Films > Las Manos de Orlac (1935)

Films > Las Manos de Orlac (1935)
Above: Trailer for Mad Love (1935). Direct YouTube link here. Above: Extract from Orlacs Hände (1924). Direct YouTube link here.
	Yet what a complicated endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer's hands; that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him – Or was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself? – UTV, 31. Las Manos de Orlac [trans. The Hands of Orlac, released as Mad Love in America] directed by Karl Freund and starring Peter Lorre as Doctor Gogol, is an American remake of the 1924 German expressionist film Orlacs Hände, itself based on a novel by Maurice Renard. The poster advertising the Spanish-dubbed version of the film appears several times throughout UTV. Not coincidentally, the name of the female lead character, conspicuous on the posters, is Yvonne.
	The hands of Orlac ... How, in a flash, that had brought back the old days of the cinema – UTV, 30. Poster advertising the seventieth anniversary screening of Las Manos de Orlac. Image courtesy of Fundación Malcolm Lowry.
	But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre had been able to salvage it and he didn't want to see it again ... – UTV, 31. Peter Lorre (left, above) starred in Mad Love as the obessive Doctor Gogol, who fell in love with Yvonne Orlac. Gogol attempted to win his Yvonne by driving her pianist husband Stephen mad, even after he had replaced the musician's hands with those of a murderer. He later pretends to be the executed Rollo, the recipient of a head transplant (left, below).
	... the Ufa days when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in Orlac. – UTV, 30. Left: Conrad Veidt as the concert pianist Paul Orlac in the 1924 silent film Orlacs Hände, directed by Robert Wiene.