wrong picture", and The Hollywood Reporter said that Colin Clive "jitters his way through". The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film was "neither important or particularly compelling ... falls right in the middle between Art and Box Office". Time magazine called it "completely horrible", and The New York Times wrote that "Mad Love is not much more than a super-Karloff melodrama, an interesting but pretty trivial adventure in Grand Guignol horror." Mad Love was not a hit at the box office, and had a small domestic gross of $170,000. Its foreign gross was larger, at $194,000. Critic Pauline Kael's essay "Raising Kane", originally published in The New Yorker, accused director Orson Welles of copying the visual style of Mad Love for Citizen Kane.Mank, 2001. p.155 Kael noted that both Gogol and Kane are bald, Gogol's house and Kane's "Xanadu" are similar, and that Gogol and Kane both have a pet cockatoo. She also wrote that Toland had "passed Freund's technique onto Welles". Peter Bogdanovich wrote a rebuttal to Kael's statements in Esquire in 1972. Both writers had a negative opinion of Mad Love. Kael called it a "dismal static horror movie", and Bogdanovich described it as "one of the worst movies I've ever seen." Recent reviews of Mad Love have been much more positive. At the online film review database Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 100% approval rating, and a 7.5 critical average. Home videoMad Love was released on VHS by MGM/UA in late 1992 in the United States. It was released on DVD by Warner Home Video on October 10, 2006, along with Doctor X, The Devil-Doll, Mark of the Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu and The Return of Doctor X, in the six-disc Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection. DVD bonus material included film commentary by Steve Haberman, and the film's theatrical trailer.Mad Love was released on Blu Ray by Warner Archive Collection on October 19, 2021. Remakes Mad Love was preceded by the 1924 Austrian silent film The Hands of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt. It was remade in 1960 as a French-British co-production entitled The Hands of Orlac, that was directed by Edmond T. Gréville, and starred Mel Ferrer as Stephen Orlac and Christopher Lee as a new magician character named Nero. Related films include Hands of a Stranger (1962) and The Crawling Hand (1963). One of Alfred Hitchcock's unproduced projects