Happy Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween!
It has become an annual tradition of mine to plunder the treasure stores of films that are, more or less, loosely or strictly, categorized under the rubric of “horror”. The definition is probably looser than some would like, but the baseline is some degree of unease, the macabre, and seasoned optionally with a monster type critter.
My pal Tim Kozlowski draws a line at films like “Silence of
the Lambs” which does wind up on horror film lists, and which I actually do
understand, but I’m not sure I can fully support, either. I’m not sure if it’s
because it’s not preposterous enough, too damned good a film (not that there
aren’t great, genre-transcending examples), or too multivalent that it can’t be
simply stuffed into the “horror film” box. That said, I would be more inclined
to assign the Ridley Scott sequel “Hannibal” to the checklist since it’s more
single-minded in its approach and execution (it has much more in common with
Dario Argento than Scott and lordy, it’s a mess…literally).
Thus far, my watch has been idiosyncratic on the one hand
and somewhat catholic, on the other.
To wit, “Mad Love” and “Les Yeux sans Visage”/”Eyes without
a Face” are not unexpected. There’s a thematic link between them and a kind of
shared poetry; likewise, with “La Strega en Amore”/The Witch”, the 1966
adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novella “Aura”.
Then there’s “The Mask of Fu Manchu”, a pre-code delirium-inducing bag
of not-completely disguised S and M with a hefty dose of casual racism, and “The
Devil-Doll”, a preposterous bit of madness that works surprisingly well. There
was something in the water in the thirties.
A couple of nights ago, I reprised “Shaun of the Dead” with
my sister, who had not seen it and I feel as though I did the Lord of All
Hallowed Eve’s work by introducing her to the first part of the Cornetto
Trilogy. She’s seen “Hot Fuzz” and so is now appropriately predisposed for “The
World’s End.” And last, to date (for there is more to come), “Scream 4.” I’m a
completest, for sure, but I’ve also been intrigued by how Craven would handle ending
this series. It turned out to be his last film, and it’s a not unworthy finish
to a lengthy career.
2020 has been a horror show all by itself, but it’s been my
experience that the genre provides several safety valves for the human psyche,
not the least of which is to vicariously experience dread and existential
horror and the often cathartic release of a story well-told. Note that I didn’t
say anything about a happy ending. However, film like literature, grants a kind
of satisfaction when the work is complete or whole in itself.
Before I do a quick pass at the past few nights’ viewing, I’m
toying – very much – with a vampire day for Halloween. I’ll start with Murnau’s
“Nosferatu” and end with Tod Browning’s “Dracula.” In between, I want to
explore some of Universal’s lesser known films, a couple of the Hammer Films
entries and a look at “I Vampiri”, the first Italian horror movie of the sound
era.
What do you have planned for your viewing pleasure? Comment
below and let me know what you are going to watch/are watching/did watch.
Okay. Cue camera two for the Reaction Shot(s).
Mad Eyes – Or Body Horror B.C. (Before Cronenberg)
There is nothing revelatory about saying that Karl Freund’s “Mad
Love” and Georges Franju’s “Les yeux sans visage” are masterpieces of the genre.
They are both works of astounding vision and a kind of daring that we take for
granted, given not just how inured we are to using the anatomy as a prism through
which to refract our more awful visions or the body as a canvas on which to
inflict them.
In the earlier film, Peter Lorre (in another of cinema’s
great performances of an outsider bearing a twisted soul) is Dr. Gogol whose
reputation for saving lives is legend around Paris. He carries a torch for
Frances Drake's Yvonne Orlac recently wed to Colin Clive as Mr. Stephen Orlac,
concert pianist. Yvonne is an actress at a Grand Guignol theater that Gogol has
been visiting every night and whose patronage seems to be quite generous.
In a not at all stalkerish (the opposite is true) meeting with Yvonne backstage, she thanks him for his support and fandom but lets him know that she’s retiring from the stage to journey through life with her husband. To be sure, Gogol takes this better than most who come unhinged. He doesn’t try to strangle her, but you see the slow burn in Lorre’s eyes. Seriously, the man was one of the screen’s great actors. As mimicked as he often was, he had a remarkable range and knew very well how to play to the camera without hogging the spotlight (he didn’t need to; and he could be wonderfully hammy in later years when it was called for).
