Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Day: Halloween 2010 edition!
[For the entirety of October I will be showcasing one horror film each day. Every film is pulled from my DVD shelf or streamed via Netflix Instant and will be one I haven’t seen. Unlike my A Movie A Day or A Movie A Week columns there won’t necessarily be connectors between each film, but you’ll more than likely see patterns emerge day to day.]
Goddamn I love Peter Lorre. From M to Casablanca to The Raven and now, Mad Love the man is one of those characters that constantly has your attention whenever he’s on screen.
And what a showstopper he has with the character of Dr. Gogol. Not only is Dr. Gogol iconic, with his shaved head and buggy eyes, he’s a classic tortured character. Gogol is rich, a brilliant doctor that started from poverty and has the entire world at his whim. Except that he was cursed at birth with air of creepiness.
He’s not so much deformed, this isn’t a Hunchback story, but his overall demeanor is creepy. As such he’s never known love (translated: he’s a virigin).
Like many of us, this weirdo falls in love with an actress. This one, played by Frances Drake, stars in a macabre play. I wish more theater was like this… monsters at the door, skeletons in the lobby, a headless coat checker, etc.
Dr. Gogol sits in the shadows of the top tier box seat for every performance, sends anonymous flowers and after some 40+ shows he gathers up the courage to approach this actress on the final night of the show.
She’s of course grateful for his loyalty. Behind closed doors she calls him “her public,” but he thinks there’s a stronger connection there.
The trick here is that he’s not played as a monster. He’s socially awkward as a lot of brilliant people are, but no more than 90% of the people that attend Comic-Con. The man has saved deformed soldiers, helped children, saved countless lives. Before this story I believe Dr. Gogol was damn near a saint.
Then in comes obsession and opportunity that is too tempting for him to ignore.
He’s crushed to find out Drake’s Yvonne Orlac is married to a concert pianist, played by Dr. Frankenstein himself, Colin Clive, but seems to be resigned to it. Then fate throws him a curveball.
That curveball is in the form of a train wreck as Clive is en route to meet his wife, who is about to quit acting for good in order to spend more time with her loving, but constantly traveling husband.
Clive survives, but his hands do not and who should show up begging Dr. Gogol for help, but the object of his desire.
His diagnoses is the same as the other doctors. The hands have to be amputated, but then, inspired by the chance to impress his love, Gogol gets the idea to attempt something never before accomplished and proceeds to arrange for a pair of hands from a recently executed murderer, a knife-thrower no less, and does the first ever transplant.
We’ve seen this concept taken in some pretty crappy movies (to be fair I like Jeff Fahey’s BODY PARTS a lot), but by now we all know this isn’t good news for Clive. Sure enough, the transplant works and he starts getting the itch to stick some fools whenever his temper flares up.
If that was the main thrust of the story it’d be a fairly quaint film, but what elevates it is that’s more of the side story, an excuse for Lorre’s obsession to fully take form, which leads him down the road of insanity and murder.
There’s a scene in the movie where Lorre is talking to his mirrored reflection, a representation of his rational mind and irrational mind fighting for control, that reminded me so much of what Peter Jackson did with Gollum in The Two Towers that I suspect Jackson had this flick on the brain when he, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens cracked how to show the Gollum/Smeagol duality visually.
Another moment worth mentioning is a scene where Clive, now thought to have murdered his asshole stepfather, is called to meet a mysterious stranger with metal hands. We don’t get a look at the stranger until the very end when he claims to be the beheaded murderer whose hands Clive now possesses.
The man reveals his face and neck, showing a crazy contraption, and says that Gogol fixed his head just like he fixed Clive’s hands and laughs maniacally.
The visual is like a Nazi nightmare. Check him out:
That’s a genuinely creepy visage, is it not?
If the movie had gone a little more in that direction it would have been one of my all time favorites, but instead we learn that’s not really a dead man with his head fixed on, but rather Gogol himself trying to convince Clive he’s a murderer in order to steal his wife.
There’s a lot of levity to the film, especially in the form of Gogol’s drunken housemaid, played by May Beatty. You know you’re in for a good character when she slurs her words and has a white parrot on her shoulder.
Director Karl Freund (famous cinematographer of films like METROPOLIS, DRACULA and KEY LARGO as well as director of THE MUMMY) does a great job here, especially with the character work. Everybody has a shade of gray to them, nobody is inherently good, bad, total victim or total villain. I also love creative credits and the final list of opening credits are painted on a window that a hand comes in and smashes, bringing us into the movie. Love stuff like that.
The only thing that got me scratching my head was just how odd the 1995 remake was. Drew Barrymore was nothing like Frances Drake and Chris O’Donnell wasn’t willing to go bald for the part. Hell, it’s not even a horror movie. What a shitty remake.
Final Thoughts: Peter Lorre is amazing here, giving a star-making performance (at least a star-making performance for anybody who didn’t see M). It’s a beautiful black and white movie that runs by in it’s short 68 minute runtime and has just enough of the tragic Universal monster feel of the era to make you sympathize with Dr. Gogol without making it feel like a rip-off. Very strong picture.
Currently in print on DVD: YES
Currently available on Netflix Instant: NO
Here are the next week’s worth of AMAD titles:
Sunday, October 17th: REPULSION (1965)
Monday, October 18th: THE VIDEO DEAD (1987)
Tuesday, October 19th: THE BLACK CAT (1981)
Wednesday, October 20th: THE BLACK CAT (1934)
Thursday, October 21st: THE COMEDY OF TERRORS (1963)
Friday, October 22nd: DOLLS (1987)
Saturday, October 23rd: SILENT SCREAM (1980)
Tomorrow is Polanski's REPULSION! See you folks then!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
