Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is Rob Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we're doing Mad Love.
That's right. This is a film that I've been excited to do on Weird House Cinema even before we really formalize what this would be. Now, before we get into the movie, you might be asking, well, what do this be? What is Weird House Cinema? What you know? You may think of Stuff to Blow your Mind, and of course you think of a science and culture show. Well, Stuff to Blow Your Mind remains a science and culture podcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Friday night is our time to
focus on weird films. We may also discuss science and culture on this show, but we put the weird horse ahead of the cart on these days. Think of this show as the haunted hands of a movie podcast grafted onto the body of a science podcast.
I like it. So this is a movie that's come up on Stuff to Blow your Mind proper before I think maybe did it come up in talking about I don't know, cutting off parts of the body and retaining memories or I think it's come up a few times because I had never seen the movie before, but I had seen the trailer for Mad Love, and the trailer is just wonderful because it begins with Peter Lourie sitting on a couch next to a dog that's bigger than he is and getting a phone call from a beautiful
actress who wants to tell him how great he is in the movie that they start in together.
Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those wonderfully weird trailers. It's just so different from anything you see today because it begins with this real, supposedly real life conversation where she's like, oh, Peter Laurie, I loved you, and em tell me about this new film you have coming up, and then you go to a more proper trailer.
That's right, And for such a mundane beginning of a trailer, this is a fabulously strange movie, especially for what you're Did it come out in nineteen thirty four? Is that right?
Thirty five?
I believe, Okay, thirty four to thirty five. Yeah, I think you're right thirty five, And Wow, what a strange film it's got. It's one of the strangest things I think we should just sell right up front, is there is a costume that Peter Lourie puts on in the later half of the movie that like, is just hard to believe it comes from the era that it does. It seems very cybernetic.
Yeah, it is is frightening to behold. But yeah, outside of that, they're just a number of crazy weird elements in this film, and it has at least two eccentric performances, the first and foremost that of Peter Lorii, which we'll get into in a minute. But you know what, I'll go ahead and do the elevator pitch for this this movie, so you know generally what we're talking about here before
we get into discussing the players. A gifted but deranged surgeon named doctor Gogel becomes obsessed with horror actress Yvonne Orlock, and when Yvonne's husband, the famous pianist Stephen Orlock, suffers a brutal accident, Google transplants the hands of an executed killer onto Orlock, and from here everything just spirals into this kind of weird tale of psychological manipulation and delusion.
Let's hear just a snip of that trailer.
I boupest have conquered serns.
Why can't I conquer love?
He shall be shut up when it's a weere mad, but nobody knows that, yes, each man kills the thing he loves.
So one of the things that maybe we should start with is the title of this movie, because it doesn't really communicate what this film is really all about, which is like severed hands and crazy psychological manipulation.
Yeah, Mad Love is I think, kind of an imperfect title. I far prefer the alternative title it sometimes it plays under, and that is The Hands of Orlock, though that one also feels somewhat, I don't know, insignificant, given the focus of the film is not on Orlock as much as it is on doctor Gogel Peter Lourie's character. I also think, I mean for modern viewers, there's also this we also have to take into to mind that you have this nineteen ninety five film that's also called Mad Love that
many of us might have remembered. If you didn't see it then then maybe even you just saw the trailers and it starred Chris O'Donnell and Drew Barrymore, and none of the plot elements were discussing here. It's a completely unrelated film. I'm sure it's quite nice. It was directed by Antonio Byrd, who of course directed Ravenous in nineteen ninety nine and Priest in nineteen ninety four. But yeah, nothing to do with Peter Lourie, The Hands of Warlock or anything.
I believe. It was based on a short story called the Hands of Orlock, right like Leman do Orlock?
Yeah? Yeah, This was by French fantasy and horror writer Maurice Renard who lived eighteen seventy five through nineteen thirty nine. And I'm not I wasn't really familiar with the works of Reynard, but he wrote multiple tales of mad scientists, alien beings, futuristic technology. And this is just one of four screen adaptations of the Hands of Orlock. And it
wasn't the first. The first was was the nineteen twenty four Silent Austrian film starring Conrad Veitt, who many of you may know from the Cabinet of Doctor Kligari or The Man Who Laughs, which even if you haven't seen it, you may have seen a still from it, because it's often discussed as being an inspiration for The Joker and the Batman franchise.
Yeah, really otherworldly disturbing face in Cabinet of Doctor Kligari does he plays Sesar, the somnambulist.
I believe. So I have a hard time remembering the characters in Caligari as much as just the you know, the breathaking visuals. That's that's certainly when it comes to silent films worth watching today. That's that's one of the good ones. Anyway, Conrad played Orlock in that, but there was no Gogel. Instead, there was a less essential character, a surgeon named doctor Sarah. So it seems that by the time they end up making Mad Love like they've
they've adapted it enough. They've made more of a character out of the surgeon. The surgeon has become the center of the piece, as opposed to just this contemplation of futuristic hand transplantation and how you know, how that affects our idea of body and personality integrity. Now, there were a couple of other adaptations of the Hands of Warlock. One was a nineteen sixty French British adaptation that actually had Christopher Lee in it playing Nero the Magician, of
which I think was just an. I don't know why you would, why you would mess around with the plot that much, but there you go. And then in nineteen sixty two there was an American adaptation titled Hands of a Stranger. It started nobody in particular. I think the main noteworthy thing about it is that director k newt Arnold also directed Blood Sport and was assistant director on a lot of major films such as Blade Runner and The Godfather Part two.
Oh that's interesting, yeah, But.
The basic plot element here of what you could think of is transplant panic and the idea of a transplanted limb altering an individual's personality. You see that showing up in a great many films and TV episodes. Just to name a few, there was The Hand of Fear, an episode of the Tom Baker era Doctor Who series. There was nineteen ninety one's Body Parts starring Jeff fay Linsey Yeah, yeah, yeah, Lindsey Duncan and Brad Doriff. And then you'll find various
horror anthology episodes. I think that they either have this particular plot of oh now I have the hands of a killer or in the hands of a stranger on my body, as well as a related but different form of dismemberment. Panic films about disembodied crawling hands. I'd love to come back to crawling hand films in the future.
