You Cannot Fart Around With Love: A Tribute to Fredric Hobbs (1931-2018)

“Even the distributor, who’s a very smart guy, said, ‘Everybody goes nuts at the end! Is that what you always do, Hobbs? In every movie you make everybody always goes nuts at the end!’ I said, ‘No, for chrissakes, listen to the dialogue! It’s in there […] But you know what? The images were so strong that nobody listened. That’s why some of my movies fail, in some things. People say, ‘Oh, the story’s weak, Hobbs doesn’t know how to do stories.’ That’s bullshit! My imagery is so powerful that they can't listen.”
- Fredric Hobbs, interview with Stephen Thrower, 2007

This week, I learned that Fredric Hobbs, a man I’d make a point of including on any list of my favourite American filmmakers, passed away in April at his home in Monterey, California. He was eighty five. (Source.)

As anyone who has read the chapter in Stephen Thrower’s indispensable Nightmare USA devoted to Hobbs and his work will be aware, to describe him as a ‘unique character’ would be something of an understatement.

Throughout his life, Hobbs primarily worked as a visual artist, and, insofar as I’ve been able to view or learn about it, I’ve always found both the theory and practice behind the “Art-Eco” movement of which he was the self-proclaimed founder to be quite appealing.

Mixing ecological / environmental concerns with a distinctly Californian outsider / pioneer aesthetic, much of his earlier work seems to have focussed on ‘moveable’ art of one kind or another, much of which can be seen in his films. Using monolithic “junk” sculptures, parade floats, ritualistic costumed processions and “drivable art”, he aimed to break away from sterile museum and gallery spaces, instead bringing his creations “straight to the people”, infiltrating everyday environments and, presumably, relishing the confusion and surrealism that resulted – a notion that, again, can be strongly felt in his cinematic work.

Assorted Fredric Hobbs art images taken from http://fredrichobbs.yolasite.com/

In addition to this, Hobbs also seems to have been deeply involved for a time with the preservation and restoration of the historic frontier town of Virginia City, Nevada (coincidentally the same locale in which acid-rock pioneers The Charlatans held their legendary residency at the Red Dog Saloon in 1965 – an event that many historians credit with first solidifying the aesthetic of San Francisco’s psychedelic counter-culture, a scene whose later mutations Hobbs would eventually incorporate into Alabama’s Ghost in 1972).

At one point, Hobbs was apparently the owner of Virginia City’s Silver Dollar Hotel, and he co-authored a history of the area, ‘The Richest Place on Earth: a History of Nevada's Comstock Lode’, with radical journalist and Hunter S. Thompson associate Warren Hinckle in 1978. More significantly for our purposes, he also shot Godmonster of Indian Flats in and around Virginia City in 1973.

Hobbs’ adventures in filmmaking began with an entirely independent production named Troika, which he initially deemed ready for exhibition in 1969. Consisting of three separate segments that may or not have been intended to be screened simultaneously on parallel screens (reports vary), this was a pretty experimental affair, utilising imagery and objects that seem to have arisen largely from Hobbs’ art practice. But, it also appears to have had a self-reflexive narrative of sorts, with the director appearing as himself, waging war in the name of art against a commercially minded Hollywood producer.

According to information unearthed by the Temple of Schlock weblog, ‘Troika’ was picked up for distribution by a company named Emerson Film Enterprises, and was screened at least a few times in both New York and Los Angeles, even gaining a remarkably positive review from Variety in October 1969. As far as I’m aware however, ‘Troika’ has never been released or screened in any form since that date, and no one has subsequently been able to view it without direct access to the materials held by Hobbs.

When Thrower interviewed Hobbs for his book, the director insisted ‘Troika’ was still unfinished(!), but he nonetheless provided Thrower with the means to watch it, thus allowing the writer to give a lengthy, and tantalising, description of its contents, running to what must be several thousand words. To give you but one extract;

“A fantastical biped, its mask-like face nodding within a carapace resembling some wondrous beetle, takes a ride on an old-West train. The creature (end credits refer to it as the Bug-Man; its onscreen name is Rax) disembarks to walk the hills, before being attacked by a savage seen burning a chicken with a blowtorch. Beaten with a stone-axe and left for dead, the Bug-Man staggers to a beach and collapses, twitching feebly, whereupon a deep reddish-orange woman emerges from the sea pushing a sculpture mounted on wheels. She attempts an erotic encounter, caressing the Bug-Man and fingering his wounds, but as he lies there unable to respond, she ends up pleasuring herself instead. Perhaps the encounter was not so one-sided after all; as if rejuvenated, we then see Rax enter an ice cave, where he encounters a black shaman called the Attentuated Man, a seven foot tall giant who speaks in drastically slowed down Arabic.”

