Pre-War Thrills: The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

A title card at the very start of Tod Browning’s ‘The Unknown’ informs us that, “this is a story they tell in Madrid… it’s a story they say is true”. I have no idea whether or not the genesis of ‘The Unknown’ actually lay in such folkloric roots (somehow I doubt it), but it wouldn’t seem an unreasonable assumption, given that, over ninety years later, the story Browning and Waldemar Young concocted here remains one of the most extraordinary tales ever put on screen. (1)

This is the kind of perfectly formed yarn – rich in unfeasibly circular dramatic ironies and almost unbearably bleak melodrama - that one could easily imagine enthralling audiences in pretty much any era or context, whether presented through the lips of some soused storyteller in a disreputable Castilian bar, dramatised for the Elizabethan stage… or indeed adapted into a motion picture.

Even if you’ve never seen ‘The Unknown’, if you’ve been reading around the subject of old movies or horror films for a few years, you probably will have encountered some writer or other gleefully summarising the film’s storyline, and thought to yourself, “wow, that sounds like one crazy movie, I should definitely track it down”, or words to that effect.

Indeed, such is the ingenuity of ‘The Unknown’s scenario that it is practically impossible to write about the film without immediately lapsing into ‘plot synopsis’ mode. Whilst I normally try to avoid this in my reviews, hearing the story of this one recounted never fails to make me happy, so in this case I’m more than happy to follow suit. (Perhaps I should have added “some chancer writing about movies on the internet” to my list above?)

So, settle in folks - it’s story time. (If you’d rather not have the plot details of a near century old movie spoiled for you, please skip to the end of the italics below.)

Alonzo (Lon Chaney Sr.) is an armless gypsy knife thrower employed by Zanzi’s Travelling Circus. As part of his act – memorably portrayed in the film’s opening scene – Alonzo uses his feet to hurl knives and fire bullets at the circus owner’s beautiful daughter Nanon (a twenty-one year old Joan Crawford). As is traditional, Nanon is tied to a wooden wheel for this performance, and Alonzo lets his projectiles pass so close to her body that that her dress is cut off, leaving her exposed in a delightful flapper-era bathing costume.

As it transpires, Alonzo is desperately in love with Nanon, making his feelings so plain that her father, Zanzi, is inspired to viciously beat him, insisting that he does not wish to see his daughter subject to the amorous intentions of a ‘freak’.

Nanon herself however sees things a little differently. Opening her heart to Alonzo, she confesses that, “..all my life men have tried to put their beastly hands on me... to paw over me. I have grown so that I shrink with fear when any man even touches me.”

As a result of this implied abuse in early life, Nanon has developed a pathological fear of men’s arms, and as such feels herself condemned to a life of loneliness. When Malabar (Norman Kerry), the circus’s lovably hapless strongman, tries to woo her (encouraged by Alonzo’s duplicitous, faux-brotherly advice), she flees from his muscular embrace as if he were a grotesque monster, subsequently weeping for her inability to accept his love.

“You are the only man I can come to without fear,” Nanon tells Alonzo, and, armed with this knowledge, you’d think our hero’s chances for romance would be looking pretty good… but unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as that.

You see, Alonzo does actually still have his arms, and furthermore, they’re still attached to him too. He keeps them hidden, tied across his torso in a constrictive leather corset - a deception he has devised in order to distract attention from his former (or perhaps continuing?) life as a thief, gangster and (so it is implied) a serial strangler. (2)

Alonzo’s only genuine physical deformity in fact is a vestigial second thumb on his left hand – an additional digit that would no doubt have brought a swift end to his strangling career, were it not for his armless disguise.

As Alonzo’s loyal dwarf servant Cojo (John George) points out to his master, the moment Nanon embraces him, she will feel the shape of his arms and learn his dark secret – a possibility rendered all the more disastrous by the fact that Alonzo has by this point throttled her father to death in order to stop him standing between them. (3)

As a result of this rash action, the circus has been forced to shut down by its deceased owner’s creditors, and, more pertinently, the police are leaving no stone unturned in their hunt for the mysterious killer with an extra thumb. (To add an extra frisson to the murder scene, poor Nanon actually sees the mutated fingers that put an end to her father through a caravan window, missing a fatal glimpse of Alonzo’s face by mere seconds.)

So, it’s quite a pickle for old Alonzo. He determines however that, whatever happens, he cannot live without Nanon’s love, and so resolves to take drastic action. Never a man to do things by half measures, he tracks down a crooked surgeon whom he had previously met through his contacts in the criminal underworld. By threatening to expose the doctor’s nefarious activities, Alonzo persuades him to carry out a fairly extreme form of elective surgery, the nature of which you can probably guess.

