Directed By Karl Freund
SYNOPSIS
An actress (Francis Drake) is leaving her stage show to spend time with her pianist husband (Colin Clive.) An obsessed fan (Peter Lorre,) who is also a surgeon, gets a break when her husband's hands are mangled in a train accident. The doctor transplants new hands on her husband... but those hands are from a killer... and they want to kill again! (or do they?)
The suspenseful American debut of Peter Lorre.
The fast paced thriller is from director Karl Freund, who completed his masterwork, The Mummy a few years before for Universal. Mad Love both looks and feels like one of the Universal classics and has all the echos of German Expressionism (in which Freund worked before coming to Hollywood.) This would be the last film Freund directed before resuming his regular duties as one of film's greatest cinematographers.
Mad Love is Peter Lorre's first American film. He is just as effective as his breakthrough role in 1931's M and his two roles for Alfred Hitchcock before heading west to avoid the Nazis. Lorre is at his creepiest here (especially with shaved head) yet also comes across as sympathetic. The role is equal to his pedophile killer in M.
Colin Clive, best known as Dr. Frankenstein (in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein) gives another haunting performance in one of his last roles before his 1937 death.
The film was also one of the last of Ted Healy's who also died in 1937 after the results of head injuries sustained in a bar fight. Healy was a vaudevillian who split from his Stooges (Moe, Larry + Curly) the year before this was released. He is the unneeded comic relief.
Mad Love was one of the early films to directly tackle psychological themes. That would become more commonplace after World War II.
Plot wise, the film can be silly at times... but Lorre's performance, and the way it was shot, lift the film above the pack.
Mad Love is one of the many good films that has slipped through the cracks and into obscurity.
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