(My first column by a guest contributor, Ms. Analee Harriman. Hopefully she'll become a regular. - Groggy)
I’m not a big fan of horror movies. Well, wait, that’s not exactly true. I’m not a fan of TODAY’S horror movies. Blood, guts, and gore have never really interested me, and I see no real reason for a horror movie to need an excess of any of the three to even be considered a horror movie. I’d much rather watch one of the classics. By classics, I mean a horror movie that doesn’t throw buckets of fake blood everywhere, has a slightly odd storyline, and is most likely in black and white. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to have a name like Karloff, Lugosi, or Price attached to it either. Most of the time, that’s an added bonus. Give me a good old-fashioned horror movie that relies on the creepiness of the actors, sets, costumes, and lighting involved ANY day.
One of the unquestionably creepiest (and best, in my opinion) horror movie actors of all time is Peter Lorre. The first time I saw a Peter Lorre film, I was 17 years old. It was a Friday night in October of 2005. To be precise, it was the 28th of October, and I remember this because it was the same night that my neighborhood had its Trick-or-Treat night. Now, at 17, I was too old to trick-or-treat properly, but not too old to get candy from any neighbor who saw me taking my little sister and her friend around and decided to reward me for being such a good teenager. Anyways, that’s beside the point.
When we got home (and after my little sister’s friend had left), I threw my candy in my room (so my dad couldn’t steal any of it) and flopped into our big green recliner with the remote control, hell-bent on catching a good horror movie. At the time, AMC was having a marathon of the old horror movies, and while they weren’t showing Frankenstein until the next morning, I figured I could still catch something worthwhile that I hadn’t seen. I changed the channel to AMC, and discovered to my delight that we had arrived home a mere 5 minutes before the start of the movie Mad Love, a movie I had been dying to see that movie since I was in 5th grade and read about it in a horror movie book. I watched the movie with my parents and little sister, and I was not disappointed. It was amazing.
A few nights ago, for some reason or another, they were showing quite a few Peter Lorre movies on Turner Classic Movies. One of the movies they were showing was Mad Love, and after a show of shoving my friend out of the apartment post-chicken nuggets and Velveeta Shells & Cheese dinner, I came back upstairs with a few minutes to spare before the movie. I had nothing else to watch that night, and as I had no homework to do and had done the dishes earlier, I felt I deserved a reward, and that reward was going to be Mad Love on Turner Classic Movies, by damn it!
Mad Love is actually a remake of a silent film from 1924 called The Hands of Orlac, which is a film version of the story with the same name. The premise of the film is thus: a pianist loses his hands in an accident, and a doctor attaches a new pair that just happened to come from a recently deceased convict who just happened to like to kill people by throwing knives at them. I think you see where this is going. Anyways, one of the biggest plot points is that Dr. Gogol (played by Mr. Lorre) is in love with a woman named Yvonne Orlac (played by Frances Drake), who is married to the protagonist and resident Unfortunate Piano Player Stephen Orlac (played
by Colin Clive).
There’s just one problem with the good doctor: the man is batshit insanely in love with Yvonne Orlac. He buys the wax figure of Madame Orlac from the theater where she works (as an actress who plays women who get tortured and killed in various ways…way to not be misogynistic there, Karl Freund!), then takes it home with him…and SERENADES IT. Later, at the climax of the movie, after Madame Orlac has snuck into his home, accidentally broken the statue, and takes its place, Gogol sees her move and thinks that the statue has come to life. So what does he do? He does what any self-respecting man who thinks the effigy of the love of his life has awakened like Galatea and come to him. Oh, wait, no he doesn’t.
Instead of having the decency to see whether or not this "wax figure come to life" is any different from the living breathing counterpart, he starts to strangle her! Because, in case you missed it at the beginning, when they stated it the first time, Dr. Gogol believes that each man should kill the thing he loves. Hence, instead of riding into the sunset with Waxy, he decides to start doing the Hitchcock movie Frenzy a few decades too early and without the proper strangulation tools. In case you missed it, by this time Dr. Gogol has gone completely batshit insane. Since it’s a 1930s horror movie, I don’t think I have to tell you how it ends. You’ve probably figured it out already.
Peter Lorre took what could have been a mildly unsettling character and turned him into the stalkery male admirer that makes all straight women cringe and all gay men run for cover. This is a man who could scare the living hell out of people in Germany just by whistling a cheery tune-you’ll understand why if you’ve seen the film M. I’ve seen him do other movies, some horror, others along the non-horror lines of The Maltese Falcon, even a comedy. The man was a brilliant actor. He took the character he was given and added an extra spark of creepy or pathos or whatever was needed to make his performance jump out at you without being over-the-top about it.
The gloomy sets, a well-written story, and the brilliance of Peter Lorre all combine to make a wonderfully creepy and unsettling piece of film that’s as timeless as it is entertaining. Feel free to disagree with me if you will, but for me, Mad Love is brilliant. Totally batshit insane, but brilliant. Mr. Lorre, you outdid yourself, and the world still hasn’t found a horror movie actor who can do it quite like you and your gang could do it back then.
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