Whilst Alonzo is busy recuperating from this (no doubt pretty traumatic) operation however, Nanon and Malabor are left kicking their heels in the town in which the circus made its last stop, where the strongman is making plans for a spectacular new stage act.

In Alonzo’s absence, Nanon feels herself increasingly drawn to the blandly good-natured Malabar, to the extent that she eventually overcomes her revulsion toward his arms and succumbs to his naively chivalrous advances.

Falling head over heels, the couple vow to marry as soon as possible, but agree to put off the big day until their good friend Alonzo – whom they respectively regard as a protector and a kind of benevolent uncle figure, unaware of his inner torment – has returned from wherever he’s gone to, in order that he may share their happiness by witnessing their union.

[Dramatic pause.]

So yes -- you’d perhaps be forgiven for not feeling much sympathy for Alonzo up to this point, but… Jesus Christ, surely no one deserves a fate like this, even if it’s largely the result of his own cracked decision-making and generally nefarious behaviour. How many characters can you think of - outside perhaps of the realm of some particularly obscure and blood-thirsty ancient mythology – who have been driven to cut off their arms in the name of love, only to find themselves cuckolded?

As you might well have expected, the reunion between Alonzo and his friends is far from a happy one, and the lengths Browning goes to to draw out his protagonist’s gradual realisation of the awful truth still stands as one of cinema’s most excruciating demonstrations of emotional sadism.

But, I’ll leave my plot synopsising there for the moment, merely noting that, in case you were wondering how a story like this could possibly end, well… as it happens, Malabor’s new stage act involves him testing his strength by harnessing his arms to two horses galloping in opposite directions on mechanical treadmills. What would happen if something went wrong with the treadmills, Alonzo asks him. Why, my arms would be torn from their sockets, he cheerily responds. It’s all just too beautiful.

For those who have taken the time to approach Tod Browning’s work from an auteurist perspective, ‘The Unknown’ can’t help but stand out as something of a Rosetta Stone in his surviving catalogue, despite the truncated fifty minute run time of the surviving print.

With its lovingly realised circus milieu, its fascination with physical deformity, its bottomless reserves of melodramatic perversity and its deployment of enough overlapping layers of castration anxiety to give a convention of Freudians a collective migraine, this is about as thorough an exploration of what are generally considered the director’s ‘key themes’ as could possibly be wished for. (4)

Browning may never have been much celebrated as a cinematic stylist, but the surviving cut of ‘The Unknown’ is nonetheless a model of narrative efficiency, hitting each and every beat it needs to to tell this story well, with the director’s talent for ensuring his imagery hits hard when it needs to in full effect throughout.

As you’d expect given his background and recurrent interest in such subject matter, Browning has a wonderful feel for the romanticism of the gypsy travelling show setting (in particular, the male characters all look really f-ing cool in their wardrobe of paisley bandanas, gaucho riding gear, hoop earrings and wide black hats), and the mixture of set and matte painting that creates the opening establishing shot of the circus exterior is a very impressive bit of work (blink and you’ll miss it).

Elsewhere, the extremely high ceilinged, brightly lit operating theatre set makes for a striking contrast to the sawdust-floored rural environs of the rest of the picture, momentarily recalling the kind of sinister, modernist interiors filmmakers like Fritz Lang were cooking up on the other side of the Atlantic, and the staging of Malabar's big stage act during the finale is absolutely extraordinary.

Complete with the sight of a scantily-clad Crawford standing atop a podium, gleefully whipping the seemingly gigantic white horses (directly recalling Alonzo's earlier confession that “it was just something in [my heart] that stung like the lash of a whip” as he struggles to explain his extreme reaction to discovering she and Malabar are lovers), I think this would remain unrivalled as a deranged spectacle of implied S&M until Alejandro Jodorowsky took elements of this story to even wilder extremes in ‘Santa Sangre’ (1989).

There are a few eccentric stylistic choices elsewhere (the curious decision to shoot several scenes through what looks like sackcloth is often mentioned), but for the most part, the remainder of the film is very plainly presented. I’m pretty sure the camera remains static throughout, and likewise, the editing of the narrative is strictly linear in its presentation, with master shots, two shots, shot/reverse shots etc all handled strictly by the book.

Nonetheless though, this grounded/fixed perspective allows Browning’s close ups and tableaux to achieve an intensely vivid pictorial quality that is often captivating. Like good paintings, these shots carry within them a depth of feeling that heightens the film's emotional power immensely.

