In short: The Hands of Orlac (1960)

Original title: Les mains d'Orlac

Self-important but brilliant pianist Stephen Orlac (Mel Ferrer) is on his way to his fiancée Louise Cochrane (Lucile Saint-Simon) when his plane crashes. His hands are destroyed in the crash. Louise convinces genius surgeon Professor Volchett (Donald Wolfit) to save Stephen’s hands. The experimental operation that may or may not be a complete transplant succeeds.

In the following weeks, Stephen turns from his old pomposity to a whiny kind of anguish that quickly turns into paranoia. He believes that something’s not right with his hands. He can’t play piano as well as before anymore, a week after his hands were completely destroyed, so clearly, his hands aren’t his own anymore! Just as clearly, his new hands are those of a strangler who was executed at about the same time of his operation! Why, he suddenly feels the need to strangle the gardener! When his hands get the wrong kind of naughty with Louise, Stephen storms off and rents a room somewhere in shadytown. There, he falls in with magician’s assistant/prostitute Li-Lang (Dany Carrel) and her always nattily dressed magician/pimp Nero (Christopher Lee).

Nero has plans for Orlac, obviously, and for reasons only known to itself, the film is rather more interested in this part of the narrative than the whole strangler’s hands business.

Well, actually, I’m not completely surprised about that, for Carrel and Lee are certainly the two actors in Edmond T. Gréville’s remake of two much superior films – Orlac’s Hände and Mad Love – who seem awake and willing to apply themselves to their roles. Particularly Lee, not an actor given to put much effort into things he deems beneath him but perfectly willing to take a pay check nonetheless, seems to be enjoying himself for a change, and so steals every scene he is in. Perhaps it’s the fantastic fashion sense of the character that kept him on board?

Of course, stealing scenes from Ferrer here is a lot like taking candy away from a baby, for his performance as Orlac is whiny, melodramatic and ineffectual as a portrait of a pianist losing his hands as well as that of a man slowly losing his grip on reality. He somehow manages to never elicit any sympathy for a character that should elicit hardly anything but.

To be fair, the script with its insistence on not making explicit important details and ignoring character motivations whenever possible, is not terribly helpful to him or anyone.

Add to this Gréville’s bland direction, the often sluggish pace and the film’s curious emphasis on its least interesting elements, and you’ll mostly wish to have watched the earlier versions of the material. I certainly did.

On the plus side, there are only few films whose happy end is based on the news that a man executed as a serial killer was innocent.