Oh maybe a future October episode. Now, this reminds me of something we talked about not too long ago on Stuff to Blow your mind when we did the episode I Want a New Blood. That was all about blood transfusions and how there were experiments in the seventeenth century, as far back as the seventeenth century in France to transfuse the blood of animals into humans for various reasons, some of which were not necessarily all that grounded in
good science. But for example, you might perform a phlebotomy because of the gallinic humoral theory of the day, you'd bleed a patient to reduce a fever or to reduce mania or something thing. And then there were some surgeons at the time who said, you know what we should do is take out the bad blood and then replace it with the blood of an animal that has the sort of personality characteristics that we want to put into
the person. So if somebody is overly excited, they're suffering from a mania, you would put lamb's blood into their body because the gentleness and coolness of the lamb would come through in the blood. And this also but this was also countered by people who opposed blood transfusions on the idea that you could create some kind of hybrid creature that like, negative qualities of the original animal would come through in the new person and they wouldn't really
be fully human anymore. So there's long been this idea that transfusing blood from one creature to another, or transplanting a body part from one creature to another or one person to another, brings with it some kind of personality characteristic.
Yeah. Yeah, this concern over the entire of the body, uh, when we get into the transplantation of tissues and fluids and organs and limbs. And I think one of course thing to note is that while a lot of the concerns over the over blood have sort of passed away with the with with the widespread use of blood transfusions. You know, you will find some religious objections to blood transfusions here and there, but for the most part, it
has become a part of our our everyday life. You know, like you even if you're not giving blood every day, you may hear about blood drives, et cetera. It's just part of the medical reality of the modern world. Hand transplants, as we'll discuss a little later, are far far rarer. Uh. They are a far more complicated procedure and one that is not not every day and uh, and also one that is you know, it seems like our ability to
pull it off is still evolving. So you definitely see that that that same kind of energy in these transplantation panic films and other bits of fiction that this sort of deal with this idea, what if the hands of another became my hands, would they really be my hands? And that, of course is one of the key things going on in this film.
I like the idea, though, of these science fiction films that take a very scientifically or at least ostensibly scientifically grounded premise. This is about medical science performing experiments at the edge of what was known to medicine at the day, but it still basically believes in magic. That still basically believes that like hands contain some magical essence of the
brain of the person they came from. And it seems to me, you know, modern science fiction doesn't usually operate on quite that level of belief in the supernatural.
Yeah, there is. There's certainly a dash of the supernatural in this one. There is a lot of science fiction, you know, it is essentially like science fiction is always about our hopes and our anxieties concerning where technology is taking us. And you know, at the time it was looking towards the future in which we would be able to carry out hand transplants or certainly double hand transplants. We eventually got to that point, but at the time
it was just pure speculation. It was just we may get to this point, and then when we get there, what will it mean? What if it goes wrong? And then the way it goes wrong is, uh, you know, it goes a bit more in the speculative and magical direction by going beyond like what if it doesn't work, but also getting into that area of what if it isn't me anymore.
Now, if you have seen any image from this film, and I think there's a decent chance you have, it is probably the image of Peter Lori in his Rollo costume.
And we'll explain how that fits into the plot a little bit more in more detail later, but in this costume, it's Peter loriie wearing this bizarre metal and leather neck brace that goes over his shoulders and goes up to his chin and is laced up with like a shoe, and then with metal hands and dark sunglasses are almost kind of welding goggles, and a big black hat.
Yes, it is a really nightmarish image to behold. I feel like it was definitely an influence on the Gestapo agent taught in Raiders of Lost Arc played by Ron Lacy. And Ron Lacey gives a very laure Esque performance in that, especially when you take into a when you're take into account the code and the hat as well, and also early character concepts for that character, and Raiders apparently gave
him a cybernetic metal arm. I feel like there's a there's some strong comparisons to be made there, and I think I have read that Spielberg went with Lacey because he reminded him of Peter Lourie.
Oh that's interesting. Well, this is getting us into the people who were involved in this movie, So maybe we should start with looking at the director, Carl Freund, who was a cinematographer before he was a director proper. And I recognized the same immediately when it came up in the opening credits, and I realized where I recognized it from was from the movies of Fritz Long.
That's right. He was a cinematographer on Metropolis as well as the nineteen not of Fritz Long film, but the nineteen thirty one Dracula film. Oh, there was another film that he was a cinematographer on. He was a cinematographer on I think one hundred and sixty three films according to IMDb, and was active through the nineteen sixties.
He worked on some other universal horror films I think, didn't he was he involved with The Mummy?
Yeah, he directed nineteen thirty two's The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff as Zemmotep Oh. Okay, but the main attraction here, really the centerpiece, is Peter Laurie as Doctor Gogel. This Laurie is the ultimate highlight in this film, as the picture I think gives him a chance to shine just in multiple ways because his go go It's interesting. He's he's sometimes quite dapper and sly, you know, walking around smoking, you know, gazing kind of slyly at everything around him.
Other times he's this tragic, earnest, even manic character and then there's this scene which again we'll get into more of the details on in a bit, where he takes on the guise of this reassembled Rollo character, and he gives a really otherworldly performance in this this kind of science fiction within a science fiction, and then ultimately the whole plot just Criscindo's into madness and he plays an
increasingly mad character. So Laurie, I feel like, really gets to just trot out all the tools in this particular movie.
I think that when Mad Love was first released, it was sort of mostly or at least partially critically panned. I think people look at it, yeah, yeah, okay, this is childish trash. But even in those reviews, there was a lot of praise for Lori because Peter Laurie is obviously, you know, one of the great actors, one of the great film actors of all time.
Yeah. He was a Hungarian American actor of Jewish descent, made a whole career basically out of playing weird characters, just weirdos. You know. He had he had kind of a you know, a kind of a weird asymmetrical look, and he had this this wonderful accent and this kind of you know, raspy voice. The voice I don't even have to do an impression, because you're hearing it now. You may already be speaking it out loud just to hear yourself use it. I mean, it's it's a universally
known voice. You know, he was, he was a legend of cinema. Now, this was his first American film, on the heels of nineteen thirty one's much acclaimed im by Fritz Lung, and then he played in that, he played an accused child murderer. And he would go on to have memorable roles and The Maltese Falcon and forty one, of course, Casablanca and forty two, along with just a long list of great, memorable and occasionally forgettable or embarrassing films.
But he worked with such directors as John Houston, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra. You know, he'd pretty much did it all.
I mean, Laurie, I think is a great early example of someone who would be well known in their own right as a powerhouse film star without being a dashing lead, without being like, you know, an attractive actor or actress who would play the lead role in films, you know, to be the hero Laurie was often a villain or a strange character actor, and I don't know how common it was at the time for actors like that to be a household name that was you know, known and revered.
