La Bête aux cinq doigts

In a turn-of-the-century Italian village, a famed pianist (Victor Francen) with only one hand is killed. Murders soon begin occurring, and the occupants of the pianist's house believe his left-hand is committing them.

What starts out as an average Warner Brothers melodrama/murder mystery is made memorable by the use of the disembodied hand. Robert Alda and Andrea King are forgettable leads, and J. Carrol Naish is horrible as the police inspector. Peter Lorre gives the best performance, and his scenes where he confronts the hand are great. The special effects are excellent.

Rewatch. 3/5

In a gloomy 1900s mansion in Italy a famed pianist(Victor Francen)lives with his devoted nurse(Andrea King) and his faithful secretary(Peter Lorre). The wheelchair bound pianist is only able to use one hand to play. An antique dealer(Robert Alda)adapts a piece of music to be played with one hand to dull the musician's bitterness. Francen dies after a rolling tumble down a staircase leaving his fortune to his nurse. A couple of upset relatives arrive protesting the will; but this moves to the back burner when murder and attempted murder is committed by the dead pianist's severed hand. Plus the hand likes to play the piano which adds to the terror. Lorre nails the hand in a box; and even throws it in a fire after confrontations with the disembodied member. Local Commissario Castanio(J. Carrol Naish)investigates this creepy mystery. Lorre is outstanding in a passive demented way. His wrestling with the severed hand is hilarious. Max Steiner is responsible for the haunting score. Great black and white from Warner Brothers.

It's nearly fifty years ago in the small Italian village of San Stefano. Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda) cons money from tourists. His friend, pianist Francis Ingram (Victor Francen) lost the use of his right side and lives in a mansion with his nurse Julie Holden (Andrea King) and his secretary Hillary Cummins (Peter Lorre). Various people gather to fight over Ingram's fortune after his death.

The hand is mighty and this hand is a beast. I would like to have more of the hand earlier. There are some functional effects but I want more. That's the money shot better than the premise. As for the premise reveal, I like it but I don't like the comedic turn at the end. The movie needs to stay dark. As for the acting, there is no one better than Lorre at being creepy. He is the king of creeps. This is good.

The Beast With Five Fingers predates any other ‘disembodied' hand film I've seen by a good twenty years. Such films include Dr. Terror's House Of Horror, The Hand, Evil Dead II, Severed Ties, and the two Addam's Family films and television series. This selection illustrates the gamut of horror film quality, from the delightful Evil Dead II to the atrocious Severed Ties. Happily, their precursor, The Beast With Five Fingers is ‘hands down' one of the better entries in this sub-genre.

The Beast… is set in an Italian village, home of the successful pianist, Francis Ingram, who resides in a sumptuous villa. Ingram is wheelchair bound as his entire right side is paralysed, and is forced to play piano using his single left hand. His style is suitably heavy and melancholic. He is a haunted figure, heavily reliant on his young nurse to the point of obsession, and fixated on his own death. Therefore, he summons his companions to dinner to witness the signing of his will. Amongst them is his personal secretary Hilary (Peter Lorre), a man with his own obsessions; astrology and the occult. It is not long before the Grim Reaper arrives as a belated dinner guest.

The film's most prominent actor is Peter Lorre. Lorre's career in horror fare has seen a slight regression over the years, though not as profound as some of his contemporaries such as Bela Lugosi and John Carradine. In the Thirties, Lorre starred in Fritz Lang's classic M and the rather good Mad Love. However, by the Sixties he was resigned to playing second fiddle to Vincent Price in horror-comedies The Comedy Of Terrors and The Raven. These two films are reasonable enough but eclipsed by his formative work. The Beast… makes a fitting mid-point between these two eras.

Lorre is an engaging actor, his childlike physique and strange manner always invoke some degree of viewer sympathy no matter how heinous his crimes (cf. M). J. Carrol Naish who plays the affable police inspector (yep, never heard of him before) is also notable but his more comedic moments do lessen the film's impact.

The special effects used to animate the hand are impressive for their time, although as the film is in b&w this helps mask its inadequacies somewhat. The rubber hand in Dr. Terror's House Of Horror is pitiable in comparison, and that was made twenty odd years later. The interplay between Lorre and the hand as he alternatively soothes and struggles with it are reminiscent of Ash's plight in Evil Dead II.

*spoliers*

The majority of the players seem primarily motivated by avarice. It is somewhat surprising then that the final bodycount is so low. A modern horror would have casually knocked off such ‘sinners' with glee. Perhaps, this highlights a rift between ‘vintage' and modern horror. The vintage film has a more human approach to its characters, although they do suffer in terms of danger and scares, they do not die. The usual modern approach is to emphasise the killings, the characters are just fodder for the killer's and the audience's whimsy. Of course this reasoning parallels the change in audience expectation and tolerance with time, and also what the changes the filmmakers could get away with in terms of censorship and ‘decency'.

This one could have been a minor classic but got butchered by the studio in the editing room. Since the script is mediocre, and the actors, aside from Peter Lorre, not at their best, the movie is quite a letdown, but for two things: excellent special effects of a disembodied hand running around and committing mayhem; and Peter Lorre's bulging eyed performance as a deranged bookworm-astrologer with a, well, disembodied hand fixation. Director Robert Florey tries his best with the material, but fails to create the right pace and feeling for the film. Since Florey and Lorre were both highly gifted men, this is all the more frustrating, as there are flashes of real brilliance in the film for all that is wrong with it. All this goes to show that a good horror movie, like any other kind, has to be built from the ground up. I sense that Florey was so intrigued by the idea of a horror based on a the image of a severed hand that he forgot to make the rest of the movie work. This won't do. Frankenstein isn't just about its set pieces,--the lightning storm, the murders, the burning windmill--it's a story rooted in a time, a place and a community, that concerns credible characters behaving in ways that make sense (even if one doesn't subscribe to their values or care for their motivations). Dracula, similarly, has a certain sweep, beginning in the remote Carpathians of central Europe, then moving to England, as we get a sense of how Dracula stalks his prey, the way he treats people, and why. The Beast With Five Fingers strains credibility from the outset, then goes swiftly downhill. One waits for the big scenes, which do not disappoint, but the story overall is poorly developed, and there's no one to care for or identify with. The movie is an interesting experiment, and worth watching once, yet never lives up to its promise, and is a terrible waste of its brilliant star, who's in very good form throughout.