And so on. After eventually concluding his description, Thrower observes;

“The version Fredric Hobbs has allowed me to see is still not the ‘final cut’, but it is already apparent to me that this is an important, original work by an artist of genuine vision. While his subsequent movies veer between astounding and frustrating, ‘Troika’ is his masterpiece, and its eventual release on DVD should be awaited with the utmost anticipation.”
- Nightmare USA, pp.358-360

Over a decade later, we are, sadly, still waiting.

Production stills from ‘Troika’, via Lost Media Wiki.

Quite how Hobbs went on from here to become involved in directing more commercial movies – or why anyone ever deemed it a sound investment to give him money to do so – is still not something I fully understand, but hey – it was a strange time, and for the sake of us all, I’m extremely glad that unreason prevailed in this regard, for at least a few years.

Bearing only scant resemblance to the marketable genres into which they were ostensibly supposed to fit, the three features Hobbs wrote and directed between 1971 and 1973 are a world unto themselves. Venturing far beyond the limits of such mild terms as “idiosyncratic” or “eccentric”, they are landmarks of High Weirdness, in which crude cinematic technique and egregiously theatrical performances fail to disguise the lunatic ambition and unrestrained visual imagination of their creator, not to mention his uniquely strange insight into life on earth and the human condition.

Inexplicably marketed as a sexploitation item by notorious producer Harry Novak, Hobbs’ first commercial film, Roseland, remains probably the least seen and most, shall we say, problematic of his three extant works. Perhaps taking the idea of a “sex drama” a bit more literally than anyone had intended, ‘Roseland’ finds Hobbs regular E. Kerrigan Prescott enunciating to the back of the room in the role of a popular operatic singer who has been confined to a psychiatric institute, where an extremely unconventional doctor attempts to cure him of his perceived sexual deviancy, following a scandalous incident that saw him hi-jacking the Ed Sullivan show to perform an allegedly obscene song entitled “You Cannot Fart Around With Love”.


Rebelling against the doctor’s regime, Prescott takes on the alter-ego of “the black bandit” and begins to indulge in nocturnal expeditions to steal prints of pornographic films. Meanwhile, heavily saturated fish-eye footage shows us an army of naked hippie primitives transporting a gigantic, phallic sculpture on a hill, draping it in chains of flowers, and dancing around it, maypole style.

Presumably this is supposed to represent a dream or vision of the kind of paradise that Prescott envisions emerging from his curious new philosophy, the ins and outs of which spends the majority of the film enunciating at length, both to the doctor, and to a black, jive-talking avatar of the artist Hieronymous Bosch (played by future Hobbs MVP Christopher Brooks), who emerges from beneath Prescott’s bed to act as some sort of spirit guide.

Basically playing out like an earnest diatribe on the need for a more progressive approach to human sexuality, as dramatised by an enthusiastic street theatre troupe and injected with industrial quantities of post-psychedelic mind damage, I can’t even begin to imagine what Novak’s usual audience made of all this. I suppose we must assume that, back in the day, punters were willing to sit through an awful lot of footage of strange, bearded men swapping spittle-flecked philosophical infective in order to eventually catch sight of some naked hippies.

Frankly, ‘Roseland’s value to 21st century viewers is equally questionable, but to Hobbs devotees such as myself, every glimpse into his singular creative process is gold, and the key facet of his filmmaking – namely, the idea of never taking the expected route from A to B, and ensuring that every small detail of his productions should in some way be rendered incredibly strange - is certainly in full effect throughout.

I realise of course that celebrating a film simply on the basis that it is “strange” or “weird” is fairly reductive, but it is difficult to know where else to start when considering Hobbs’ next production, the extraordinary Alabama’s Ghost. Sometimes written off as a “Blaxploitation horror film” (a summation that feels akin to describing Godard’s ‘Week End’ as a “comedy of manners”), I would make the case for ‘Alabama..’ being one of the most errant outpourings of unhinged creativity that has ever been placed before the American public in the guise of a narrative entertainment.

I wrote extensively about the film after first watching it back in 2011, but, in summary, ‘Alabama’s Ghost’ concerns the travails of Christopher Brooks as the titular Alabama – a free-wheeling hep-cat who discovers the artefacts and props of real life 1920s magician Carter The Great buried beneath Earthquake McGoon’s Irish pub, and subsequently decides to reinvent himself as a stage magician. This decision catapults him into a sprawling drama whose ever-shifting sands involve sinister Nazi mind control techniques, vampire world domination conspiracies, messianic desert rock festivals, obnoxious racist ghosts, paper-mache enhanced monster cars and – you probably saw this one coming – mind-altering psychoactive snuff. Also featuring voodoo blood-letting rituals, a rampaging elephant, witches, bikers, a robot, many, many hippies and music from The Loading Zone and The Turk Murphy Jazz Band.


