The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  I can’t help myself! I haven’t any control over this evil thing that’s inside me—the fire, the voices, the torment! Always … always, there’s this evil force inside me…. It’s there all the time, driving me out to wander through the streets … following me … silently, but I can feel it there…. It’s me, pursuing myself…. I want to escape … to escape from myself! … but it’s impossible. I can’t. I can’t escape. I have to obey it. I have to run … run … streets … endless streets. I want to escape. I want to get away. And I am pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers. And of those children…. They never leave me. Shouting desperately.

  … I see the posters and I read what I’ve done…. I read … and … and read…. Did I do that? But I can’t remember anything about it…. But who will believe me? Who knows what it feels like to be me? How I’m forced to act…. His eyes close in ecstasy. How I must … Don’t want to, but must … He screams. Must … Don’t want to … must. And then … a voice screams … I can’t bear to hear it. He throws himself against the wooden barrier in a paroxysm covering his ears with his hands…. I can’t … I can’t go on. Can’t go on…. Can’t go on…. Can’t go on …

  Nor could Lorre go on. Like Beckert, he had spent himself. “Lang wrung him out like an old towel,” recalled Paul Falkenberg, who edited M and spent almost every day on the set. “He was completely worn out. Tongue hanging out. He had given his all and his best.” Lang knew what he wanted and how to get it. Beginning at eight in the morning, he shot the “court” scenes until one the next morning. “Peter fainted,” said writer Kurt Siodmak, who stopped by to visit his cousin Seymour Nebenzal. “That was what Lang wanted and he used that shot.” Siodmak was anxious to meet Lorre, but Lang had given instructions that no one talk with the actor, who, broken down and isolated, had become one with his role.8

  The bruises soon faded, but their memory did not. By 1931 Lang had earned a reputation as the “Stalin of Film.” Like the Russian dictator, he ruled with an iron fist. “Look, if you want me to make a picture for you,” Lang had told Nebenzal (whom he later credited for courageously financing a social drama “in which there is no love interest and the ‘hero’ is a child murderer”), “I have the choice of everything—script, actors, cutting, everything. And nobody else has anything to say.” He got his way. Described as brutal, abusive, exacting, driven, omnipotent, imperious, and autocratic, to name only a few of the more charitable adjectives, Lang was a perfectionist, who, according to actor Gerhard Bienert, “liked to stir up actors, to keep them off balance. He felt more creative in an atmosphere of tension.”

  In Berlin for an auto show, Andrew Lorre stopped by the makeshift studio at the Staaken Zeppelinhalle to see his brother. “I came upon the scene,” he recalled, “when Mr. Fritz Lang was seized by one of his frequent rages and there was no way to calm him down. I mentioned to Thea von Harbou, Mr. Lang’s wife, who was his assistant, that I had brought some Hungarian salami for Peter. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘we’ll slice some up and give it to him.’ Lang really calmed down immediately and polished off the salami.”

  “A director,” said Fritz Lang, “crawls under the skin of an actor and gets out something maybe he doesn’t even know exists in himself.” If, as Falkenberg claimed, Lang cast a magic spell over Lorre that “unloosened” realms of possibility, the enchantment also harbored a darker side: “Lang sort of plucked him from the gutter and made him feel that he was the boss and he was the creature. He didn’t do it outright, like coming and hitting him in the face right and left. No, he took the opportunity to use him for a perfectly innocuous scene that anybody could have done. There is a shot, if you look very closely, in the final scene of M, where he is trying to escape and these plug-uglies, these gorillas, try to push him down the stairs so he can face the trial by the criminals. There is a close-up where a nailed boot hits him against his shin. Now this shot was taken at least thirteen times and it wasn’t second unit shooting. It had to be Peter, who had his whole leg bandaged and couldn’t walk for three days. Lang insisted that he lend his own shin to this close-up, which was perfectly idiotic. Anybody could have done that.”

  Celia Lovsky also recalled watching Lang film eighteen takes of Peter being dragged down a staircase inside a bag. Although in the scene his rugwrapped body comes to no physical harm, consensus of opinion would tend to support Lovsky’s claim that Lang put Lorre through more than appears onscreen.

