Beast With Five Fingers

If you can not laugh when 'THE HAND' starts crawling around, then you are indeed a serious horror movie fan!

Recommended for Lorre's performance.


Give Peter Lorre A Hand!!   July 8, 2003
James L. (Toronto, Canada)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

This is a well-titled, but bizarre horror film from Warner Bros, a studio not known for producing horror films. Victor Francen stars as a renowned pianist living in one of those dark creepy movie mansions/castles. One hand is useless, so he uses his other hand to play. He relies heavily on his nurse, Andrea King, shuns his secretary, Peter Lorre, and sometimes seeks the company of Robert Alda who helped adapt the music for one-handed playing. When Francen dies (violently) and leaves his estate to his nurse, this sets off a series of strange events as everyone is terrorized by his disembodied hand!!

Sound bizarre? Well the film certainly is strange, establishing a foreboding mood early on and then taking the story in "unusual" directions. The characters are not well defined, especially the nominal leads Alda and King. It's one of those films where the characters need a slap to the head since they act so stupidly at times (or maybe it's the writers who should have been slapped around a bit). Only Peter Lorre really establishes a presence and performance here, going all the way in his characterization of the decidely strange secretary. It's perfect casting for the role and he capitalizes on it.

Director Robert Florey does establish some mood and atmosphere, but the outright silliness and illogic of the whole story hurts the film. It's fun to watch at a certain level, but with a better script and director it could have been a much more effective chiller.


his Bach is worse than his bite   August 9, 2001
Peter Shelley (Marrickville, New South Wales Australia)
4 out of 8 found this review helpful

In their Hollywood in the Forties book, writers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg attest that director Robert Florey disowned the studio cut of his film. Florey shot the story as seen through the eyes of Peter Lorre as an assistant to a disabled pianist whose hand it is believed is responsible for murder. Florey was confident the audience would be smart enough to realise that what we were seeing is not objective reality but rather Lorre's tormented vision. What survives is only redeemed by Lorre's hallucinations with the disembodied hand, his own manic intensity, handprints in the dirt, and the professional mourners hired to chant for the dead pianist. Otherwise we get stuck with a sappy romance between Robert Alda as a local fake antique sealer and big-haired Andrea King as the pianist's nurse, and static scenes of talk. The screenplay by Curt Siodmak gives Lorre an interest in "the secrets of the ancient astrologists, lost since the burning of the Alexandrian library", and the logic that someone could have been playing the piano other than the hand in "because nobody's ever heard you play, that doesn't mean you can't". The special effects of the hand require some getting used to since one naturally expects it to be a fake and therefore is looking at the mechanics, as in darkened sleave or blocking that can cheat the shot as when the hand is supposed to grab someone's throat behind a door or we get a hand POV shot. However there are moments where disbelief is suspended. The film's most bizarre... image is the disembodied hand, extending it's ring finger for Peter Lorre to replace the ring the pianist used to wear.