Mad Love (1935)/The Hands of Orlac (1924)

Oh. Yeah. It's October. Guess I better start paying attention to Horror films.

Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) It's been filmed many times since the silent era—most recently in 1958 starring Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee, and another in 1962 as The Hands of a Stranger—but the most famous version of the 1920 French novel (by Maurice Renard) "The Hands of Orlac" is this 1935 version by German director Karl Freund.*  Well, "most famous" is a relative term—this one was pretty much forgotten until Pauline Kael exhumed it in her essay "Raising Kane" as an example of what she considered Orson Welles' derivative direction of Citizen Kane. There are similarities, but vague ones—Peter Lorre's mad doctor bears a very slight resemblance to the elderly Charles Foster Kane, and his maid carries a pet cockatiel on her shoulder.**

Big deal, that. Oh, and, of course, it's a deep-shadowed black-and-white film with deep-focus—a bit standard when dealing with low light levels in black-and-white (especially when the cinematographer is Gregg Toland, who worked on both films). Beyond that, Mad Love is a completely different proposition than Citizen Kane and comparisons between the two are desperate and tortured, (as the writer could be at times).

But, that madness aside, Mad Love is a late version of German Expressionism from the silent era of film, and a direct descendant of:

The Hands of Orlac (Robert Weine, 1924) the silent version, re-teaming the director and star of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Weine and Conrad Veidt. Both stories involve the maiming of a brilliant concert pianist in a train wreck. His fiancée, in a desperate attempt to save his career—implores a surgeon to perform a radical double-hand transplant that—by rule of thumb— has unforeseen circumstances. The difference between the two is motivational—in the latter version, the surgeon performs the surgery, not just for the sake of music, but also for his desperate love of the fiancée, an actress in a theater macabre that he devotedly attends every night, going so far as to buy the waxwork figure of her in the lobby as an object of adoration.

The operation is a success, but on the other hand, it isn't. There's just one hitch, the same one that befell Dr. Frankenstein (coincidentally, the pianist in Freund's version is played by Colin Clive, the doctor in James Whale's version)—be careful where you shop for spare parts. In this case, Orlac's hands are replaced by those of a murderer—a strangler in the silent version, a master knife-thrower in Freund's. Before long, the composer is struggling to do his five finger exercises, and working on other handiwork, as well. Before long, he is implicated in a murder, and beset by nightmares that his hands are out of his control (they are, after all, the devil's playground).

The two diverge at this point, with Mad Love concentrating on the insane machinations (literally in one instance) of Lorre's insane Dr. Gogol—in the silent version, the surgeon's role diminishes significantly at this point—and Orlac's new talents become even more literally "handy."

Both versions weigh heavily on the psychological, as Orlac and his new hands lose their grip on reality, but the first one is quite satisfied with taking the macabre elements so far. The later version, post-Frankenstein and Dracula relishes the more twisted elements of the subject, going places that the original finds fanciful and, frankly, superstitious. Mad Love embraces the possibility that the murderer's hands will, actually, assert their sense memory allowing Orlac to throw pointy things very, very accurately...and the difference between the two films is only a span of seven years. Interesting how an audience's capacity for the weird and supernatural—and Hollywood's willingness to deliver it—could become so prevalent. 

* Freund was the German director/cinematographer whose most enduring influence came in the early days of television production when his 3-camera recording technique revolutionized filmed comedy shows (before a live audience)—a concept that started during his days with "I Love Lucy" but continues to be used today.

** Welles used a super-imposed shot of a cockatiel during what he considered a "rough transition" that didn't have enough dramatic impact, and later joked that he did it "just to wake people up."

Dark Journey (1937)

Dark Journey (Victor Saville, 1937) All's fair in love and World War I—but when love and war are running congruently, neck and neck, that's when things really get dicey. Especially when the warring lovers are spies, spying on each other. There's Madeleine Goddard (Vivien Leigh) is a designer and couture diva who regularly makes a shopping run between France and Switzerland, cloaking her activities as an agent for the British. She moves through the hoi-poloi (who never seem aware there's a war going on) attracting all the best customers, none of them suspecting that her decorative scarves and pattern swatches contain secret plans and schematics. Her assignment—find out who's the head of the German intelligence agency, Section 8. Enter the snakily charming Baron Karl von Marwitz (Conrad Veit), a German deserter who caddishly trolls the gargantuan supper-clubs with their high ceilings and higher society for the more low hanging fruit of females. It is through one of his companions that he becomes acquainted with Madeleine, becomes smitten and just a little stalkerish with her. For some reason, she finds this attractive and the two begin a wary relationship.

