A homage to Peter Lorre: the unlikeliest screen great of them all

Four interesting facts about the Austrian-American actor, Peter Lorre:

    • He  pronounced his own name “law-ree”, while just about everyone           

       else went with “lorry”. 

    • He struggled with morphine addiction for much of his adult life,     

      after being prescribed it for a painful gall-bladder condition.

    • His daughter was stopped by the Los Angeles serial killer duo, the

       Hillside Stranglers when they were disguised as policemen, but they

       decided not to kill her after finding out whose daughter she was.

    • Charlie Chaplin once called him “the greatest living actor”.

Of course, Peter Lorre was, let’s not mince words, a bit peculiar – small (5’5”, but he looks smaller), no oil painting (the face of a grotesque baby), tubby, and with a bizarre voice (an evil, insidious purr) and a strong unplaceable accent which prevented him from playing anything but foreigners (both comic and sinister). His career went through prolonged bleak patches (pretty much the whole of the last fifteen years, from 1949 to his death in  1964) and even when he was fully employed, he had to do an awful lot of crap (The 1930s Mr. Moto series, in which he played a Japanese detective, didn’t quite fall into this category, but he hated doing it, nevertheless - he might have objected less if he’d known he’d end up doing Muscle Beach Party towards the end of his life.) 

       

 

                                    Branded a psychopathic killer

The consensus is that Lorre was a great actor wasted by Hoillywood – as a Jew, he had been forced to abandon his burgeoning German film career in 1933 (having come to the attention of Dr Goebbels). But I’m always deeply suspicious of “if only” thinking. In amongst the dross, Lorre managed to appear in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon,Casablanca, The Man Who Knew Too Much (Hitchock), Secret Agent (Hitchcock again), The Mask of Dimitrios, Stranger on the Third Floor (an oddly compelling little film which some critics consider the first film noir) , All Through the Night, Passage to Marseiile, Arsenic and Old Lace, Three Strangers, Beat the Devil, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Comedy of Terrors. 

That adds up to one hell of a career! (You can get a sense of it from this entertaining video featuring posters of his films.)

In the process, he became one of the most instantly recognizable screen actors of all time - as Vincent Price commented: “His voice . . . face . . . the way he moved . . . laughed - he was the most identifiable actor I have ever known." His performances have been appreciated by tens of millions of movie-goers and probably billions of TV viewers around the world. Given that his German film career vanished with Hitler’s rise to power, and given that Lorre simply didn’t have the looks to become a leading man in commercial cinema, his career in exile could be seen as a triumph of  talent over circumstance. Yes, he suffered from depression in later years, but that was probably as much to do with his drug addiction and poor health as anything else (his drug-taking apparently caused the failure of all three of his marriages). 

   

    

                           Joel Cairo - not really interested in black birds              

Lorre’s greatest role remains the psycopathic child-killer in Fritz Lang’s M: his performance in the last section of the film, where he tries to justify himself to a kangaroo court made up of criminals, is simply superb. In Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, he plays a terrorist mastermind as convincingly as anyone ever has – creating the prototype for the sneering Euronasties of a later Hollywood era. In Mad Love(original title: The Hands of Orlac) his performance as the deranged Dr Gogol set a new weirdness benchmark for horror movies: his make-up in the latter part of the film is as horribly unnerving as anything in cinema – it’s like being confronted by a figure from the worst nightmare you’ve ever experienced. 

       

        

     

                                  Have you met Dr Gogol, our new locum?

As Joel Cairo, the distinctly exotic (i.e. ravingly homosexual) character inThe Maltese Falcon, he was once again stunning – and it led to a whole series of films with Sydney Greenstreet, including Casablanca, Three Strangers (where he actually does play a romantic lead!) and, one of my favourites, The Mask of Dimitrios, an intriguing adaptation of Eric Ambler’s classic thriller. 

In 1951, Lorre achieved an ambition by directing Die Verloren (The Lost One) – a German art-house movie which I’ve never seen (I doubt many people have). After what must have been a particularly abysmal period during the late fifties and early 1960s, when his career was largely sustained by appearances in TV series such as 77 Sunset Strip and Wagon Train (Peter Lorre in the Wild West - the mind boggles, but it’s true: see it here), he appeared in two Roger Corman cheapie horror comedies – The Raven (1963) and Comedy of Terrors (1964) – with actors like Boris Karloff, Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price. Against all the odds, they were pretty decent films, and Comedy of Terrors was genuinely funny (no, honestly!).

So, not the sort of career promised by his blazing performance in M, but a pretty damned fine one nonetheless, and certainly one that film fans should be extremely grateful for.