Yeah, Like you see footage of him, such as in that trailer, you know, like how many weird actors and character actors today? Can you even imagine such a setup? You know, where you're coming at everyone first with the celebrity and the natural charisma of the actor, and then you hit the trailer. And I think it speaks to you know, one of the things about him, It is
like he was charismatic. He was, you know, kind of dashing in his own slightly anti Hollywood way, And like I say, he also just became cemented in popular culture. I was looking around for, you know, books about him, and I ran across The Animated Peter Lourie by Matthew Hahn. This is a book that points out apparently seven hundred instances of animated cartoons using Laurie's face or voice or both.
So this is everything from old timey cartoons where it's like, oh, suddenly a bunch of dead celebrities have shown up, and here's one of them, it's it's Peter Lourie. Two just characters like on Scooby Doo or whatever that may not be Peter Lourie but have his voice and or his appearance. And you see that still today. Like the Peter Lourie impersonation is kind of like a standard impersonation one might
turn to. You see it, for instance, in the Star Wars Clone Wars animated series, there's a character that shows up, a bounty hunter named Cad Baine, and it has kind of like a mechanically augmented voice, but the root of it is a Peter Lourie impersonation, and you can pinpoint it.
Oh that's interesting. I like how that connects Star Wars to the classic old serials.
Yeah, I mean clearly, Like this is a guy that people like Spielberg and Lucas, you know, they grew up watching these films like he was. He was one of the maybe not the top tier deities, but one of the supporting deities in the pantheon of film.
Now there's another actor in the movie who I think is maybe weirder than people realized when they cast him. I don't know. He's supposed to be the hero of the film. But this is Colin Clive playing Stephen Orlock, who appeared in the Frankenstein movies. He was Doctor Frankenstein in James Wale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. And he has such a such a rat like nervous energy in this film. It's similar actually to what you see in the Frankenstein movies.
Yeah, yeah, I mean in both films he plays an accomplished and seemingly confident man who is then riddled by madness and trauma. You know, has gone through a traumatic experience and is continually haunted by what has occurred. And yeah, he seems to just and I have to admit I've only seen Colin Clive in this movie, Mad Love and the two Frankenstein films of note, but in all three of those, like he just has this wonderful raw energy to him, and there is this sense of like tragedy too.
I don't know how much of the tragedy is just knowing that, for instance, he would die in nineteen thirty seven, just two years later at the age of thirty seven, and that he had, you know, a number of demons in his life.
I believe he.
He suffered from alcoholism. But you know, whatever, whatever traumas he had in his life, you know, he seems able to have translated that into these performances. And so, yeah, he's perfect for this role. Is this, you know, handsome and accomplished individual who is then put through this this traumatic situation and then then pushed towards delusion by the villainist doctor Gogel.
He has this energy as if he's undergoing fission. You think that you're going to walk into a room and catch him just chewing on a corner of the wall.
Yeah.
Now, there's another major actress in this film, Francis Drake, who plays Stephen Orlac's wife, Yvonne Orlac, the heroine of the film, who plays an actress within the movie. But one thing before we get into details about Francis Drake that I thought was interesting is I read that originally this role of Yvonne Orlac was cast with another actress,
an actress named Virginia Bruce. And just clicking around on the internet, I discovered that Virginia Bruce played Jane Eyre in a nineteen thirty four American adaptation of the Bronte novel, and in this movie, Colin Clive, the guy with the fision rat nervous energy plays mister Rochester. I just I don't know. I would have to see that to believe it, because mister Rochester is supposed to be this, you know, dark, smooth byronic hunk. But Colin Clive's teeth are almost audibly
rattling when you watch him. It's hard to imagine him really fitting with that role.
Huh. Yeah, Now I'm gonna have to watch that or watch some clips from it, just to see, you know, what kind of energy he has in that, because again I've only seen this level of energy out of Colin Clive. Now, Francis Drake is quite good in this. It's easy to lose sight of her because she is kind of sandwiched between these very manic performance but she was a star of the day. She was only active from nineteen thirty three to nineteen forty two, but she lived a long life,
lived to see the twenty first century. What happened is she married into the English aristocracy and her first husband, Lieutenant Cecil John Author Howard, urged her to leave show business, so she did. But she's she's really good in this. I mean there it's one of these roles that you encounter for women in films, particularly of this era, where you feel like it's definitely suffering from the limitations of
female roles at the time. You know, like, you know she's going to faint when the villain comes comes at her. You know it's going she's going to be saved by the male hero of the piece, that sort of thing. But that being said, she's really good in it. You know, she's able to. I mean, it's kind of interesting. She
doesn't come off as a scream queen. I'm not sure if that was truly a thing yet, but that at the same time she kind of plays a scream queen and her character is a scream queen in the context of the film.
Yeah, her character ivon Orlock is playing a scream queen of the Grand Genial Theater in Paris. It's not named as the Grand Genial Theater but the Grand gien yall historically is this tradition of extremely gory, morbid stage productions that would be done in Paris, and in this movie,
it's called the Theatre des horus. I can't I don't have French pronunciation, sorry, the Theater of Horrors and it's got all these creeps sitting in the audience every night just watching her get tortured on the rack and doing doing a marvelous job screaming and yeah. And so she clearly has her fans. I think she's sort of supposed to be the Linea Quigley of her day.
Yeah. And of course those creepy fans include one super creepy fan, doctor Gogel, So he is kind of like the the you know, the the ultimate creepy fan in this a very successful creepy fan, but a creepy fan.
Nonetheless, I think it's interesting that you mentioned that Francis Drake got out of acting because she married a successful husband who did not want her to pursue further pursue her career, because that is the role she plays in this movie. Vonn Orlack is retiring from acting at the Theater of Horrors because she's marrying a successful husband and they're moving to England.
Yeah, that is interesting. I having not read the Hands of Orlocker seen the previous adaptation, I don't know if that was part of the original or Like a lot of things in Mad Love, you know, it's been embellished and added upon now. Believe it or not, there is another screen legend in this film, and that is Key Luke. You might know him best as the man who sells Gizmo to that kid in nineteen eighty four's Grimlins.
Well, I think he sells him to the kid's dad, right the kids.
Oh look, that's true. The dad gets gizmo as a gift to give the kid or does he actually sell him or does he kind of the dad steal him, like after he won't sell him. I forget how that goes down exactly.
I don't recall exactly. I mean he Key Luke is the proprietor of the Shop of a Cursed Items and yeah, yeah, and he's good in this film, though it's a small role. He plays doctor Gogol's colleague. Basically, he's the other surgeon that works at doctor Gogols clinic.