Unsurprisingly, this heady brew – which to some extent retained the theatrical performance styles and lengthy, digressive dialogue of its predecessor, in spite of all the hullaballoo outlined above – proved impossible for America’s grindhouse/drive-in audiences to adequately digest, especially when the film was ill-advisedly marketed to inner-city theatres as a straight up blaxploitation item, and it soon sank without trace.

(It’s a real shame I think that no one came up with the idea of resurrecting ‘Alabama..’ as a “midnight movie” ala ‘El Topo’ or ‘Eraserhead’. Something tells me if would be far better remembered today if it had been allowed the chance to establish a similar cult following.)

After ‘Alabama..’, I’d imagine Hobbs probably had to put in a lot of persuasion to secure financial backing for his next project. In the end, I suppose his long-suffering production associates thought, well, the guy loves to build crazy creatures and big, monstrous costumes and stuff… how far wrong can he go with a good, old-fashioned monster movie? Little did they know.

Although Godmonster of Indian Flats – which I reviewed here in 2012 – may lack the ostentatious freakery of ‘Alabama..’, it is at heart perhaps an even more unique proposition, and a film that I find more compelling and thematically rich each time I return to it.

To recap, ‘Godmonster..’ begins when a simple-minded shepherd, returning from a gambling and drinking binge, collapses amid his beloved flock and experiences what can only be described as a religious visitation. When he awakes, he finds that one of his sheep has given birth to some kind of shapeless, embryonic creature, which is subsequently commandeered and placed in an incubator by the local not-quite-mad-but-probably-getting-there scientist (again played by the irrepressible E. Kerrigan Prescott).

Meanwhile, we find ourselves drawn into the cut-throat world of local Virginia City politics, as a charismatic black cowboy named Barnstable (Brooks once again) arrives in town with the intention of trying to wrestle the city’s mining concessions away from the cabal surrounding the corrupt Mayor Silverdale, and handing them instead to his employer, a reclusive billionaire with the somewhat loaded name of Mr. Reich. (In view of Hobbs’ personal connections to Virginia City, one wonders how much of this storyline may have been inspired by his own experiences.)

How will Barnstable’s story intersect with that of the misshapen beast growing in the doctor’s lab? And what indeed of Madame Alta, the local clairvoyant, who briefs some of our more sympathetic characters on the nature of her connection to the land, and communes with spirits in the derelict, Wild West era cemetery?

Well, I may have watched the film three or four times, but… don’t ask me. What I can tell you however is that these parallel threads allow Hobbs a perfect opportunity to introduce some of the themes and networks of imagery that also informed his art into what might on the surface appear to be little more than a boilerplate monster movie narrative (anti-pollution sub-division).

In particular, Hobbs uses the film to consistently highlight the disjuncture that exists between the spiritual and materialistic impulses underlying American history and culture (even the “Godmonster” of the title hints at this all-consuming contradiction), whilst also exploring notions of environmental degradation, mutation and reclamation that now appear quite prescient.

When the fully grown “Godmonster” – designed by Hobbs himself, of course – eventually emerges meanwhile, it is quite a thing to behold, if not quite in the manner monster fans may have been hoping for. An utterly inexplicable mass of bulbous flesh with a camel-like head and gangly, malformed limbs, it is simultaneously forlorn, pathetic and hilarious. The scene in which it rambles out of the undergrowth to disrupt a children’s picnic has rightly become the stuff of cult movie legend.


Of course, the true horror of this story though lays not with the mild outrages committed by this poor, harmless beast, so misshapen that can barely stand upright, but with the directionless rage, avarice and hysteria exhibited by the confused local populace as they attempt to capture and destroy it.

Even as we may be driven to laughter by the “Godmonster”s lumbering, uncoordinated movements (at times it looks somewhat like a gigantic, hairy flea), we simultaneously feel vast sympathy for it during its traumatic journey through our world. In spite of its inhuman, faceless construction, there is a terrible poignancy to this sad-sack creation that is difficult to put into words.

