You Just Can't Go Wrong with Peter Lorre

My October just couldn't be complete without a little love to Peter Lorre. I'm so glad and feel so fortunate Turner Classics decided to give Lorre some love Friday night, the 9th. I recorded "Mad Love" (from 1935; directed by Karl Fruend, the director of The Mummy) & The Beast with Five Fingers (from '46, directed by a miserable Robert Florey who disavowed it) on DVR due to matters of watching other movies. I think I did right, though, as Saturday afternoon seemed to be just right for both films. First off, Mad Love is always welcome in October. What a fabulous movie with a richly layered, creep in Lorre's surgeon.

He loves to watch an actress appear in Grand Guignol productions involving torture and sadism in a delightfully wicked stage show for fans of the macabre. It isn't a wax museum as much as a theatrical tribute to the ghoulish and ghastly. Lorre's Gogol (love the name!) is bald, wearing fur-lining coats, with these sleepy (and when tackled by unrest and unease at his love being unrequited, bug-eyed) eyes that speak for him when his lips are unable too. He is a genius surgeon, but his obsessive "love" (lust?) for Frances Drake, attending every show she stars in a specific box, devoting flowers to her performances, will be his undoing.

He is simply unable to conquer his demons, eventually overcome with not having her, doing whatever he must to have her...even if it means framing her pianist husband (Colin Clive in a less distinguished role than his Baron Frankenstein) for the murder of his vile stepfather (who operated a pawn shop)! This is Lorre's show, and I love watching the guy work. He does madness in that token Lorre way that is all his. His face, mannerisms, his sloth-like walk, and that foreboding lust that Frances (rightfully) considers repulsive make him an ideal villain. He brings a pathos, still, to his surgeon. He just wants his love returned in kind. Frances is devoted entirely to Clive. Clive is as subdued as you'll ever see him here, only a bit theatrical when he speaks of the hands attached to his arms (hence, the "hands of Orlac" portion of the plot included) to the authorities.

A knife-thrower had killed his father-in-law, getting the death sentence of the guillotine as a result. But a train crash prematurely *derails* that. Oh, the knife-thrower survives intact, but preeminent symphony pianist Clive suffers crushed hands. Off goes the head (Gogol loves to see heads chopped off, proclaims his always-drunk maid), and the hands are surgically applied to Clive as Lorre's surgeon couldn't deny the pleas of Frances. The actions of Gogol, pretending to be the knife-thrower (!), in an effort to convince Clive's pianist, Steve Orlac, that his hands committed the murder of stepdad solidifies the mad love of the title. The wax sculpture of Frances *in character* bought by Gogol for his home certainly identifies his mad love even further. She might be quitting the *stage* but her character lives on with Gogol! The ending is rather ironic...the very knife-throwing hands given to Clive through Lorre's mastery actually stop him from hurting Frances!

The Beast with Five Fingers is this year's scene stealer. The usual suspects are always a pleasure, but when a new film gets introduced the line up for the first October and manages to leave this viewer quite well pleased, I have to give it some major props. Regardless of whether Florey disliked this film or not, Lorre and his mental breakdown involving a disembodied hand which he envisions as real simply won't be denied its entertainment value. If you find Lorre's performance high-camp, at least he's a hell of a lot of fun to watch! He's like third billed in this one but he's only rivaled by J. Carrol Naish, a wonderful actor who deserves his just due as a renowned supporting actor deserved of re-evaluation. His performance as a "man transformed from his primate origins" in "Dr. Renault's Secret" from 1942 is a B-movie triumph that deserves to be seen and appreciated.

Here Naish is just simply a delight as a "commissario" of an Italian village who investigates the death of a popular pianist whose right side went paralyzed while in New York, returning to a palatial estate as a type of retirement. Obsessed with his nurse, Julie (Andrea King), who came with him to the estate, she fell in love with an antiquities con artist who used his charisma and charm to trick tourists into buying fraudulent trinkets. This man, Conrad (Robert Alda, getting top billing over Lorre inexplicably), sort of assists the commissario in their efforts to uncover who murdered a lawyer planning to help the dead pianist's brother-in-law (from America, living in England) and nephew battle an updated will leaving everything to Julie. Lorre is someone who lives off the kindness of the dead pianist (Victor Francen), given the library and books galore to *conduct research* in matters of astrology, a way to use elements of life, the universe, and the past to decide the fates of us all. Lorre is aloof, curious, peculiar, eccentric, and slightly off, but when you threaten to take away his books then you get the beast emerging. He doesn't like it when you threaten his library and books. All of this--the thought of losing his *existence*--is the catalyst in his mental deterioration. Naish is so much fun to watch because of how he carries himself. When it looks like an actual hand could be on the loose, he cautiously conforms the possibility but never fails to see if more practical methods are behind the one murder, and then a second attempted strangulation on the nephew not long after he provoked a harsh response from Lorre for positing the fact that there might be a will in the safe behind the library book shelf that could contest Julie's.

This is a tour-de-force of performance and effects unfolding before our eyes, before the hand from the box in The Addams Family became standard entertainment fare. Trying to get rid of the hand and his decline because of its insistence to remain "alive" is enough for Lorre fans to experience this for yourselves...of course, I imagine any self-respected Lorre fan already has. But Naish fans, this is a must. He breaks the fourth wall at the end in grand style in regards to the hand that is enough incentive for Naish fans to see this immediately. That Naishy way he questions Julie and Conrad, without totally implying they are suspects but not dismissing them, and his whole good-hearty approach to everything he does makes this character so appealing and a total joy to watch from start to finish.

A double feature on a Saturday afternoon I certainly don't regret, my kids watched these movies with me and got some Lorre themselves. Lorre, so memorably strange, with a presence that grabs you and takes you wherever he wants you to go with his performances, is an icon.