Such is the ingenuity of the story Browning and his collaborators have devised here, I’m tempted to say it would have been difficult for them to go wrong however they chose to frame the action, but perhaps even more crucial to the success ‘The Unknown’ is its casting.

Had merely adequate performers been cast in its central roles, it is likely ‘The Unknown’ would never have risen above the level of a particularly bizarre theatrical melodrama, forgotten by all but a handful of silent/pre-code era archivists and fanatics. With Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford on hand however, it’s a whole different story… and not merely on account of their (contemporary or subsequent) fame either.

Crawford’s performance, it must be said, is excellent. Such is the strength of her presence on screen that it feel entirely believable that a man of Alonzo’s wide and bitter experience should become obsessed with Nanon, even as her damaged, brittle mannerisms simultaneously provide a surprisingly raw portrayal of an abused/victimised woman for this era of cinema; “Men! The beasts! God would show wisdom if he took the hands from all of them!” she exclaims in impotent fury after Malabar initially tries to embrace her.

And, speaking of Malabar, even Norman Kerry acquits himself well here, despite initially seeming lined up to be a complete waste of space. Blank-eyed, empty-headed and perpetually grinning, he provides a complete contrast to the ancient, deep red claret of Alonzo’s uniquely troubled character, making us feel our anti-hero’s humiliation all the more keenly once he discovers he has lost out in love to the human equivalent of an unflavoured biscuit.

Mainly though, we need to talk about Lon Chaney.

It may have become a bit of a truism to point out that silent film acting is a different beast from sound acting, but rarely has that point been more clearly demonstrated than by Chaney’s performance in ‘The Unknown’.

In a sound context, his facial gymnastics and heavily made up features would have been regarded as intolerably OTT, but, denied a voice, it is through these kind of gestures that silent characters gain live – and all the more so when they’re even denied the use of their arms for most of the picture. The way that Chaney methodically builds Alonzo up as a character, entirely through his facial tics and eye movements, his mode of dress, his sudden shivers and lunges, is absolutely remarkable. (5)

The figure of the “sympathetic monster” would of course go on to become a cornerstone of American horror cinema as it developed through the rest of the 20th century, but in ‘The Unknown’ Chaney delivers a very different, and considerably more challenging, recipient of our sympathies from the kind of sad-eyed, agency-fee automatons derived from the lineage of Conrad Veidt’s Cesare, Paul Wegener’s Golem and, eventually, Karloff’s monster and it’s descendants.

Unlike those critters, Alonzo is unambiguously a villain – one who neither seeks nor receives any pardon for his maleficence. A criminal, liar and murderer, he cheats, deceives and manipulates everyone he meets through the course of the film, including the woman he professes to love. He upturns the foundations of the essentially benign world in which the drama begins, brings doom upon his own head with admirable efficiency, and basically behaves in the most tyrannical manner imaginable. And yet…

Scanning reviews online, I have often seen ‘The Unknown’ described as a “classical tragedy”, but in reality Alonzo represents something closer to the opposite of a conventional tragic hero. Rather than noble character with one fatal flaw, Chaney presents Alonzo as a tangled mass of flaws and neuroses, from behind which a redeeming spirit of nobility somehow still shines, daring us, for want of a better word, to feel love for him, as well as pity.

It is possible that Vincent Van Gogh’s infamous sacrifice of his ear may to some extent have distantly inspired the story of ‘The Unknown’, and I would go so far as to say that Chaney imbues Alonzo with what I can only describe as an ‘artistic’ sensibility. We don’t doubt for a second the sincerity of Alonzo’s love for Nanon, even as we recognise that his ability to differentiate reality from fantasy hangs by the very thinnest of threads.

Rather than just an intimidating heavy, he serves as a rich, over-powering presence in the lives of the younger characters, giving generously of himself, in spite of the self-interested machinations cloud his honesty. He may, we swiftly learn, be more or less insane, but his is not the kind of insanity that can easily be written off, and his companionship with both Nanon and Cojo (even with Malabar) is seen to be real and compassionate, even as his conduct is shaded by a strain of misanthropy that we feel is birthed more from bitter experience than from mere ingrained nastiness. (“You are wise, Nanon”, he says early on the film when Crawford confesses her hatred of men’s touch, “always fear them, always hate them.”)

Chaney’s big moment of course is Alonzo’s post-amputation reunion with Nanon and Malabar. This takes place - where else - on the stage of a theatre, and, as noted, is handled by Browning as a scene of excruciating emotional torture, extended well beyond the point of audience discomfort.