The film’s final sequence, in which the strangely messianic, caged creature is crucified by proxy, pelted with silver dollars whilst the townspeople shriek and cry and argue beneath it as if descending into collective insanity, is senselessly harrowing – a kind of apocalyptic Golgotha of the Western American soul, and a bleak and genuinely upsetting conclusion to Fredric Hobbs’ brief directorial career. (His recollection of a distributor’s reaction to this divisive ending has been quoted at the start of this post.)

Having taken a bath three times on these basketcase motion pictures, it is perhaps unsurprising that Hobbs’ financial backers pulled the plug at this stage, and, with no other potential revenue sources forthcoming, Hobbs returned his attention to the art world.

Even on the basis of this limited canon, I believe that Hobbs deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as such filmmakers as Alejandro Jodorowsky, José Mojica Marins, David Lynch, Kim Ki-Young or Ken Russell – a true one-off whose personality veritably screams from every frame of his work - and am consistently saddened by the fact that his films remains so misunderstood and under-appreciated by the cult movie fraternity.

Sadly, Hobbs’ reputation is probably not helped by the fact the all currently extant copies of his films look absolutely terrible. ‘Alabama’s Ghost’ in particular is (to my knowledge) only available as a brutally cropped ‘80s-era VHS rip featuring murky, degraded colours that seem to reduce everything to an unsavoury shade of brown.

I’ve often reflected that, should I ever attain the time and finances necessary to enter the film restoration game, attempting to track down whatever elements still survive for ‘Alabama..’ would be my number one priority, but unfortunately, from what I can gather, the film’s legal ownership seems to be lost in some kind of limbo, and, by this stage, when every obscure horror film under the sun seems to be getting a special edition blu-ray, I’m sure others before me must have tried and failed.

Speaking of which, at the time of writing, The American Genre Film Archive are taking pre-orders for their forthcoming blu-ray release of ‘Godmonster of Indian Flats’, and have also helped spread the news of Fredric Hobbs’ passing in recent weeks.

Whilst on the one hand I am absolutely overjoyed at the prospect of soon being able to watch a transfer of a Hobbs film that does not, in the parlance of our times, look like ass, I was initially quite crushed to see that the extras on AGFA’s release offer no context at all on Hobbs or the film’s place within his work, instead filling out the disc with some generic cheesy-monster-movie type stuff.

Now, sadly, the knowledge that the director had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for around five years prior to his recent passing helps to explain why AGFA couldn’t go straight to the source for some background, but I’m still disappointed they were unable to at least reach out to Thrower or someone else who might have been able to properly contextualise the film for first time viewers.

Still, to some extent it is the mystery that surrounds this man and his work that continues to make it so fascinating, and, as long as the films are still out there in some form, we can at least be reassured that sympathetic viewers will be able to recognise them as something special, and will beat their way down the same well-worn Google trail I’ve taken in compiling this article in order to learn more.

In truth though, given both the prolific/obsessive manner in which he went about creating art, and the attention-grabbing nature of his work, I’m amazed at what an obscure figure Hobbs remains. I suppose it is possible that both his disinclination toward self-publicity and his, uh, somewhat extreme personality may not have exactly endeared him to writers or researchers who might have helped to raise his profile during his lifetime, but either way, the sheer dearth of available information about him is remarkable.

For a man who seems to have produced such a vast quantity of paintings, drawings and sculpture, there are very few images of his work online, and, although his capsule biographies speak of work held by major institutions, I can find very little in the way of info regarding exhibitions, auctions and so forth. Frankly, most of the information about him on the internet concerns his films, and, as we’ve established, not many people even seem to like his films. In 1980 he authored a book entitled ‘Eat Your House: An Art Eco Guide to Self-Sufficiency’, but I only know this because it is for sale on Amazon for £0.01 plus postage. (Should I take a chance?)

Just like the unseen content of ‘Troika’, the few scraps of information we do have are fascinating, and the vast gaps in the story remain tantalising.

How did he end up owning the Silver Dollar Hotel, and what did he do with it whilst he was there? How did he go about assembling the several hundred people who took their clothes off and carried his giant penis statue up a hill whilst filming ‘Roseland’, and how did the complaints of outraged locals that are reported in a scanned clipping from the San Mateo Times pan out? Why did he withdraw ‘Troika’ from circulation, and what on earth was he doing to it that rendered it “unfinished” over thirty years later? Why is there so little photographic evidence of the ‘Highway’ exhibition of “drivable art” that he apparently sent roaring across America at some point in the 1960s? What did he do to inspire a snarky, anonymous Youtube commenter to declare that he was “still alive and being obnoxious” in 2010? What was he UP TO through all these invisible years, and will We The People ever be able to benefit from seeing the results?

