THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 411, 9 May 1947, Page 12

THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS

(Warner Bros.)

EING, in spite of the flippant tone of the above (but those remarks about children are serious), rather a connoisseur of horror, I

went to see- this film with a certain pleasurable anticipation, for I remembered the title as Belonging to one of the best items in a fairly recent Ameri-: can collection of unpleasant tales. There doesn’t seem to be much of the original left now except the title and the sufficiently horrible central idea about a dead man’s hand which is embued with life of its own and which, severed from the corpse, continues to scuttle like a crab about the house, tap at windows, play the piano, hide behind the books in the library, and throttle people it doesn’t like. In the film the hand belongs to a once-great pianist living in eccentric retirement in Italy; and in order to pad the story out to feature length, provide "love interest," dramatic cross-purposes, and so on, the pianist is surrounded by a houseful of unlikely characters. After his death thesé people snarl at each other over the terms of the will, while the dead hand plays havoc’ with their nerves. It is not likely to haye any such very serious effects on members of the audience, unless they are young and/or susceptible, especially as the adroit beastie is ultimately revealed as nothing more than the hallucination of a madman (Peter Lorre). However, the failure of the film to raise anything except an isolated patch of goose-pimples does not lie with the cameramen: their trick photography makes the hand seem diabolically intelligent as well as mobile.