Mad Love (1935)
★★½ — Mad Love (1935)
Made in 1935 and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mad Love sits at an interesting crossroads in Hollywood history. The early sound era was still feeling its way through genre filmmaking, and horror in particular was cycling through a run of pictures that drew heavily on European Expressionism and Gothic source material. This film is adapted from the 1920 German novel The Hands of Orlac by Maurice Renard (which had already been filmed once before, as a silent Austrian production in 1924), and the premise is the sort of gleefully macabre conceit that the pre-Code and early post-Code studios seemed to relish: a surgeon, consumed by obsession for an actress, grafts the hands of an executed knife-thrower onto her husband, a concert pianist who has lost his own in an accident. It is pulpy, theatrical material, and the studio dressed it accordingly.
Behind the camera is Karl Freund, a name worth knowing if you have any interest in the visual grammar of classic Hollywood horror. A cinematographer by training, he had shot some of the most visually inventive films coming out of Germany in the 1920s before moving to the United States, and he had already directed The Mummy (1932) for Universal. His eye for shadow, architecture and off-kilter composition is very much in evidence here, and at just 68 minutes the film moves at a brisk enough clip that Freund rarely has time to let the visuals grow stale. The cast around him is a mixed proposition. Frances Drake plays the actress at the centre of the obsession, Colin Clive (fresh from his work as Henry Frankenstein in the Universal pictures) takes the role of the afflicted pianist husband, and Ted Healy and Isabel Jewell provide the lighter comic relief that 1930s studio pictures tended to insist upon whether the material needed it or not. The real point of interest, though, is Peter Lorre. This was his first American film role, arriving off the back of considerable European work, most notably his performance as the child murderer in Fritz Lang's M (1931) and a turn in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). MGM were clearly keen to see whether the peculiar, unsettling quality he brought to those roles could translate to American audiences, and they gave him a part that leaned into every strange angle of his screen presence.
Mad Love (1935), sometimes titled The Hands of Orlac, is exactly what its reputation suggests: a curio of early sound horror that impresses in flashes but never quite coheres into something gripping. Peter Lorre, in his American film debut, is the undeniable draw. A gaunt, feverish presence as the obsessive surgeon Dr. Gogol, whose unrequited love curdles into madness. His performance alone justifies the film's cult status: every twitch, every whispered line crackles with unnerving intensity. The Expressionist-influenced cinematography lends genuine atmosphere with shadow-drenched rooms, distorted angles, and that unforgettable waxwork theatre setting create moments of authentic unease. But beyond Lorre's brilliance, the film settles into melodramatic inertia. The plot (a concert pianist receiving the hands of an executed murderer via transplant) unfolds with theatrical sluggishness, burdened by exposition and a romantic subplot that saps momentum. What might have been a taut psychological thriller becomes a creaky stage play committed to celluloid. For a horror film, it's curiously bloodless and restrained, relying on suggestion rather than shock, a virtue in theory, but one that leaves modern viewers waiting for a payoff that never quite arrives. A historically interesting footnote elevated solely by Lorre's magnetic presence. Worth a glance for horror completists and Lorre admirers, but ultimately an average old film: atmospheric in patches, tedious in stretches, and memorable for one performance rather than the whole.
I keep coming back to that tension at the heart of the film, between what Freund's camera promises and what the script actually delivers. There are moments here where you can feel the bones of something genuinely unnerving, a horror picture that trusts its atmosphere over its action, and for those stretches Lorre carries it with an ease that makes you wish the material had been bolder. As it stands, Mad Love is the kind of film I'd recommend to anyone building a proper grounding in 1930s horror, alongside polished but unremarkable studio pictures of the same period like The Invisible Man (1933), rather than to someone expecting a forgotten gem. It earns its place in the conversation, just not quite at the head of the table.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1935 | Watched: 2026-04-03
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Karl Freund: The Mummy (1932)
More with Peter Lorre: M (1931) · The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
More from the 1930s: Earth (1930) · Monkey Business (1931) · Sabotage (1936) · People on Sunday (1930)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More romance: The Eagle (1925) · The Last Picture Show (1971) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928)
