My e-mail is out of commission until further notice. My computer's ability to play DVDs is permanently out of comission. Fortunately, that's what this external DVD drive is for.
What we used it to watch tonight was Robert Florey's The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), because it's been an exhausting week—four doctor's appointments down, one to go—and Peter Lorre makes everything better. He's in fine hysterical form here, playing the fragile, territorial secretary to a partly paralyzed pianist whose sudden death, after abruptly changing his will in favor of his nurse, sets off a combination of country house mystery and Gothic thriller, with some good old-fashioned haunted house humor thrown in for . . . Honestly, I'm not sure what the film's coda is doing, unless it was either studio interference or J. Carrol Naish clowning around too endearingly to leave on the cutting-room floor, but the story until then is sturdy B-horror at worst and at best a pure Expressionist nightmare.
While relatives contest the will and a mysterious light shines in the mausoleum, Lorre's Hilary Cummins wants nothing more than to be left alone with the library of occult books he's been allowed to amass over the years, priceless volumes of Renaissance astrology and Hermetic magic, feverishly trying to bring the stars into line with his life to tell him what to do next; the prospect of losing his patron has already driven him to a white-knuckled anxiety even before the next of kin (a father-and-son pair of materialistic Americans; we are in turn-of-the-century rural Italy, although it matters to the plot only insofar as the extras believe in the evil eye) promise, with coarse self-righteousness, to see the deluded little sponger turned out and his books sold to the British Museum. It is through Hilary's eyes that we see, most vividly, the severed hand of the pianist as it clutches blindly across his desk, crawls tarantula-like behind a shelf of books, plays Francis Ingram's last and most famous one-handed arrangement on the grand piano that should be standing silent in the salon. (The effects are terrific. We think we were looking at a combination of puppet, stop-motion, traveling matte, and clever camera placement, but it was very difficult to distinguish everything but the obvious prop which Lorre could pick up. In some scenes it behaves as though still animated by a dead man's muscle memory, recognizably human in its gestures and limitations; in others it is creepily self-willed, contracting around its palm like a pillbug, probing the air with its fingertips as a spider tests its surroundings. At the piano, the fingers move as dexterously as a live hand: end-on, we see the roughly sawn bones.) Strictly speaking, he's neither of the picture's leads, but his vision comes to dominate its cinematography except when, brilliantly, it doesn't. If Florey had set him up as the protagonist, anyway, I suspect we would have lost the refreshing agency of Andrea King as the nurse Julie, a female lead who doesn't need anyone to rescue her from the threat of a supernatural strangling or a madman with Bach's "Partita" in D minor pounding in his head. Someone surprises her, coming up stealthily behind her through the second door of the room she thought she safely locked herself into? She gets them out of the room and locks both doors. Her romance with Robert Alda is one of the less convincing portions of the story, but mostly because he's a careless ne'er-do-well who makes his money bilking tourists with "modern antiquities" and the script never clarifies whether we are meant to believe his feelings for Julie or view them with similar skepticism until it apparently it turns out he was sincere all along. As the local Commissario, Naish employs an accent straight out of vaudeville, but Ovidio Castanio is a pleasingly competent policeman whose wavering rationalism does not relegate him to comic relief; as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel noted, "He's superstitious, but he's not an idiot." And there are some other people in the credits, but mostly I watched the film for Peter Lorre and Peter Lorre I got. Hilary Cummins is by no means one of his more subtle parts, but he's what makes the movie work. Anyone can be menaced by a disembodied hand. Anyone who's as terrified by it as Lorre's Hilary makes it real.
It's Wednesday. (It's Wednesday until I go to sleep.) I've seen four doctors so far this week and I have a fifth coming up on Friday. I have no doctors to see tomorrow, but I have to prove to the Massachusetts Health Connector that I am a real person with a legally valid identity so that I can complete my online application during the open enrollment period and have a chance at something resembling actual health insurance in 2015, as opposed to the ten months of temporary coverage that interfered with medications and prevented me from seeing doctors and other delightful surprises that we discovered as I ran into them. Someday I will not have to spend so much time thinking about my body and the ways in which it is or is not working and it will be awesome.
