You Need Hands

I needed the obscure 60s remake of THE HANDS OF ORLAC, since it appears in Denis Gifford’s big green book of horror movies, and you know what that means. Sending off for an out-of-print VHS, I awaited the thing’s arrival with a certain lack of enthusiasm — I had actually seen bits of it years ago, and found it, well, terribly boring.

It’s amazing the difference a few years can make. But, on the other hand, THE HANDS OF ORLAC is still just as boring as it always was. Director Edmond T Greville was responsible for BEAT GIRL the previous year, which is eighteen separate kinds of HOOT, but how much of its unquestionably mad merits can be credited to the director? OK, he wrote the story too, and he must get credit for wrestling Gillian Hills, David Farrar, Christopher Lee, Oliver Reed and Adam Faith into the one movie. But his visual style is often pretty flat, his control of pace sometimes flaccid, and those negative qualities are allowed to dominate ORLAC.

You know the story — concert pianist Stephen Orlac (gangling meerkat Mel Ferrer) suffers horrific injuries to his hands in an accident, and a brilliant surgeon repairs the damage — but has he done so by transplanting the hands of a murderer? And will those hands resume their homicidal career from the ends of their new wrists?

No, and no. But getting to that answer is a protracted and largely tension-free drag, enlivened only by the appearance or lovely couple Chris Lee and Dany Carrel. Lee is a criminally inclined stage magician and Carrel his chanteuse squeeze, whom he persuades to seduce the fugitive Ferrer. Chris and Dany have a genuinely warm and delightful relationship:

“You made me into a slut, ” she accuses. Lee counters that she didn’t need much pushing. Charming.

Dany gets Mel’s interest by blundering into his room and having the front of her dress collapse in his face. This is typical behaviour of the rather adorable Ms. Carrel, who spent her career popping out, as in this perverse moment from MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN, a colourful yet turgid French horror –

It’s a strain, but she manages it. As early as 1957, in Duvivier’s POT-BOUILLE, she was bursting her bodice in Gerard Philippe’s direction (her co-star was Danielle Darrieux: Dany might not be able to out-act this living legend, but she could beat her in the random nudity department), and you can see her in archive footage in the new documentary about Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’ENFER, again managing a nip-slip, I believe it’s called, setting off a chain of reactions in a lakeside restaurant. It’s a cheesy idea, one would think, but Clouzot gets some simply incredible stuff out of it, his camera gliding decisively from one glance to another. Vulgarity + excellence = Clouzot.

Sexy bad guys Chris and Dany are so much more exciting than protags Ferrer and Lucile Saint-Simon that one wishes for a whole other movie centering on the bad guys. Greville’s screenplay doesn’t provide this, of course, and it short-changes us out of the expected pleasure of an ORLAC movie also, wasting the great moment where the villain dresses up as an executed killer, brought back from the dead and demanding the return of his hands. Lee pops up in a crappy rubber mask, sporting a pair of hooks, then whips the disguise off within seconds.

But then, the movie’s explicit demonstration that Ferrer’s idée fixe (having the hands of murderer) is only a delusion has already spoiled the plot, and without really getting inside the hero’s disturbed mind, or turning him full-on psycho and letting him kill someone, the movie has no actual narrative resources to scare us with.

An intriguing image NOT present in my VHS copy. There’s a separate, uncensored French cut? What’s he going to write? Is that the first downstroke of the letter “B”, as in “BREASTS” — is he teaching her English?

So the whole mess is a valuable example of the fabled Million Dollar Mistake, or False Good Idea, in action — exposing the twist before the climax leaves the film without a motor to drive it forward, since we can assume a happy ending for the nice, middle-class hero and heroine, and a less-than happy one for the declassé du of Lee and Carrel. And we get both… eventually.

Similar Images

In homage to the sublime picture-blog known as If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats –

Some dead guy in THE DECEIVERS, a Merchant-Ivory production about the Thugee sect, directed by Nicholas Meyer.

