Peter Lorre, Emigre, Star of M, Face-Maker, Mis-Used, Actor’s Actor

Several months back I saw Fritz Lang’s M in which Peter Lorre introduced himself to cinema. In the film he is a child molester and murderer;  for the greater part of the movie we see Lorre at angles, in shadows and then we catch that face with eyes as big as “soft-boiled eggs” Kirk douglas labeled them in a much later Disney movie. Lorre’s head was round and often he gave the appearance of a goiterous frog. At the end of the movie he has about three to four minutes in which he pleads and cajoles his criminal captors to grasp his compulsions as molester. (Lorre had attended the lectures of Freud as a young man which goes a long way to explain how he worked at his roles; he was actor as intellectual.) It is an astounding performance; Daniel Day-Lewis would enjoy this as did so many actors for decades to come. Lorre does not act; he inhabits his role, he turns himself inside out and reveals what there is to behold. Absolutely remarkable! Yet this role was to haunt him to the end of his life — imitated, mimicked, stereotyped and mired in Hollywood typecasting so that he rarely escaped. Lorre’s first and greatest performance (perhaps) crippled him.

What is important here is some context. He was Hungarian, his real name Lowenstein. He was a close friend to Berthold Brecht and performed in his plays during the Weimar period in Germany (his apprenticeship as a performer, entertainer and actor was profound). By the time he fled the Nazis he was quite the professional. He starred in two Hitchcock movies, Secret Agent and The Man Who Knew Too Much, and terrific in both; he was a character actor of the first order and in the heyday of character actors in the 30s and 40s, he was marvelous — I give you Joe Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, the gardenia wearing closet homosexual and in Casablanca as Ugarte, the chain-smoking conniver who is nabbed by the Nazis in the early scenes at Rick’s. Bogart loved him dearly as a friend.

Bogie had very good taste. In fact there is a charming and very tender picture of Lorre resting his head on Bogie’s chest in comradeship, affection and love in the book I am reading, The Lost One by Stephen D. Youngckin, more on that in a moment. Hitchcock, Langs, Houston all knew very well that Lorre was masterful, and a remarkable scene stealer as well, but also very generous with other actors all through his short life (he died at 59 from a cerebral hemorrage). Lorre would coach an actor about his lines or ease him into a performance by kibitzing or playing. In fact, Lorre was an imp and elf and often had actors chase him about a set because he pinched their fannies or told them the truth. I admire him for telling Robert Morley that he was a pompous ass, which he was. Yet within a moment he could become serious and give a good performance. He had the ability to move from one stance to another, the consummate professional. He wanted to make people happy but it came from his acting needs rather than some sorry emptiness within.

Although he was the “monster” on radio, then TV, he could rarely if ever escape the parameters set for him. He spent his later years with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone in a series of Corman movies based very loosely on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. (Ironically, during the war Lorre would narrate from memory Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and by all accounts audiences were enthralled by his skills.) They knew they were acting in trash, but Lorre and the other pros kidded themselves and tried to make the most of it; they had to eat. Professional to the end, Lorre was always quick to ad-lib a line or show through gesture (his genius) what pages of dialogue tried to communicate. Karloff was a kindly man, Price was quite literate, graduating from Yale or Princeton and had written books on art. As a young boy I saw Karloff in 1957 with Julie Harris in The Lark. Even then I vaguely recall the fuss kicked up by having Karloff in a serious role. It is the classic story of how this country run by entrepreneurs and its plutocracy of puppets assimilates creative artists and grinds them into a kind of soylent green cracker. All through his short life Lorre joined the resistance, fled from it, toyed with it, criticized it until he dropped dead. He could stand apart and wisecrack about what was being done to him. What is admirable about him is his scrappiness, his unwillingness to be shut down and he paid the price of his persona being turned into cartoons, Robin Williams as the genii in Aladdin and one sordid person who tried to change his name to Lorre’s and to pose as his son.

Lorre returned to German in the very early 50s to direct and write a screenplay with strong undercurrents about Germany’s role in the past war. In the rubble that was Germany this introspective film was not received well, for the Germans had, perhaps still do, a short memory and Lorre was very disappointed with the reception. The film is the title of the book,  Der Verlorene (The Lost One) made in 1951. For much different reasons Charles Laughton never directed another movie after The Night of the Hunter and Lorre never did direct again, but ended his life going back to the old stuff the audience knew and expected from him.

At the end of the book a eulogy is reprinted given by Vincent Price. Remarkable in its insight, in its love and respect for Lorre, one actor to another actor, with full admiration for his special genius, I was very, very moved. I suggest if you get the book read the eulogy first and then go back to the specifics of a life, almost well lived, almost respected. His fans cherished him; he had the remarkable capacity to extend his warmth to you over the airwaves, in his comedic stances. I believe that Price’s words reflect so well on him and the special gift Lorre had for making friends.  I give you Peter Lorre: Any man who is mistakenly thought not Jewish in a hotel and faces anti-Semitism, purposely spills ink on the register and then forwards a three month subscription of the Jewish Forward to the hotel manager is my kind of man — my kind of Jew.