If I’ve learned anything from watching his films, it’s that the answers to these questions will not be simple.

R.I.P. Fredric Hobbs. Safe to say, we will not see his like again.

A memorial site set up by his friends and family can be visited here.

“Aesthetic communication may stop wars. If a man would build his own chartreuse gargoyle and live in it rather than glass and steel boxes, he could communicate better with his neighbour.”
- Fredric Hobbs, quoted in the San Mateo Times, January 1971

Mad Love /‘The Hands of Orlac’ (Karl Freund, 1935)

Whilst I bow to no man in my appreciation of The Black Cat (1934 version), ‘Island of Lost Souls’, Bride of Frankenstein and numerous other masterworks of weirdo horror that crawled from the recesses of the Hollywood studios in the 1930s, I think after much consideration that my vote for the single best pre-war American horror film must go to ‘Mad Love’ (released in the UK as ‘The Hands of Orlac’), one of MGM’s intermittent attempts to leapfrog the success of Universal’s horror cycle, which opened in New York in the summer of 1935.

I say “best pre-war *American* horror film”, but it is worth noting before we move on that one of the things that makes ‘Mad Love’ such a unique brew is the fact that it takes its personnel, inspiration, setting and aesthetic style from just about everywhere BUT America. This of course was a pattern well established by the Universal horrors, which drew from European gothic traditions to such an extent that their success often hinged largely upon the contribution of European actors and directors, but ‘Mad Love’ takes this tendency even further, creating what is in effect a Hollywood studio movie in which American input didn’t extend much beyond putting up the money and providing accents and dialogue for some of the supporting cast.

Set amid the narrow streets of a grimy and decadent Montmartre, the film was adapted by ‘Werewolf of Paris’ scribe Guy Endore from the French pulp perennial ‘Les Mains D'Orlac’ by Maurice Renard, and subsequently massaged into filmable shape by ubiquitous Universal horror script doctor John L. Balderson. Famously, ‘Mad Love’ gave Peter Lorre his first role in an American film after leaving Germany for fairly obvious reasons a few years previously, and, whether by accident or design, he found himself under the direction of another exile from the Nazis (and another key Fritz Lang collaborator to boot), the master cinematographer Karl Freund.

A US resident since 1929, Freund had by this point already established himself as an important contributor to Universal’s horror films - as director of photography on Todd Browning’s ‘Dracula’ he is often credited with devising most of that film’s best moments, and his directorial debut on the following year’s ‘The Mummy’ proved equally auspicious. It seems likely that it was this element of Freund’s CV that convinced MGM to hand him the reins here, and the studio’s attempts to echo Universal continued with the casting of Englishman Colin Clive – Dr. Frankenstein himself – in the pivotal role of Stephen Orlac.

The presence of Clive seems appropriate, as, initially, ‘Mad Love’ could easily be mistaken for one of James Whale’s pioneering horror films. The same odd mixture of modernist cynicism and crumbling gothic / music hall melodrama, the same lightning fast pace, striking visuals and constant unpredictability that made ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘The Old Dark House’ such head-spinning prospects – all are present and correct here, suggesting that the team behind Freund’s film had been taking careful note of Whale’s achievements. But the circumstances of ‘Mad Love’s creation arguably resulted in an even better and more accomplished film than Whale had managed – a heady mixture of all that was good in the pre-existing French, German and American horror traditions, with just a touch of Britishness lurking somewhere in the background for good measure.

In its original form, ‘Les Mains D'Orlac’ (which had already been filmed in Germany in 1924 with Conrad Veidt in the title role) tells the tale of Stephen Orlac, a master pianist whose hands, crushed in a train accident, are replaced with those of an executed murderer via a bit of ground-breaking transplant surgery. Blackouts and homicidal impulses follow, resulting in, well… unfortunate results for all concerned.

‘Mad Love’ diverges considerably from its source however, pushing Orlac into the background and concentrating instead upon the surgeon who performs the transplant operation, Professor Gogol (played by Lorre, of course) - a sinister and lovelorn individual driven to madness by his unrequited love for Orlac’s wife Yvonne (Frances Drake), who appears nightly as the top-billed actress in a Grand Guignol-esque horror theatre.

In this iteration of the story, Gogol acquires a pair of hands from a condemned killer who had previously worked as a circus knife-thrower, and initially transplants them onto Orlac simply as doomed attempt to win Yvonne’s favour, telling the couple that he has merely rebuilt Stephen’s existing hands, rather than replacing them entirely. It is only after Stephen’s behavior becomes erratic as a result of the supernatural influence of his new hands that Gogol goes off the deep end and steps in to push Orlac toward madness and murder, in a fiendish and rather desperate attempt to get him out of the way so that he can, presumably, have his wicked way with Yvonne.

