Review: The Hands of Orlac

Like his more famous The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac is ponderous but indelible.

The Hands of Orlac
Photo: Aywon Film

Like his more famous The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac is ponderous but indelible. Orlac (Conrad Veidt) is a concert pianist whose hands—the tools of his trade and his wife Ivana’s (Alexandra Sorina) favorite part of his body—are mangled in a train wreck. The macabre twist is that the new limbs sewn to Orlac’s stumps previously belonged to a murderer, a revelation that, along with the appearance of a mysterious blackmailer (Fritz Kortner), proceeds to demolish Orlac’s sanity. “The spirit rules the hand,” his doctor (Hans Homma) attempts to convince him, but no less than Veidt’s Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Orlac suggests a prisoner in a trance-like march, and it’s only a matter of time before his hands are drawn to their old owner’s dagger.

The film is full of castration imagery, Freudian intimations (including a patriarchal ogre in a twisted castle), and assorted perversities (like Ivana’s erotic yearning to be touched), yet next to the relentlessly distorted subjectivity of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Wiene’s handling here seems almost minimalist, keeping the camera angles mostly balanced as the horrors materialize through stark atmosphere and Veidt’s extraordinary physical expressiveness.

Paced like a funeral and saddled with one of the least satisfying endings in the pantheon of German Expressionism, The Hands of Orlac scarcely reaches the baroque complexities of The Man Who Laughs, where it was Veidt’s grin, rather than his mitts, that tortured his character. Still, it lingers as a unique waking nightmare both in the viewer’s mind and in film history: He may have inspired a long line of unruly-appendage shocks, from Karl Freund’s 1935 remake Mad Love to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2, but Wiene’s greatest contribution was imagining, decades before David Cronenberg, the ultimate horror of the body turning against itself.

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Score: 
 Cast: Conrad Veidt, Alexandra Sorina, Fritz Kortner, Carmen Cartellieri, Fritz Strassny, Paul Askonas  Director: Robert Wiene  Screenwriter: Louis Nerz  Distributor: Aywon Film  Running Time: 110 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1924  Buy: Video

Fernando F. Croce

Fernando F. Croce is a San Francisco-based film writer whose work has been published in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, MUBI, and Fandor. He runs the website CinePassion.

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