La Bête aux cinq doigts

Classic early horror with Lorre in superb eye-popping form. Film is set in an Italian mansion where a wealthy pianist is close to death. When he passes away it turns out he has left everything in his will to his nurse, who incurs the wrath of the grasping relatives who have arrived. The bickering takes a sinister turn when the solicitor is strangled, seemingly by the severed hand of the dead pianist.

Lorre plays the deranged librarian whose sightings of the hand send him increasingly over the edge into madness. Despite the true horror potential of the storyline, the film tends to play more like a murder mystery. Much of the atmosphere is wasted by the air of light-heartedness, particularly the contrived slap-happy ending.

Misgivings aside, 'The Beast with Five Fingers' is still one of the genre making horrors, and while not in the same league as the heavyweight films of the 1930's like 'Frankenstein', 'The Invisible Man' or 'Mad Love', still rates serious attention.

Other severed hands featured in ' Dr Terror's House of Horrors, 'Evil Dead II', and Oliver Stone's 'The Hand'.

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.

The Beast with Five Fingers is directed by Robert Florey and jointly written by Curt Siodmak and William Fryer Harvey. It stars Robert Alda, Andrea King, Peter Lorre, Victor Francen, J. Carrol Naish, Charles Dingle, John Alvin and David Haffman. Music is by Max Steiner and cinematography by Wesley Anderson.

Francis Ingram (Francen) is a well regarded pianist who after suffering a stroke leaves him paralysed on one side, chooses to live at an isolated manor in rural Italy. After he calls family and carers together for the reading of his will, tragedy strikes and something sinister begins to stalk the manor house...

Wonderfully weird, a blend of guignol, noir, expressionism and cheese, The Beast with Five Fingers delivers rich rewards for those not expecting a horror masterpiece.

Following the classic "old dark house" formula, plot basically sees the characters introduced, their means and motives deliberately grey, tragedy strikes and then the titular beast of the title comes into play. Cue characters getting bumped off, some shouting, some eerie scenes and then the mystery solved. All of which is set to the backdrop of a typical mansion of many rooms and doors, an imposing staircase and of course a grand piano. Florey stitches it together neatly, Anderson provides some striking photography that embraces shadows and deals in odd angles, while Lorre does yet another film stealing performance involving twitchy weasel like mania.

A stupid tacked on coda soils things a touch, and you really have to have a bent for this type of creaky chiller, but it is great fun and it "pointed" the way for other "beastly hand" tales that followed down the line. 7/10

This is one of the scariest movies I ever saw. It really plays with your mind. I admit that I first saw this movie as a kid int the back seat of my parent's car at the drive-in, and FOR YEARS, I was very afraid of the hand coming out from under sofas, beds and anywhere dark.

It connects with something deep in the subconscious as the hand is the part of the body that does all things and in this movie it is a power all unto itself.

The black and white film makes this movie a perfect expression of the subconscious, fearful and malevolent. Definitely one that I hope would eventually make it to DVD, and one to own if you're into the classics of this genre.