It’s the twilight zone between Christmas and New Year,
the days of grace you get for responsibility-free pottering and for consuming
your presents without feeling like you should be preparing for a zoom call or
checking emails… it’s the time for suspending disbelief and watching Conrad
Veidt.
Orlacs Hände is one of the most famous silent
films I’ve never seen, not top-tier cannon but certainly featuring some
Premiership players and with an influence that has endured with a Simpsons Treehouse
of Horror episode re-working the plot in 1998 when Homer gets a hair
transplant from a murderer in Hell Toupée*. Robert Wiene directs, united
with his Caligari star Conrad Veidt who acts his socks off in a tour de
force of unsettling, blood-vessel busting emoting that completely evokes the
feeling that his body is fighting his mind and spirit. I doubt the film would
work at all without Veidt’s skill, but Wiene directs well, making the most of
his star and a storyline that would be hard to credit in other hands.
Some have described the film as expressionist but Lotte
Eisner’s having none of it deeming only Caligari as worthy of the
description and seeing it as a deceptive start for the “second-rate” Wiene who
in this film makes use of “all those Romantic characteristics which seemed to
him Expressionist in kind…” The film’s shadows, cavernous exaggerations of
space and perspective and “Hoffmannesque” characters are more stylistic features
than an intrinsic style. She does describe Veidt as dancing a kind of
expressionist ballet, “…bending and twisting extravagantly, simultaneously
drawn and repelled by the murderous dagger held by hands which do not seem to
belong to him.”**
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| Conrad Veidt |
This may seem like nit-picking, but I can see the point,
the expressionist movement was broader than film and was clearly the jumping
off point for specific techniques. Orlac is partially shot on location,
and this alone mitigates against the kind of visual control Wiene exerted over Caligari,
but even so there are some glorious contrasts between light and shade captured
by his cinematographers Günther Krampf and Hans Androschin whether outside or
within the massive rooms of the sets – designed by Stefan Wessely and Hans Rouc.
This is especially the case at the start of the film when
renowned classical pianist Paul Orlac (Veidt) is onboard when two locomotive
trains crash head on. Weine lingers on the devastation as people run through
the smoke and flames trying to find loved ones and help arrives via another
train; this is a very modern horror and one that was all too real especially in
the post war/flu pandemic years. Paul’s wife Yvonne (Alexandra Sorina) arrives
and her desperate search for him is heartrending.
Paul’s battered body is just about alive and surgery on
his fractured skull saves his life, but his hands are beyond repair… Enter
Doctor Serra (Hans Homma) who has perfected advanced transplant techniques and
offers to restore that without which the pianist could not really live. Serra
attaches the hands of recently executed murderer named Vasseur to Paul but
while there’s no physical rejection, the psychological impact begins to be felt
almost immediately the pianist finds out where his transplant came from. There’s
one immediate change, the fingers are bigger than his own and his wedding ring
won’t fit them… he gradually becomes obsessed with the idea that these hands
will not fit him either.
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| Help arrives at the train wreck |
Paul returns home to Yvonne, and both are strained as he
tries but fails to get his guilty hands to play his brain’s musical
instructions… their rooms are huge, and they both feel lost in their darkness
often at distance from each other or alone. The architecture is not distorted though
and as Lotte said, Veidt put his entire body on the line for this film with
some distorted contortions that are exhausting even to watch.
Paul is haunted by his hands and also believes he is
catching glimpses of Vasseur (Fritz Kortner, Lulu’s sugar daddy from Pandora’s
Box) urging him on towards evil. The Orlac’s maid, Regine (Carmen
Cartellieri) is also sucked into the madness and is being pressured by what appears
to be the very alive dead man who got her to leave Vasseur’s signature knife
for Paul to find. There’s a strange sexual tension between the two, the killer’s
mind overwhelming the maid’s will and when he puts his hands on her head she is
almost completely in his power.
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| Carmen Cartellieri and Alexandra Sorina |
He hates all men and even more so your husband…
Orlac’s career is ruined and as he lives in fear Yvonne
tries to keep their household afloat as the debts mount, the only solution is
to go and ask his extremely wealthy father (Fritz Strassny) for help.
Unfortunately, Orlac Snr is weird and unforgiving man who has the strangest of
servants as Yvonne finds out when the grey-headed retainer (Paul Askonas) opens
the door, leering over her. The old man agrees to meet his son and Paul wends
his nervous way along twisted lanes to his father’s darkened house… they very
quickly disagree and part on bad terms.
Encouraged by his creditors and Yvonne, Paul returns to
find his father dead, Vasseur’s knife (which he had hidden in his grand piano)
deep in his chest… he runs to call the police but with Vasseur’s fingerprints
all over the crime scene he begins to suspect himself…
It’s the horror of losing control, of your mind folding
in on itself as you fall into madness and Conrad Veidt is exactly the man for
this job ably assisted by the three other main players. As often observed,
there’s Freudian psychological elements at work but Weine’s film leaves so much
room for interpretation and, Lotte Eisner, he does a first-rate job of making
us believe in what is a fairly shaky premise. There are many twists and turns
in the final segment of the film – perhaps too many – but the set up and build
up of tension is very effective.
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| The old man... |
Santa brought me the new Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray
which comes with a new score from Johannes Kalitzke which mixes harsh textures
with experimental orchestrations that whilst musically interesting sometimes
rub against the nuances on screen. It is suitably dark toned, but I did find
myself drifting between sight and sound on occasion.
There’s also a dark, cavernous set of extras including
the alternate presentation of The Hands of Orlac of the F. W. Murnau
Foundation. This is some twenty minutes longer at 110 minutes and is a transfer
from a from a different print source, featuring alternate takes of certain
scenes. I think this is the same as the Kino release, especially as it includes
Paul Mercer’s more sympathetic score.
The main feature is in much clearer quality being a 1080p
presentation of the Film Archiv Austria restoration and it’s fascinating to look
at the scene comparisons highlighting some of the differences between the two
versions of the film. There’s also a new feature length audio commentary with
author Stephen Jones and author / critic / man of mystery, Kim Newman along
with a video essay by filmmakers David Cairns and Fiona Watson. The booklet is
great too including new writing by Philip Kemp, and Tim Lucas.
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| Fritz Kortner |
You can order the set direct from Eureka here and no silent home should really be without a copy. Go ahead… grab a copy… it’s in your hands.
*Snake wasn’t actually executed for killing, he was on
a “third strike” after he was caught smoking indoors in the Kwik-E-Mart. His
first two crimes were burning down an orphanage and crashing into a bus full of
nuns…
**The Haunted Screen, Lotte H Eisner, University of
California Press. She decided that there were only two fully-fledged
expressionist films - Von morgens bis mitternachts (1920) and The Cabinet of Dr
Caligari (1919) – along with the third segment of Waxworks (1924).
.JPG)
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