The Beast with Five Fingers

“You’re ill. You can’t distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, between imagination and reality.” As the brother of superstar noir director Robert Siodmak, Curt Siodmak was known primarily for writing horror scripts, and that Gothic sensibility worked out well in Robert Florey’s The Beast with Five Fingers. A psychological thriller dressed up as a period horror film (the “supernatural” element is ultimately explained away), Siodmak’s script, set in an old Italian mansion, is based on a short story by William Fryer Harvey and shares a premise with Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (1924), which in turn was based on a different French novel. In his final film for Warner Brothers (and that studio’s only horror film of the 1940’s), Peter Lorre plays the paranoid, delusional Hilary Cummins, secretary to the wealthy, disabled pianist Francis Ingram (Victor Francen) whose sudden death sparks a war among his potential heirs, including his nurse Julie Holden (Andrea King) who’s in love with Ingram’s old friend Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda). Amidst all the conflict, a mysterious killer, thought to be the severed, ivory-tickling hand of Ingram’s corpse, begins claiming more lives, prompting the arrival of Commissioner Ovidio Castanio (J. Carrol Naish) to investigate. Max Steiner’s orchestral score offers exceptional accompaniment to the action and intrigue while cinematographer Wesley Anderson takes some risks with the dark Gothic ambience, such as the gorgeous shot toward the end when we see Cummins enter Julie’s bedroom through the reflection in her makeup table mirror.