From this already somewhat contrived outline, things spread out into a wider plotline that incorporates enough fiendish disguises, snooping reporters, pilfered corpses and mistaken identities to recall the heady Gallic pulp of Louis Feuillade’s silent serials. But Freund and his collaborators wisely decided to pare things down to their bare emotional essence here, building an atmosphere of furtive dread through the application of powerful cinematic imagery rather than elaborate plotting, and keeping the focus squarely on the pitiful and terrifying figure of Gogol – a move that helps to elevate the film from just another variation on a hoary old pulp yarn into something approaching a masterpiece.

All classic horror films of course trade to some extent on the idea of the ‘sympathetic monster’, but ‘Mad Love’ is uniquely uncompromising in its exploration of the real implications of feeling sympathy for a ‘monster’, as the heart-wrenching pity we feel for the lost and lonely Gogol in the early part of the film is gradually overcome by a growing sense of shock and revulsion as the character succumbs to obsession, and Lorre transforms before our eyes into a truly unhinged creature - a sweaty, cackling imp of the perverse whose un-human visage surpasses any of Lon Chaney’s creations without even requiring the application of make-up.

Lorre’s mixing of these two distinct modes, the way in which he manages to let them co-exist within the same cohesive character, is remarkable, as he moves between quiet, awkward dignity and snarling, eye-rolling hammery on the turn of a dime. As Andre Sennwald rightly points out in his insightful review in The New York Times (readable here), there are few actors who could deliver a line like “I, a poor peasant, have conquered science – why can’t I conquer love?” and succeed not only in making such a pronouncement seem natural, but in actually drawing us into the character’s emotional turmoil to such an extent that any sniggering or suggestions of ironic ‘b movie’ camp become unthinkable.

Whilst Lorre’s performance in ‘Mad Love’ was widely praised at the time and has frequently been cited as his best American role, I would go one further and say, with all due respect to Lang’s ‘M’, that this must surely be the best performance of Lorre’s entire career.

Meanwhile, Freund echoes Whale at his best by sidestepping the bland and obvious at every turn, crowbarring a little bit of strangeness and uncertainty into every scene as he twists the oft melodramatic scenarios offered by the script into a veritable feast of unheimlich imagery. From the sight of Gogol strangling his beloved with her own hair, to Orlac staring at his hairy, oversized new hands, to the dream-like blurring of the line separating the real-life Drake from the wax mannequin of her that Gogol keeps in his attic room, everything is rendered kind of perverse, as the film offers endless variations on the theme of the body being turned against itself.

A series of stark, inscrutable images that could literally have been taken from a nightmare, these scattered tableaus seem to graze the skin of some deeper psychological significance, but never quite settle into the comforting realm of an easily applicable ‘meaning’. Masterful examples of the kind of unchecked weirdness that ‘30s horror so often inadvertently let through the gate, they are practical applications of surrealism, loaded with all the spiritual unease of German expressionism but still, somehow, rendered just about acceptable to the audience of a commercial Hollywood thriller.

Even ‘Mad Love’s title sequence, featuring the name of the film scrawled across the condensation on a steamy window before a bare fist smashes the glass upon which the cast list is super-imposed, is unnerving and faintly suggestive (not to mention quite daring for the 1930s, when most films still announced themselves in a manner rather more like this).

Fittingly, ‘Mad Love’s cinematography is often extraordinary - as I suppose you might well expect from a film on which  'Citizen Kane's future cameraman was taking orders from the cameraman of ‘Metropolis’. Though we can reasonably assume the film was a pretty low budget exercise for MGM, the wonky expressionist angles and stark lighting applied to the sets in and around Gogol’s apartment are nonetheless exquisite, whilst DP Gregg Toland, five years before ‘Kane’, already demonstrates his aptitude for turning studio sets into lofty and vertiginous spaces.(1)

Helpfully, the film’s action is spread across a variety of visually appealing locations. The night-haunted tenement building in which Gogol lives could have come straight from ‘Der Student von Prag’ or ‘Der Golem’ (the latter of which was actually photographed by Freund), whilst the bare halls and gleaming chrome fixtures of his clinic seem emblematic of a whole lineage of cold, unsettling surgical spaces that leads through ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ right up to Cronenberg’s ‘Dead Ringers’, and the ‘Théâtre des Horreurs’ where he spies upon Yvonne each night is pure spook-house gothic. Combined with Toland’s bold use of perspective and Freund’s oneiric Germanic sensibilities, these threatening and confined backgrounds lend ‘Mad Love’ a unique visual identity, with the stagey drawing room scenes and fixed medium shots that usually dominate low budget films of this era wisely kept to minimum (if not eradicated entirely).