Shock, frustration, sorrow, rage, menace, terror, hysteria, despair, self-hatred and all-out howling madness - all of these are powerfully felt as they shift, meld and mutate across Alonzo’s visage in what amounts to a harrowing tour de force of silent emotional devastation. It may seem melodramatic to speak of seeing a man's heart smashed into a million pieces live on screen, but you'll feel pretty sure you know what that looks like after watching Chaney here.

In fact, the only rationale I can think of for this film being named ‘The Unknown’ relates to the unimaginable combinations of errant emotions that Chaney manages to dredge up here, verging into states of being that remain entirely nameless, and concluding only when he works himself up to the point of seizure.

“I'm all right now,” an inter-title assigned to Alonzo reads just a few a few moments later, as he regains his composure, his mask back in place and his plan of vengeance already taking shape.

Before watching ‘The Unknown’, I’d always assumed Chaney’s “man of a thousand faces” legend was coined in reference to the effects he achieved with his famous make up box, but, from watching his performance here, it’s clear he could cycle through those faces live in front of the camera with the ease of a martial arts star demonstrating his/her training moves. It is an incredible sight to behold – perhaps the very zenith of a form of acting that would be rendered obsolete mere months after this film’s release.

I had been all set to herald Alonzo as the progenitor of his own lineage of doomed, sociopathic anti-heroes within horror cinema, but, to be honest, I can think of very few characters within the genre who actually lived up to the example Chaney sets here. Peter Lorre’s Dr Gogol in Mad Love perhaps comes closest, with Karloff’s Imhotep in ‘The Mummy’, Price’s Phibes and Usher, and perhaps an unusually affecting mad scientist turn here and there all lurking distantly in the background – but really, Alonzo the Armless stands alone.

We will never really know how Chaney might have adapted to the coming of sound, but, as far as America’s silent cinema goes, he remains a performer without peer, and ‘The Unknown’ is perhaps his strongest surviving vehicle. An unforgettable viewing experience, it is not so much ‘haunting’ in the genteel sense of the ghosts more commonly encountered in the era’s mystery stories, but a raw, emotional wound of a picture that lodges itself in your mind and refuses to leave you be, like a scab you just can’t help but scratch.

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(1) Browning and Young respectively take credit for “story” and “scenario”, whatever that’s supposed to mean, in addition to which we should also mention Joseph Farnham, whose work on the text for film’s inter-titles is wonderful. We should note at this point that various online sources claim that ‘The Unknown’ was adapted without credit from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1915 novel ‘K’. As I can’t find a detailed plot synopsis of the novel though, and certainly can’t be bothered to track down a copy and read it, I’ll have to refrain from further comment on this for the time being.

(2)If the precise details of Alonzo’s criminal career remain frustratingly vague, this seems to be due to the fact that no less than fourteen minutes of footage, reportedly dealing largely with this subject, have been excised from all surviving prints of ‘The Unknown’, and are now – tragically - assumed lost.)

(3) Browning’s notorious ‘Freaks’ (1932) - which, as you will have surmised, directly rehashes a few key plot elements from ‘The Unknown’ – may be similarly personal, and similarly memorable, but for my money the earlier film is by far the greater achievement. (More on this perhaps when I get around to reviewing ‘Freaks at some point in the future.)

(4) If you’re thinking that actor John George looks a bit familiar, that’s probably due to the fact that he appeared in upwards of two hundred Hollywood productions prior to his death in 1968, and, as was so sadly often the case for dwarf actors, suffered the indignity of going uncredited in almost all of them. Such is the range of his filmography, chances are you must have seen him in something over the years, although oddly enough he apparently didn’t appear in ‘Freaks’, which you’d think would have been a shoe-in given his work for Browning here.

(5) I was originally going to take some time here to lavish further praise upon Chaney for his astonishing dedication to this role vis-a-vis learning to drink wine, smoke cigarettes, wipe his eyes with a handkerchief and throw knives, all using his feet. I have read elsewhere however that at least some of these accomplishments were doubled for Chaney by Paul Desmuke – a genuine armless man apparently famed for his performances on the violin.

Although we ostensibly see Chaney perform out these actions in single shots with his face clearly visible, after watching the film again I can’t rule out the possibility that some of them may have been cleverly faked – eg, with Desmuke concealed beneath a table, or just out of frame, extending his legs upward toward Chaney’s face.

