Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

The story of a surgeon's fanatic love for a woman he cannot have, Mad Love is a prime example of the influences of German expressionism in early sound Hollywood and involved the collaboration of three huge imports from the Weimar studios: the great actor Peter Lorre and the cinematographers Gregg Toland and Karl Freund (acting as the film's director). Peter Lorre is his most exaggeratedly best in this movie, eyes bulging out further than in Fritz Lang's M and his gleaming dome reminiscent of Uncle Fester if his travails as a monstrous creature was ever taken seriously and not just for comic relief. Lorre's Dr. Gogol is as sinister as any German monster, but his expressive face, pathetically stubbly fingers, and short stature that causes him to always have to look up gave this horrific monster a humanity and even a reason for being so evil. All around him, truth, morality, and sexuality are being traded for mere francs, and he cannot participate not only because he is far too generous (he tells a crying mother that she does not have to surrender her last fifty francs, only later to discover that she is wearing a giant gleaming ring), but because ironically, he is far too ugly to ever be part of this "normal world." His efforts to "own" the thing he loves--which in essence is what has been happening during the entire film, people owning and buying each others' devotions and allegiances--fires back, leading to his sad demise (the reunion of the woman he covets and her husband is heard in the background, while Gogol slowly dies). Gregg Toland and Karl Freund adds to Lorre's tragic character the eeriness and highly-contrasting shadows of German cinema, especially the use of sillhouettes to represent characters (a technique that will later find its greatest expression in Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a film clearly influenced by Citizen Kane (1940), which Toland lensed). The constant interchange between high-angle and low-angle shots, Freund's specialty (he innovated the use of multiple camera angles for use in television broadcast) here worked well in depcting Gogol's psychological downfall and eventually, his death. In essence, Mad Love is a horror masterpiece and a great example of the German contribution to Hollywood cinema.