Yeah, well, hunt a tiger...and opposites attract, and all that. It isn't giving away any state secrets that the revelations that ultimately come about are a little less than surprising. Nor is it surprising that two intelligence agents so visibly hiding in plain sight might not actually be that effective (C'mon kids, it's called "undercover" for a reason). Imagine the dinner table conversation: "What did you do today?" "Nothing. And you?" "Same thing." Double crossing does not "go" with star-crossing.

Anyway, you thought YOU had a complicated relationship. This was a few years before Leigh would toss away such behavior with a dismissive "Fiddle-dee-dee." And it's fun to watch the complications that ensue when the two spies are a little too loose with their lips. It's amazing that WWI was won at all.

The costumes and sets are lavish (and very un-WWI era). Leigh and Veidt do very well conveying conflicting loyalties, but the plot is a bit spare in details as to be confusing. It's never really determined who has the upper hand—is Madeleine basically a "honey-trap" to seduce the German and get him where he can easily be captured, or is it all a misinformation campaign by either side. Whatever it is, the romance is the least charged of the themes in the film, even though Leigh and Veidt try their damnedest to be anything more than inscrutable. It's an interesting spy melodrama, it's just that there's not a lot to love.

The Thief of Bagdad

The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, etc., 1940) Epic Alexander Korda production, with considerable work from his brothers Vincent and Zoltan, and the grand production designer William Cameron Menzies, that boasted three directors, filming on two continents (interrupted by the Blitz) and became a fantasy favorite.

It's still amazing, even if the two leads are a little leaden (and if we don't get too picky that all of the featured players are extraordinarily ethnically inaccurate—Sabu was born in Mysore, then a part of British India, and Conrad Veidt...was German!), but if one takes it with a light-heartedness, and a mighty roaring laughter worthy of the Djinn (played by the larger-than-life—even without special effects—Rex Ingram), there are more than enough wonders that would enchant and entice a watcher (as it did with the young Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who both count it as their favorite childhood film).

Because it all comes together, all the disparate elements in eye-popping Technicolor, that somehow manages to make the real world look drab and shabby by comparison. I've had that experience where movies change your outlook:  every new Orson Welles film made me see the world—and its possibilities—differently; a theater screening of the cinematography documentary Visions of Light was followed by an extended parking lot discussion in which the lights of the city (even in that drab corner of Seattle) never looked more beautiful to the eye; a screening of Don't Look Now (in the very same theater, coincidentally) had me walking back to the car, obsessively looking for the color red.

And The Thief of Bagdad has that same effect. Between Menzies' sets (and his insistence on how they be filmed), the vibrant color sense and stylishness of the entire production, one yearns that movies might be more like this one, let alone the world (oh, by the way, give me a chance at those three wishes)...and isn't that illusion why we go to the movies, anyway?

The visually eye-popping The Thief of Bagdad

Nazi Agent

Nazi Agent (Jules Dassin, 1942) The first film of director Jules Dassin—for no less a studio than M-G-M—was a tough one to start with, both technically and politically. Nazi Agent was released in March of 1942, just four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii—the U.S. only declared war on Nazi Germany (and Imperial Japan) on December 11, 1941. It was certainly in production before those events (filming started in November of 1941). Even after the Nazi's invaded Poland in 1939, Hollywood kept fairly silent on the subject, even if British films were more vocal. Before Pearl Harbor, there were Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Hawks' Sergeant York (obliquely promoting vigilance), Confessions of a Nazi Spy, and A Yank in the R.A.F. (written by Darryl F. Zanuck under a pseudonym). There was a reason for this: there was a strident line of isolationist viewpoints in the U.S.—"America First," if you will—that very publicly urged against the intervention of the States in any conflict in Europe—among them were British Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and famed pilot Charles Lindbergh—either because they saw Hitler as no threat or because the government needed to concentrate on issues at home (America was still re-building its economy after 1929 stock market crash). President Roosevelt was under constant pressure to keep the U.S. out of the conflict, even while European allies were urging him to take action (before the shipping of supplies, that is).

