This evening I got together with Keith and we watched
Mad Love (M-G-M 1935) with Peter Lorre at his best in raving lunatic doctor mode; Colin Clive, appropriately panicky and nervous with women despite being the romantic lead; snooty Frances Drake; Ted Healy perfect as a nosy reporter with a weak stomach and a loose mouth, and even Keye Luke in a supporting part as Dr. Lorre's not so mad assistant. It is hard to believe that this film is not better known, as it has so many things going for it. It's based on a story first filmed in a legendary German silent
Orlacs Hande (1924) directed by Robert Wiene with Conrad Veidt in Clive's Part and Fritz Kortner in Lorre's. I had thought that Mad Love director Karl Freund had worked on the original, but this is wrong. Actually, that year Freund was busy being principal cimentographer on The Last Laugh with F.W. Murnau. Freund directed far too few films, only eight, but also including the "original" The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff. Freund's worklist at www.imdb.com for cinmeatography reads like a what's what of the great films of the first half of the 20th century - the only person, I'm sure, to have worked on Metropolis, Carl Dreyer's Mikael (also 1924), The Good Earth (1938), Key Largo and "I Love Lucy".
I also note that Freund was the principal on Robert Florey's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), one of my favorite Poe adaptations; Bela Lugosi is just awesomely menacing in that one. There is a scene where the female love interest is swinging on an outdoor swing, singing a stupid song about "the funny little man" - the song didn't stick with me, but the swinging did, all through my childhood in my dreams, as the camera swings with her - it's an amazing sequence.
Mad Love I never did get to enjoy in my childhood - it just wasn't available. I'd read about it certainly; I was a voracious devourer of books about horror movies when I was a kid. Today I can recall many to most of the horror films made in English before Halloween (1978), after that I confess I lost interest. I thrive on myth and suspension of belief - one of my favorite horror cycles is the cheesy z-grade "Mummy" cycle of the 1940s, as the stories are so strange, complex and convoluted. Seeing a guy drag a hunting knife across the voluptious throat of a scared teen girl in an extreme close up isn't my idea of a good time, although it might be Charles Manson's idea of a good time. I find it disquieting that we have raised a generation of kids on Charles Manson's taste in horror, although I guess it was inevitable, as it turned out to be a taboo that, once broken, got cash registers ringing. And in our society, that's what counts, isn't it?
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com