“That monster will die! His hands will never strangle again, but the hands of Orlac can still be saved!”

60s polymath Max Bygraves once sang “You need hands”, and it’s fair to say that on the list of professions where hands are needed, “concert pianist” is quite high up.

So when the pilot of the plane ferrying concert pianist Stephen Orlac (Mel Ferrer) to Paris insists on a landing despite there being no visibility, resulting in a crash and subsequent buggering-up of said pianist’s prehensile multi-fingered appendages, we’re thinking this isn’t going to go down well. Much like the plane. The visibility WAS truly shocking, too. Put it this way, it was so bad even we, the audience, couldn’t see the crash.

If at this point you’re thinking “not this old chestnut again”, you won’t be alone. Just reading the title makes a person feel a bit tired. Much like “The Monkey’s Paw”, or “The Tell-Tale Heart”, your first question is what exactly is it they’re going to tell me here that I didn’t already know? Well, nothing, if you already know the story. But let’s face it, that hasn’t stopped them bunging out Frankenstein after Frankenstein over the past 100 years, has it? As of writing, we’re about to get another one as well. Cue Tesla coils and floppy hair.

But I’m here to talk about Orlac, and his hands. Where is he? In hospital, that’s where. What are they? Knackered, that’s what.

As luck would have it, Stephen’s unfortunate accident happens to have occurred at an opportune moment. For elsewhere in the city, the practitioner of another hand-related profession is about to meet his fate. Yes, they’re executing a prolific strangler. And you know what this means – “That monster will die! His hands will never strangle again, but the hands of Orlac can still be saved!”

SO much to unpack there. Why are the strangler’s meaty sausage-fingers a sure-fire swap for Orlac’s (presumably) dainty, perfect-for-hitting-the-right-keys-in-the-right-order digits? And purely from an accuracy point of view, they AREN’T saving Orlac’s hands at all, are they? Unless by “saving” they mean they’re planning on putting them in a box and keeping them. Well, keep those questions at the back of your mind, because thereby hangs a tale (this one, in fact). And all may not be as it seems.

Enter Professor Volchett (Donald Wolfit). Apparently the greatest surgeon in the world. Before you can say “vascularised composite allotransplantation” Orlac awakens in his hospital bed, to be greeted by a newspaper front page running both his story and the death of the strangler, which seems like it may be an important plot point we’ll need to remember later on.

He’s also the proud owner of what look like those “Hulk Smash” gauntlets you can buy in toy shops. Which further begs the question, might he have been better going to the second-best surgeon in the world? It’s unlikely they could have done a worse job.

“These hands don’t feel like they belong to me,” moans the ungrateful bastard. It has now been six months since the accident, and Orlac and his faithful fiancée Louise (Lucille Saint-Simon) still haven’t tied the knot. Apparently because if he ever does get handsy with her, he’s in danger of snapping something off. He wanders off to a fairground (for some reason) where he nearly breaks the “test your grip” machine and then rips the head of the doll he’s inadvertently won.

Trying to sort his head out they take a trip to the South of France, where it’s not long before someone(?) strangles the cat (the discovery of the body accompanied by some inappropriate jazz music). Local gypsies get blamed (those cat-hating monsters), but when the gardener attempts to bury the poor creature, HE gets attacked by Orlac, who then moves on to strangling his fiancée as she takes him to the bedroom, her diaphanous nightie proving no protection against his murderous intent.

He stops himself just in time and runs off, deadpanning “Please let me go, please let me go”.

Next stop a cheap motel, where he runs into seedy magician Nero (Christopher Lee) and his assistant Regina (Dany Carrel). Nero devises a convoluted plan to blackmail Orlac, using Regina as bait (“You were born a slut and you always will be one” he tells her. What is it about Christopher Lee and that word? Feels like he bandies it about A LOT in these films).

Nero’s magic act is presented on-screen through a lot of jump-cuts and backwards filming, which if it was really happening in front of people would elicit more of a response than it gets. Perhaps they’re being put off by the interminable song Regina sings (three times, during the film!).

Anyway, it’s at this point in proceedings we find out that everything that has happened since the air crash might simply be the deranged imaginings of Orlac himself, having spotted the two stories on the front of the newspaper when he awoke (remember that?).

He’s now saved by the doting Louise, and they get married and return to London for a concert at the Philharmonic Hall. So, all’s well that ends well? NO! We’ve barely got started, here.

Orlac is now happy. His hands are behaving themselves, and he’s getting some action. But then a pair of the strangler’s gloves arrive in the post, and now every time he plays the piano he sees his hands as be-gloved. Nero and Regina have followed him to London, a sculptor called Coates (Donald Pleasence) has popped up wanting to do a cast of the hands, and Louise has turned private investigator, trying to get to the bottom of whether those hands DID once belong to the strangler.

There then follows a fair amount of what can only be called “shenanigans”, with Orlac’s paranoia stoked up by Nero and leading him to misread an overheard phone call. Plus you get Regina reprising her song (told you), this time wearing a bikini which causes all the men in the audience to lose their monocles. This all leads to a VERY peculiar ending with Christopher Lee going nuts and the hands thing being not quite what you expect.

Once again, I’m in danger of making this film sound better than it is. Until the overwrought ending, it’s very much the case that no-one is really acting for most of the run-time, they’re just standing around talking to each other to move the plot along. It’s a cheap bit of black-and-white support feature, notable these days only because of the inclusion of Lee and Pleasence.