The Beast with Five Fingers

The Beast with Five Fingers
Blu-ray
Warner Archive
1946 – 88 Min.
Starring Peter Lorre, Robert Alda, Andrea King, J. Carroll Naish
Cinematography by Wesley Anderson
Written by Curt Siodmak
Directed by Robert Florey

Long before The Addams Family made disembodied hands a punchline there was The Beast with Five Fingers, W. F. Harvey’s short story about a bedridden scholar possessed by his own left hand. Its grip grows stronger day by day and when the old man finally succumbs, the claw-like appendage liberates itself. No longer chained to its master, it proves a surprisingly agile mischief-maker, skittering about the house like a five-fingered poltergeist. A raging fire signals an end to the horror but not before a note scribbled in the dead man’s handwriting is found; “I’ve got out… but I’ll be back before long.”

A staple of horror anthologies since 1919, Harvey’s story is laid out in an oddly prosaic manner with little rationale for the monster’s existence, in fact its victims seem more annoyed than frightened. When Dresden-born Curt Siodmak was hired to write the screenplay for Robert Florey’s 1946 adaptation, he expanded the simple, if ambiguous narrative into a family tragedy, a German expressionist’s take on a Eugene O’Neill play.

The Belgian actor Victor Francen plays Francis Ingram, a pianist confined to a wheelchair but in full command of his defacto family: his nurse Julie Holden; former conman Bruce Conrad; the two-faced lawyer Durpex; and longtime secretary Hilary Cummins, part-time astrologer and Ingram’s full time archivist. Peter Lorre plays the slow-simmering bookkeeper and, as in so many of his films, the incendiary actor is the catalyst for the inevitable calamity.

Everyone in this quasi-family has a secret. Infirmity has poisoned Ingram—a stroke has left him partly paralyzed and his dependence on Julie has sparked less-than grandfatherly feelings for the unsuspecting caregiver. Fortunately for Julie, Ingram has remained blissfully ignorant of her own secret: she and Conrad are plotting to elope. But Cummins is always lurking in the wings; superstitious, and dangerously paranoid, he has his own reasons for wanting the nurse to stay on call—her presence allows him the freedom to ponder the astrological plane while leading a life of relative leisure. When he reveals Julie’s affair to the old man, the enraged musician nearly strangles Cummins with his one good, and very strong, hand. That same evening Ingram conveniently falls to his death.

Not surprisingly the supernatural raises its head, strange lights appear from Ingram’s crypt and the sound of a piano floats from an empty room. When Durpex is found with his neck broken, an inspector (played in comic relief mode by J. Carroll Naish) discovers a grisly clue; Ingram’s grave has been defiled and his body mutilated, his left hand is missing, severed with surgical precision.

Talky, over-long and over-complicated, Florey’s melodrama finally begins to show some teeth—or at least five very sharp fingernails; the once cozy villa takes on the unpredictable atmosphere of a carnival spook-house with jump scares waiting around every corner—cadaverous fingers wriggle past the fireplace and race across the floor like hairless rats (Harvey described the freakish thing as “crablike.”) The reluctant witness to all these nightmarish images is the increasingly volatile Cummins, and Lorre, finally off his leash, is in his element.

Siodmak wrote his screenplay hoping Paul Henreid would play the deluded astrologist but the suave leading man of Now, Voyager and Casablanca balked: “You want me to play against a god-damned hand? I’m not crazy.” It’s doubtful he could play “crazy” as well as Lorre and it’s Lorre who makes the picture worth watching (he’s surrounded by less than compelling co-stars—as the star-crossed lovers, Robert Alda and Andrea King tend to fade into the wallpaper). Even in this insubstantial Weird Story knock-off Lorre evokes real pathos with echoes of his greatest work: the child-murderer of Fritz Lang’s M and his guilt-ridden killer in Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment.

The special effects that bring Ingram’s hand to life are literally skin-crawling, the disembodied hand is remarkably fluid as it slithers out of jewelry boxes, peeks around doors and, most effectively, plays the piano. The stellar effects team was headed by William McGann with Russell Collings in charge of the optical effects. A beautiful gloom blankets the film and for some of that you can thank the matte paintings of  Mario Larrinaga (the wizardly art director who helped create the dreamlike landscapes of King Kong‘s Skull Island home).

Wesley Anderson’s cinematography is top notch (Anderson capped his career giving the same noirish allure to Warner TV shows like Cheyenne and 77 Sunset Strip). Warner Archive’s new blu ray does full justice to both Anderson’s work and Florey’s kaleidoscopic vision of Cummin’s disintegrating mind. Warner Archive’s Blu ray release of The Return of Doctor X is used as a template for The Beast with Five Fingers: an audio Commentary, two cartoons and a trailer. Dr. Steve Haberman and filmmaker/film historian Constantine Nasr provide the commentary and the toons are The Foxy Duckling and The Gay Anties—each from 1947 and each one a representative of Warner Bros.’ Merrie Melodies. The merrier, the better; you’ll need a laugh after watching Lorre hammer a nail into his five-fingered nemesis.

Here’s Don Coscarelli on The Beast with Five Fingers: