I have conquered science! Why can’t I conquer love?
This post contains spoilers for the 1935 film Mad Love starring Peter Lorre and Francis Drake. Please do not read below the cut (or photo if you’re reading this via the feed) if you have not seen this film and plan to, and aren’t already familiar with this or the story The Hands of Orlac.
Art hid with art, so well perform’d the cheat,
It caught the carver with his own deceit:
He knows ’tis madness, yet he must adore,
And still the more he knows it, loves the more:
The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Fir’d with this thought, at once he strain’d the breast,
And on the lips a burning kiss impress’d.
~Ovid, Metamorphoses (Translated by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden, et al)
Dr. Gogol in his box seat, watching Mme Yvonne's torture scene.
In a twist of the Pygmalion story, German film director Karl Freund’s sculptor is a skilled surgeon shown as a benevolent doctor healing deformed children in his last film, 1935′s Mad Love. His Pygmalion, Dr. Gogol, played by Peter Lorre, is a study in loneliness and obsession; short, bald and, well, Lorre-esquely strange looking, Gogol never misses a public beheading or a night at the horror theater where Yvonne Orlac plays the role of a tortured dutchess.
The film opens with him ogling a wax statue of her character in the Parisian Theatre des Horreurs before her final performance. After the show, he brings flowers to her dressing room and professes his love and deep upset at her leaving the stage. She explains that it really must be her last performance as she is meeting up with her husband, famous pianist Stephen Orlac, that very night so that they can finally begin their life together as a married couple. After an awkward, creepy exchange, someone comes in to bring her down to her farewell party that has begun downstairs, and seeing her biggest fan the respectable Dr. Gogol there, insists that he come join in the festivities.
At the party everyone is stepping up to give her farewell kisses (in exchange for cake) and yet another oblivious numskull suggests Dr. Gogol have a go — which he uses as an invitation to introduce her to his tongue. The assembled French actors shrug it off assuming it is some custom from his strange foreign country full of short creepy fellows, and they proceed to emulate what I can only imagine becomes a new trend in fashionable molestation.
Perhaps mortified by her reaction, or upset by the frenzy of ridiculous kisses that he’s started, Dr. Gogol leaves in a hurry, passing some workmen taking down the wax display of Mrs. Orlac. He bribes them to deliver it to his home instead of the melting pot. There are all sorts of other things happening in the film, but for our purposes here you only need to know that he has his housekeeper brush her hair and maintain her see-through flow-y robes, while he plays the organ to her, calls her Galatea and discusses with her his crazy scheme to get Stephen Orlac into the loony bin and have the real Mme Yvonne for himself. You’ll have to watch the film yourself to see the Pygmalion/Galatea story played out in its tragi-comedic way. This was Lorre’s first American film, and it is no wonder he became a horror favorite.
Parting ways with the original book, Maurice Renard’s The Hands of Orlac, the story here is not about Gogol as a scientist/medical genius playing God. Initially he saves Stephen Orlac with the best of intentions. He did it for Yvonne, and because he was the only one who could. The results (as preposterous as they are) could not have been known to him, silly horror-”science” aside, he’s accomplished something miraculous — the first successful hand transplant. This is the story not of his scientific obsession, but of his misguided idea of love making him a monster.
“I have conquered science! Why can’t I conquer love?”
In the following scene we watch the further unraveling of Dr. Gogol:
Why is he so crazy? Which came first, the craziness or the loneliness? Surely someone would be so impressed by his brilliance, and his kind focus on treating unfortunate children and mutilated soldiers, and being surrounded by the lovely nurses at his practice, he could find someone to be with? Is his mistake thinking he could attain a gorgeous actress? Does your pity end when he persists after discovering she is married? Or does it linger, tugging your heartstrings over his sad eyes and obvious mental illness? I, myself, am not sure when or if I ever stop feeling sorry for this fellow. Clearly we are meant to think him out of his mind to consider that Mme Yvonne would return his feelings; her a beauty, and him an odd foreign unlovable beast.
Ignoring the superficial aspect of the film entirely, let’s look at a redeeming quality. Perhaps this does not do anything to further the Hollywood image of scientists as non-creeps and people with normal, fulfilled lives capable of healthy relationships — but I was surprised by the fact that this wasn’t about a lost soul wearing blinders to keep out everything but his great work that will help the world while destroying the lives of those around him. The Pygmalion addition to Renard’s story gives it more depth than if Freund had followed a more familiar science fiction tale. Even the other film paired on the dvd with Mad Love, Devil Dolls, is a heavy-handed tale of Evil Scientists too single-minded to even know how evil they are. Mad Love is not a brilliant film, and the story of recycled body parts has been done over scores of times before and since. But it does stand out for me after being positively buried in anti-science films. I don’t normally like remakes, however I would love to see this done with a different type of casting for Dr. Gogol, but with the same treatment of love being the monster-maker.
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