Yeah. What I like about his role in Mad Love is that he's simply playing another doctor, doctor Wong in a straightforward part, which I mean it's kind of complicated to think about because on one hand, you had a lot of stereotypical Asian characters in films at the time, and in many cases those characters were played by non Asian actors. Laurie himself would go on to play a
stereotypical Asian character, mister Moto, in several pictures. And this is just sadly the practice in Hollywood at the time. You see, you would see and even the decades to follow, you'd see actors like Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Harrison, Katherine Hepburn, Mickey Rooney, Alex Guinness, just to name a few names. You know. So it feels perversely progressive to have Luke
in this role playing just a surgeon. Yet at the same time I read that Luke himself pointed out that he was often cast in quote good boy scout roles like doctors and lawyers, which in this also entails racial stereotyping. You know, so we have to keep both extremes in mind when looking at films like this, as well as with films today. Now that being said, Key Luke, though
interesting character, very long career in Hollywood. I believe he started out in the advertising realm of Hollywood, like promotional posters in all, and just became a staple of Hollywood.
Oh that's interesting, I never heard that. Yeah, Okay, well, I guess maybe we should talk through the plot in a little bit more detail. Now we've already discussed the basic setup that Ivonne Orlac, played by Francis Drake, is this grand gain y'all scream queen that she she goes on stage at the Theater of Horrors every night in Paris. They grotesquely torture her for whatever play they're putting on.
It looks like the play they're putting on is about a a count or some you know, wicked aristocrat who finds out that his wife is two timing him and then puts her on the rack. And so I put her on this big wheel and starts stretching her arms and she screams. And then it shows these people in the audience where there looks like there are a lot of couples in the audience, and the women are like not happy to be there, and the men are like,
oh wow, this is great. But she seems to be she seems to enjoy her job acting in this theater. And she she talks about her husband, Stephen Orlac. I think it's communicated that they are recently married. Stephen Orlac again is played by Colin Clive and he is a genius pianist. So like when she's preparing to go out on stage, in her dressing room, she's listening to a performance that he's doing live on the radio. And I think we're supposed to understand that they're very happily married.
They adore one another. And the film opens on the night of Yvonne's final performance at the Theater of Horrors before she's going to move off to England with Stephen. But as you mentioned, Yvonne has a creepy secret admirer among the audience. Doctor Gogol, it is said, is there every single night in his theater box. He's basically keeping the theater running, constantly buying this expensive box seat to watch her from.
Because doctor Gogel, I'm not sure if we firmly established this, but he is a superstar surgeon of the day. Like he is. He is a wealthy, super talented surgeon who is clearly I don't know if he's really performed anything, you know, miracle level yet at this point you know, in the timeline, but like he's out there saving lives, Like there's a scene where he is saved a child's life through his brilliant surgical intervention.
Yes, it's communicated that he has a very powerful mind and very gifted hands, coming back to a theme throughout the movie, and so he saves children's lives. They talk about how he saves soldiers who have been injured in the war. They don't talk about what war. This is the nineteen thirties in Paris, so I guess that would refer to World War One. I'm not sure. But then doctor Gogol finds out that this is Yvonne's last night, and he does not like this. He's horrified, in fact,
because he is obsessed with her. He's there every night to see her. Like she says, I'm leaving and then he's like, oh, what theater are you going to? And she's like, well, actually I'm just moving to England. And he doesn't like this at all. He's distraught. But fortunately for doctor Gogol, the theater happens to be removing a wax figure of Yvonne. They have it like standing out in the lobby, and it looks so much like her that it is in fact played by her. It's just
it's just Francis Drake's standing there, not moving. But they're taking the wax figure out of the theater so it can be melted down for scrap wax, and then Gogl intercepts this delivery, buys the wax figure of her, and he has it delivered to his apartment. The whole time he's monologuing about the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a great scene because like the guy that you know clearly thinks it's creepy, and Google Google just you know, offers them enough money to buy it. It's kind of like a a pre eBay creepy eBay trans transaction.
You know.
Yes, that's very but I don't quite understand how it's supposed to be like the myth of Pygmalion or of Galatea, because he doesn't make the wax sculpture. He just buys it. But he keeps streaming that it's going to come to life and love.
Him, yeah, ranting about the Galatea. Uh yeah, I love it and I love that that it's just Francis Drake playing the wax duplicate and without any I don't think they did anything to her, just have her stand there in costume, which which is nice because it plays in with what is to come later in the in the plot.
Yeah. So, next thing is we meet the pianist stephn Orlac on a train and there's a scene that comes here that I love so much. The sausage slash dog scene is just amazing. So Orlac is riding in a train car. Across from him, there's a passenger who's just eating a giant sausage. I'm pretty sure it's a sausage. I don't know what else it could be. It's not a baguette because it shows him holding a baguette next to it, So I think it's just a huge sausage the size of a baguette.
And is the is it that I don't remember this part of the movie as much? Is does the guy with the bag at have like a snappy American accent?
No? No, no, no, he's supposed to be French, I believe.
Okay, all right, so the snappy American characters are yet to come.
Okay, there yet to come. Yes, yes, no, The guy eating the huge sausage I think is French. And next to him on the bench and the train car is a picnic basket. And then suddenly a little puppy pops up out of the picnic basket pops up its head, and the man explains to calin Clive. He's like, well, it costs twenty francs extra if you want to bring a dog on the train. So I'm sneaking the dog on in my picnic basket and don't let the guards find out. And then colin Clive wonderfully says, if my
silence is worth twenty francs, buy it. I'm hungry. So the guy cuts off a piece of his monster sausage and gives it to Orlac, and then Orlac immediately gives the sausage to the basket dog, and then the sausage man after that abandons all pretensive utensil use. He like puts down his knife and he just gnaws it. He just sticks the thing in his mouth and bites it like an apple.
Yeah, I never sausage a scene. It's one of several humorous scenes in this film that at once feel completely out of place, but also you know, I wouldn't I wouldn't want this film without him there. They're they're interesting, they're they're funny. I don't know they're funny in the way they would have been received at the time, but there is there's something kind of slapsticky and amusing about them.
I think it's supposed to be funny. In any case, whatever it was supposed to be, Sausage Man is my hero. I want action figures of Sausage Man. I want I want our fans to make us Sausage Man t shirts.
That what it would have been a totally different film. By the way, had Sausage Man's hands end up transplanted onto Steven Orlock.
My god, yes, like I can't play the piano anymore. I can only grab huge sausages. But anyway, that that preludes the next thing we have to talk about, which is that a prisoner is brought on board the train and it is explained that this is Rollow, the knife thrower, who is skilled at throwing knives. I guess that's a skill. I'd never thought about that much before. But what do they say he did. I think it's that he murdered his own father by throwing knife at him.
Yep, yep, which will become important later on. So yeah, he's a he's a convicted murderer, and he's he's on the way to the guillotine.