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| Not awkward. Not awkward, at all. |
We also get a crisp picture of Gogol’s obsession for Yvonne when he buys a life-size wax figurine of her and has it delivered to his house. Admittedly, buying a wax figure of an actress isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it spills over into something else when we see Gogol begin speaking to the sculpture and framing it as Galatea to his Pygmalion. His housekeeper - played in a strong turn by May Beatty – is a drunk who seems to be on thin ice with Gogol from one moment to the next. She seems to grow increasingly plastered over the course of the film and has a white cockatiel attached to her.
About this cockatiel, this was one of Gregg Toland’s
definitive films as cinematographer and I have often wondered if Pauline Kael’s
observation that “Mad Love” influenced “Citizen Kane” didn’t stem quite so much
from Toland’s position as Welles’s director of cinematographer, as from the
presence of the cockatiel in the later film. I am joking, of course. The
cameraman had a distinct visual style that used light and shadow in extremely
effective ways. I would argue, still, though, that Welles and Toland were more
collaborators than that “Mad Love” itself was a major influence on “Kane.”
In any case, it is a remarkably lensed film (although Kael was not fond of it; she found it “a dismal, static, horror movie”, notable only for its photography”1) and I have to part company with Kael on another point. While she acknowledges Freund’s contribution to cinema (he shot “The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari”, “The Last Laugh”, and “Metropolis”, for starters), I can’t agree that “Mad Love” is static. Sure, some of the framing is almost painterly in composition, but the movie itself packs a ton of development in little over an hour.
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| May Beatty, Ted Healy, and the bird. |
Stephen and Yvonne are running low on reserves as payments
for the surgery and therapy drain their coffers. He pays a visit to his father and
rather spontaneously throws a fountain pen that shatters the shop window. The
hands seem to have taken on a life of their own. He confronts Gogol about why
his hands are behaving this way and the doctor replies by saying that Stephen
is probably acting out a childhood trauma.
Meanwhile, Gogol has made a couple of moves on Yvonne and goes
so far as to tell her she should be careful of Stephen, that he recommended Stephen
take some time in the country. Stephen’s father is found dead, a knife in the back
and is lured to meet a mysterious figure with metal hands who claims to be
Rollo; that he survived his execution and that Stephen has his hands. Of course,
it’s Gogol who has gaslit Stephen into thinking that it was he who killed his
father and whose hands are now possessed of Rollo’s murderous instincts.
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| Dr. Gogol, the prankster. |
Stephen returns to Yvonne and tells him what he’s learned and that he needs to turn himself in. Yvonne heads for Gogol’s to confront him and/or ask for help (I can’t recall precisely her motivation).
To be sure, other wheels have been spinning; we were
introduced earlier in the film to an American reporter, Reagan (played by Ted
Healy, with nary a Stooge in sight) who follows several leads to Gogol when he
discovers that Rollo’s body is allegedly at Gogol’s house. Through
cross-purposes, he gets Gogol’s housekeeper to talk but she thinks Reagan is
referring to the wax figure of Yvonne. When Reagan gains entry to Gogol’s
house, he sees the statue and begins to reassess the situation. The housekeeper
sees him out and all the while, during this time, Yvonne is en route to Gogol’s.
Reagan realizes that there’s more afoot and attempts to figure
out the connections involved. The police are alerted as they are to arrest
Orlac. In the meantime, Yvonne has made it to Gogol’s house, freaked the
housekeeper out of her mind, enters the room where her wax doppelganger stands
and accidently breaks it. She hears Gogol approach and assumes the statue’s
place while we watch Gogol fall apart more and more. Lorre’s descent into
madness across the film is remarkable.
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| Funny meeting you here. |
We see him come increasingly unglued to the point where he
cannot operate on a child. His assistant, played by Keye Luke (they’d team up
again in the Mr. Moto series in “Mr. Moto’s Gamble”) has to finish the
operation and through it all, Lorre’s Gogol is barely holding it together. By
the time he’s messed with Stephen Orlac’s mind, he’s gone full-tilt loon. When
he shows up back at his house, Gogol is loudly mocking Stephen’s gullibility and
crowing over his victory.
He begins his regular babbling at his Galatea for a bit and
starts playing the organ (I can’t help but feel that this was a deliberate
call-back to Lon Chaney, but for all I know, this may be in the source novel.)
Yvonne breaks character, Gogol believes she really has come to life and then,
upon realizing it’s Yvonne who rebuffs him again, begins strangling her.