(Pierce Brosnan, a British office of the Raj, goes undercover in blackface to expose the murderous Thugs. He’s supposed to speak five dialects like a native, but since the whole film is in English, all we get is a slight “My-goodness-gracious-me” accent. It’s a startling true story made less startling and less true by nearly every script decision in it.)

And this is Flying Office Trubshawe, played by Robert Coote, in A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.

Trubshawe was apparently Powell & Pressburger’s lucky name: David Niven has a servant (Robert Griffiths) with that surname in THE ELUSIVE PIMPERNEL. Similarly, Billy Wilder’s lucky name was Sheldrake — it appears in SUNSET BLVD, THE APARTMENT, KISS ME STUPID, and I think in ACE IN THE HOLE somebody mentions a Sheldrake.

When I make my first feature film I’ll be sure to have a Sheldrake AND a Trubshawe.

Any other filmmakers we know of with lucky character names?

The Valentine’s Day Intertitle

“Art titles by Victor Vance.”

Half dog! Half wolf! All man!

From CLASH OF THE WOLVES, a 1925 Rin-Tin-Tin feature generously included on the disc MORE TREASURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES 1894-1931. Nestled alongside eye-popping curios like GUS VISSER AND HIS SINGING DUCK (a movie which really lives up to its title) and the beauty of THE FLUTE OF KRISHNA, in which Martha Graham conducts her students in a faux-Indian ballet in glorious two-strip Kodachrome, the dog movie struck me as a particularly attractive item. I shall explain.

I knew little of cinema’s most famous Alsatian (apart from possibly William Wyler) Rin-Tin-Tin — besides that famous and possibly apocryphal story about screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, in a moment of drunken nihilism, deliberately getting himself fired by writing a scene in which Rin-Tin-Tin carries a baby INTO a burning building — until I read Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, which contains a sort of potted history of the Hollywood dog-flick. Gold’s evocation of RTT’s unparalleled gifts as a canine thespian had me positively ulcerating to see the hound in action.

The description in Sunnyside made me imagine a kind of Alsatian Monty Clift, soulful and sensitive, with large, expressive eyes. But the star Rin (his friends call him Rin) most resembles, I find, is Burt Lancaster. An athletic, vigorous performer (he runs up trees, leaps ravines, in locations pre-arranged to show off his precise physical reach, just as Doug Fairbanks had sets built to order measured around his leaping ability), Rin tends to rely on his charismatic grin to convey any and every emotion. He also pants a lot, something I can’t think of any other male star exploiting to this extent, apart from the young Woody Allen.

The many faces of Rin-Tin-Tin:

“I am not an animal!”

“Four score and seven years ago…”

“Elaaaaaaaaaaaaine!”

Rin’s human co-star is Charles Farrell (a very remarkable fellow!), or Charlie Farlie, as Fiona calls him. The notably young and slender Chas, as young as the century itself, has one of his very first leading roles here (he played an uncredited bit part in Harold Lloyd’s THE FRESHMAN earlier in ’25), and would make the big time with SEVENTH HEAVEN in just a couple of years.

Director Noel Mason Smith, whatever the talents of his furry protagonist, is compelled to make sophisticated use of the Kuleshov Effect to bring us into the action: he shows Rin, he shows the posse on his trail, and then he shows Rin react, thus giving us unlimited access to the dog’s thought processes. Expanding on this, Smith does some decent work with his human players, using a series of ever-closer close shots on the bad guy when he first espies the dainty heroine, ending on a Leone-esque ECU of the swine’s rheumy eyes, no doubt brimming with lust and villainy. A shame this guy never made it out of B pictures, this is a rather classy, genuinely exciting, sometimes silly but always generous and good-hearted example of the breed.

What a great dog movie! Although I worry slightly about Rin’s stunt doubles, who leap or fall off cliffs and rooftops, are slung out of shot, and scamper about amid the hooves of rampaging horses. Are the Nevada deserts dotted with the unmarked graves of ersatz Rin-Tin-Tins? Something to keep the gangsters company, I guess.

This is my first entry in For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon. Fellow bloggers, join in! Give generously here — this is a fund-raiser. And follow the action here and here.

More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931