Reeling Backward: "The Hands of Orlac" (1924)

I don't review a lot of silent films here in this space -- and by "not many," I mean I believe this is the very first one.

I freely admit I don't respond to most silent film like I do other classical cinema. To me, it's almost an entirely different art form. Silent films are, with some exceptions, much more theatrical and slow-paced. They were made for people used to stage productions, vaudeville or crushingly long novels.

Let's face it: people just had more patience a century years ago. Of course, they had to: there just wasn't as much to do.

One advantage silent films had was their universality. By changing around the title cards for dialogue, a film could just as easily play in Istanbul as Idaho. Music was also much more important to a movie, since it consisted of the entire auditory aspect of a cinematic experience (and often was played live by an orchestra). 

"The Hands of Orlac" is pretty typical of its era. It falls into the expressionist horror neighborhood, and is a fairly close cousin to the better-known "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," which also was directed by Robert Wiene and starred Conrad Veidt. Veidt is mot remembered as the stern German commandant from "Casablanca," but in his youth made a career out of playing spindly fellows given to violence and/or supernatural control.

(He also starred in 1928's "The Man Who Laughed," as a man whose face was frozen in a rictus grin, and clearly served as the inspiration for the Joker character.)

Based on a story by Maurice Renard, "Orlac" tells the tale of a famous pianist who loses his hands in a train accident, and wakes up to discover that doctors have miraculously stitched on a new pair that work perfectly. (Except for playing the piano.) Alas, they turn out to have belonged to a condemned murderer named Vassuer. Haunted by the origins of his appendages, Orlac begins to have visions and feels compelled to knife somebody -- particularly his wife, Yvonne (Alexandra Sorina).

Later, he's bedeviled by a man (Fritz Kortner) with iron gloves who claims to be the guillotined murderer, brought back to life by the same mysterious medical process that returned Orlac's hands. He murders Orlac's father and demands a large chunk of the inheritance as compensation for his stolen hands.

Story-wise, there isn't that much to tell... actually, I just relayed the entire plot to you. As I said, the narratives of silent films tend to be fairly simplistic.

The movie is very slow-moving, with long extended scenes of Veidt staring at his hands as if they were foreign objects, and bulging his eyes out in that way very popular in films of the time to depict people in peril or physical distress. (Sorina also gets to pull this move several times.)

The visuals are creepy and evocative, but my modern sensibility kept wishing the director would speed things along. My reaction was very much the same as that I had watching Terence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" -- it really doesn't take long to convey emotional power through moving imagery. When you keep the camera focused on the same thing, on and on, or keep cutting back to the same image, over and over, you're beating a dead horse, cinematically.

It's a beautiful-looking film, even with the graininess and scratches that come with 90-year-old celluloid. The use of irises and slow fade-ins and -outs feels very dated, of course, but Wiene's use of dense, murky shadows offset by harshly lit foregrounds and faces is still compelling to look at.

This idea of body parts imbued with their own spirits became a familiar one in movies after this one came out. "The Hands of Orlac" was adapted into film twice more, and a 1980s horror flick starring Michael Caine, "The Hand," which scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a lad staying up too late watching HBO, also seems clearly inspired.

The metaphysics remain pretty vague. At first we are told Orlac's new appendages act independently of his will -- he finds he can no longer play the piano, and even his handwriting resembles Vassuer's. Subsequent events, though, suggest it's all part of an elaborate delusion contacted inside his fevered head.

I enjoyed the artistry of "The Hands of Orlac," but it exists for me now as an artifact rather than a living, breathing piece of cinema. Watching it is akin to wandering through a museum, peering at dusty trophies behind thick glass. We relate to these objects not for the power they hold, but its echo.

Reeling Backward: "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)

I'm not normally the type of critic who insists on forcing political correctness upon films. For example, I think the stink conservatives have raised about "Avatar" is (mostly) bunk. But watching 1940's "The Thief of Bagdad," I couldn't help but notice some troubling trends when it comes to casting.

On the whole, the film does pretty well in depicting Arab and African peoples. There are lots of shots of faces in the crowd, men at toil, etc. So one would be hard-pressed to say Middle Eastern folk are not to be found in a story set in Arabia.

But looking over the principal cast list, there's nary a native among them.

Most of the leads are played by English actors: Ahmad (John Justin), the prince and ostensible hero; the Princess (June Duprez) he loves; her father the Sultan (Miles Malleson); and the wise old king/prophet (Morton Selten).

The villain Jaffar is played by the great German actor Conrad Veidt. The djinn role was handled by Rex Ingram, an African-American. And Abu -- who starts out as Ahmad's sidekick but eventually occupies the center of the story -- was played by Sabu, an Indian.

Western cinema has an enduring and troubling tradition of casting Caucasians as Arab, Latino and even African characters. Heck, the forthcoming "Prince of Persia" movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal.

But the fact that this English production appears to lack an Arab in a single speaking role does leave an unpleasant tinge.

The other thing that struck me watching this movie is its intended audience. Nowadays, studios tend to delineate their productions into specific targets: Adult dramas, romantic comedies, gross-out comedies, etc. Seen today, "Thief" seems very much like a children's film. In its day, though, it was viewed as a rousing adventure story for the whole family.

I liked it well enough, although the special effects (which won an Oscar) haven't aged very well. I'm thinking particularly of the djinn's flying sequences, which all seem to feature a motionless puppet. Even more embarrassing is the scene where Abu seeks out the All-Seeing Eye and is trapped in the web of a giant spider. The arachnid literally looks like a child's toy danging from a clearly visible string.

The story is based on "The Book of a Thousand and One Nights," which has spawned countless other cinematic versions, including a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. 1924 silent version.

Disney's 1992 animated film "Aladdin" draws particularly heavily from the 1940 movie. The name and look of Jaffar as an imperious figure cloaked in black was very similar to Veidt's portrayal. The brightly colored costume and childlike demeanor of the Sultan is virtually a straight copy. (Although the cartoon sultan doesn't get assassinated by a blue chick with multiple arms.)

Curiously, in most versions of the story the thief and the prince are the same character, although 1940's "Thief" splits them into two different people. Justin's Ahmad is frankly an uninteresting drip, and the romance with the princess is similarly drab. The filmmakers wisely keep its screen time to a minimum to concentrate on the adventure.

Ingram makes a real impression as the thunderous djinn, whose first impulse upon being released from his bottle after 2,000 years is to kill the one who freed him. Abu outsmarts him, though, receiving the requisite three wishes in return. Ingram, who also played Jim in the previous year's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," had a long career in film and TV.

Although it hasn't worn its 70 years well, "The Thief of Bagdad" remains a remarkable film, one that set the bar for many subsequent adventure tales -- even ones that included Arab actors.

3 stars