Ellis St. Joseph saw something deeply personal in the actor’s portrayal of Beckert, something that sprang from another irresistible impulse—morphine. “Do you realize how important M is to Peter Lorre?” he asked. “When he cried out in the kangaroo trial, ‘I cannot help it,’ he is telling you everything about his victims and if you translate the child murderer drive into another kind of drive, you can see why there was such an explosion of genius in that performance.” For those who knew Lorre well, the letter M on his back stood for morphine as well as murderer. That his drug addiction neither numbed nor stimulated his performance—at least directly—testified to Lorre’s ability as an actor. It enabled him to keep his habit at arm’s—however punctured—length.
“My trouble is that I try to cover a part entirely,” Lorre said, looking back several years later. “When you do that there’s the danger that the patron will leave the theatre feeling that you are so perfectly suited to the character he has just seen that he can’t imagine you in any other part.” Women seemed most convinced of this—and at least one little girl. To the six-year-old Inge Landgut, who played Elsie Beckmann, Lorre seemed “eerie,” not least because Lang told her nothing about the story, “so that I wasn’t influenced by anything.” Only after the war did she see M for the first time. Fifty years later, Landgut remembered Lorre as “not unfriendly, not friendly either.” What stuck most in her memory was holding his sweaty hands: “I wanted to run to my mother. When I remember the scene I become uncomfortable.”
Friend and screenwriter Axel Eggebrecht wrote in his autobiography that M remained important to him because he had “never before so directly observed that fruitful and, at the same time, alarming impact a great actor can have on viewers who are no longer able to distinguish between the real person and the person portrayed.” At a gala reception after the premiere, an obviously nymphomaniacal high-society lady forced her way up to Lorre and confessed that the ghostly character of his child murderer had left a deep impression on her: “He couldn’t get rid of her and finally looked at her with his kind, bulging eyes and said ironically, ‘Did it really please you so much, madam? Well, then send me your daughter in the morning.’”
In the coming weeks and years, women who wanted both to suffer at his hands and to mother him penned invitations to tea. “Terrible letters came to me,” recalled Lorre. “Letters from strange people; people who I never believed lived in the world; depraved and disturbed minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic. A success can be too great, I tell you.”
While filming Secret Agent (1936) at Gaumont-British film studios in London, he told a publicist about a man who claimed the actor’s eyes haunted him: “Obsessed with the idea that they were watching him, he wrote weird and threatening letters to Lorre. It seems that he woke up nights and saw those eyes peering at him. The horror became unendurable and one day the maddened wretch wrote that he was going to kill the actor.” An incredulous Lorre showed letters from society women—including one who begged “M” to whip her—to journalist and historian Heinrich Fraenkel, who recalled that “it was a giggle to him that they thought of this timid little Jew as a tough guy.”
Although Lorre and Lang’s working relationship during the filming of M had been rancorous, the actor told friend and set designer Harper Goff that the director had thought of using him in a film about “a schoolteacher, an unsung hero who was fighting the problems of education during World War I.” Lorre apparently resented Lang’s assumption that audiences “would imagine he was going to end up seducing the boys in the school.” Whatever the reason, the picture wasn’t made. Lang and Lorre saw little of one another in Berlin after M was released. Thrown together at émigré gatherings in Los Angeles a few years later, they socialized and, judging from the photos, even shared a laugh. Never one to hold a grudge, Lorre nonetheless sounded fairly disparaging when interviewers brought up Lang.10 Only shortly before his death, at a UCLA showing of M attended by both men, was Lorre able to laugh off Lang’s callous treatment. By then, these fossils of the Weimar age apparently had come to accept their shared past.
In early March 1931, Lorre stepped on to the Schiffbauerdamm stage for the last time as Pipi the Clown in a French circus farce by Alfred Savoir. Der Dompteur (The Lion Tamer) starred Carola Neher, Fritz Kampers, and the elegant Gustaf Gründgens, who had dieted down for the role; that fact possibly accounted for his moody behavior. The slim actor kept his composure onstage, not batting an eye at the unexpected toppling of a circus tent around him. Offstage, however, he kicked holes in the scenery and demolished his dressing room with a stool, “in order,” explained Aufricht, “to quiet his nerves.”
Picked apart by the critics for its cheap sophistication, Savoir’s love triangle between a circus rider, a lion tamer, and a decadent lord quickly collapsed, despite finding a receptive audience that appreciated the production’s erotica and diverse surprises. The ensemble fared well with theatergoers and critics alike. With only the thinnest thread of interest given to his role as a melancholic clown, who sighs with his “suggestive voice,” the gifted Peter Lorre was hailed in “mask and play, truest circus.”