Given that there is almost certainly no one left alive who can give us a definitive answer either way though, I didn’t want to clog up the main text of the review with such conjecture. Naturally I’d love to believe that it was Chaney himself getting busy with his feet (as if the performance he gives with the rest of his body wasn’t impressive enough), but… who knows.

Mad Love /‘The Hands of Orlac’ (Karl Freund, 1935)

Whilst I bow to no man in my appreciation of The Black Cat (1934 version), ‘Island of Lost Souls’, Bride of Frankenstein and numerous other masterworks of weirdo horror that crawled from the recesses of the Hollywood studios in the 1930s, I think after much consideration that my vote for the single best pre-war American horror film must go to ‘Mad Love’ (released in the UK as ‘The Hands of Orlac’), one of MGM’s intermittent attempts to leapfrog the success of Universal’s horror cycle, which opened in New York in the summer of 1935.

I say “best pre-war *American* horror film”, but it is worth noting before we move on that one of the things that makes ‘Mad Love’ such a unique brew is the fact that it takes its personnel, inspiration, setting and aesthetic style from just about everywhere BUT America. This of course was a pattern well established by the Universal horrors, which drew from European gothic traditions to such an extent that their success often hinged largely upon the contribution of European actors and directors, but ‘Mad Love’ takes this tendency even further, creating what is in effect a Hollywood studio movie in which American input didn’t extend much beyond putting up the money and providing accents and dialogue for some of the supporting cast.

Set amid the narrow streets of a grimy and decadent Montmartre, the film was adapted by ‘Werewolf of Paris’ scribe Guy Endore from the French pulp perennial ‘Les Mains D'Orlac’ by Maurice Renard, and subsequently massaged into filmable shape by ubiquitous Universal horror script doctor John L. Balderson. Famously, ‘Mad Love’ gave Peter Lorre his first role in an American film after leaving Germany for fairly obvious reasons a few years previously, and, whether by accident or design, he found himself under the direction of another exile from the Nazis (and another key Fritz Lang collaborator to boot), the master cinematographer Karl Freund.

A US resident since 1929, Freund had by this point already established himself as an important contributor to Universal’s horror films - as director of photography on Todd Browning’s ‘Dracula’ he is often credited with devising most of that film’s best moments, and his directorial debut on the following year’s ‘The Mummy’ proved equally auspicious. It seems likely that it was this element of Freund’s CV that convinced MGM to hand him the reins here, and the studio’s attempts to echo Universal continued with the casting of Englishman Colin Clive – Dr. Frankenstein himself – in the pivotal role of Stephen Orlac.

The presence of Clive seems appropriate, as, initially, ‘Mad Love’ could easily be mistaken for one of James Whale’s pioneering horror films. The same odd mixture of modernist cynicism and crumbling gothic / music hall melodrama, the same lightning fast pace, striking visuals and constant unpredictability that made ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘The Old Dark House’ such head-spinning prospects – all are present and correct here, suggesting that the team behind Freund’s film had been taking careful note of Whale’s achievements. But the circumstances of ‘Mad Love’s creation arguably resulted in an even better and more accomplished film than Whale had managed – a heady mixture of all that was good in the pre-existing French, German and American horror traditions, with just a touch of Britishness lurking somewhere in the background for good measure.

In its original form, ‘Les Mains D'Orlac’ (which had already been filmed in Germany in 1924 with Conrad Veidt in the title role) tells the tale of Stephen Orlac, a master pianist whose hands, crushed in a train accident, are replaced with those of an executed murderer via a bit of ground-breaking transplant surgery. Blackouts and homicidal impulses follow, resulting in, well… unfortunate results for all concerned.

‘Mad Love’ diverges considerably from its source however, pushing Orlac into the background and concentrating instead upon the surgeon who performs the transplant operation, Professor Gogol (played by Lorre, of course) - a sinister and lovelorn individual driven to madness by his unrequited love for Orlac’s wife Yvonne (Frances Drake), who appears nightly as the top-billed actress in a Grand Guignol-esque horror theatre.

In this iteration of the story, Gogol acquires a pair of hands from a condemned killer who had previously worked as a circus knife-thrower, and initially transplants them onto Orlac simply as doomed attempt to win Yvonne’s favour, telling the couple that he has merely rebuilt Stephen’s existing hands, rather than replacing them entirely. It is only after Stephen’s behavior becomes erratic as a result of the supernatural influence of his new hands that Gogol goes off the deep end and steps in to push Orlac toward madness and murder, in a fiendish and rather desperate attempt to get him out of the way so that he can, presumably, have his wicked way with Yvonne.

