Log

Perhaps it’s best to understand the intensity of Finney’s performance as a form of defense, an intimate, idiosyncratic citadel against the forceful encroachments of metaphor.  Finney’s face, his unsettlingly foreign gesticulations, the fact of his body:  all withstand the immutable, immaterial forces of the Volcano, the Day of the Dead, even Mexico.

The Hands of Orlac we see are not Conrad Veidt’s but Peter Lorre’s in Karl Freund’s 1935 Mad Love, a remake of Robert Wiene’s 1924 film.  Two brilliant, dislocated Germans, refiguring in a foreign idiom the terror of losing control of one’s own hands.