The Hands of Orlac: The Pianist and the Murderer's Fingers

Four years after he made the world’s most famous painted set, Robert Wiene made a film in which the most frightening object is a pair of hands attached to the leading man, photographed against nothing much at all. Orlacs Hände is the anti-Caligari, and it is the film that seeded an entire century of stories about a body part that will not take orders.

It was produced in Vienna in 1924 by Pan-Film, an Austrian outfit rather than a German one, and adapted from Maurice Renard’s 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac. Conrad Veidt plays Paul Orlac, a celebrated concert pianist whose hands are destroyed in a rail crash. A surgeon grafts on a replacement pair. Orlac then discovers whose they were.

Wiene takes the sets away

The received account of Wiene is that he was a one-trick director who lucked into a design team and spent the rest of his career failing to repeat himself. The Hands of Orlac is the evidence against.

There are almost no sets here. Orlac’s house is a series of large, bare, under-furnished rooms with high walls and pools of blackness in the corners. There is a table. There is a piano. There is an enormous amount of empty floor. Where Caligari crammed the frame with painted geometry until the eye had nowhere to rest, Wiene here evacuates the frame and lets a man stand in the middle of it with his arms held away from his sides.

The choice is closer to Kammerspielfilm — the chamber-drama mode that Carl Mayer was pushing at the same time, stripped-down psychological realism with few titles and fewer locations — than to Expressionism proper, and it has been argued about ever since by people who want Orlac filed neatly. What it achieves is that the horror has no external referent. Nothing in the room is wrong. The wrongness is entirely in Veidt.

The crash sequence, which opens the film, is the one place Wiene spends money: a rail disaster staged with real wreckage, lanterns swinging through smoke, searchers picking over bodies, and Orlac’s wife Yvonne running the length of the train. It is genuinely frightening and it is over in minutes, and its function is to buy credit for the ninety quiet minutes that follow.

Veidt’s arms

Conrad Veidt gives what may be the most physically committed performance of the silent era, and it is all in the upper limbs.

Once the bandages come off, Veidt never lets his hands rest naturally again. He holds them out in front of him, splayed, at a distance from his body, as if carrying something contaminated. He recoils from his own fingers. When he sits at the piano — the instrument that made him, the thing the film has established as his entire identity — he cannot make them play, and Veidt performs the failure as a kind of stiffening horror, the arms locking, the shoulders rising.

The reason it works rather than tipping into farce is that Veidt commits to the physicality without a flicker of irony, and that Wiene shoots him in wide, patient takes with no cutaways offering relief. Veidt had played Cesare for the same director four years earlier, a body possessed by another man’s will, and he is doing a sophisticated variation here: Cesare had no self to lose, Orlac has one and is watching it evacuate.

Fritz Kortner arrives at the midpoint as Nera, a black-gloved figure who turns up in Orlac’s house claiming to be the dead murderer, and Kortner plays him at a completely different pitch — theatrical, oily, enjoying himself. The clash of registers is deliberate. Veidt is drowning; Kortner is doing a turn. The film’s second half runs on the friction.

Alexandra Sorina, as Yvonne, has the film’s least discussed and most difficult role. She is the one who has to keep reaching for a husband who flinches away from her, and Wiene stages their scenes with a consistent piece of blocking: she moves toward him, he retreats, and the empty rooms give him somewhere to retreat to. The bare sets earn their keep here. A cluttered house would have trapped him against the furniture and turned the marriage into a confrontation. Wiene’s high, vacant walls let a man back away from his wife across twenty feet of floor, over and over, until the geometry of the room is the shape of the marriage.

The idea, and why it has never gone away

The transplant premise has been remade and rehashed for a hundred years because it is a perfect little machine.

It asks a question the audience cannot answer about itself: how much of what you do is you? Orlac is told the graft belonged to Vasseur, a knife-murderer executed by guillotine. He immediately begins to feel the intent in his fingers. He finds a dagger. He cannot bring himself to touch his wife. The film’s engine is a man who has been given a piece of information about his own body and cannot un-know it.

Renard’s novel and Wiene’s film arrived at the precise historical moment when this became imaginable. Reconstructive surgery had advanced enormously through the First World War, driven by facial and limb injuries at a scale no medical system had ever handled; Harold Gillies’s work at Sidcup was a decade old. Europe was full of men who had been repaired. A story about a graft that carries a stranger’s soul is what a continent does with that.

The film has been remade twice with names attached. Karl Freund — the cinematographer of The Golem, by then directing at MGM — made Mad Love in 1935, which gives the surgeon top billing and Peter Lorre his American debut, with Colin Clive as Orlac; it is a lurid, superb thing and Lorre’s Dr Gogol is the version most people mean when they mention the story. Then in 1960 came another The Hands of Orlac with Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee, which is the weakest of the three.

The descendants are everywhere: The Beast with Five Fingers, Body Parts, The Eye, every film where a graft comes with a previous owner’s memories. The lineage from a stiffening pair of silent-film hands to Cronenberg’s flesh-machines is direct, and it runs through the body horror lineage. The wider period sits in the silent horror canon.

There is one more connection worth making. Seven years after Orlac, Fritz Lang’s M would put a murderer on screen and ask whether a man who cannot stop himself can be held responsible. Wiene got there first, with the same anxiety and a rather more literal device. Lang had the better film. Wiene had the better metaphor.

The version to seek is the restoration by the Filmarchiv Austria, which reassembled the film from surviving prints of varying generations and reinstated the tinting; earlier releases ran short and murky, and Orlac is a film in which you need to see the fingers.

Spoilers below

The reveal turns the film inside out, and it is the reason Orlac is more interesting than its imitators.

There is nothing wrong with the hands. Vasseur, the executed murderer, was innocent — framed for a killing he did not commit, convicted on fingerprint evidence. Nera, the man in the gloves who has been tormenting Orlac, is the real killer. He murdered Vasseur’s supposed victim, planted the prints using a set of moulded fakes, and let the state execute an innocent man on the strength of them. Having learned that Vasseur’s hands went to a wealthy pianist, he turned up to blackmail him, playing the dead murderer come back for his property.

So Orlac’s affliction is entirely psychosomatic. The hands are ordinary hands, taken from an ordinary man. Everything Orlac has felt in his fingers — the pull toward the knife, the horror of touching his wife, the ruin of his playing — he generated himself, from a piece of false information supplied by a con man.

That is a considerably stranger and more modern ending than the supernatural one the premise promises, and it is what the remakes soften. Mad Love is far more interested in Lorre’s obsession than in Orlac’s psychology, and the 1960 version fumbles the fingerprint plot entirely. Wiene’s film says the graft was a story someone told Orlac about himself, and that the story was sufficient to disable his hands.

The forensic detail underneath it is the sharpest thing in the picture. Fingerprint evidence was still novel in 1924 — courts had been convicting on it for barely two decades — and a mass audience had been told it was infallible. Wiene’s plot rests on the proposition that it can be manufactured, and that a state which trusts it will kill the wrong man. That is a film about the unreliability of the body arriving at a film about the unreliability of evidence, and it gets there without raising its voice.