From this already somewhat contrived outline, things spread out into a wider plotline that incorporates enough fiendish disguises, snooping reporters, pilfered corpses and mistaken identities to recall the heady Gallic pulp of Louis Feuillade’s silent serials. But Freund and his collaborators wisely decided to pare things down to their bare emotional essence here, building an atmosphere of furtive dread through the application of powerful cinematic imagery rather than elaborate plotting, and keeping the focus squarely on the pitiful and terrifying figure of Gogol – a move that helps to elevate the film from just another variation on a hoary old pulp yarn into something approaching a masterpiece.

All classic horror films of course trade to some extent on the idea of the ‘sympathetic monster’, but ‘Mad Love’ is uniquely uncompromising in its exploration of the real implications of feeling sympathy for a ‘monster’, as the heart-wrenching pity we feel for the lost and lonely Gogol in the early part of the film is gradually overcome by a growing sense of shock and revulsion as the character succumbs to obsession, and Lorre transforms before our eyes into a truly unhinged creature - a sweaty, cackling imp of the perverse whose un-human visage surpasses any of Lon Chaney’s creations without even requiring the application of make-up.

Lorre’s mixing of these two distinct modes, the way in which he manages to let them co-exist within the same cohesive character, is remarkable, as he moves between quiet, awkward dignity and snarling, eye-rolling hammery on the turn of a dime. As Andre Sennwald rightly points out in his insightful review in The New York Times (readable here), there are few actors who could deliver a line like “I, a poor peasant, have conquered science – why can’t I conquer love?” and succeed not only in making such a pronouncement seem natural, but in actually drawing us into the character’s emotional turmoil to such an extent that any sniggering or suggestions of ironic ‘b movie’ camp become unthinkable.

Whilst Lorre’s performance in ‘Mad Love’ was widely praised at the time and has frequently been cited as his best American role, I would go one further and say, with all due respect to Lang’s ‘M’, that this must surely be the best performance of Lorre’s entire career.

Meanwhile, Freund echoes Whale at his best by sidestepping the bland and obvious at every turn, crowbarring a little bit of strangeness and uncertainty into every scene as he twists the oft melodramatic scenarios offered by the script into a veritable feast of unheimlich imagery. From the sight of Gogol strangling his beloved with her own hair, to Orlac staring at his hairy, oversized new hands, to the dream-like blurring of the line separating the real-life Drake from the wax mannequin of her that Gogol keeps in his attic room, everything is rendered kind of perverse, as the film offers endless variations on the theme of the body being turned against itself.

A series of stark, inscrutable images that could literally have been taken from a nightmare, these scattered tableaus seem to graze the skin of some deeper psychological significance, but never quite settle into the comforting realm of an easily applicable ‘meaning’. Masterful examples of the kind of unchecked weirdness that ‘30s horror so often inadvertently let through the gate, they are practical applications of surrealism, loaded with all the spiritual unease of German expressionism but still, somehow, rendered just about acceptable to the audience of a commercial Hollywood thriller.

Even ‘Mad Love’s title sequence, featuring the name of the film scrawled across the condensation on a steamy window before a bare fist smashes the glass upon which the cast list is super-imposed, is unnerving and faintly suggestive (not to mention quite daring for the 1930s, when most films still announced themselves in a manner rather more like this).

Fittingly, ‘Mad Love’s cinematography is often extraordinary - as I suppose you might well expect from a film on which  'Citizen Kane's future cameraman was taking orders from the cameraman of ‘Metropolis’. Though we can reasonably assume the film was a pretty low budget exercise for MGM, the wonky expressionist angles and stark lighting applied to the sets in and around Gogol’s apartment are nonetheless exquisite, whilst DP Gregg Toland, five years before ‘Kane’, already demonstrates his aptitude for turning studio sets into lofty and vertiginous spaces.(1)

Helpfully, the film’s action is spread across a variety of visually appealing locations. The night-haunted tenement building in which Gogol lives could have come straight from ‘Der Student von Prag’ or ‘Der Golem’ (the latter of which was actually photographed by Freund), whilst the bare halls and gleaming chrome fixtures of his clinic seem emblematic of a whole lineage of cold, unsettling surgical spaces that leads through ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ right up to Cronenberg’s ‘Dead Ringers’, and the ‘Théâtre des Horreurs’ where he spies upon Yvonne each night is pure spook-house gothic. Combined with Toland’s bold use of perspective and Freund’s oneiric Germanic sensibilities, these threatening and confined backgrounds lend ‘Mad Love’ a unique visual identity, with the stagey drawing room scenes and fixed medium shots that usually dominate low budget films of this era wisely kept to minimum (if not eradicated entirely).