  Lorre knew perfectly well that Lang could have used a double and shot around him, possibly explaining why he took the liberty of requesting a leave of absence from the set to appear in Mann ist Mann the first week of February. According to Lang, Lorre didn’t want to listen to reason. “If you don’t come,” threatened the director, who reminded Lorre that he had three hundred extras on the payroll, “I’ll have to bring an injunction against you.”

  Normally full of jokes, good humor, and funny stories, Lorre “muttered dire threats,” said Falkenberg and “spoke about the bastard, what’s he’s doing to him. I don’t recall that there was ever an open conflict in the sense that Peter openly revolted and walked off the set. He knew where his bread was buttered and what kind of an important part he was playing…. Ms. von Harbou was always trying to pour oil on the waters, trying to heal the wound and make up for Lang’s transgressions in her own idiotic way. She used to say to me, ‘Where there’s lots of light, there’s lots of shadow, so you can’t avoid it.’ These idiotic truisms she threw out, trying to keep things on a steady keel.”

  As a “genius who sometimes gets his finest effects independently of his director,” Lorre claimed to have researched his role from within: “I did not see the actual murderer. I did not need to. I saw a few photographs of him, that was all. It did not matter to me what he looked like, or what his mannerisms were. It only mattered that he did what he did, and my only concern was to understand why. And I did understand.” But not without outside help. Lorre had not studied the police files or canvassed the criminal community. However, he held a deep interest in psychology and read widely in the field. Moreover, as Lang pointed out in a 1967 interview with the BBC’s Alexander Walker, the climate of experimentation on his first sound film invited a careful exchange of ideas between director and actor.

  “Create your own method,” Konstantin Stanislavski advised young actors. “Make up something that will work for you.” Described by his daughter Catharine as “a very emotional man” who learned to “suppress a lot of his emotions,” Lorre heeded the Russian stage director and developed a method that accommodated the extremes of his nature. “You can’t portray a character,” he echoed repeatedly. “You have to be that person while you’re in the role.” Even the Deutsche Filmzeitung agreed that “Lorre brings a realism to all the problems Lang avoided.” That he so convincingly transformed himself into a compulsive child murderer goes far toward explaining public reaction to the actor in the streets of Berlin, where mothers with children allegedly fled from him.

  Lang and Brecht wanted—and got—the same thing from Lorre, a split style of acting that left a gap between the person and his actions. The actor seamlessly stepped in and out of character, one minute exploring the “contradictions of existence” at a critical distance, the next swept away by the catharsis of confession. His performance is not so much what Brecht pejoratively labeled a “psychological operation,” but is rather a dissection in which the actor becomes both doctor and patient, alternately looking at himself from within and from without. Through “interruptions and jumps,” he broke the spell cast by conventional actors, shocking rather than beguiling the audience into understanding. Sympathy pulls them in and repulsion pushes them away. By distinguishing the cause of Beckert’s behavior (“There’s an evil force inside me”) from its effect (“I read what I have done”), Lorre allowed for an outcome that was not tragically inevitable. This process made strange bedfellows of Brecht and Stanislavski, playing their means against an end that achieved what all acting methods strive for: reality.

 
Where a director as controlling as Lang leaves off and an actor as psychologically intuitive as Lorre begins is impossible to say. Bienert stated that Lang “never guided actors, rather pushed them to overdo it.” (Lorre confided to Lovsky that he would have played the climactic courtroom scene “more simply, in his own way.”) The director, however, coldly claimed that he only photographed “the feelings of a person,” using his camera to show things from “the viewpoint of the protagonist; in that way my audience identifies itself with the character on the screen and thinks with him.” Lorre, through what Graham Greene called his “sympathetic grasp,” suffused Lang’s form with sensibility. Committed to explaining the murderer’s motives, he presented Beckert not as a monster but as a divided human being whose darker side acts independently of his will. “If you could examine that film more closely,” he told an interviewer in 1935, “you would perceive that it was a tragedy—as real a tragedy as ever Shakespeare conceived. One felt for the murderer—as one does for Macbeth—an overwhelming pity.”