Things were such that the U.S. Senate launched an investigation in September of 1941 into any attempt Hollywood might be making to try and fan the flames of war, citing that "at least twenty pictures in the last year designed to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them." It was pointed out that the heads of the studios were mostly Jewish and might be suspected of promoting some sort of propaganda over alleged "holocausts." Imagine that. In fact, the studio's were quite mindful of the criticisms and deliberately chose a path of least controversy for fear of offending European audiences and even firing "non-Aryan" employees of the German offices at the Reich's request.

So, you can see why making a film like Nazi Agent might be a concern.

On the other hand, it is also a daunting first film in that it relies on a "trick," both artistic and technical: the story of twin brothers—one now a naturalized citizen and the other, a Nazi spy using his position as the German consul to the U.S.—it relied on the lead actor to play two different parts of different temperaments, as well as for the gentler of the two to pose as his more ruthless brother for a time; the film required trick photography with the actor portraying different characters on different sides of the screen, conversing with each other, meeting each others' eye-lines—this was well-done by a veteran director like John Ford in The Whole Town's Talking, but for a first-time director like Dassin?

To say it is credible work—to the point where you don't question it—says a lot. Dassin has an able ally in lead actor Conrad Veidt—he would play the Nazi Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca in a few months and played a similar role, shortly before, as a U.S. Nazi ring-leader (also with Bogart) in Warners' All Through the Night—who had been acting in films since 1916, appearing in the landmark The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and top-lined in films on both sides of the Atlantic, playing both romantic leads and villains.* Veidt manages to clearly delineate each brother instantly with expression and body language (he did start in silent films, after all) and, when the "good" twin takes over the role of the "bad" one, is just capable enough to pull off the masquerade to convince his fellow German spies without betraying to the audience that he is still the same man that we have sympathy for. 

It's an amazing performance of the "prince-and-pauper" variety and Dassin's technical skills complete the illusion by never calling attention to the trickery, keeping the set-up's dramatically neutral and focusing on the performances (uh...performance?) which is where the real magic is happening.

In the meantime, the film manages to deliver the intended message—Nazi's look just like us. So be vigilant.

And in 2017, they still do. And now is not the time to let your guard down.

* Veidt acted in Germany until he fled with his Jewish wife Ilona to Britain in 1933. He moved to Hollywood in 1941—donating his life savings to the British government for their war effort—in the hopes that he would be cast as Nazi's (he had it in his contract that they should always be villains) to encourage the making of films promoting the U.S. entering the war. After Casablanca, he would make one more film before dying of a massive heart attack while playing golf on April 3rd, 1943.

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) Of all the films in all the film-houses in all the world...I've never written a review of Casablanca.

At least, I've seen it (only about a million times). A recent story on NPR's "Weekend Edition" had host Scott Simon interviewing a fellow who'd just gotten around to seeing the 1942 film for the first time (evidently that's what constitutes "news" these days). It reminded me of the time, my buddy-in-Bond, Frank, proudly announced that he had finally watched Casablanca (was it at the premiere of Skyfall or Spectre?) I think I asked him what he thought of it after congratulating him and I recall he said "Great!" (or something like that). 

It did, after all, win The Best Picture Oscar of 1944.

I've never written a review of Casablanca—not here or on any previous movie blog. Oh, there was the five-part series of "Don't Make a Scene" entries centered around what other character's think of Humphrey Bogart's character (under the collective title of "Deconstructing Rick") and that said a lot. There's no formal review of the film Casablanca, however, anywhere. It doesn't even show up as one of my "Anytime Movies"—those that I can watch anytime and have the power to keep me to the end, fascinated, over and over. Again, that series is most interesting to me for what's NOT on it than for what's on it.

And Casablanca isn't there.

Casablanca is legendary, because it should NOT have "worked." Production was a mess. Bogart got the role because George Raft and Ronald Reagan didn't play it. Ingrid Bergman was an unknown. Paul Heinreid had more audience appeal. The actors frequently didn't know "why" they were playing the scenes they were playing and were not sure how it would "end" (it's a rather brilliant strategy to not have the actors betray any fore-knowledge lest the audience catch on, but...really, they were still working on the script). It is not a movie of strong "auteur" sensibilities—but its Hungarian director, Michael Curtiz, manages to fill every frame to bursting and his filming strategies have been copied in the decades since, probably as much for nostalgic recognition factor as for the fact that the strategies are so...apt. It was based on a play that flopped, but it was cobbled together by two twin-brother writers and the estimable Howard Koch into a crazy quilt of conflicts and various sides.