But, speaking of the budget, some moments here do make me wonder… If you’ll allow me a bit of a gratuitous digression, I was struck on my second viewing of ‘Mad Love’ by how astonishingly elaborate the presentation of the train crash in which Orlac loses his hands was. Though a pivotal plot point, this sequence is basically of little consequence vis-a-vis the central drive of the film’s narrative, and I’m sure many filmmakers would have been happy to present it at a distance, or just mention it in passing. Freund though opts to give us a full picture of the accident and its terrible aftermath, complete with shots of several full-size train cars lying up-ended on top of each other as piles of debris burn on the ground and a chaotic crowd of onlookers, including a small army of wimpled nurses, attend to the prone bodies that litter the track.

None of this looks like the result any in-camera trickery or matte painting, and one can’t help but wonder how the hell the producers managed to justify such an indulgence for such a ‘small’ film. Did they opportunistically jump onboard a set constructed for a far bigger production, or is the scene actually the result of some kind of ingenious use of model shots and visual effects? Whatever the story may be, the resulting shots certainly help to expand what could have merely been a throwaway plot device into a quite lengthy and very effective sequence.

We already feel an awful queasiness when Yvonne arrives at the station to greet her husband, only to be met with the confusion of his train’s mysterious non-arrival, and when we follow her aboard the ‘relief train’ to the sight of the accident, the scene we see through her eyes is genuinely hellish – a Brueghel-esque vision of machine-age devastation. As with the post-WWI angst that consumes Edgar Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’, ‘Mad Love’ is a gothic potboiler that wants to show us it is not afraid to confront the real life horrors of its era – one that refuses to allow us to drift completely into horror of a purely fantastical / escapist variety.

And, what could be more ‘real life’ than the crushing loneliness and social inadequacy of Gogol himself? A Kafka-esque urban lost soul if ever there was one. His piteous inability to express his feelings to others and the cracked actions that eventually result are near unbearable to behold. More than avarice, cruelty or narcissism, he is a monster driven to monstrousness simply by his own failure to master human interaction.

One of the most haunting images in ‘Mad Love’ is that of Gogol watching Yvonne perform at the horror theatre, early on in the film. Though the staged violence is never graphic, the extracts we are shown from the performance are startlingly sadistic for a film of this vintage. (How they got past the recently imposed Hays Code is anyone’s guess - I can only assume that perhaps they were deemed acceptable by vestige of being a ‘play-within-a-play’ or somesuch?)

Regardless of the era though, this sequence remains genuinely unnerving, as we are forced to watch Frances Drake being ‘stretched’ on the rack and ‘burned’ with a branding iron, her theatrically exaggerated expressions of ‘pain’ revealed in unflinching close-up. As her ‘screams’ ring out across the theatre, the camera pans in on Gogol’s private box, where the doctor watches staring and impassive, his face half-hidden by shadow.

What we have here is a direct spiritual precursor to every Jess Franco-esque voyeuristic performance/reality blurring scenario that followed in subsequent decades, and indeed of every one of the innumerable instances of horror movies and thrillers using such material to open themselves up to ‘metaphor for cinema itself’ type meta-commentary; but only rarely did Franco or his aimilarly inclined contemporaries ever manage to twist their fantasies into anything quite as disturbing as Lorre’s expressionless face silently observing the gory spectacle of Drake’s torment, his emotions unguessable, until his eyes eventually close in some kind of private, devotional ecstasy.

We are never given any background on what attracted Gogol to the ‘Théâtre des Horreurs’, or what kick-started his obsession with Yvonne, but we feel that, trapped as he is within his strange, slightly autistic state of isolation, he remains ignorant of the conventions or meaning of popular entertainment. The tawdry exploitation offered by the theatre thus somehow becomes the highest and most beautiful sight Gogol can imagine, and its cathartic excesses affect him in ways he doesn’t quite understand - just like Travis Bickle, innocently insisting his date accompanies him to his favourite x-rated movie all those years later.

Always a solid actor, Clive meanwhile puts in a fine performance as Orlac – with flapping fringe and furrowed brow, he’s a quintessential proto-Dirk Bogarde English neurotic, never more lovable than when he’s cheerfully welcoming his own doom (“don’t worry dear, it’s alright” he reassures his wife as the police drag him off on a murder charge). And Drake, though her role isn’t exactly what you’d call ‘demanding’, is perfectly cast as raven-haired, dewy-eyed the object of both men’s affections (her shock/fear faces are first rate too). Though as formal and florid as the conventions of the era dictated, pair’s scenes as husband and wife convey the genuine pathos of a pair of lovers facing challenging circumstances.

