classicsoncall Every year Turner Classics employs the weekends of October to prepare for the annual Halloween holiday. One of their themes this year was the appropriately named 'rogue body parts', kicked off by the airing of this Peter Lorre horror classic from 1935. I had to think about the rogue body parts business but it makes perfect sense if you think about it and how it relates to the story here.If you've never seen a bald Peter Lorre before you're in for a treat. The look adds to an already demented and creepy appearance usually augmented by those shifty eyes, and with director Karl Freund's effective use of shadow and light, there are times Dr. Gogol (Lorre) takes on an almost demonic appearance. At one point in the story, Gogol comes almost completely unglued as he removes an intricately devised harness from his neck and head that would have made Hannibal Lecter proud.As desperate as the circumstances are for Gogol's patient Steven Orlac (Colin Clive) and his wife Yvonne (Frances Drake), the picture manages to interject a fair amount of humor into the story. Gogol's housekeeper Marie (Sarah Haden) is an absolute trip with her pet cockatoo. In one particular scene the photographer captured a wonderful shadow of the bird on her shoulder affecting an over-sized headdress. Newspaperman Reagan (Ted Healy) played off the housekeeper in a couple of scenes that would have convinced you this was a comedy had the overall story not been so grim.Ultimately the film ends in tragedy for Gogol who goes mad in his obsession for the love of a woman he can never attain. The theme of 'each man kills the thing he loves' runs throughout the picture, though in Dr. Gogol's case, he is pre-empted by the accurate throw of a knife by the hand he grafted onto the arm of Orlac, an irony easily overlooked during the frantic finish of this off beat horror film.If the idea of crawling hands appeals to you, I would direct you to the 1960 film "Tormented", or better yet, have another go round with Peter Lorre in the 1946 film "The Beast With Five Fingers". That film followed "Mad Love" on this year's rogue body parts extravaganza on Turner Classics.

dougdoepke With his bald head, pudgy diminutive figure and buggy eyes, Lorre's Dr. Gogol resembles a troll from heck. So, with those looks, how does he think he's going to win the affection of the beauteous Yvonne (Drake). Besides he can't really decide whether it's the live Yvonne or her wax figure that attracts him most. After all the character's adapted from the Greek myth of a statue that springs to life because of a man's yearning. Here I've got to hand it to Drake who manages to stand stock still while impersonating the statue, no mean trick.Anyhow, Lorre manages to look scary, but still be sympathetic, since he devotes his physician's skills to healing injured kids just for the humanity of it. But he's got this weird obsession with Yvonne after seeing her in one of those old style gory stage shows. Besides she's already got a husband who plays beautiful music, unlike the poor ill-formed Gogol. Still that's no problem for a guy who can not only help kids, but also transplant heads and hands when needed. After all, this is Peter Lorre, not Robert Taylor. So watch out Mr. Yvonne (Clive), that obsession is all-consuming.Having seen the movie years ago with all its nightmarish light and shadow, I chuckle every time director Freund's name comes up as a regular crew member in the old slapstick series, I Love Lucy. It's hard to conceive of two more contrasting formats, yet he appeared to excel at both. Anyway, the movie's an effective horror piece thanks mainly to Lorre and Freund. My only reservations are Clive who looks too dissipated to be either a desirable husband or a concert pianist, while the knife-throwing gimmick seems too impersonal to be scary. I'd have preferred the hands of maybe a more "ripper" type psychopath. All in all, the movie's a Lorre showcase, proving you don't have to have glamour-boy type looks to carry a movie impressively.

Panamint Lorre is wacko and goes over the top in this one- but he is never less than brilliant. He obviously prepared and planned for this role and his craftsmanship is apparent.The subject matter about the hands is pretty creepy, but there is one scene in particular when Gogol appears as a "reconstructed" dead man that is as creepy as it gets and it still holds up today.Gogol's progression from sadist to flat out lunatic is the basis of the film and it displays some weird psychology along the way.A strong performance is delivered by the lead actress and it contrasts well with Lorre's strong character.This is one crazy 1930's horror film and is not to be missed. There is even a sadistic cockatoo that makes the proceedings crazier.

Robert J. Maxwell In this reasonably good 1935 film, Peter Lorre is Dr. Gogol, a genius at surgery who is driven irretrievably mad by his love for Frances Drake. Drake is an actress at the Grand Guignol Theater in Paris. The shows at the theater consist of nothing more than scenes of staged torture featuring different characters, much like today's unending stream of slasher movies, appealing to the most noble parts of human nature.Drake, however, is married to a renowned pianist, Colin Clive as Stephen Orlac. You'll remember Colin Clive when you see him. You'll probably recall his most famous lines: "Get BECK! Oh, get BECK! -- It's ALIVE!" Gogol attends every show that features Frances Drake, hopeless as his love is. It's a kind of self torture. She, on the other hand, has no idea that his passion for her extends beyond her role as an actress.Then Clive has his marvelous hands crushed in a train accident. (Good scene.) Drake importunes Lorre to help, so Lorre takes the hands of a recently guillotines murderer who was a circus knife thrower, and attaches them to the stumps of Clive's wrists. The hands seem to take on a life of their own, with Clive still unable to play the piano well but now a skilled thrower of knives.This is a familiar theme, probably started by Maurice Renard's novel, "The Hands of Orlac" (1920). It was not only made into a silent film in 1924 but remade again in 1962. And on top of that there have been myriad variations on the theme. Michael Caine had trouble with his hand in the innovatively titled "The Hand." I don't think we need to go on to list all the other transplant horror movies. There are enough to make me think twice about having a hair transplant. Brain transplants alone would run to thousands of pages. And then there's Frankenstein's monster with his enormous Schwanz in Mel Brooks' movie, "Young Dr. Frankenstein." As Dr. Gogol -- where do they get these names? -- as Dr. Gogol, Peter Lorre is really rather creepy. He keeps popping up with queerly apt quotes. "Each man kills the things he loves," from Oscar Wilde, and later some shtick from "Othello". His face is chubby and pasty, his head is shaved, his eyeballs pop, he plays mournful music on the organ, and as he descends into madness he begins to look and act drunk instead of just insane. His lower lip droops and he seems to drool. There are a couple of horrific scenes that will scare the kids, the most likely being the one in which Lorre poses as the guillotined man and rips open his collar to show the neck brace and metal struts that keep his head attached to his body. His wild and manic cackle is spooky.I thought it was well done, as these things go. It was part of a series of shocking monster and horror flicks that came out of Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. After 1935, they declined rapidly in quality and lost their surprise value. There was a brief revival of horror flicks, half spoofs of themselves, in the early 60s, and then about 20 years ago a new cycle began that has yet to exhaust itself. For the most part they're pretty revolting gore fests, not nearly as scary as some of the better done, practically antiseptic movies like "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby."