Vintage Vault: Mad Love
By Jeff Vandusen
Lance Writer
October 8, 2008
 Mad Love was reviled upon its release in the United States. The Hays production code, which set new standards of decency in American film, had been in effect for about a year by the time Mad Love came out. While there was no specific mention of torture in the pages of the production code (sex and proper depictions of the institution of marriage took precedence), Mad Love’s testy, yet subtle depictions of torture and fetishism set off big alarms in the censor’s office. The film bombed at the box office in 1935 and was proclaimed by a Time Magazine critic to be “the type of film that brought about censorship in the first place.” Some countries banned the film, or axed any scene depicting torture or execution.
Mad Love stars Peter Lorre as the medical genius/mad scientist Dr. Gogol. The character Gogol is the very personification of sadism and insanity—a sexually frustrated weirdo with a penchant for watching executions and simulated torture. He has a particular obsession with a raven-haired actress named Yvonne Orlac (played by Frances Drake) who finds the good doctor repulsive. When Gogol has his advances rejected by Yvonne, it’s a pleasure to watch one of the more memorable and unfortunate descents into madness.
Karl Freund—the cinematographer and stand-in director for the 1931 Dracula film starring Bela Lugosi—directed Mad Love from The Hands of Orlac; a French horror story about a famous pianist who loses his hands in a train wreck and has those of an executed knife-throwing circus performer transplanted in their place. Mad Love was the second and most-bizarre of three screen adaptations of the story.
There are hints of rape, necrophilia and sadomasochism throughout Mad Love. Toward the end of the movie we see Dr. Gogol attempt to strangle Yvonne with her hair. Gogol, playing Pygmalion, frequently pines over a wax statue of Yvonne while he plays an organ and dreams of one day making love to the real thing. The film even opens with a particularly graphic scene of simulated torture, where Yvonne play-acts the victim in a French stage production of the Marquis de Sade. Strung up on a rack while a judge reads her sentence, a burly executioner singes her thighs with a hot iron. We miss the action as the camera cuts away to a shot of an obviously aroused Dr. Gogol while he closes his eyes and listens to Yvonne scream. It’s music to his ears, but to us, those screams are incredibly unnerving and sound a little bit more real than fake. By the end of the film, when the jealous Dr. Gogol pretends to be the guillotined knife thrower to drive Yvonne’s husband and his former patient (Colin Clive, of Frankenstein fame) mad, it’s hard to feel sorry for someone so cruel. Prior to that, you can feel some sort of empathy for the poor Dr. Gogol—he just seems misunderstood.
When Dr. Gogol, spurned by Yvonne, groans that he has conquered science, but cannot conquer love, you can see the beginnings of the caricature of Peter Lorre, who was unfortunately typecast from then on as the creepy German heel. It would solidify itself in the cultural consciousness for decades to come.
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