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The Lost One

Page 9

by Stephen D. Youngkin


  Lorre also understood what Galy Gay asked of him. “There was an accidental meeting of the minds there,” said Bentley of Lorre’s split style of acting. “Galy Gay was an absolutely sensational coincidence for it calls for exactly that, a man cut off from his own feelings. The other actors in the story are taking a knife and cutting off the channel of feeling so that he has none. He’s totally calloused, but you can still tell from his calloused tone what he’s gone through.”

  Soon after Mann ist Mann closed (after only six performances), Brecht and Lorre spun up to the door of Berlin’s Staatstheater in the writer’s “singing Steyr” roadster. Gazing up at the democratic motto inscribed in stone on the theater’s facade, Brecht predicted, “This will be the last play around here for a very long time.” While Lorre as Galy Gay sat on his coffin and delivered his own eulogy, Brownshirts laughed, chattered, and whistled, threatening to close the show. For a moment, the gnome-like Lorre stood there helplessly. On the verge of tears and gripped by an intense excitement—not a very Brechtian thing, said Bentley—he decided to pit himself against the disturbance. Softly speaking his lines, he grabbed the audience and held it, powering it into silence. “He is a neurasthenic Kaspar Hauser,” wrote a Berlin theater critic, “and the laughing died in him and in us.”

  2

  M IS FOR MORPHINE

  One of the first movies Monty [Clift] and I ever saw was M. We couldn’t stop talking about this marvelous actor. We went back three times to see it. And Monty said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be like him as an actor.”

  —Andrea King

  I was a murderer, but I was a matinee idol.

  —Peter Lorre

  Absolutely convinced that Peter Lorre was perfect for the lead in his new picture, Fritz Lang saw no need to screen test the “virgin” actor. With script in hand, he turned up at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. “I sometimes cursed him secretly,” Lorre looked back twenty years later, “as I must have waited fourteen months and couldn’t accept any film offers.” He had even turned down an overture from director Richard Oswald, who promised a three-day guarantee to reprise his role as Moritz Stiefel in a film production of Spring’s Awakening.1Indeed, Lorre supposed Lang had forgotten about him. “I never paid any attention to it,” said the actor, later claiming he had accepted the role out of politeness.

  “Peter confessed to us that he didn’t believe he really would go through with it,” recalled Walter Reisch. “If Lang realizes how small he is … when he sees the dailies, he may not like it. Peter had a complex about that, but that’s exactly what Lang wanted.” The director told him he would begin shooting in six to eight weeks. Lorre then learned a closely guarded secret (one that he was sworn to keep): he would play Hans Beckert, a compulsive child murderer, in Mörder unter Uns (The Murderer among Us), later shortened to M.2

  “A director should not talk or speak about his films,” Lang said in 1973. “If his films don’t convey his ideas, he’s a lousy director and shouldn’t make any movies.” To his credit, he took his own advice and spoke about his films only when asked, which, as it turned out, was often. Like most filmmakers who become legends during their lifetimes, Lang formatted his answers to questions about his work posed by journalists, students, and biographers (and somehow still left room to maneuver around his own mythmaking). Behind the glib generalizations, however, lay a trail of differing details. Tired of making what he later called “big canvasses,” films of colossal construction, such as Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1926), and Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929), the director opted for a simple story about a real human being and “what makes him do what he does, what makes him tick.” Lang asked his wife and collaborator, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, what was the most unspeakably heinous crime to which man put his hand. Writing poison-pen letters topped the list. They began work on a synopsis. Scanning the newspaper headlines one day, Lang hit upon another idea, one more symptomatic of the times. Rape, robbery, and mass murder filled the front pages. Karl Denke, of Munsterberg, had smoked the bodies of his thirty victims. Berlin’s Carl Wilhelm Grossman had cut twenty-seven women to bits. Fritz Haarman, the “Ogre of Hannover,” had dismembered and potted the meat of young boys and afterward said he remembered nothing. And Peter Kürten, the highly intelligent, naturally reticent “Vampire of Düsseldorf,” strangled, axed, hammered, drowned, and knifed to death forty men, women, and children. “The first idea for ‘M’ came to me,” recalled Lang in his notes for a 1948 showing of M at Princeton University, “when I read a news item in the local part of the Berliner Tageblatt that criminals through their underground organization had offered their help to the police in their effort to catch [Kürten].”3

