The Beast with Five Fingers (1946)
If Thing is your favorite member of the Addams Family, then creep on over to see The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), which stars Peter Lorre as a mistreated secretary who is haunted by the murderous hand of his recently deceased employer. This eerie Warner Bros. outing from director Robert Florey gets off to a slow start, but once the hand referenced in the title shows up, it’s a non-stop haunted house experience with some truly delightful special effects. Lorre and the hand are the stars of the show, naturally, but the cast also includes J. Carrol Naish, Andrea King, Robert Alda, Victor Francen, Charles Dingle, and John Alvin, with Naish, Dingle, and Francen all giving particularly noteworthy performances. The Beast with Five Fingers is not the scariest classic horror movie by any means, but it offers plenty of entertainment for the Halloween season in the same vein as an old dark house story or amusement park ride.
The opening does little to suggest the weird thrills waiting in the wings, as we first meet affable con artist Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda) swindling some American tourists in a scenic Italian village. Bruce provides our introduction to the rest of his social circle, including the mostly paralyzed pianist Francis Ingram (Victor Francen), Ingram’s nurse, Julie (Andrea King), and his astrology obsessed secretary, Hilary (Peter Lorre). Just as Bruce and Julie are planning their secret elopement, Ingram dies, throwing the village into turmoil as accusations of misconduct and murder swirl around the lovers. Ingram’s nasty relatives (Charles Dingle and John Alvin) scheme to contest a new will that declares Julie Ingram’s sole heir, but mysterious events at the house seem to suggest that Ingram’s severed hand is on the prowl and ready to murder anyone who defies the dead man’s wishes.
Although he’s a relatively minor character in the hierarchy of the house, Peter Lorre’s Hilary is very much the central figure in terms of the horror plot, along with the beastly hand, of course. It’s always fascinating to watch Lorre go off the rails because he’s so good at the building hysteria of a man losing his mind, but rarely does he have such an unusual costar for those scenes. The movie uses every trick at its disposal to bring the hand to life, from a mechanized version that crawls across the floor to clever shot framing that shows the hand writhing in Hilary’s grip. We even see the hand play the piano in several key scenes, much to Hilary’s horror. Several other characters have encounters with the homicidal hand, but the story emphasizes Hilary’s relationship with it, starting with an early scene in which Ingram tries to strangle Hilary for reporting on the young lovers’ plans. Even attached to Ingram, the hand seems to have a mind of its own, as Julie watches it convulsively squeeze while the unconscious pianist lies in his bed. It’s clear that Ingram is psychologically unwell – perfectly telegraphed by his demand that everyone at dinner affirm him to be sane – and that his obsessive, demanding nature has damaged Hilary and Julie, both of whom yearn to escape his relentless attention. Ingram seems like exactly the kind of person whose hand might take up postmortem perambulations, with Hilary and Julie as his most obvious targets. Julie, fortunately, possesses stronger nerves than the usual haunted house heroine, but Hilary quickly comes unglued, and there’s a fantastic scene that juxtaposes their differing experiences with the piano-playing hand near the end of the picture.
The rest of the cast provides enough uncertainty to keep things interesting even if we know from the outset that you don’t cast Peter Lorre in a horror movie and waste him. Bruce is introduced to us as a bit of a crook who’s very smooth and not particularly moral, so we don’t know if he’s really in love with Julie or just using her for his own purposes. Is he driving Hilary mad on purpose to cover his own crimes? Julie herself seems sincere but is capable of some very hard expressions in key moments, leading us to doubt her innocence, as well. We have no such doubts about Ingram’s brother-in-law, Raymond (Charles Dingle), and nephew, Don (John Alvin). They’re blatantly greedy vultures determined to get their hands on Ingram’s money, and Dingle makes Raymond an especially nasty piece of work, the kind of character we long to see the hand throttle. The detective trying to muddle his way through this tangled mystery is Commissario Castanio, played by J. Carrol Naish with a light touch that occasionally turns purely comedic, especially right at the picture’s last scene. While Ingram’s own death becomes a question due to his relatives, who want to disqualify Julie as the heir, it’s the obvious murder of their lawyer, Duprex (David Hoffman), that opens the attacks mounted by the rampaging hand. Castanio’s investigation must consider who benefits from the lawyer’s death even as the policeman finds evidence of Ingram’s disturbed tomb and sees other signs that the pianist’s hand has gained an afterlife of its own. Whether the story ends up being a murder mystery or a ghost story would be telling, but both genres are sufficiently at work here to entertain fans of either one.
It’s probably not surprising that I enjoy The Beast with Five Fingers given that the screenplay comes from Curt Siodmak, the writer behind The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and one of my favorite Val Lewton horrors, I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Peter Lorre is easy to find in classic movies, but for more of Robert Alda (father of Alan), see Rhapsody in Blue (1945), The Man I Love (1947), and Imitation of Life (1959). Andrea King also costars with Alda in The Man I Love. See more of Victor Francen in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), Passage to Marseille (1944), and with Lorre in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944). If you find the music in the picture especially compelling, you can credit Bach, Brahms, and Max Steiner. For more spooky movies featuring piano players, check out The Hands of Orlac (1924) and its Hollywood remake, Mad Love (1935), which also stars Peter Lorre, or, for more from the 1940s, try Hangover Square (1945) and Dragonwyck (1946), even though the instrument in the second is technically a harpsichord.
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— Jennifer Garlen for Classic Movie Hub
Jennifer Garlen pens our monthly Silver Screen Standards column. You can read all of Jennifer’s Silver Screen Standards articles here.
Jennifer is a former college professor with a PhD in English Literature and a lifelong obsession with film. She writes about classic movies at her blog, Virtual Virago, and presents classic film programs for lifetime learning groups and retirement communities. She’s the author of Beyond Casablanca: 100 Classic Movies Worth Watching and its sequel, Beyond Casablanca II: 101 Classic Movies Worth Watching, and she is also the co-editor of two books about the works of Jim Henson.