What we used it to watch tonight was Robert Florey's The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), because it's been an exhausting week—four doctor's appointments down, one to go—and Peter Lorre makes everything better. He's in fine hysterical form here, playing the fragile, territorial secretary to a partly paralyzed pianist whose sudden death, after abruptly changing his will in favor of his nurse, sets off a combination of country house mystery and Gothic thriller, with some good old-fashioned haunted house humor thrown in for . . . Honestly, I'm not sure what the film's coda is doing, unless it was either studio interference or J. Carrol Naish clowning around too endearingly to leave on the cutting-room floor, but the story until then is sturdy B-horror at worst and at best a pure Expressionist nightmare.
While relatives contest the will and a mysterious light shines in the mausoleum, Lorre's Hilary Cummins wants nothing more than to be left alone with the library of occult books he's been allowed to amass over the years, priceless volumes of Renaissance astrology and Hermetic magic, feverishly trying to bring the stars into line with his life to tell him what to do next; the prospect of losing his patron has already driven him to a white-knuckled anxiety even before the next of kin (a father-and-son pair of materialistic Americans; we are in turn-of-the-century rural Italy, although it matters to the plot only insofar as the extras believe in the evil eye) promise, with coarse self-righteousness, to see the deluded little sponger turned out and his books sold to the British Museum. It is through Hilary's eyes that we see, most vividly, the severed hand of the pianist as it clutches blindly across his desk, crawls tarantula-like behind a shelf of books, plays Francis Ingram's last and most famous one-handed arrangement on the grand piano that should be standing silent in the salon. (The effects are terrific. We think we were looking at a combination of puppet, stop-motion, traveling matte, and clever camera placement, but it was very difficult to distinguish everything but the obvious prop which Lorre could pick up. In some scenes it behaves as though still animated by a dead man's muscle memory, recognizably human in its gestures and limitations; in others it is creepily self-willed, contracting around its palm like a pillbug, probing the air with its fingertips as a spider tests its surroundings. At the piano, the fingers move as dexterously as a live hand: end-on, we see the roughly sawn bones.) Strictly speaking, he's neither of the picture's leads, but his vision comes to dominate its cinematography except when, brilliantly, it doesn't. If Florey had set him up as the protagonist, anyway, I suspect we would have lost the refreshing agency of Andrea King as the nurse Julie, a female lead who doesn't need anyone to rescue her from the threat of a supernatural strangling or a madman with Bach's "Partita" in D minor pounding in his head. Someone surprises her, coming up stealthily behind her through the second door of the room she thought she safely locked herself into? She gets them out of the room and locks both doors. Her romance with Robert Alda is one of the less convincing portions of the story, but mostly because he's a careless ne'er-do-well who makes his money bilking tourists with "modern antiquities" and the script never clarifies whether we are meant to believe his feelings for Julie or view them with similar skepticism until it apparently it turns out he was sincere all along. As the local Commissario, Naish employs an accent straight out of vaudeville, but Ovidio Castanio is a pleasingly competent policeman whose wavering rationalism does not relegate him to comic relief; as
derspatchel noted, "He's superstitious, but he's not an idiot." And there are some other people in the credits, but mostly I watched the film for Peter Lorre and Peter Lorre I got. Hilary Cummins is by no means one of his more subtle parts, but he's what makes the movie work. Anyone can be menaced by a disembodied hand. Anyone who's as terrified by it as Lorre's Hilary makes it real.It's Wednesday. (It's Wednesday until I go to sleep.) I've seen four doctors so far this week and I have a fifth coming up on Friday. I have no doctors to see tomorrow, but I have to prove to the Massachusetts Health Connector that I am a real person with a legally valid identity so that I can complete my online application during the open enrollment period and have a chance at something resembling actual health insurance in 2015, as opposed to the ten months of temporary coverage that interfered with medications and prevented me from seeing doctors and other delightful surprises that we discovered as I ran into them. Someday I will not have to spend so much time thinking about my body and the ways in which it is or is not working and it will be awesome.
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