  On the set of Island of Doomed Men some nine years after M, a conversation between Lorre and his director, Charles Barton, turned to his portrayal of Hans Beckert. “In M,” recalled Barton, “Peter didn’t come on as strong as I think he wanted to. He wanted to overplay it. I didn’t want him to do it in this picture…. When you do that you become weak.” Unbeknownst to Fritz Lang scholars—and likely forgotten by Lorre himself—was M le maudit (M the Damned One), the French-language version of M, shot at the same time as Lang’s original and rediscovered in 2004 in the archives of the Centre Nationale de la Cinematographie, outside Paris. In this film the actor indeed went “over the top.” There is no longer any record of whether Fritz Lang supervised the French M himself, but it seems likely that the work was not his. The final result is a mixture of dubbed scenes from the German original (notably Gründgens in the kangaroo court) and sequences reshot with French actors (the phone conversation between the Government Minister and the Chief of Police). There is one exception: Peter Lorre. He reprised his role in French, but for whatever reason—most likely his imperfect command of the language—another actor, a French actor, revoiced all his dialogue. Although Lorre had obviously taken the trouble to learn his role phonetically (his lip movements match perfectly), he apparently wasn’t polished enough for a French audience.

  But the performances stand further apart than merely the language gap. For the German version, Lang had literally beaten a performance out of Lorre in the film’s finale. Lorre was clearly pushed past the limits of physical endurance. The same actor who verges on collapse in the German M is far fresher in the French version, obviously shot at a different time entirely. The sets and lighting are pale imitations of Lang’s original, and, unfortunately, so is Lorre’s performance. Freed of Lang’s notorious sadism and left to his own devices, Lorre took his performance where he felt it belonged. His renewed energy feeds an agitated reenactment that fails to capture the immediacy of the original. In the less-centered French version, he stands instead of crouches, wildly flipping his head and shaking his body. He directs himself outward rather than inward in a portrayal that is more personified than personal. And all this coupled with a voice that, while technically fluent, has little of the passion, anguish, and individuality that is Peter Lorre’s original German. That his performance in M le maudit falls short of that in M, there can be no doubt. But it hardly matters. It is, after all, the original that has become film history.

  M intersected the latitude of life and the longitude of death. The film premiered at 6:00 p.m., Monday, May 11, 1931.9 Moviegoers blocked the sidewalks. Automobiles jammed the street. Inside the theater, spectators clapped and whistled for and against capital punishment while Kürten sat on death row. He had asked to die, then to live. Condemned to death on April 22, he was beheaded on July 2, 1931. Classic stature came to Lang’s favorite film overnight and stayed. After two hours’ deliberation, the politically conservative Filmprüfstelle (Film Examiner’s Office) announced: “Mr. Lang, this film has practically everything about which we disagree and which we cannot accept but it is done with such integrity that we don’t want to make any cuts.”

  It was the first of many mixed notices. While the jury of critics reached an easy verdict on Lang’s mastery of technical details—provocative camera angles; newsreel atmosphere; dramaturgical use of sound, tempo, and tension; expertise with mass scenes; casting; and even the writing—it hung on content. Debunking the film’s documentary ambitions, Herbert Jhering pointed out that where M was most cinematic, it was also most inaccurate. He argued that Lang’s Threepenny reality made “a gruesome mockery of social custom,” undermining police authority and romanticizing the criminal element. Both conservative and liberal voices warned that arousing feeling for a murderous underdog would only feed the frenzy of psychotic types. Even those swept along by the sheer entertainment of the film stumbled over its anticlimactic ending. It came down to a matter of style. Pick one, advised Jhering—“cold or neutral” or “amusing or satirical”—but not both. Like a firefly, Lang flitted between morality and suspense, never alighting on a consistent point of view, provoking the criticism that he “only ever peeps into the great problems…. Lang has only thought of his subject; he has not felt it. M, like Frankenstein, is a fullblown tragedy that has been diminished in the creation to a mere ‘sensational.’”

