Karl Freund's The Mummy is one of the most effective horror films in its creation of an atmosphere of menace without showing the source of the menace to the audience. Instead of revealing the resurrected Imhotep, all Freund shows us is Karloff opening his eyes and the movement of an arm. After that, all we are shown is his right hand taking back the "Scroll of Thoth" and the look of terror on Bramwell Fletcher's' face when he lay eyes on the mummy, then nothing but trailing bandages slipping through a door. We never see the reanimated mummy again.
The unseen menace of The Beast With Five Fingers is the severed hand of an old pianist named Francis Ingram (played by Victor Francen), who, before his death falling down some stairs, regales his house guests by playing the Brahms arrangement of Bach's 'Chaconne' with his left hand, since his right hand was rendered useless by a stroke.
With Ingram's body safely entombed in a mausoleum, visitors to the house awaiting the reading of his will hear someone playing the same 'Chaconne' on the downstairs piano one night, but see no one there. A police inspector (J. Carroll Naish) takes fingerprints off of the piano keys, inspects the dead body and discovers its left hand is missing and it has a knife clutched in its right hand. There is a small hole in a nearby window and, on the ground outside, there is a handprint and further prints along the ground leading toward the house.
Ingram's eccentric astrologer, named Cummins (Peter Lorre, particularly creepy), wants only to be left alone to work in the old man's library. One night, he watches from his desk as something disturbs books on a shelf from behind. Cummins catches the hand, which crawls around independently, replaces Ingram's ring on its index finger, but then nails it to a board and puts it away in a drawer. He goes upstairs to the room of Ingram's nurse, Julie Holden (Andrea King), and takes her and Conrad, a friend of Ingram's (Robert Alda) to see the hand, but it's no longer there.
Ingram's will leaves everything to Julie, compelling Ingram's nephew Donald Arlington (John Alvin) to contest the will. Shortly after the reading, the lawyer is strangled, apparently by Ingram's hand. His body is discovered by Arlington, who finds a hidden safe in the library. Before he can open the safe someone plays the Bach Chaconne again on the piano. The inspector looks at the piano and sees no one around. He hides close by when the door of the library begins to open. Arlington looks out and, while the inspector watches, a hand emerges from behind the door and grips Arlington by the throat.
It becomes clear that Ingram's reanimated hand is Cummins's delusion. It was he who cut it off Ingram's dead body and used it to terrorize everyone else in the house. The ghostly piano playing was a record activated by Cummins from inside the library. Deluded unto death, Cummins hallucinates that the hand, after being thrown into a fire, crawls out of the flames and strangles him.
Robert Florey, who directed The Beast was by no means a studio hack. After his arrival in Hollywood from France in 1921, he worked in silent films before directing The Marx Brothers in their first film for Paramount, The Cocoanuts (1929). At Universal, he was all set to direct Bela Lugosi as the Monster for Universal's production of Frankenstein, but studio heads didn't like the screen tests and the production was reassigned to James Whale. (12 years later, Lugosi would play the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man).
The decor and costumes for The Beast are both refulgent and tacky. All the male actors wear woolen suits. Though set in the Italian Alps, the outdoor architecture looks somehow Mexican. But the hand itself is what makes the film worth watching. The scenes in which it plays the piano are genuinely macabre. Whomever created the illusion was careful enough to show the wrist bones - the radius and ulna - in cross-section. Since the piano piece in the film was played by a Warner Brothers pianist named Victor Aller, it is his hand that we see, apparently disembodied.
As fate would have it, given his quite pronounced - and unabashed - fetishes, the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel was involved, in an advisory capacity, in the film’s production just prior to his relocation to Mexico. As he describes it in his memoir, My Last Sigh :
I also tried working for Robert Florey, who was making The Beast with Five Fingers, starring Peter Lorre. At his suggestion, I thought up a scene that shows the beast, a living hand, moving through a library. Lorre and Florey liked it, but the producer absolutely refused to use it. When I saw the film later in Mexico, there was my scene in all its original purity. I was on the verge of suing them when someone warned me that Warner Brothers had sixty-four lawyers in New York alone. Needless to say, I dropped the whole idea.
In an essay on Buñuel, Vernon Young mentions his own fascination with the film:
I recall it rather vividly, for it featured a single dismembered hand which, removed from the body of its owner, a concert pianist, insisted, like a demented crab or the heliotropic segment of a centipede, in remaining "alive" - in this case for the purpose of playing the piano arrangement of Bach's Chaconne! I witnessed this spectacle, with sharply divided emotions; actually the film introduced me to that particular Bach arrangement, which is marvelous, and the hand, if you could contemplate it without a qualm, was in itself beautiful: it was, I believe, the hand of the actor Victor Francen. But normally I know nothing more loathsome, in art as in life, than a
member removed from its organic whole to which it should be
attached.(1)
A few inadvertently funny moments in the movie are provided by Andrea King's immovable helmet of hair, and John Alvin's girlie scream when the hand attacks him from behind a door. The scene at the very end, when J. Carroll Naish breaks the fourth wall and mocks the housemaid's fear of a "hand" - which is only a white glove, provides us with a little comic relief, but is the worst kind of directorial intrusion. "Who could possibly be afraid of a hand?" is the very question the movie tries to answer.
(1) "Thoughts After Attending Another Film Society Buñuel Series," 1967, On Film: Unpopular Essays On a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), p. 380.
So, was it or was it not as good as an episode of the Addams Family ("The Thing"!), I guess is the question begged. I do think that "Cat People" is one of the better Hollywood movies of its era, although that may be letting Simone Simon blind me of my reticence to all that's ludicrous about it. It had a montage-of-cartoon-kitty-cats that was done very efficiently, and it also benefits posthumously from how Jacques Tourneur would later direct the best-scripted Noir film ever, "Out of the Past". Florey needs more research his way, of course, being the master auteur director of the "Monkey-Doodle-Do" number (I'll never forget it!) in "The Cocoanuts"....
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