But, speaking of the budget, some moments here do make me wonder… If you’ll allow me a bit of a gratuitous digression, I was struck on my second viewing of ‘Mad Love’ by how astonishingly elaborate the presentation of the train crash in which Orlac loses his hands was. Though a pivotal plot point, this sequence is basically of little consequence vis-a-vis the central drive of the film’s narrative, and I’m sure many filmmakers would have been happy to present it at a distance, or just mention it in passing. Freund though opts to give us a full picture of the accident and its terrible aftermath, complete with shots of several full-size train cars lying up-ended on top of each other as piles of debris burn on the ground and a chaotic crowd of onlookers, including a small army of wimpled nurses, attend to the prone bodies that litter the track.

None of this looks like the result any in-camera trickery or matte painting, and one can’t help but wonder how the hell the producers managed to justify such an indulgence for such a ‘small’ film. Did they opportunistically jump onboard a set constructed for a far bigger production, or is the scene actually the result of some kind of ingenious use of model shots and visual effects? Whatever the story may be, the resulting shots certainly help to expand what could have merely been a throwaway plot device into a quite lengthy and very effective sequence.

We already feel an awful queasiness when Yvonne arrives at the station to greet her husband, only to be met with the confusion of his train’s mysterious non-arrival, and when we follow her aboard the ‘relief train’ to the sight of the accident, the scene we see through her eyes is genuinely hellish – a Brueghel-esque vision of machine-age devastation. As with the post-WWI angst that consumes Edgar Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’, ‘Mad Love’ is a gothic potboiler that wants to show us it is not afraid to confront the real life horrors of its era – one that refuses to allow us to drift completely into horror of a purely fantastical / escapist variety.

And, what could be more ‘real life’ than the crushing loneliness and social inadequacy of Gogol himself? A Kafka-esque urban lost soul if ever there was one. His piteous inability to express his feelings to others and the cracked actions that eventually result are near unbearable to behold. More than avarice, cruelty or narcissism, he is a monster driven to monstrousness simply by his own failure to master human interaction.

One of the most haunting images in ‘Mad Love’ is that of Gogol watching Yvonne perform at the horror theatre, early on in the film. Though the staged violence is never graphic, the extracts we are shown from the performance are startlingly sadistic for a film of this vintage. (How they got past the recently imposed Hays Code is anyone’s guess - I can only assume that perhaps they were deemed acceptable by vestige of being a ‘play-within-a-play’ or somesuch?)

Regardless of the era though, this sequence remains genuinely unnerving, as we are forced to watch Frances Drake being ‘stretched’ on the rack and ‘burned’ with a branding iron, her theatrically exaggerated expressions of ‘pain’ revealed in unflinching close-up. As her ‘screams’ ring out across the theatre, the camera pans in on Gogol’s private box, where the doctor watches staring and impassive, his face half-hidden by shadow.

What we have here is a direct spiritual precursor to every Jess Franco-esque voyeuristic performance/reality blurring scenario that followed in subsequent decades, and indeed of every one of the innumerable instances of horror movies and thrillers using such material to open themselves up to ‘metaphor for cinema itself’ type meta-commentary; but only rarely did Franco or his aimilarly inclined contemporaries ever manage to twist their fantasies into anything quite as disturbing as Lorre’s expressionless face silently observing the gory spectacle of Drake’s torment, his emotions unguessable, until his eyes eventually close in some kind of private, devotional ecstasy.

We are never given any background on what attracted Gogol to the ‘Théâtre des Horreurs’, or what kick-started his obsession with Yvonne, but we feel that, trapped as he is within his strange, slightly autistic state of isolation, he remains ignorant of the conventions or meaning of popular entertainment. The tawdry exploitation offered by the theatre thus somehow becomes the highest and most beautiful sight Gogol can imagine, and its cathartic excesses affect him in ways he doesn’t quite understand - just like Travis Bickle, innocently insisting his date accompanies him to his favourite x-rated movie all those years later.

Always a solid actor, Clive meanwhile puts in a fine performance as Orlac – with flapping fringe and furrowed brow, he’s a quintessential proto-Dirk Bogarde English neurotic, never more lovable than when he’s cheerfully welcoming his own doom (“don’t worry dear, it’s alright” he reassures his wife as the police drag him off on a murder charge). And Drake, though her role isn’t exactly what you’d call ‘demanding’, is perfectly cast as raven-haired, dewy-eyed the object of both men’s affections (her shock/fear faces are first rate too). Though as formal and florid as the conventions of the era dictated, pair’s scenes as husband and wife convey the genuine pathos of a pair of lovers facing challenging circumstances.