On May 25, 1931, the actor returned to Funkstunde Berlin as a servant in Blaubart (Bluebeard), a Jacques Offenbach operetta adapted by Karl Kraus and costarring Celia Lovsky as Princess Hermia.
Tagged as a screen menace, Lorre claimed he was offered dozens of villainous roles after M. “I wanted to do them,” he later recalled, “but the attitude of the public made me think. Here they were trying to type me. Once you are typed your field is limited and your screen life is apt to be short.” Intent on demonstrating his versatility, he turned down picture after picture until a comedy turned up. Bomben auf Monte Carlo (Bombs on Monte Carlo, 1931) afforded him both comedy and caricature, although on a small scale. In the supposedly true story of a ship captain’s efforts to win his crew’s back pay at a casino in Monte Carlo, Lorre played the chief engineer, relegated to the role of cook. Emerging from the galley holding a large ladle, he quizzes, with “cannibalistic innuendo,” according to editor Paul Falkenberg, “Guess what I am making beef goulash out of, gentlemen? Well? Well?”
Thinking it was children, audiences laughed at what appeared to be a sardonic reference to M.
“Out of the beard of a billy-goat,” he retorts.
In his remaining moments on the screen, he clowns, mugs, and even sings. “Now people began to forget M,” celebrated Lorre, “and the belief that I was strictly a horror actor.” Critics, however, took little notice. Hans Albers, Germany’s blue-eyed Clark Gable, carried the picture. Bomben auf Monte Carlo couldn’t decide between reality and cheap operetta, but it hardly mattered. Albers electrified the low-voltage script, encasing the movie in a “glimmermagic” that guaranteed box-office returns and passing marks from critic Herbert Jhering for its “lyrical frivolity, sexual patriotism and heart in the right place.”
In the summer, Lorre enthusiastically tackled one of the most unusual roles of his movie career, that of a happy, healthy husband and father in Die Koffer des Herrn O.F. (The Luggage of Mr. O.F., 1931). When the titular luggage arrives in sleepy Ostend, excitement spreads as the town readies itself for the announced arrival of millionaire Oscar Flot. The local hotel becomes “Grand Hotel Ostend.” The hairdresser renames his shop “Coiffure Jean.” The tailor turns into “The Old Gentleman Tailor Dorn.” A movie theater, a casino, an opera, a town hall, a department store, and a cabaret all go up. The flurry of activity triggers an economic boom during times of financial crisis, making Ostend the focus of international attention. By the time editor Stix (Lorre) decides to end the hoax by reporting the stranger’s death in an automobile accident, myth has eclipsed the man and no one remembers who he is. As the 78th World Economic Conference opens in Ostend, a travel agent in another city fires one of his secretaries, who sent the thirteen trunks of movie star Ola Fallon to the wrong town.
Critics complained that director Alexis Granowsky for
ged his actors into a team instead of giving free reign to their individual styles. He offered film audiences a Peter Lorre—earnest, exuberant, ardent—better known to theatergoers than movie fans. “It is amusing to see Peter Lorre, the terrible M,” observed a French review, “as a bon vivant, a good boy, well-scrubbed, his face innocent, with a romantic lock of blond hair, singing joyfully of love and guile.”
The Nazis didn’t find Lorre and Koffer’s other Jewish performers and writers as endearing. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the Reichsfilmkammer forced the removal of most of the songs in the picture and trimmed many of the performances. The censored version was released under the title Bauen und Heiraten (Build and Marry).
In October Lorre returned to the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz for the starring role of the Pawnbroker in Georg Kaiser’s Nebeneinander: Volksstück in fünf Akten (Side by Side: Popular Play in Five Acts), under the direction of Karl Heinz Martin. Set against the economic and moral degradation of post-World War I Germany, it tells the stories of three isolated individuals connected only by an undelivered letter discovered in a hocked suit. Because the address has been effaced by cleaning fluid, the Pawnbroker opens and reads the message, which appeals to the owner’s jilted lover not to commit suicide. The Pawnbroker’s conscience and sense of duty impels him to help a fellow human being: “Nothing has any sense, if all are not ready at all times to save the life of a single person.” However, he is arrested for wearing a pawned fur and loses his license. The policemen deride him for trying to help his neighbor. The Pawnbroker breaks under the realization that his brotherly love has gone to the dogs. He seals his room, turns on the gas, and dies before experience robs him of his lost illusion, “The imperceptible gain of the most wonderful feeling: to do something for a stranger! Therein lies the sense and the completion of the adventure. It douses its object—but the wave of which it tore up foams silver white. I perceived the voice of my neighbor—for which others closed themselves off—I heard it! … Or should one not take some part in the fate of a neighbor??—But how come this urge—erupting precipitously—is planted in our blood????”