His mannerisms are very soft and friendly and American. They specify he is American, He's not French. He just happens to be in France going to the guillotine, and he's he comes up off almost kind of like Buddy Hackett.
Yes, he reminds me a lot of and I'm sorry, I forget the actor's name of the actor who plays baby Face Nelson. You know, no brother, where art thou? You know that kind of old time he likely he comes off as a charismatic, likable character, not a a knife wielding murderer. And on one hand, I found myself thinking, well, what if they had actually made Rollo terrifying here? Would that have been more beneficial later on? But maybe I'm not. The thing is, I'm not sure it would because I
don't know. The The impersonation of a re animated Rollo that comes later is very much, you know, a go Gole creation, So I don't know. I guess ultimately I'm okay with this particular character being a little hammy and a little likable despite being a murder.
Well, I think it kind of works because Gogol, if I recall correctly, has never meets Rollo, while he's alive, he only gets access to his dead body once it's guillotined. Yeah, but we should say before Rollo gets guillotined through happenstance orchestrated by sausage Man by the way, because sausage Man wants Rollo's autograph. He apparently collects the autographs of famous people,
including father murderers. He goes next, he goes next to the other train car using Steven Orlac's pin to try to get an autograph, Orlac has to go get his pin, and so by these means he meets Rollo. But anyway, Rollo gets off the train to get executed. Laurie goes
to the guillotining because apparently he always does. But after Rollo gets off the train, the train tragically derails and Stephen survives the crash, but his hands are mangled and destroyed, and of course he's a pianist by trade, so he needs his hands to play, and Yvonne wants to so she's talking to the surgeon and in the hospital after the accident, saying can't you save his hands? And the
Surgeon's like, I'm sorry, ma'am, we'll have to amputate. So Yvonne is desperate and she realizes, oh, I've got this creepy admirer, doctor Gogol, and he's the world's greatest surgeon. I can take Stephen to him. And so that's what she does. She has Stephen taking an ambulance to doctor Gogol's clinic and says, you've got to save his hands. He needs them to play. But unfortunately doctor Gogol discovers it is impossible to salvage his hands as they are.
But Gogol, in his desire to please Yvonne, manages to transplant Rolo the knife thrower's hands onto Stephen's wrists.
Yes, he decides to to essentially try him. There's that great scene where he's in there with doctor Wong and Laurie's character proclaims an impossible Napoleon said that word is not French.
Yes, that part's great.
Yeah.
So it seems for a while like all is well, or you know, Stephen discovers that his hands work, and everything's good until Steven starts to figure out that he can't play the piano anymore. You hear, there are these scenes of him sort of banging on the keys with with nothing like the deafness that he's used to and he so he can't play the piano, but he can do things he couldn't do before, such as accurately throw knives and pins so that they stick into doors and walls.
Yes, how does he discover this?
I think he just gets angry. So this is part of the personality bleed over too, because there's the idea that his hands have the skills of Raloh with throwing a knife, but they also have Raullo's murderous inclination. That he's suddenly violent when he wasn't before. Now this leads to all kinds of problems because he can't play piano. Suddenly, they're in want of money, and Stephen and Yvonne's position just sorts to fall apart, and Yvonne goes to Gogl
for help. Go Gol of course demands her love and she won't give it to him, and then, in a fit of rage, go Gol decides that he needs to
drive Stephen mad. So his plan is that he's going to commit murders and then assume the identity of Rollo, the knife thrower who Stephen knows was executed, and try to convince Stephen that Stephen himself did the murders that the go Gol actually did, by telling him the truth that he has Rollo's hands on his wrists and using as proof the fact that he go Gol, pretending to be Rallo, is now still alive because go Gol transplant
did his dead head onto another person's body. And this is when gogl as Rollo dawns that amazing outfit with the neck brace and the leather and the steel hands.
Yeah, and it is just it is a really haunting scene. It is if you if you don't have the I don't know the courage or the time to watch the full movie. I think, uh, I think there's a there's some clip. There's a clip of this, an official clip
of just this scene online and yeah, it's wonderful. It's there's so there's the costume level of it, which we've described already, but also Gogel as Rollo is speaking in this this faint whisper, this raspy whisper, you know, the voice of one whose whose head has been refused with his body, and he's he feels at once like this this this strange, perverse miracle of modern surgery. But also he's like a ghost. He's like a wraith brought back to warn uh or Lock of what is to come.
I am a little confused about Gogol's plan or the logic of it. So I think what he thinks is that if he can falsely convince Stephen that he did murders, this will cause Stephen to continue to actually do.
Murders, right, or get caught by the police, either by turning himself in or just by doing more murders. Yeah, either way, it's a win for Gogle because then he can swoop in and you know, he and Evon will be married and live happily ever after.
Yeah, but he sort of neglects to consider the fact that Yvonn doesn't want to marry him. Go Gol is not thinking clearly at this point, right.
He doesn't have a good head for romance. No, you know, he asked that question at one point. He says, hi, peasdant have conquered science, why can't I conquer love? And I mean, clearly he has a great head for science, but not for love. He doesn't really understand how love works. And you know, he can certainly use his technical skills in his brilliant mind to put the hands of a dead man onto the hands of a survivor. But in terms of transplanting Yvonne into his life, that is beyond
his ability. But he still has this wonderfully perhaps overly complex plan to pull it off. It may sound a bit overly complex here, but I don't know. I feel like within the context of this plot and in the context of this movie, it works. You just kind of have to roll with it. But it was just.
Sort of skips lightly over the top of the water and then moves on. Yeah, So, of course Stephen is implicated in these murders that Gogol did, or at least one murder. I think maybe it's just one actually, and he so he's arrested by the police, and Yvonne goes to Gogol's apartment to confront him. But then while she's there, she discovers his evil plan, and.
Because he's coming back in the rollo costume cackling to himself about how about it, basically reveals his entire plot and then taking the costume off, and what does she do to hide?
Oh wait, no, before we get there, I've got to say about when he's explaining the plot. He's not even doing the Bond villain explaining it to Bond. He's doing the Bond villain explaining his whole scheme to no one. He's just explaining it to the ceiling.
Isn't there a bird?
Oh maybe it is the parrot.
There is a bird.
Yeah, Okay, I take it back. Maybe he's explaining to the bird. But yes, So he's coming home, he's coming into his study. She's there because she had come to confront him, and then she discovers she she has to hide, and in this suspenseful final scene, she has to pretend to be the wax sculpture of herself, which is a fantastic set piece.
