Pauline Kael on how Gregg Toland's work in Karl Freund's "Mad Love" (1935) influenced Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941):
"I had always been puzzled by the fact that Kane seemed to draw not only on the Expressionist theatrical style of Welles’s stage productions but on the German Expressionist and Gothic movies of the silent period. In Kane, as in the German silents, depth was used like stage depth, and attention was frequently moved from one figure to another within a fixed frame by essentially the same techniques as on the stage — by the actors’ moving into light or by a shift of the light to other actors (rather than by the fluid camera of a Renoir, which follows the actors, or the fragmentation and quick cutting of the early Russians).
There were frames in Kane that seemed so close to the exaggerations in German films like 'Pandora’s Box' (1929) and 'The Last Laugh' (1924) and 'Secrets of a Soul' (1926) that I wondered what Welles was talking about when he said he had prepared for Kane by running John Ford’s 'Stagecoach' (1939) forty times.
Even allowing for the hyperbole of the forty times, why should Orson Welles have studied 'Stagecoach' and come up with a film that looked more like 'The Cabinet of Dr Caligari?' (1920) | wondered if there might be a link between Gregg Toland and the German tradition, though most of Toland’s other films didn’t suggest much German influence. When I looked up his credits as a cameraman, the name 'Mad Love' rang a bell, I closed my eyes and visualized it, and there was the Gothic atmosphere, and the huge, dark rooms with lighted figures, and Peter Lorre, bald, with a spoiled-baby face, looking astoundingly like a miniature Orson Welles.
'Mad Love', made in Hollywood in 1935, was a dismal, static horror movie — an American version of a German film directed by the same man [Robert Weine - "The Hands of Orlac' (1924)] who had directed The 'Cabinet of Dr Caligari'. The American remake, remarkable only for its photography, was directed by Karl Freund, who had been head cinematographer at Ufa, in Germany. He had worked with such great directors as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst, and, by his technical innovations, had helped create their styles; he had shot many of the German silent classics (The Last Laugh, Variety, Metropolis, Tartuffe).
I recently looked at a print of 'Mad Love', and the resemblances to Citizen Kane are even greater than my memories of it suggested. Not only is the large room with the fireplace at Xanadu similar to Lorre’s domain as a mad doctor, with similar lighting and similar placement of figures, but Kane’s appearance and makeup in some sequences might be a facsimile of Lorre’s. Lorre, who had come out of the German theatre and German films, played in a stylized manner that is visually imitated in Kane. And, amusingly, that screeching white cockatoo, which isn’t in the script of Kane, but appeared out of nowhere in the movie to provide an extra ‘touch,’ is a regular member of Lorre’s household."
("Raising Kane and Other Essays", Pauline Kael, 1996)
P.S: Remembering the legendary American Cinematographer Gregg Toland on his 122nd birthday!
クランクインは1935年5月6日[11]。撮影監督はチェスター・A・ライアンズだったが、フロイントはグレッグ・トーランドを推し、「8日間の追加撮影」の名目でトーランドを起用する[11]。女優のドレイクはフロイント、トーランド、そしてコンシダインの間で苦労したと回想している。「フロイントは撮影監督も兼任したかった」。さらに、「誰が監督なのかわからなかった。実を言うと、プロデューサーは監督をやりたがっていた、演出のことなんかまったくわかっていないのに」[12]。タイトルについても迷走した。1935年5月22日の段階でMGMは『オルラックの手（The Hands of Orlac）』と発表した[13]。他に『パリの狂った医師（The Mad Doctor of Paris）』というのもあったが、結局元々のタイトルだった『狂恋（Mad Love）』に落ち着いた[12]。予定より一週間オーバーして、1935年6月8日に撮了[13]。初公開後、MGMは15分ほど短縮[14]。削られたシーンは殺人犯ロロの手を切断するシーン、『フランケンシュタイン』で使われた本編前の前口上、そしてイザベル・ジュエル（英語版）演じるマリアンヌのシーンすべて[14]。
公開
アメリカでの封切りは1935年7月12日[15]。イギリスでは『Hands of Orlac』というタイトルで1935年8月2日に公開された[16][17]。全英映像等級審査機構のエドワード・ショートは上映禁止の意向を表明した[18]。
Greene,Graham(9 August 1935).“The Trunk Mystery/Hands of Orlac/Look Up and Laugh/The Memory Expert”.The Spectator.(reprinted in: Taylor, John Russell, ed(1980).The Pleasure Dome.p.11.ISBN0192812866)
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