Indeed, whilst scenes of ‘normal folk’ faffing about whilst the monsters and misfits are off-screen are usually a big weakness in ‘30s and ‘40s horror films, that’s thankfully not the case here. Scripting and acting both remain engaging whilst Gogol is out of sight, and, in contrast to the NY Times review linked above, I even think the film’s comedy interludes work quite well. Gogol’s housekeeper (played by landlady/Great Aunt specialist May Beatty) is weirdly likeable as a Whale-esque music hall throwback, and the blunt interjections of Ted Healy’s meddlesome American reporter serve to deflate the film’s more introspective moments in much the same way as the intrusion of the landlord in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’, particularly in the brief scene he spends palling around with the equally jovial knife-throwing murderer Rollo. (After three viewings, Healy’s balloon-bursting “man without head kills rich jeweler – what an eight column spread that’ll be for the front page!” outburst still gets a laugh out of me).

Unlike the strict horror/humour dichotomy that upsets the tone of many older horror films, ‘Mad Love’ is a rare example of the genre that is perceptive enough to let the two strands intermingle. All of the film’s designated ‘comic relief’ characters are in some sense as perversely tragic as the leads – the tactless reporter obsessively chasing corpses, the drunken landlady cowed by her sinister tenant, the condemned murderer cheerfully grinning his way to the guillotine. As a result, they add to, rather than detract from, the anguished and oppressive atmosphere of the film’s world.

And conversely, by the time we reach the film’s final act, there is sometimes no adequate response to the black-hearted absurdity of Gogol’s pathetic travails than that of outright laughter. As he pounds away at his organ (yes, of course he has an organ), his mind utterly gone, Lorre grins and gurns like some deranged toddler, and we’re not sure if we should laugh at, sympathise with or simply be terrified of this bizarre figure – so laughter, of course, becomes the default solution. Slicing between his identities as a tragic lover and a monster, Gogol is now also a figure of fun, prompting an uneasy feeling indeed for the audience, as we are invited to mock this character whom we’ve previously felt for so deeply, creating a nagging guilt in the back of our minds that, like so much in the film, lingers on after the story’s glib conclusion, never satisfactorily resolved.

Though ‘Mad Love’s American title might as first seem a bland Hollywood rebranding of the more ominous and overtly horror-ish ‘The Hands of Orlac’, I must say that on reflection it is a name that I absolutely love – a fiery and weirdly poetic two word combo that couldn’t possibly be more appropriate, given that Freund’s film essentially concerns a love triangle in which both of the heroine’s suitors spend most of the film slowly going insane.

For all my enthusiasm though, it is the duty of a reviewer to grudgingly admit that ‘Mad Love’ is not exactly what you’d call a perfect film. As mentioned above, the plotting is distinctly creaky and overwrought in places, and the film’s dream sequences (of which there are several) are perhaps not terribly effective – a hackneyed mélange of super-impositions and twirling, zooming camera tricks that somehow seem far less ‘otherworldly’ than the movie’s ‘real life’ scenes – whilst the ending seems quite abrupt in view of the care that has been taken with all that proceeded it, even by the clock-watching standards of old-time b pictures.

But, as I have said innumerable times before on these pages, who the hell wants to watch a perfect film? It is the ambiguities, the mysteries, the sheer strangeness of supernatural horror stories that keeps us coming back for more, and in that sense, ‘Mad Love’ is an example of the form that succeeds on every level.

A convoluted pulp potboiler somehow worked up into a mutant cinematic text that leaves us with a wealth of images never to be forgotten, questions never to be answered, raw emotions we don’t quite know what to do with and that may do uncomfortable things to the soul should we let them get to us too much, it surely matches up to the finest intentions of original gothic traditions of which it forms such a startling and uncanny modernisation.

Indeed, if the success of a horror film can be measured in terms of the sheer number of images that remain burned onto the viewer’s retina after viewing, lingering long in the back of the mind and never quite resolving themselves in any reassuring sense of order, then ‘Mad Love’, eighty years young this summer, can still be considered one of the best ever made.

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(1) If you want to take the comparison further, you could argue that Gogol even looks a little Kane-like in some low angle close-ups here, looming above us in his wide-brimmed hat and fur-collared coat… and making an actor of Lorre’s stature ‘loom’ is no mean feat, I can tell you.