  Like the police, Lang needed a motive for the murders. Recognizing that “every human mind harbors a latent compulsion to murder,” he believed that guilt and innocence walk a fine line: “Yes, you, you and you, are all potential killers needing only the flick of a mental trigger to send you before a jury of your peers.”

  “Let’s make a film about a child murderer,” he said to von Harbou. “A child murderer who is forced by a power within him to commit a crime which he afterwards resents very much.”

  In his own way, Lang was as compulsive as Kürten. He conducted his research at the “Alex,” Berlin’s Police Headquarters at Alexanderplatz. Believing there are no small details, he studied its methods and procedures. Through his discussions with psychiatrists, he got into the heads of the criminally insane. He even claimed to have interviewed several mass murderers and talked with members of the Berlin underground that were looking for Kürten. Thea von Harbou, according to Lang, declined an invitation to scrutinize the criminal “types.” “This is not necessary,” she told him, confident in her ability to work from the inside. “I see everything before me.”

  Lang did not need to be asked on what particular crime or criminal he had based his story. As much as he considered M a factual report, he was quick to point out that the script had been completed before Kürten was apprehended. Only after the murderer had urged his wife to turn him in for the reward—a courtesy expected to subsidize her old age—did the public hear his confession. Before he was caught, however, Kürten’s description (based on two thousand eyewitness accounts), case histories of the murders, profiles of his victims, and even symptoms of a growing psychosis in Düsseldorf had been graphically chronicled in a special edition of Kriminal-Magazin. Although Lang could afford to pick and choose from both the secret police files and the popular press, the outline of the case indulged his need “to explain Kürten, to account for him, to explain his mind. Just to label him with disapproval was not enough. I saw him not as a criminal, not as a corpse in a police mortuary slab but as a man, not as an isolate, a phenomenon, but one of many criminals of this time, as a unit in a disintegrating social system.” Lang later admitted to journalist Gretchen Berg, who interviewed the director in 1964, that he and von Harbou had based their script not only on a “synthesis of facts” taken from the Denke and Haarman cases, but also on Kürten’s “habit of sending notes to the police telling them where his hammer-killed bodies were to be found.” Although the script was completed before the murderer confessed, filming did not begin until January 8, 1931, giving Lang and von Harbou time to further document the script.

  Lang recognized that it was best to leave some details of Kürten’s history out of the script. Committed to presenting “an objective account, showing neither harshness nor pity for such a sick mind,” he chose to omit the psychological and sociological roots of the murderer’s pathology. Gone were scenes of a drunken, abusive father and a local dogcatcher who taught Kürten how to torture animals. Lang took from Kürten only what he needed for Beckert.

  A chronic criminal and sometime construction worker, Kürten cultivated a refined exterior. He dressed impeccably, read widely, and behaved properly. He was, according to friends, a most unlikely murderer. But he also had a weakness for women. By his own admission, he derived a heighten
ed sexual gratification from shedding the blood of his female victims, sometimes breaking into song. He confessed that while committing his crimes, he lost touch with his human side. Becoming more animal, he said, felt good. Kürten rationalized taking revenge on a world he was trying to better. Afterward, he seemed strange to himself and disconnected from his deeds, reason, he believed, to deny responsibility and reject moral judgment. He was, as his wife described him—and as he characterized himself—“a two-natured human being.” This concept was a theme central to Lang and von Harbou’s efforts to “fill in some of the gaps” in their own treatment. But unlike their murderer, no conscience followed Kürten to bed. He felt no remorse, suffered no inner torment.