Director Michael Curtiz told Bogart to nod, but didn't tell him what he was nodding for or at.
It's to cue the band to play "La Marsellies," an emotional high-point in the film,
and the first instance of Bogart resisting his urge to "stick my neck out for nobody."

And great lines. Quotable lines. Lines so memorable that they're mis-remembered:  "Play it, Sam." (NOT "play it again, Sam") "Here's looking at you, kid." "I am shocked, SHOCKED to find out that GAMBLING is going on in this facility." "I don't mind a parasite, I object to a cut-rate one." "I was misinformed." "Be careful! There are vultures, VULTURES everywhere." "I remember every detail—the Germans wore gray. You wore blue." "I'm going to die in Casablanca, it's a good spot for it." "We mustn't underestimate 'American blundering.' I was with them when they 'blundered' into Berlin in 1918." "I stick my neck out for nobody." "It would take a miracle to get you out of Casablanca and the Germans have outlawed miracles." "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." "Go ahead and shoot. You'll be doing me a favor." "Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try and invade." "And remember this gun is pointed right at your heart"--"That's my least vulnerable spot." "You'll get along beautifully in America." "Well, that's the way it goes—one in and one out." "Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." "I'm no good at being noble." "The problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." "We'll always have Paris." And the line that the Epstein brothers realized simultaneously in the middle of L.A. traffic would solve all their script problems: "Round up the usual suspects."

It's a film that exudes the exotic even though it was filmed in Burbank, on Warner stages combined with matte shots (like the one above--see any waves in that ocean?) filling in the details. Other legerdemain done on the cheap complete the picture; the scene below has the actors performing in front of a screen back-projected with model airplanes to improve the scope. It's something they did in the finale at an airport, where to give the proper distance they had model planes attended to by "little people," and lots of fog to increase the illusion.

They could get away with it because Curtiz directed and edited fast and the audience was concentrating on a convoluted plot with equal parts conflicted romance and cloak-and-luger politics played out by a terrific cast of Warner contract players and a new fresh-faced import from Sweden named Ingrid Bergman. Everything resonated. Women liked it...even though Bogart was hardly considered a romantic lead...until then. Men liked it...even if things didn't turn out by the dictates of billing.

And, it's hardly a glamorous story: an ex-pat American, Richard Blaine, is running a saloon in Casablanca where booze flows freely, the gambling is questionable and all the authorities are paid off; Rick's Cafe Americain is a going concern because it is a black market hide-out in a desperate city and its owner, Richard—call him "Rick" (but everybody calls him something different*)—keeps a surly dispassionate view on things. But, don't approach him unless you're working for him. He doesn't drink with the guests, he doesn't fraternize, he sits in lordly isolation at a table against the wall playing chess against himself and keeping an eye out for the glance directed his way by an employee looking for direction. Then, he simply nods and that's the last word. He doesn't get involved in the deals, in the tables, nothing. He keeps things orderly, but for the under-the-table dealings going on in the saloon he has one comeback: "I stick my neck out for nobody." 

On this particular day, there are rumors and desperation flying around: two German couriers who have "letters of transit" out of Morocco to Lisbon, gateway "to the Americas," have been found murdered, their much-sought-after documents missing. They mean freedom for anyone seeking asylum, but the police are stymied, doing what they normally do when they have no other option—"round up the usual suspects." Roust some people to intimidate and see what you can scare out of them. Under pressure from the Nazi's, their interest is in both the murderer and in the papers; but, the letters are in safe-keeping in the one place they don't suspect—hidden in the piano at the Cafe American, hiding in plain sight, Rick's non-commitment being their best camouflage.

But, even a Rick Blaine has his limits. As the original play-title says "Everybody Comes to Rick's" and that includes one particularly prominent (too prominent) Czech partisan named Victor Laszlo (Heinreid). Rick would only have a dispassionate on-looker's interest in Laszlo's struggles to evade Nazi capture, if not for one key element, one a burden that he will not neglect: he has a wife Ilsa Lund (a radiant Bergman).

