Thursday 30 December 2021

Gripping… The Hands of Orlac (1924), Eureka Blu-ray

 

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.”**

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.


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.

 

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).

 

 



 

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