  Invited to Lang’s apartment on Berlin’s Breitenbachplatz, Lorre, by his own account, bored the guests with his silence. “Wordless, he sat at the bar,” reported Der Spiegel. “Wordless, he gulped down his cognac, wordless he stared with lost, deeply sad eyes at the guests.” His hectic theater schedule—performances in Squaring the Circle overlapped rehearsals for Mann ist Mann—had relegated Lang’s film project to a rather trifling third place. Suddenly, Lorre lashed out at Lang, denigrating his idea as Schmarren (tripe). Lang, who believed that “a director should be a kind of psychoanalyst [who] must be able to go under the skin of his characters … so that he can explain to the actor why a scene is the way it is, why a character does something—in case the actor doesn’t catch on after reading the script,” sketched out the story. The actor now understood. He cursed himself for his outburst, jumped from his barstool, and excitedly picked up where Lang had left off.

  Lang described M as “simply a cops-and-robbers story.” A murderer runs loose. Neighbor suspects neighbor. The public demands results. Police raids yield silverware, burglary tools, brass knuckles, guns, knives, binoculars, and even furs, but no clue to the identity of the culprit. “Keep up your investigations,” the killer advises. “Everything will happen just as I have predicted. But I haven’t yet FINISHED.”4

  “This is wrecking our business,” laments a landlady. “If they catch that bastard, they’ll wring his neck.”

  “Wherever you spit,” cries a burglar, “nothing but cops.”

  Tired of “someone who is not a member of the Union” screwing up their business, a crime boss takes the moral high ground: “We are not on the same level as this man…. There is an abyss between him and us…. We’re just doing our job…. because we have a living to make. But this monster has no right to live…. He must be exterminated, without pity, without scruples.” With its reputation at stake, the criminal community decides to catch the murderer in their ranks.

  The race is on. While the police search from house to house and hedge to hedge, mapping their methodical progress in concentric circles, the underground mobilizes its beggars’ union, which monitors every corner and courtyard.

  A stranger whistles. “I’ve heard that somewhere before,” says a blind beggar who remembers selling a balloon to a “fellow [who] whistled just like that” the day Elsie Beckmann was killed. “After him,” he orders, “and don’t let him go.” A young man chalks a letter on his palm and marks the murderer’s back. When the killer sees the letter M reflected in a mirror, his eyes bulge in panic. The underworld closes in. After rooting him from the attic of an office building, the criminals put the killer on trial. He tells them there must be some mistake, that he is not responsible for his actions. The mob offers “no mercy … no pardon … kill him.” At the last moment, policemen show up and arrest the murderer “in the name of the law.”

  Behind what one reviewer dismissively labeled a “plain thriller” lay what Lang called “higher instincts.” He believed that film should educate as well as entertain. It is this counterpointing of convictions that gave M a sense of equilibrium. Asked if Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper influenced him, Lang replied that he had been open to many outside impulses. As a “witness to the 30s,” M mirrored the trends of the times, which checked and balanced his vision of a society precipitately poised on the edge. Realism and expressionism set parameters that embraced light and dark, sound and silence, emotion and reason, sanity and sickness, revenge and justice. Lang was at his artistic best when searching out common ground among them.

  In the opening scene, Lang coldly observes a group of children playing a game. A little girl, standing inside a circle of her playmates, points a finger from one to another as she ominously chants a gruesome nursery rhyme:

  Just you wait a little while,

  The evil man in black will come.

  With his little chopper,

  He will chop you up.

  Counted out, a child leaves the circle. The camera then scans the gray face of a tenement block. On the balcony hang wet clothes. A pregnant woman lugs a load of laundry up the stairs. Life’s repetitions weigh pleasure and pain.

  Later, the director intercuts the cool efficiency of the criminals, headed by the sleek Schränker (Gustaf Gründgens), with the crippling inefficiency of the police, led by the fat, feet-soaking Lohmann (Otto Wernicke).5 Lang seems to be saying they are only opposite sides of the same coin, knocked off its slim edge by an outsider who has upset the balance between the separate but somehow equal worlds.

