Prime candidate for the weirdest American horror film of the 1930s. If the nutball story isn’t enough, the wild Expressionist imagery around every corner seals the deal. This thing’s odder than a talking dog that rides a magic carpet and gives you stock tips. It’s also the final film directed by Karl Freund, seminal cinematographer and major player in the German Expressionist movement, and it’s a grand last hurrah (Freund would stick to cinematography after this). On top of all that is Peter Lorre as a great lunatic. He’s a creepy bald-headed loner and mad medical genius who’s in love with big-eyed actress Frances Drake. He goes out every
night to a Grand Guignol-style theater to see her perform in a show where her character is tortured and killed, but she wants nothing to do with him. She’s in love with Colin Clive, a famous pianist. Things go all wrong though when Clive is in a train accident that crushes his valuable piano-tinkling hands. The lovely Drake slinks over to Dr. Lorre to see if he can help, and he can, but it means amputating Clive’s hands and sewing on the hands of a recently executed knife-throwing murderer. Things look good at first, but Clive quickly finds out that his new hands can’t play the piano for shit. However, they’re great at throwing knives and he’s starting to get strange psychotic urges. It all adds up the best film adaptation of Maurice Renard’s classic Hands of Orlac story and one of the must-sees of the 1930s, I say.