And it's it's really well shot too. There's this wonderful sort of long shot where they come around the corner. It's like Gogol's point of view, and there she is standing there as the wax sculpture. It's it's a beautiful moment in the film.
Mm hmm uh. And then, of course, uh, the steam and the police come to the rescue. I feel like it has a kind of disappointing conventional ending where Steven in the climax puts his new hands to good use, you could say, and then it's just like, okay, go Goll's dead, and then Steven and Yvonne embrace, and then just immediately the end happily ever after. This is the thing about a lot of these old movies. It seems
like they wrap up very fast. They don't have any kind of interesting coda that puts a new spin on this. Like it's like this movie, it's like the moment the villain is defeated, the two main characters embrace and kiss, and then music swells and it's over at the end.
Well, you know, bladders were much smaller back then, and you can only make it so far through a film.
Speaking of bladders, there are some great side plots we haven't even mentioned. Actually, I don't know if they're great. There are some side plots that exist involving an alcoholic housekeeper who's always trying to you get some brandy, and a fast talking American reporter played by Ted Healy, who's the guy who you know he sounds like a baseball announcer of the nineteen thirties, and he's always using strange
mannerisms and figures of speech. Like there's a scene where where Rollo is about to be executed by guillotine and he's there to cover it. I don't know why this American reporter is there to cover the guillotining of a criminal there in Paris, but he's explaining to the police commissioner that He's like, look, you know, you got to have jen for executions, you got to have champagne for this. And I can't reproduce it, but it's pretty good.
Yeah, But it's that kind of snappy, snappy American accent that you hear in these old films and you end up wondering, I think people ever actually talk like this or is this just this sort of vaudevillian trope, because I believe Heally was like a Vaudevillian comic actor. I think he had ties to the Three Stooges, even its part of that whole syndicate.
I think it is playing up the Transatlantic accent of the time, which was like not an organic accent, but an accent that was sort of a a product of training. And so it was taking that accent and then accentuating it to unreal levels like what it's kind of like what a lot of like pop country musicians do with their Southern accents and music today, where you're taking something that is a real accent but just playing it up to a point that it's a parody of itself.
Yeah, I think so it's kind of kind in a like a vicious circle of self parody and you end up with this just, I have to say, kind of obnoxious performance. That's just it's just full of one liners and zingers, and I mean, I wouldn't take it out. It's it's part of this film, but it's it's I feel like the modern parallel here would be an otherwise serious film. And suddenly Rob Schneider shows up and he's
doing some sort of goofy lame character. I meanwhile, you have like Peter Lourie and Colin Clive, you know, doing their own crazy but ultimately seriously grounded performance. All right, So, as we've been pointing out, this film really centers around hand transplantation. So let's talk a little bit about the science of hand transplantation and also the history of hand transplantation.
All right, Well, hand transplantation is it's interesting how this movie fits into the history of it, because hand transplantation is absolutely real now, but it was not at the time this film was made, I was looking at a paper called the History and Evolution of Hand Transplantation, published in the journal hand Clinics in twenty eleven by Furuhar at All and so one thing to note is that hand transplantation is an example of a broader class of
surgeries that are now known as vascularized composite ALLO transplantation or sometimes vascularized composite allograft a VCA for short, and this basically means the grafting of a whole unit organ composed of multiple kinds of tissue, so that would mean muscles, tendons, circulation, bones, nerves, skin, It's a lot of different stuff and it all has to connect properly to be functional, which is not easy.
It's sometimes described as like there's this ascending ladder of the priorities of things that you have to connect and in what order of importance they come, and it does rely on very advanced techniques in microsurgery. Now, obviously the surgery involved to connect a hand to an arm segment in a functional way is really complicated, but it's not
just the complexity of the surgery. One of the main barriers to successful hand transplantation in history, or at least in previous decades, was the insufficient development of immunosuppression, without which the immune system will revolt and reject the new organ. The first ever hand transplant that we know of was performed by a doctor Robert Gilbert in Ecuador in nineteen
sixty four, and this transplant did not really work. So the authors here explained that about three weeks after the initial graft, the transplanted hand had to be amputated because there was an acute immune rejection. And the authors say that quote This early experience, along with similar failures in animal models, led researchers to believe that skin bearing transplants
were prohibitively immunogenic. A thirty year period of stagnation followed, but then in the nineteen eighties and nineties, new medications came online that made hand transplantation seem viable again, and they list a few examples here, including calcineurin inhibitors, cyclospore in A, TACROLEMAS, and MMF, and drugs like these opened
the doors to multiple kinds of VCA. The authors here cite a couple of the first successful hand transplants in the late nineteen nineties, one of which actually was in France by a surgeon named Jean Michel Dubernard and his colleagues in Leone in nineteen ninety eight. So this first
patient in ninety eight received a single hand transplant. The surgery apparently took thirteen hours and the operation was at first successful, but unfortunately the patient did not follow instructions for his immunosuppression and physical therapy, and he eventually left the care of the team in Leone, and this had disastrous consequences and he had to have the hand amputated in two thousand and one. Presumably it didn't say why,
but presumably this was because of immune rejection. And then the same group in France under du Bernard performed the world's first bilateral hand transplant, so both hands in January two thousand. Here the patient was a painter thirty three years old who lost both of his hands when he was experimenting with a homemade rocket and it exploded.
Oh wow.
Now, the time of this review that was published in twenty eleven, the authors believed that more than sixty five hand transplants had been carried out worldwide, most of them at this point were successful, some had had to be amputated due to immune reactions, but most of them were successful. I haven't found a more recent estimate, but surely the number is a good bit higher than that now as therapies have continued to evolve.
You know, doctor Cody k Azari is a big name in hand transplantation, having served as one of the lead surgeons on six hand transplantation operations, including the first double hand transplantation and first arm transplantation performed in the United States. I got to hear him give a talk for the Moth in New York City several years ago as part of the World Science Festival, and you can listen to this at themoth dot org or look it up on YouTube,
I believe. But it was a really cool talk because he talks about just the intensity of the surgery, and I remember feeling like like I either got the impression or maybe he even used this comparison himself, that you got the idea that this was like scaling a mountain, you know, it was like the surgical you know, again, all the different types of connections that have to be made, you know, all the concerns that have to be taken into place to pull this off. You know, it's it's
really impressive. And that's without even getting again into what comes afterward. You know, it's not a situation where you wake up Stephen Orlock and say hey, you got new hands, and he's like okay, I'm gonna go and try and play piano and like, no, it's there. You know, there's a drug regime that has to be followed, and physical therapy is a huge part of adapting to life post transplantation.