Meanwhile, the woman who had contemplated suicide has received a second copy of the letter and marries a young engineer. The amoral, egotistical writer of the letter rises in the business world to the station of manager of a film company.
Under Berthold Viertel’s successful direction, Nebeneinander had premiered in 1923 at the close of the expressionist era. By 1931, pointed out Norbert Falk in the Berliner Zeitung, the Zeitstück “goes down the throat as historical reminiscence.” Without updating the story, Karl Heinz Martin had no hope of connecting with contemporary audiences, which found the tragedy hollow and false. Critics also faulted the production for its lack of uniform tone and continuity, imperceptible structure, and lifeless diction. Worse yet, the director was accused of tipping the delicate balance between comedy and tragedy in the altruist’s favor, overburdening the play with compassion.
Critics took specific aim at Lorre, damning his performance with faint praise. Oddly enough, the same reviewers who found Nebeneinander “too stale, too strange” by contemporary standards charged the actor with being un-Kaiserly. In 1923 Rudolph Forster, as the seducer, had amplified the Pawnbroker’s comic possibilities for appreciative audiences. Reprising the role, Ernst Busch played “without the shine and aura of a life winner,” weighting the play in Lorre’s favor but disadvantaging him with the critics, who accused the actor of “hopelessly drowning in the mush of empty tragic tirades.” Instead of “streaking like a shot out of a gun” in Kaiserly fashion, he carefully brooded over each word, spreading on too thickly “the mask of misery and imposed sentimentality.” Even the Berliner Börsen Couriers Emil Faktor, who commended the actor for his “able, intensive performance” and said his excellent “facial expressions give good insight into one driven by demons,” tempered his approval with the disclaimer that Lorre did not sustain his vision and lapsed into “a monotone lament.” Another reviewer suggested that Lorre was simply too young for the role.11 “Playing more out of a whim than direct tragedy,” capped Norbert Falk, “one can pity him as a poor fool but not lament him as a hero of the old clothes shop.”
No one lodged the same complaint about his next assignment, which followed closely on the heels of the unhappy pawnbroker. In Ödön von Horváth’s Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald: Volksstück in Drei Teilen (Tales from the Vienna Woods: Folk Piece in Three Acts), inspired by Johann Strauss’s enchanting waltz, the actor starred as a flesh-and-blood villain far more frightening than anything he had played on-screen. By his own admission, Alfred (Peter Lorre) weighed in on the human scale as “a weak person,” incapable of mending his lying, cheating, philandering ways.
Following what Jhering called the “sweet kitsch” of romance with the “sour kitsch” of reality, Horváth scratched Vienna’s golden veneer to expose the bitter truth about a petite bourgeoisie that consumes itself in an endless search for personal happiness. The last Berlin production of Max Reinhardt, who cast the play but did not oversee it, Horváth’s “slice of life” premiered at the Deutsches Theater on November 2, 1931, under the direction of Heinz Hilpert. His dark satire of human “mistakes and vices” won over critics accustomed to seeing the city’s heartland idealized on stage and screen. That year Horváth received the Kleist prize for drama. Lorre drew accolades as the rascally seducer of females of all ages, “for whose immeasurably shabby soul [he] finds a surprisingly fitting cover and an expression of a smiling, slick meanness that almost borders on innocence.”
On December 12 Lorre again performed on Funkstunde Berlin (which was also broadcast by Radio Wien), this time starring in Fortunios Lied (Fortunio’s Song), a one-act comedy by Offenbach. Kraus, who adapted the piece, cast Celia Lovsky as Charlotte, Fortunio’s scribe. Friedrich Hollaender, with whom Peter and Celia would share fate and fortune in Paris after their emigration, conducted the music.
