Mad Love (1935)

Simply A Masterpiece

Admirable film.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

M notwithstanding, MAD LOVE is probably Peter Lorre at his very best: his bulging eyes and sinister whisper combine to make his ghoulish Dr. Gogol (whose obsessive patronage of the Grand Guignol theater leads in the end to disaster) very Strange- but also strangely Sympathetic. In M, his unsavory character stalked unsuspecting children; here, he moons for a beautiful woman he can never really hope to possess and it's an absolutely riveting performance- one of the finest in the history of Fright Films. Director Freund no doubt deserves a great deal of credit for what we see here, but it's Lorre at his bug-eyed best who commands center stage. An outstanding movie.

Apparently this movie is a remake of the Austrian silent "The Hands of Orlac" which I really want to see now since I thought "Mad Love" was awesome. This is mainly thanks to the role of Peter Lorre as the creepy looking and acting Dr. Gogol. That gaze in his eyes, that laugh when he disguised himself as the murderer that was insanely good. Another good role was for Gogol's housekeeper played by May Beatty together with her parrot putting some humor in an otherwise very serious and dark movie. Gogol's love interest Yvonne is played by Frances Drake, beautiful actress of who the doctor keeps a wax statue in his home. At the start of the movie I really thought that statue was a real person, so real it looked. The scene where Yvonne pretends to be the statue to fool Gogol is just awesome. The story is simple but really effective.

In Paris, creepy bald-headed Peter Lorre (as Doctor Gogol) visits the incredibly realistic wax museum figure of beautiful scream queen Frances Drake (as Yvonne). Later, Mr. Lorre is consumed with orgasmic desire as he watches the real Ms. Drake perform on stage as a tortured victim. Backstage, the actress is flattered by the renown surgeon's admiration. But, Lorre is devastated to learn Drake will be leaving for England with pianist husband Colin Clive (as Stephen Orlac).En route, Mr. Clive's hands are wounded in a train wreck. Called in to operate, Lorre decides to amputate Clive's hands and sew on the hands of a recently decapitated murderer. Poor Clive loses his piano-playing ability, but gains other talents… The whole "hand transplant" machinations never grabbed me or aided in my suspension of disbelief; but "Mad Love" is stylish, has Karl Freund directing, and Lorre is an amazing sight for sore eyes. Also watch for the Yvonne's maid Sara Haden (as Marie), who can really hold her own.******* Mad Love (7/12/35) Karl Freund ~ Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy

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."