Just in time for Halloween I have a piece up at Biff Bam Pop as part of their 31 Days of Horror. They invited me to write something on my favorite performance in a horror movie. And I thought about several before settling on Peter Lorre’s Dr. Gogol in Karl Frend’s 1935 film, Mad Love. It’s a film adaptation of Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel, Les Mains du Orlac / The Hands of Orlac, but instead of following the story of Stephen Orlac, a famed pianist who loses his hands in a train accident, the film follows Gogol, the surgeon who performs a miraculous surgery–transplanting the hands of a recently executed murderer onto Orlac.
“M (1931) might be Peter Lorre’s best performance and role, but Mad Love (1935) is my favorite. Lorre is an actor who is probably best remembered now for his character roles in film noir and campier horror. But in the 1930s, he had two roles that prefigured our modern sympathetic killers, especially serial killers. In Fritz Lang’s M, he plays serial killer Hans Beckert. And in Mad Love, he plays Dr. Gogol, a man who isn’t exactly a serial killer yet, but many signs are there.
Beckert in Lang’s M was terrifying not only in his stalking of children, but in his humanity. Beckert is horrified by what he has done and what he feels compelled to do, but it isn’t enough to stop him. Confronted by an underworld court who have taken action when the police fail, Lorre as Beckert howls, “Who knows what it’s like to be me?” Lorre brings this same genuine, tragic and contemporary humanity to his role as Dr. Gogol in Karl Freund’s underappreciated Mad Love. Both films are excellently rife with Expressionism, but Mad Love is a much less “realistic” story than M. In Mad Love, Lorre plays something he would rarely play in later decades: a man of refinement and tragic depth, a man who is respected by others at the pinnacle of his career, a man who destroys his whole life and has far to fall. As much as I love Lorre in films like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Black Angel (1946), The Raven (1963), and Tales of Terror (1962), they don’t give Lorre the same latitude for his talent.”
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Monstrous Industry 