Beast With Five Fingers

Beast With Five Fingers
by Robert Florey

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VHS Tape Cover Information

Actor: Andrea King, J. Carrol Naish, Peter Lorre, Robert Alda, Victor Francen
Director: Robert Florey
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, NTSC
Running Time: 89 minutes
Release Date: 1998-09-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: MGM (Warner)
Studio: MGM (Warner)

VHS Movie Reviews of Beast With Five Fingers

Movie Review: Fun stuff.
Summary: 4 Stars

The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946)

1946 was the last year Peter Lorre worked for Warner Brothers, and his parting from the company was career suicide; while he remains one of the world's most famous actors, endlessly imitated and paid tribute, from his parting with Warner Brothers until his death in 1964, Lorre picked up only the odd film here and there (though some of them are truly excellent) and some TV guest appearances. Thus it is that The Beast with Five Fingers is something of a bittersweet film for the nostalgia buff; it is a great Lorre performance, but it marked the beginning of the end.

Set in the late nineteenth century in northern Italy, The Beast with Five Fingers is the tale of Frances Ingram (Victor Francen), a pianist with a rather motley crew of eccentrics living with him. There's Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda), a smooth con man who's in love with the old pianist's companion/nurse Julie Holden (Andrea King). This wouldn't necessarily be so bad, but read "companion/nurse"as a rough equivalent to "trophy wife" here. Then there's Hilary Cummins (Lorre), a crackpot who's collected a great number of very old books on all sorts of topics while looking for... something, we're never quite sure what. Conrad, con man that he is, is in a state of detente with the local police commissioner, Castano (J. Carrol Naish); they seem to cordially despise one another. Until, that is, the old man finally kicks the bucket, setting off a nasty inheritance battle between Julie and the pianist's blood relations, Raymond (Charles Dingle) and Donald (John Alvin) Arlington. But all of that is beside the point; the real plot here is that the dead pianist's hand was removed, and is now the leading suspect in the murders of some of the inhabitants of the house.

It's your basic potboiler horror flick, really, with the expected silly ending, snatches of overacting, and all the other things that make so many genre horror films cheesy. But the reason to watch the film is Hilary's descent into madness, played to pitch-perfection by Lorre. (Contrasting this with his role in Mad Love is a great way to examine how much effect a good script can have on a movie.) It's otherwise watchable, if a bit dumb, but Lorre's performance raises it above the level it would normally be. *** ?

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