Lorre made his final stage appearance in Berlin quite inauspiciously as a crooked teller in Louis Verneuil’s bitter comedy Die Nemo Bank, which opened at the Komödienhaus just before Christmas. Max Pallenberg swindles his way up the ladder from bank porter to financial minister. However, the world of finance does not speak a universal language. German fraud, Alfred Kerr indignantly pointed out in the Berliner Tageblatt, bore its own homemade stamp of specificity. From inside Germany, Die Nemo Bank looked French provincial, despite the well-publicized coincidence that Pallenberg had earlier lost his fortune with the collapse of the Holland Umstelbank.12 Audiences came to laugh at the popular actor, who held them in his hands, but ended up laughing with him, although not hard enough to leaven the flat satire.
Brecht had tentatively cast Lorre as the teacher, Nikolai Wessovschikow, in Die Mutter (The Mother), set to premiere at Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on January 17, 1932. When he failed to show up for rehearsals, Gerhard Bienert stepped into the role. Perhaps nothing more than the result of a scheduling conflict with his next picture, it likely signaled the actor’s growing interest in movies and the money he could make by appearing in them, no small consideration to someone addicted to drugs and tired of just getting by on Brecht’s low wages.
Lorre’s busy radio schedule further complicated his calendar. On January 14 he had performed on Funkstunde Berlin as Bellecour, a singer in Offenbach’s comic opera Vert-Vert (new text and dialogue direction by Kraus). The following week, he returned to the Radio Hour as a swindler in Nestroy’s Das Notwendige und das Überflüssige (The Necessary and the Unnecessary), arranged and directed by Kraus.
Between film assignments, the actor also performed a double role in an abridged radio production of a play that did not reach the stage until 1959. Where theater feared to tread, radio stepped in. Funkstunde Berlin premiered Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (St. Joan of the Stockyards) on April 11, 1932. One of Brecht’s most daring dramas, the Lehrstücke (learning play) not only took on classical drama, which it boldly parodied, but also indicted the cor
rupt partnership between Christianity and the capitalist system. Stock was as specific to Chicago as it was universal to the world exchange and the current German economic crisis in particular. In the larger of his two parts, Lorre played Sullivan Slift, a Mephistophelian character who brokers more than beef. With honey-smooth slickness, he set off the free-market magniloquence of meat magnate Pierpont Mauler (Fritz Kortner) to full effect and paved the descent of Joan Dark (Carola Neher) into the depths of poverty and degradation. As the broker Graham, the actor further flexed his vocality in the longest speech in the play, recounting the battle between the meat packers with a rolling rhythm broken by Hitlerian bombast.
In 1928 screenwriter Hermann Kosterlitz had seen Lorre in Pioniere in Ingolstadt and had bookmarked his comic aptitude for later use.13 Kosterlitz and stage and film director Erich Engel returned to the page when casting a film adaptation of the popular musical comedy Fünf von der Jazzband (The Jazz Band Five, 1932). To Felix Joachimson’s story of a struggling group of acrobatic musicians, the writer added a thread about a couple of look-alike car thieves played by Robert Klein-Lörk and Peter Lorre with deadpan delivery and studied insolence:
Policeman: Do you two know the lady?
Lorre: Maybe we know the lady. Who knows?
Policeman: Do you know her or don’t you?
Klein-Lörk: Well, you’re getting paid to find out those things.
Lorre: We cannot do the work of other people. That’s too much.
Policeman: Get them out.
Herbert Jhering, the influential drama critic for the liberal-minded Berliner Börsen Courier, had treated Lorre with an even hand since 1929, singing his praises for Pioniere in Ingolstadt and Frühlings Erwachen but faulting him for Die Unüberwindlichen. Between his reviews, Jhering sandwiched critiques of the rising stars of stage and screen, including Ernst Busch, Leonard Steckel, and Peter Lorre. Jhering offered constructive criticism that pointed the way to perfected talent. He also pointed out the pitfalls for even the most consummate actor, making the case that how an artist’s talent is used is just as important as how an artist uses his talent. For example, Jhering noted that under Reinhardt, an actor’s distinctive physical appearance won contracts. With his pudgy body, round face, and protruding eyes, Lorre would have become “in a time of specialty a specialty.” Producers and directors were now looking for a more typical appearance, leading them to use Lorre “for criminal types, for underworld figures.” Jhering suggested in June 1932 that the former cramped Lorre’s talent as much as the latter. His “areas,” hammered the critic, “are the ironic, ambiguous, charming-infamous border figures. Not the obviously sick, not the obviously uncomplicated.” As an agent for “the wicked harmlessness, the infernal friendliness, the cynical gentleness, the cunning naiveté, the ironic smugness … his ‘ability’ and ‘being’ come together. Here Lorre is first-class. Here he is a modern actor.”
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