  Critics bit into Lang without drawing blood. M played at film festivals, and scholars confirmed its place in cinema history. Nonetheless, the movie had struck a collective nerve. As a Zeitstück (period piece), it not only mirrored the time in which it was made but also documented the time that made it. Regarded today as Lang’s masterpiece, M was, to the best of the director’s knowledge, “the first film to deal with social and psychological aspects of crime.” That he put this pill in a jelly sandwich didn’t bother the moviegoing public. Although it lumped in the throats of some squeamish Americans, those who put European cinematic art on a pedestal considered M ahead of its time. With two years’ hindsight, the New Republic’s Bruce Blevin held that “the film is one which deserves to rank with the very best things in this field which have come out of Germany, with ‘Mädchen in Uniform,’ ‘The Last Laugh,’ ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,’ and ‘Variety.’ It is a picture which I do not believe could under any circumstances have been made in Hollywood—indeed, any American director who suggested such a thing would probably find his own sanity suspected. Nevertheless, Hollywood will make better pictures after seeing this one. And so we progress.”

  Time has vindicated the few German critics who credited Lang with exploring both sides of a complex question “with delicacy and fine feeling.” Indeed, old weaknesses have been heralded as new strengths, namely “every attempt to explain, exhaustively, the murderer’s viewpoint and the question of his punishment.” Although Lorre later confessed that he found the film “oldfashioned,” for generations of moviegoers, M “remains as fresh as on the day of its release.”

  Lang believed that Lorre gave “one of the best performances in film history and certainly the best in his life.” Most critics agreed. Reviewers coined fresh superlatives for the director’s discovery, who was cast over the objections of those who thought it rash to pin the success of his first sound picture on a newcomer. “The murderer Peter Lorre,” wrote Film Kurier, “is captured in the nuances of an extraordinary mimic art. He is an individual who is not crushed by the monumentality of the surrounding, but within the whole work penetrating to the moving touch.”

  Dr. Hans Wollenberg, writing for the Lichtbildbühne, also credited the actor with achieving “the scarcely comprehensible that gives the lust murderer’s features life!—which follow one into the dreams. Unbelievable …”

  However dazzled by Lorre’s unique gifts, German critics allotted more weight than space to them in their columns. It was the Nation‘s William Troy who identified the classic element of his performance:

  For the crystallization of these symbols in an emotion abso
lutely realized in the spectator and effecting in him a genuine Aristotelian catharsis, the flawless acting of Peter Lorre is perhaps finally responsible. In his rendering of the paralysis of frustrated lust in the scene on the cafe terrace, for example, he gives us an intuition of the conflict of will and desire such as we are accustomed to only in the great classic dramas when they are played by great tragic actors. And in the last scene, when he stands at bay before the assembled underworld seated in judgment, his wide-eyed, inarticulate defense is made the equivalent of those long passages of rhetoric at the close of Greek or Elizabe- than plays in which the hero himself is forced to admit his helplessness before the forces which have undone him. The modern psychopath, through Peter Lorre’s acting, attains to the dignity of the tragic hero.

  The actor had the added benefit of not having worked extensively in silent films, whose visual histrionics often carried over to early sound movies. Nonetheless, what some critics pinpointed as M’s abrupt change in style from “nervetickling” suspense to moral manipulation left Lorre seesawing from a soap box, “on the whole indescribably bad, he overacts and diminishes the impression.” Even Herbert Jhering believed that “physiognomically he is so terrifyingly good that he should not have felt it necessary to go through the streets with such an obvious play of the bad conscience shortly before the pursuit by the beggars.” In any case, such ripples dissipated in the pool of favorable public opinion.

  Lorre also had his own doubts about M before it was released. “To show you how much faith I had in the film at that time,” he said later, “I was faithfully rehearsing Brecht’s new play while I was appearing, I thought quite indifferently, in Lang’s M.” That would have been in January, just after shooting began. After stunned audiences spilled out of the UFA-Palast am Zoo on to the Ku’damm, Lorre knew his life would never be the same.