Both Laszlo and Lund are unfamiliar travelers to Casablanca, but it is Ilsa who arrives at Rick's with extra baggage. She recognizes Sam (Dooley Wilson)—whom she refers to as as "the boy," the only hint of racial inequity in the film—the piano player, and where Sam is, Rick can't be too far away. It's obvious that Ilsa and Rick (and Sam) have a shared past, and he is determined to keep Rick from Ilsa. But, a song request brings on Rick, charging on Sam like a bull, with an accusation of...well, betrayal. But, that protest is cut short when a larger betrayal is brought to mind when he notices Ilsa, and he realizes he was pulled by a siren song, whose first line ("You must remember this...") is both a promise and a curse.

For probably his first time in Casablanca, things get personal for him, and he is pulled into a series of complex triangulations that he is uncomfortable with—triangulations of loyalty and partisanship that he has avoided since coming to the Moroccan city at the edge of freedom and despair. He finds himself just another fish in a small pond.

Rick recovers well, but he spends that eventful evening in an indulgent, sodden reverie (which we see, conveniently, in flashback) over a bottle (or five) in which he reaches the depths of his own personal despair, and for the rest of the movie, he conducts an inner battle with himself and his character, walking the maze of morality while trying to betray...nothing.

The character of Rick is a cypher—to the audience as well as the characters surrounding him in the movie, whether strangers or intimates. He is the big mystery in Casablanca, a man with no past (and professing no future), who must deal when confronted with it, and whose best weapon is his own veneer of inscrutability, walking among the powerful and the weak, with equal contempt showing for both. He is the puzzle at the center of Casablanca, the mystery that cannot be solved...except by himself.

So, why has Casablanca lasted so long? It has been 75 years.

Perhaps it has survived because it lays out a  landscape familiar to us as we shuffle through life—a morally indifferent cesspool where "life is cheap" and everything is expensively out of reach. The only thing worth less is one's word—loyalties are betrayed, women are not only not respected but treated like disposable playthings, authority is corrupt (quite happily and never apologetically), and where even a high-roller like Richard Blaine can stare at the business end of a gun and come to say "Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor," but it's the best that one can do when one has been pushed to the water's edge by the Nazi's, and who do all of these things and worse, and have all the charm of a rubber stamp...and all of the conscience.

In such an atmosphere, an air of nihilism abides, irony substitutes for humor, sarcasm for philosophy, cynicism instead of the naive impulse of positivism or faith. All of that abounds in the film, which exudes sophistication and entertainment value with vast displays of all of it in witty, pointed  rejoinders...but no one laughs. No one dares to. It's a comedy for people with withered hearts.

So, that takes care of the sophisticates (poor, wretched souls!). But, where does that leave the rest of us? Why does Casablanca survive in our minds...and in our hearts?

I would contend that it presents us a fable, a choice that we can live with and hope with. It is because, despite desperation, despite the hopelessness, it shows us, in the most romantic of terms, that—even in that landscape—an instance of nobility—of conscience—is a candle in the darkness and that is heartening (whether it's in the middle of WWII or the Trump Administration). Cities may crumble, all may seem lost, but one act by one lone angel of mercy can dissipate the fog and make it clear again. It may take generosity, it may take courage, it may take inspiration or love, but, whatever it takes, the noble effort is still the best way to fight the ordinary tendency of sloth or indifference. March on. You must remember this.

 

So, it has been 75 years. We will always have Casablanca. The fundamental things still do apply...as time has gone by.

The last of the Casablanca principles to pass on:
Madelein Lebeau, who played Yvonne ("Because, 'Ewonne'...I luff you")
the saloon girl of divided loyalties, who also has her own reckoning.
I've always loved the sauciness of Captain Renault's rude
remark of her: "In her own way, she may constitute a third front!"
She died May of last year at the age of 92. Vive la France!

Casablanca through the years

*That's a telling little detail hidden in the screenplay's infrastructure (and part of the point I was making in "Deconstructing Rick") everybody sees him differently and so all call him something different. He owns, and is central to, "Cafe Rick" so mostly people call him "Rick." But, to Renault, he's "Ricky." To the staff, and most importantly, to Sam, he's "Boss." To the Nazi's, he's "Monsieur Rick" but to Victor Laszlo, he's "Monsieur Blaine." Ilsa calls him something nobody else in the movie does. To her, he's "Richard."