You Review: Mad Love

By Travis Johnson (President of the Weird Film Society of St. Augustine)

This review pertains neither to Vicente Aranda’s excellent 2001 film, nor to the 1995 Drew Barrymore vehicle but, rather, to Karl Freund’s horror masterpiece of 1935.

As a cinematographer, Freund helped to define the look of Weimar-era German cinema with his work on such classics as F.W. Murnau’s “Der Januskopf,” Paul Wegener’s “Der Golem” and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” Emigrating to the U.S. in 1929, he became a horror specialist at Universal Studios, shooting “Dracula” and directing “The Mummy” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

Freund’s first film for MGM, “Mad Love,” is one of the most unique and powerful works in the annals of cinema. Universal, having already adapted the most obvious choices of terror literature (“Dracula” and “Frankenstein”), Freund found his inspiration in the work of the gothic novel’s bastard children, the Surrealists and the fin de siècle decadent poets Oscar Wilde and Stéphane Mallarmé. He also looked to French science fiction author Maurice Renard, whose 1920 novel “Les Mains d’Orlac” served as the primary source for “Mad Love”’s story.

“Mad Love” tells of the obsessive, ingenious and effete Dr. Gogol, (portrayed perfectly by Peter Lorre four years after his brilliant performance as the pathetic child-murderer in Lang’s “M”) who, while loved and renowned for his charitable surgeries performed upon children, finds his pleasure in attending public executions and the gory productions of a torture theater (clearly modeled upon the notorious Grand-Guignol of Paris). It is at this theater that Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), the object of Gogol’s mad love, is employed as an actress. Gogol comes each night to see her and, after approaching her, is devastated to learn that she is married to a concert pianist, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive). When Stephen’s hands are mangled in a train accident, Yvonne implores Gogol to restore them. Instead, he replaces them with those of an executed knife-killer. As Gogol’s obsession with Yvonne festers (he has a wax statue, which he calls “Galatea”, made in her likeness), Stephen discovers that he has an unexpected aptitude for wielding knives. …

“Mad Love” is a relentlessly beautiful and morbid film. Freund and lighting camera-man Gregg Toland (who went on to photograph “Citizen Kane”) create a shadowy world of doomed romanticism and perverse sensuality, while Lorre’s performance is amongst the great-est in movie history. Nobody else could have been Dr. Gogol. The film’s delirious pinnacles include the scene in which Gogol forsakes his dandy fur scarf in favor of a fedora, bandages and grotesque mechanical hands, and the climax in which Gogol, quoting Wilde (“each man kills the thing he loves”), decides that Yvonne must die.

“Mad Love” was a commercial disaster when released, losing MGM thousands of dollars, and was also banned in some countries. Today, however, it stands as the zenith of the early American horror film. Existing at the intersection of the avant-garde and the outermost fringes of popular culture, the movie invented a sort of pulp Surrealism that would find its demented apotheosis in the 1960s and 1970s, in the work of European directors Jean Rollin and Jess Franco.

Look for “Mad Love” this month on Turner Classic Movies.

Travis Johnson is a writer for Screem Magazine and the president of the Weird Film Society of St. Augustine. He is currently in pre-production on his first motion picture as writer-director, Tower of the Screaming Virgins. He can be contacted at: travisj-ohnson@hotmail.com