  Throughout the film, stretches of silence throw sound into sharp relief, giving objective voice to subjective reality: a cuckoo clock, a stone-cold stairway, a ball smacking the sidewalk and then noiselessly rolling to a stop, a doll-shaped balloon flailing silently in utility wires before flying off, a Hampelmann (jumping jack) soundlessly convulsing in a toy-store window, an electric drill boring into a floor while a knife covertly turns the screws of a lock.

  Like Brecht, Lang wanted to awaken his audience, in this case to the need to “look after the little ones better,” a theme close to von Harbou’s heart. He also accurately predicted that his message about capital punishment would trigger heated debate about the “pros and cons” of the death penalty. Lang said it wasn’t his place to take sides, though it is obvious where his sympathies lay. He sought to explain the murderer’s base crimes, not to defend them. He counted on Lorre to sing the higher notes.

  A shadow of a man falls across a wanted poster.

  “What a pretty ball!” says an offscreen voice. “What’s your name?”

  Later, tunelessly whistling the “Hall of the Mountain King” theme from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suites, a sinister leitmotif that runs the course of the story, the man buys a balloon for little Elsie Beckmann.6 The audience sees only his back, concealed by a long, dark overcoat.

  Writing a note to the newspapers on his windowsill, Beckert remains faceless to both the audience and the handwriting expert who determines that “the very particular shape of the letters indicates a strong pathological sexuality.” His conclusion that “some of the broken letters reveal an actor’s personality, which is indolent and even lazy,” is voiced over the reflected image of a facemaking Beckert searching for the murderer in the mirror.7

  “It’s a man who looks like a peaceful little family man, who wouldn’t hurt a fly,” predicts a detective.

  When buying a bag of apples, the symbolic forbidden fruit in Judeo-Christian tradition, the murderer finally steps into the light. He appears terrifyingly normal.

  Looking at a window display in a cutlery and silverware shop, Beckert is framed by the rhomboid reflection of a knife arrangement. In a diamond-shaped mirror he sees a little girl, whose image is also outlined by the geometric pattern formed by the shiny blades, ornamental details sharply suggestive of an overwhelming sense of fatalism. The script very specifically directs Lorre to stand “transfixed, staring at her. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes bulging…. [his] arms fall limply to his side, he gasps for breath and his eyes close as he sways forward against the shop front. Then the fit subsides and he recovers slightly.” Lorre invests the scene with inner struggle, assuming a brutish, almost feral, look before bursting once more into Peer Gynt, the barometer of his bloodlust. When the girl
’s mother shows up, he ducks into a doorway and then steps onto the sidewalk and scratches his hand in frustration. Beside him, in a bookshop window, an arrow incessantly bounces up and down, stabbing space with phallic thrusts. Next to it, a cardboard circle spirals inward.

  The murderer retreats to a nearby café, where he orders a brandy and peers out from behind a trellis of climbing plants. Like a cornered animal, he distorts his features, externalizing the evil force inside him. Whistling “gives wordless expression to his inner urges.” He puts his hands over his ears, but cannot block out the sound. The melody floats behind him as he leaves.

  Lang later said he had only one complaint about working with Lorre. “Though Peter had the script eight to ten weeks before,” said the director, “and knew that the first scene called for a whistle, he didn’t think it necessary to tell me that he could not whistle.” Lang “told Peter to fake it,” but the actor remained mute. “I am a musical moron who can’t carry a tune,” Lang told film historian Gene Phillips, “but I decided to dub the whistling myself. It was off key and turned out to be just right since the murderer himself is off balance mentally.”

  Lang credited von Harbou with writing the climactic courtroom scenes, in which the tribunal of thieves and burglars try Beckert. Like the dialogue itself, the “fear … horror … pain” directed in the script does not touch Lorre’s performance, which sealed his fate as an actor. Rawly emotional and physically racking, it is as exhausting to watch as it was to give. “If I play a pathological part,” Lorre later admitted, “I put myself into this character until I begin to display his symptoms.” He sweats, screams, pants, pleads, and squeals. His eyes bulge, his fingers clench, and his voice pitches toward an ecstatic frenzy:

 

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