Yeah, and some of the sources I was looking at emphasized the importance of the psychology, like psychological screening and
the psychology of how people adapt to hand transplants. I mean for multiple reasons, but one of which is following through after the surgery is incredibly important, as was for example, made clear by that first case where the guy was not taking his immunosuppression drugs properly, it was not following through physical therapy, and that eventually led to the hand being rejected.
Yeah. On the psychological front, I was looking at a paper from nineteen ninety nine by Martin M. Klappeck, MD titled Transplantation in the Human Hand Psychiatric Considerations, and the author here points out the one has to take into account the psychology of the hand as well as the quote psychodynamic issues in limb loss and the psychological integration
of a transplanted hand. He wrote, quote, Potential candidates for hand transplantation should receive a psychiatric interview and projective testing to assess the patient's adaptability to body image, level of personality, organization,
and capacity for pathological regression. And one of the things that he was pointing out is that at the time anyway, there wasn't as much of this, Like just there you saw this with the various levels of organ transplantation, but there apparently wasn't as much of it in place for hand transplantation.
Yeah, and this now hopefully that will look for hand transplantation is just continuing to get better, it seems like it is. But for at least going back to say ten or twenty years ago, I was seeing papers that were talking about the pros and cons of hand transplantation, saying, well, you could potentially get this quality of life increase, like
with the transplanted hand as opposed to prosthetics. But you know, obviously there are major health consequences, like if it is rejected, so there are big risks involved as well, and there it seems like over time the pros are starting to build up and the cons are decreasing. But for a while, I think there was serious debate over whether this was a reasonable surgery to perform given all the risks and downsides.
Yeah, I mean, you can find sort of outstanding examples in either direction. So take bilateral hand transplantation for example. You know someone who's lost both hands and they get two hands transplanted on. For instance. Some of you might remember in twenty sixteen there was the case of American double hand transplant recipient Jeff Kepner, who made headlines saying that he wanted his own transplanted planted hands removed that
he had received like ten years earlier. And it wasn't something where he was blaming the doctors, like he's communicated that, you know, he knew it was a risk to try this out, but he wanted to give it a go. But at this point he was saying, like I just don't have functionality in these hands, like I was better with with process is instead, and I would prefer to
go back, if possible, to what I had before. But then on the other hand, you have the case of an Austrian police officer named Theo Klez who is able to return full to full time work after bilateral hand transplantation.
So it is very much a success story. And that story is even even more dramatic because Klez was a bomb disposal expert working to diffuse a bomb placed in a school by Austrian mass murder of Franz Fuchs, who killed four and injured fifteen in five waves of male bombs I think a total of twenty four mail bombs. So a rather dramatic case, but ultimately a surgical success story, I understand.
So it seems like the transplantation of hands has made great strides and I think is continuing to do so. The transplantation of heads is another theme in the movie, though I don't think in the film anyone actually gets their head transplanted. It's just that doctor Gogol comes up with this story to try to drive drive, calling Clive Insaying by saying that he is Rollo after having undergone a head transplant which didn't actually happen. It's just Gogall in disguise.
Right, and again it's almost almost feels like a tragedy that we have created such a fantastic character that is itself a fantasy within the context of the film. But I don't know, it's still it's still perfect. It's still perfect. Yeah.
Now, every few years it seems like you hear new stories about a doctor or surgeon somewhere who claims that they can perform a head transplant or however you want to call it. We could talk about the terminology. It just never seems to materialize. I don't know how realistic the idea of a head transplant with modern medicine is.
Yeah, it's if we can compare hand transplantation to scaling a mountain, then ultimately head transplantation or whole body transplantation the other way referring to it, this would be the Mount Everest, Like, this would be the ultimate peace because.
It's more like scaling a mountain on the moon.
Yeah, yeah, it is. Uh, it would be the ultimate surgical achievement because this is this is something you know, we have to face, like no human being has ever truly survived decapitation. I mean, certainly there are arguments and various observations about how long consciousness seems to remain in a freshly cut head. But this is only brief. Yeah, you know, interns right in terms of keeping it alive in a jar or on a pan, as we see in a whole other genre of sci fi films from
the especially the twentieth century. You know, that is that is thus far beyond us, as certainly is the idea of taking ahead and attaching a body to it so that we the head can use the body. And this is where it gets kind of weird, like, not only is this like not a surgical reality, it's still within the realm of fantasy like it even it even further accentuates that question of what is self? What is body? The idea of head and body it because it is
a quite literal invocation of the whole. You know, we've talked about the mind body connection and how it is perhaps unhealthy to think of ourselves as a brain attached to a body, a head on a body, like a rider on a horse, when instead we're this integrated system.
We are essentially a centaur of mind and body. But then you have an example like this, or at least a theoretical idea like this, that you could take the head and attach it to another body, and this would be the new individual you know, it does raise all sorts of questions and and even nightmares in the human mind.
It does remind me of the Daniel Dinnett short story where am I that we've talked about on the show before.
Yeah, I mean it raises all sorts of questions, big questions and small questions, thoughtful questions and grotesque ones. I feel like there's there's at least one episode right where there's a head transplantation on the Simpsons. It's like a treehouse of.
Horror where that sounds right?
Yeah? The what they put Homer's brain in a robot and the robot falls onto mister Burns and then mister burns head is transplanted onto Homer's body.
Why was I imagining Flanders head on Homer's body? That doesn't sound That's not right, is it?
Maybe they got around to that later. There are a lot of treehouses I haven't seen. Well.
Yeah, with this point at the Simpsons, basically you can just like throw out random ideas and then it turns out they already did that in an episode and probably maybe did it more than once.
Now, in terms of surviving decapitation, there are animals that can survive longer certainly longer than us without a head. It's often pointed out that decapitated cockroaches die of starvation rather than just simply the loss of their head.
But there you're talking about which one? Are you talking about surviving the head or the body?
Yeah, again, it kind of messes with our conception of what an individual, even an individual cockroach is, right. It's kind of like that running around like a chicken with the head cut off, which is alluding to, you know, observations that a chicken seems to the chicken's body seems to live longer than a human body without a head. But is the body living? You know, is the head? It gets complicated.
I could be mistaken about this because it's just off the top of my head, so to speak. But I think the reason that's observed with chickens is because the brain basically isn't fully removed, like you can sort of decapitate a chicken, but the brain stem is still there and functioning. It's just the upper part of the brain that's been taken away. I might be wrong about that, but that's what I recall.