By this time, the gendarmes, Reagan, and Stephen have
arrived at Gogol’s and unable to break through the door, Stephen throws a knife
across the room to nail Gogol in the back. Gogol dies, the door finally gives
way, and Stephen and Yvonne are reunited. Whew.
All of this is told with an immense amount of finesse. There’s
an economy of story-telling here that in other hands would have felt rushed,
but Freund manages to stretch out the moments and ratchet up the tension in an
almost Hitchcockian degree, if not fashion. Interestingly, Gregg Toland would
lens “Rebecca” for Hitchcock a few years later.
There are layers of signifiers and foreshadowing throughout
the film. The Grand Guignol theater’s very entrance seems more like the actual
entrance to the story than the MGM lion at the film’s beginning. There’s a hanging
dummy that seems to presage Rollo’s demise under the guillotine’s blade, and
from there, we encounter some fascinating xenophobia when one character refers
to Gogol as a foreigner in a derogatory tone. The retort is that he’s a fine
man who has saved many lives and doesn’t charge the poor (or something to that
effect; I’m piecing this together days after the fact.) It was this exchange
that got me thinking later, though; in Vichy France, prior to World War II,
would xenophobia have been as pronounced?
Again, not being familiar with Maurice Renard’s novel, I’m
not sure what’s there in the source or what’s been overlaid as a result of Wolfson
and Balderston’s screenplay and the additional script writers. More intriguing,
though, is the relationship between Gogol and Yvonne. There’s a kind of
Hannibal Lector – Clarisse Starling dynamic that is based on the one needing
something from the other but the other unwilling to give it. Conversely, Yvonne
needed assistance from Gogol and got it, but obviously, could not reciprocate (and
no doubt would not have anyway).
Aside from Lorre, Drake’s performance stands out the most.
She’s able to bring a range of color to what is often the routine damsel in
distress; except that here, that’s not the case. The script has set up a
sequence of ever more unhinged events that take us into a more psychological
landscape than a movie of this type might otherwise be likely to do.
Colin Clive is actually left with a weaker role. His Stephen
bears the brunt of ill-fortune and career ending tragedy, plus his relationship
with his father is pretty hellish. (Your son has lost his hands, and he and his
wife are bleeding out of money, and you’re not going to help him? Gogol may
have been doing Stephen a favor.) So, naturally, he’s not going to exactly be a
bastion of stiff upper lip. In his short career, Clive played this role, Dr.
Henry Frankenstein (twice!) and Edward Rochester in “Jane Eyre” and breathed
life into each of them. So to speak.
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| Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) with Rollo's hands |
There’s not much to say about Ted Healy as something like
comic relief. May Beatty, as I mentioned, comes off stronger; hers is a more
flamboyant role, as it is. Withal, the supporting cast comport themselves well,
but it’s Lorre’s show.
His work in the thirties showed a young master thespian at
work. He was acting in a comedy while he was filming “M” for Fritz Lang. He
would arrive in England and give a formidable performance in Hitchcock’s “The Man
Who Knew Too Much” (and he’d work for Hitch again as a good guy in “Secret
Agent”). His work in “Mad Love” and “Crime and Punishment” would cement his
reputation as a serious actor. Sadly, his drug addiction would derail much of
the goodwill that his acting elicited. The Mr. Moto series is not a Charlie Chan
knock-off, though it traffics much in that 1930s Orientalism. Lorre in
yellow-face reflects, of course, the inherent racism of the times and although
he was playing an ethnic Japanese, one suspects that the Chinese Exclusion Act
was probably extended to other Asian ethnicities, as well.
Be all this as it may, Lorre never gave less than assured
and often stellar, performances, regardless of the studio or the script. His
later turns as part of Warner Brothers’ stock company would establish him as one
of the greatest character actors that cinema has seen.
Regarding his performance here, there is a kind of vulnerability
we see in Gogol’s attempts to approach the object of his obsession. You get the
feeling that his is a stunted sexuality, one that had never found expression
either from trauma (since he leveraged that bit of cheap psychology on his
victim) or from his own disposition. Characters like Gogol aren’t entirely unsympathetic
in the hands of actors that can bring more to the role than the role may
require.
It would have been easy and cheap for Lorre to overplay Gogol
and no one would have been the wiser, but his devolving into madness rings true
and is all the more potent for it.
Next up, the body horror intensifies with Franju’s
masterpiece, “Eyes Without a Face.”
Notes
1. Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies. p. 347; The Citizen Kane Book, p. 112
___________. The Citizen Kane Book. New York. Bantam Books. 1974.
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