series of polite whispers, small facial expressions; his head a white egg upon which almost grotesquely definite features have been drawn, with Lorre for the most part content to just let those features be, as if the very being of Gogol were sufficient to constitute a tragedy—…it seems something out of an entirely different movie than the one he’s actually in.

Ernst Lubitsch may have preferred “Paris, Paramount,” to the real thing, but “Paris, MGM”—Mad Love’s setting—is a hilarious mish-mosh. Gogol’s housekeeper’s a cockney. The knife-throwing killer is specified as an American (and is played by Edward Brophy, and is named Rollo; as it happens, Brophy also played one of the knife-throwing Rollo brothers in Browning’s Freaks; was MGM trying to create its own horror movie omniverse or something?). Yvonne seems pretty American, while Orlac is Colin Clive, who sounds just like Colin Clive. The fact that Rollo’s an American is I suppose to excuse presence of Ted Healy as “wisecracking” American reporter Reagan, but of course nothing excuses the presense of Ted Healy in anything (although in certain moments here, he reminds one of a more genial Bill O’Reilly, which makes a perverse kind of sense). One of the few overtly “French” references comes from Gogol—who, of course, speaks in Lorre’s German accent—in one of the more remarkable two-shots of any era; as Gogol and his second, Played by Keye Luke, prepare for surgery, they discuss Orlac’s case. Luke we see head-on; Lorre is reflected in the mirror above the washbasin. Luke says a certain procedure is “impossible;” Lorre’s Gogol, in his one show of enthusiasm in the entire film, scoffs, “’Impossible’? Napoleon said that word is not French!”

In the midst of all Mad Love’s stuff and (sometimes marvelous) nonsense there is, of course, the marvelous Expressionist-inspired light and shadow of the cinematography (in part by Gregg Toland; Pauline Kael astutely draws connections to his work here and in Citizen Kane, in what I consider the best portion of her controversial essay "Raising Kane") and the stillness, the sadness, of Lorre. “The face of all the world is changed I think, since I first heard the footprints of your soul,” he reads at one point; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning has never sounded both so sad and so sinister. Once Lorre’s Gogol cracks, his performance goes up in register (and the character’s literary taste shifts; he adopts Wilde’s epigram “Each man kills the thing he loves” as a mantra), but not so much that we forget what’s come before, and what remains the most haunting thing about the picture, its inert, non-narrative, soul.

Comments

[HarryTuttle]

Nice review! Thank you very much for your participation to the blogathon Glenn! I'm really honored.

I missed this film at the full German Expressionism retrospective in Paris Cinematheque last year... but I did catch Weine's 1924 version, which was a real treat. The main protagonist was the pianist, so the story was told from his point of view. The young couple in love, the recovery from the accident, and then the decline of their relationship as he worries more about his dispossession of his body (the artist is unable to produce music anymore) than about her.

[swhitty]

Burton mentioned "Mad Love" too, when we spoke before the film opened. Also specifically noted Karloff's very understated performance in the '34 "The Black Cat."

BTW, although everyone has noted Burton's fascination with old Uni and AIP horror, has anyone else noticed how much his heroines all look like Elsa Lanchester in the opening to "Bride of Frankenstein"?

The pale skin, the wide brow, the large eyes, the decolletage -- she seems like a prototype for not only "The Corpse Bride" but just about all his leading ladies (Ryder, Ricci, Bonham Carter.)

Don't know if Elsa's Mary Shelley was an early fixation for Tim or not, but it's a far more intriguing fetish than Quentin T's obsession with feet.

[Peachtreegal]

Dear Glenn,

You should have mentioned that the restored silent film version of The Hands of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt, will be released on DVD by Kino on February 19. :)

Link to Kino's Hands of Orlac page:

http://www.kino.com/video/item.php?film_id=897

Link to blog by Bret Wood, the DVD's producer:

http://bretwood.blogspot.com/

Bret's blog has links to a trailer he created for the DVD -- mesmerizing!

[Ryan Stewart]

I clicked on this because I honestly thought it was going to be a piece on the 1995 Drew Barrymore movie.

I'll turn in my film critic's badge at the door.

Ryan Stewart

[Glenn Kenny]

Thanks, Peachtree; you're right, I ought to have mentioned the upcoming restored DVD, but I can't think of EVERYTHING. Like Regis Philbin said, I'm only one man.

Also—wow. Ryan. Dude. No need to turn in your badge. Just get that Warner box.

[Jerry]

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

[Red Bottom shoes]

Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.

[Canada Goose Jakker salg]

I have always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated.

[Red Bottom shoes sale]

Don't gild the lily.

[Beats by Dr Dre sale]

It's no use crying over spilt milk.

[cheap Beats by Dr Dre]

conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past.

[Discount Canada Goose]

Truth is honest, truth is sure; Truth is strong and must endure.