Indeed, whilst scenes of ‘normal folk’ faffing about whilst the monsters and misfits are off-screen are usually a big weakness in ‘30s and ‘40s horror films, that’s thankfully not the case here. Scripting and acting both remain engaging whilst Gogol is out of sight, and, in contrast to the NY Times review linked above, I even think the film’s comedy interludes work quite well. Gogol’s housekeeper (played by landlady/Great Aunt specialist May Beatty) is weirdly likeable as a Whale-esque music hall throwback, and the blunt interjections of Ted Healy’s meddlesome American reporter serve to deflate the film’s more introspective moments in much the same way as the intrusion of the landlord in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’, particularly in the brief scene he spends palling around with the equally jovial knife-throwing murderer Rollo. (After three viewings, Healy’s balloon-bursting “man without head kills rich jeweler – what an eight column spread that’ll be for the front page!” outburst still gets a laugh out of me).

Unlike the strict horror/humour dichotomy that upsets the tone of many older horror films, ‘Mad Love’ is a rare example of the genre that is perceptive enough to let the two strands intermingle. All of the film’s designated ‘comic relief’ characters are in some sense as perversely tragic as the leads – the tactless reporter obsessively chasing corpses, the drunken landlady cowed by her sinister tenant, the condemned murderer cheerfully grinning his way to the guillotine. As a result, they add to, rather than detract from, the anguished and oppressive atmosphere of the film’s world.

And conversely, by the time we reach the film’s final act, there is sometimes no adequate response to the black-hearted absurdity of Gogol’s pathetic travails than that of outright laughter. As he pounds away at his organ (yes, of course he has an organ), his mind utterly gone, Lorre grins and gurns like some deranged toddler, and we’re not sure if we should laugh at, sympathise with or simply be terrified of this bizarre figure – so laughter, of course, becomes the default solution. Slicing between his identities as a tragic lover and a monster, Gogol is now also a figure of fun, prompting an uneasy feeling indeed for the audience, as we are invited to mock this character whom we’ve previously felt for so deeply, creating a nagging guilt in the back of our minds that, like so much in the film, lingers on after the story’s glib conclusion, never satisfactorily resolved.

Though ‘Mad Love’s American title might as first seem a bland Hollywood rebranding of the more ominous and overtly horror-ish ‘The Hands of Orlac’, I must say that on reflection it is a name that I absolutely love – a fiery and weirdly poetic two word combo that couldn’t possibly be more appropriate, given that Freund’s film essentially concerns a love triangle in which both of the heroine’s suitors spend most of the film slowly going insane.

For all my enthusiasm though, it is the duty of a reviewer to grudgingly admit that ‘Mad Love’ is not exactly what you’d call a perfect film. As mentioned above, the plotting is distinctly creaky and overwrought in places, and the film’s dream sequences (of which there are several) are perhaps not terribly effective – a hackneyed mélange of super-impositions and twirling, zooming camera tricks that somehow seem far less ‘otherworldly’ than the movie’s ‘real life’ scenes – whilst the ending seems quite abrupt in view of the care that has been taken with all that proceeded it, even by the clock-watching standards of old-time b pictures.

But, as I have said innumerable times before on these pages, who the hell wants to watch a perfect film? It is the ambiguities, the mysteries, the sheer strangeness of supernatural horror stories that keeps us coming back for more, and in that sense, ‘Mad Love’ is an example of the form that succeeds on every level.

A convoluted pulp potboiler somehow worked up into a mutant cinematic text that leaves us with a wealth of images never to be forgotten, questions never to be answered, raw emotions we don’t quite know what to do with and that may do uncomfortable things to the soul should we let them get to us too much, it surely matches up to the finest intentions of original gothic traditions of which it forms such a startling and uncanny modernisation.

Indeed, if the success of a horror film can be measured in terms of the sheer number of images that remain burned onto the viewer’s retina after viewing, lingering long in the back of the mind and never quite resolving themselves in any reassuring sense of order, then ‘Mad Love’, eighty years young this summer, can still be considered one of the best ever made.

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(1) If you want to take the comparison further, you could argue that Gogol even looks a little Kane-like in some low angle close-ups here, looming above us in his wide-brimmed hat and fur-collared coat… and making an actor of Lorre’s stature ‘loom’ is no mean feat, I can tell you.