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—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.
Image/Sound
For this Blu-ray edition, Masters of Cinema has transferred a restoration of the original film elements by Film Archive Austria. As with many silent films, The Hands of Orlac’s surviving elements have sustained noticeable damage, and there’s an abundance of vertical scratches and instability in the black levels that intermittently compromises the contrast, especially in the first half. Still, the film looks wonderful in this high-definition presentation, and even in the rougher patches, there’s a great deal of depth and detail in the image. On the audio side, the 24-bit stereo track maximizes the creepiness of Johannes Kalitzke’s unsettling score.
Extras
In a newly recorded audio commentary, authors Stephen Jones and Kim Newman cover a lot of terrain, from the differences between Maurice Renard’s source novel and Robert Wiene’s film to the numerous remakes. They also position The Hands of Orlac as an early example of body horror and disfiguration on film, tracing its influence to James Whale’s Frankenstein and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. In their dry but informative 25-minute video essay, filmmakers David Cairns and Fiona Watson draw some intriguing connections between Wiene’s film and the brutality of World War I and the widespread effects of mechanization. The disc also includes the alternate 110-minute version of the film and a side-by-side comparison of some of the differences between the two cuts. The package is rounded out with a slipcase and 31-page booklet with essays by critics Philip Kemp and Tim Lucas.
Overall
Reach out and grab a copy of this special edition of Robert Wiene’s body horror classic, which boasts a sturdy image transfer and a wealth of informative extra features.
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