Now. In animals, blood vessel reattachment has been achieved, but a full human head reattachment would require a complete reattachment of vessels, muscles, et cetera, everything that's involved in transplanting a hand, but also the spinal cord as well, and we'd need to be able to sustain the head while all of this was happening. You know, again, how do we keep ahead alive after it is removed from the body, and then how would we keep it alive long enough
to get it reattached. So so yeah, we're simply not there yet in terms of reattaching a head to a body, though though I love the way that it is real. It is created by Gogel in the film, you know, the idea of this brace being used to achieve a kind of like rough head transplantation, like he seems to have approached it with it, you know, the thoughtful mind like, oh, well, this would be a very difficult thing to pull off. The results would not be pleasant. How would I depict this to Orlock?
I think I just noticed that this entire episode, we've been saying all these names in different ways multiple times. I think I've been saying Gogall and Gogall, and I've been saying or Lock and or Lock, and I really don't know which one is right at this point. As for Orlock, isn't that the name of the vampire in Nosferatu?
Oh? Yeah, count Orlock?
It is Max Shrek.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure. Say is it's felt same?
No? I don't think so. I think this spell hey in't it?
Yeah? And of course I think I think Orlock was that they chose that name well because they didn't have the rights to Dracula, so they're like, all right, come up with something else.
They should have used Alu card or doctor Acula in the Doctor.
That would have been good.
So there's another thing I wanted to talk about in this movie that I thought was interesting is that it features a couple of poems that are by two different Brownings, that there are parts of the movie where Gogall quotes poetry. The first I noticed was there's a part where he's I think he's pining for Yvonne, you know, he's he's feeling despondent because he loves her and she's married to another. And he says he starts reading a quote from a book.
It sounded familiar to me, and I looked it up, and I think the quote is from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the English poet Sonnets from the Puguese Seven.
It's often known by its first line, which is the face of all the world has changed, I think, And the lines are like the face of all the world has changed, I think, since first I heard the footsteps of the soul move still, Oh, still beside me, as they stole betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink, was caught up into love and taught the whole of life in a new rhythm. And it goes on from there. But
that's the part that has what he reads. And then later in the film I thought this was pretty interesting. On the screenwriter's part, he quotes a poem when he is trying to murder Yvonne. He starts to strangle her with the braids of her own hair, and as he's leaning over Francis Drake, I think she has fainted at this point, and he quotes from the poem Porphyria's Lover by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's husband, the poet Robert Browning. And this is a line. You may have read this poem
in school. It's pretty famous it the poem, the speaker is talking about a murder he committed, having murdered his lover, and he says, I found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string. I wound three times her little throat around and strangled her. No pain felt she I am quite sure she felt no pain. As a shut bud that holds a bee, I warily opened her lids again, laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
Yeah, this is a part of just that. I mean, the whole movie is wonderful, where this last stretch is just excellent, and where he recites this poem while he's going to strangle her while she's unconscious, as as Oorlock, Stephen Orlock and the others are trying to beat down the door.
But then I guess Gogaula is undone by his own work. In addition to becoming an evil murderer, he also made the mistake of giving Stephen Orlock hands that are really good at killing from a distance. Yeah right, So Orlac sort of reaches through the the grate in the door and throws a knife and sticks it in, go galls back, and then I don't get I guess somehow right after that they get through the door anyway, you know.
It also drives home why the Hands of Warlock isn't a good title for this ether, because it's basically the hands of Ralloh, that's what That's what's in the film. The Hands of Warlock are lost pretty early on unless you're getting deep and wondering about like who owns the hands? I don't know. But in the end, also, it is Mad Love. It is about mad characters going mad and trying to figure out how love works.
So there is a thing I noticed about this movie as it was on Amazon Prime. Amazon declares this film to be rated PG thirteen, and I was like, how did Mad Love end up rated PG thirteen when movie ratings had not been invented yet? Or I don't think there were any kinds of ratings. If there were, they weren't the system we have now, and certainly not the PG thirteen rating, which was not invented till the nineteen eighties. I looked it up. The first PG thirteen film was Red Dawn.
They must have My only guess here is they must have accidentally pulled the rating off of nineteen ninety five's Mad Love. That we mentioned earlier unrelated film, but that was rated PG thirteen. In the air in which that rating actually existed, it would be horrible.
I think if they are going back in applying MPAA ratings to like pre code movies, yeah, don't even try.
Now. You might be wondering, well, where can I watch Mad Love? We already mentioned Checking it out on Amazon Prime, I found that you can pretty much rent or buy digitally Mad Love anywhere that you would rent or buy a movie. You can also find it on DVD, sometimes thrown unlovingly into a multi pack alongside far more forgotten films of the era. I watched it on a nice DVD edition that I rented from Video Drum here in Atlanta.
They had a nice historical commentary track. I mean, it was clearly somebody sort of reading no about the film, but it was quite interesting. I think this was from the Legends of Horror box set.
Interesting.
Yeah, as far as I know, there's not a BLU ray of this film, at least not yet.
I didn't see one. Okay, one last question before we wrap it up, what does Stephen Orlak do the rest of his life? So he maybe he just can't play piano ever again, but he's good at throwing knives? Does that become his new profession? Like they're reunited at the end, Yvonne is saved, they embrace. Oh we're all right now, And I guess I will enter my life in the circus as a knife thrower.
Well, you know, I so identified with doctor Gogel that after he was dead, I was just kind of like, all right, it doesn't matter, you know, But I did think about it more after you brought it up. And yeah, I guess I imagine him taking up knife throwing, professional knife throwing and that becomes like his new traveling act. And maybe she gets to go back into theater, and you know, because now it's like his profession is more
aligned with hers. Right, maybe they worked again. They do a show together.
Okay, I see, Yeah, they do a stage show where he throws knives and she screams while the knives are thrown.
The fabulous Oarlocks Warlocks coming to a theater tent near you.
I love it. Okay, we wrap up here.
Yeah, let's go ahead and wrap up this edition of Weird House Cinema. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everybody out there. Did you enjoy Mad Love. If you have, you watched it? What do you think of it? Do you agree with this? Disagree with this? Do you have additional insights that we may have missed? Let us know. We'd also love to hear from you. Do you do you feel like this is a good use of our time producing episodes of Weird House Cinema.
We've heard both ways so far.
Have we? Maybe I'm just I'm blind to the criticism, but I haven't noticed anybody saying not to.
Well, I don't know. We heard from one person who said this was not for them, but.
Okay, well then that's understandable. Is this show? Is this? If the Friday night Weird House Cinema isn't for you, just stick to Stuff to Blow your Mind. Our feelings will not be hurt. But let us know either way. We're excited to hear from our listeners. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Again, Tuesdays and Thursdays you get the core episodes, and then on Fridays were dishing out some
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