Horror-ble!: The Hands of Orlac

This is a silent 1924 horror film directed by Robert Wiene.  Orlac (Conrad Veidt), a famous pianist, is maimed in a tragic train accident. At the same time, the convicted murderer Vasseur is to be executed. When Orlac's hands cannot be saved, despite the pleading of his anguished wife (Alexandra Sorina), the doctor replaces them with Vasseur's hands, unbeknownst at first to everyone.

When Orlac finds out the source of his hands, he is of course plagued by this and even afraid to touch his wife now with those murderous hands. Some new crimes are committed where Vassuer's fingerprints are found, but that seems impossible because Orlac now owns those hands. But Orlac sleepwalks, and since the hands have a mind of their own, he is fearful that he is the culprit.

Meanwhile there is a mysterious man plotting against Orlac. He blackmails Orlac for money in order to keep quiet about the hands and Orlac's suspected commission of the new crimes. His identity is revealed, then revealed again, and we question just how much Orlac was guided by the hands.


I think this would make a much more interesting film now, especially with scifi and futuristic concepts and technology, as well as more digging into things such as death, religion, social taboos. The actress who plays the wife does a lot of overacting, I guess because it is silent she has to over-emote.  The wrap-up at the end is tied up a bit too neatly and I would have preferred, storywise, that Orlac had a true moral conflict to overcome, instead of being duped. If this were to be remade I don't know if it should stay in olden times, or move it to the future where surgery of this sort is possible, something along the lines of a Face/Off, Seconds or The Skin I Live In, other films where replaced body parts (in those cases, they are faces) all cause internal moral battles in the characters.