The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Film critic and historian Andrew Sarris aptly pointed out, “Lorre … embodies much of the charming irony of a European sensibility in conflict with the stolid British passion for decorum.” In The Man Who Knew Too Much, a chilling malignancy masks his benign humor. No matter how discordant the fit, he accommodated it to his personal acting style. “Peter had the amazing ability,” observed Ellis St. Joseph, “which we see again in Marlon Brando, of the delayed reaction, the surprising delivery, a softness which has the effect of a bullet when it is delivered.”

  A script note describes Abbott as merely “a round-faced person about 45. He is an invalid … helped by a rather straight-faced woman who is apparently [his] nurse.” Hitchcock went one better, introducing the character as a gregarious tourist ripe for a good laugh. Asked if he is all right after a ski jumper flattens him, the murderer cracks, “Better ask my nurse. My English is not good enough for me to know.” Abbott discomposes his victims with spasms of laughter, then menaces them with well-mannered restraint. “Mr. Lorre, as the anarchist leader,” wrote Andre Sennwald in the New York Times, “is able to crowd his role with dark and terrifying emotions without disturbing his placid moon face.” It is just this kind of ambiguity that unsettled audiences, heightened dramatic tension, and fascinated Hitchcock. While Beckert baited his victims with candy, Abbott entreats a young girl’s silence with a shiny pocket watch. “I’m not a baby,” she indignantly remarks as she thrusts the watch back into his hand. After kidnapping the child, he figuratively twists the knife with sardonic duplicity: “One of the sweetest children I ever met. You know, to a man with a heart as soft as mine, there’s nothing sweeter than a touching scene … such as a father saying good-bye to his child, good-bye for the last time.” In a deleted scene, the “unctuous but deadly” Abbott—so called in the script—winds the same sort of duality around her father’s neck with the polite warning, “I am pained by your headache, Mr. Lawrence, and I should be quiet if I were you, in case of a very much more painful ache in the head—yes?” He controls his gang—“my children” in the script—with a malicious grin rather than an iron fist and seems to care only for the severe Nurse Agnes, who dies in the gun battle. In a moment of awkward emotion—not in the script—Abbott tenderly embraces his fallen comrade. With this simple gesture, Lorre underscores the humanity of evil.

  Modestly budgeted at forty thousand pounds, The Man Who Knew Too Much drew plaudits from audiences as a fine thriller and from critics as a technical masterpiece. Likewise, those within and outside the film world singled out Lorre’s performance as a masterwork of staccato violence. “One of the striking things about the picture is the way grimness and terror are heightened by pitching the acting in a low key,” wrote James Shelley Hamilton for Britain’s National Board of Review. “Nothing is done violently or loudly—a careful style of understatement achieves in the sum total a remarkably gripping force. All of the actors are casual and unassertive, and particularly effective is this method as used by Peter Lorre; always low-voiced, with sometimes a slow, deprecating smile moving over his melancholy face, often completely motionless and devoid of expression, he creates one of the few really sinister characters of the screen.”

  Andre Sennwald, an ocean away, continued the thought in a piece for the New York Times: “Even Charles Laughton, who comes the closest to resembling him in physical appearance and in talent, seems by comparison to be an impish and rosy-cheeked gentleman striving to play the bad boy.”

  Lorre was, in Montagu’s words, “a brilliant actor who would concentrate attention by his timing and explosion and take direction easily, filling into Hitch’s conception.” In the process, he catapulted himself to stardom in the English-speaking world.

  As cogs in intricate mechanisms, or more derisively, pawns in methodical chess games, Hitchcock’s players often found themselves the object of his caustic wit. When Johnny Carson pointed out on The Tonight Show, April 21, 1976, that he was quoted as saying, “All actors are cattle,” Hitchcock dryly corrected, “What I probably said is actors should be treated like cattle.”

  “He told some they were kittle-cattle,” said Montagu, “and that his film was finished when the script was written, and so got on terms of humor with them. If they were dunces, he did not waste time on them unnecessarily. If they were intelligent of course he would be grateful for and encourage and readily snap up any suggestions. This is doubtless the relationship Peter and he had.”

  Hitchcock and Lorre found common ground in their unconventional senses of humor and fondness for elaborate practical jokes. Excusing the director’s well-documented sadistic streak, Montagu commented, “Hitch loved and frequently played practical jokes, BUT ONLY on people who liked them equally and enjoyed them and were in a position to (and usually did) reciprocate.” Several years later, a newspaper story credited Lorre, dubbed “the walking overcoat” for his floor-length mantles, with sending fifty singing canaries to Hitchcock at his Cromwell Road flat. As the versions of the story multiplied, so did the number of birds—to three hundred in some accounts. In retaliation, Hitchcock reportedly bombarded a shipboard Lorre with hourly wires giving him news of the birds.

  In his biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto charged the director with sending a dray horse to Lorre’s flat. Montagu debunked the story, declaring, “I regard this as totally absurd. Hitch indeed had a horse delivered to the theatre dressing room of an English actor [Sir Gerald du Maurier]—it was one of the most well-known jokes of the West End for a long time. How could Hitch possibly have repeated such a joke? He would only have invited contempt for plagiarizing himself and shown his imagination grown dull. Besides, as far as I remember, Peter’s flat was on what we call the first or Americans call the second floor.” While not completely factual, such stories well serve the spirit if not the letter of their shared fun.

  Peter decided that he and Celia should legalize their five-year romance before sailing to America. “We were married in Austria,” she told a reporter, “but it was a marriage by consent—not valid here in England or in the united States.” Red tape, Celia later explained, had frustrated all their earlier efforts to tie the knot. In England, however, only passports and certificates of good behavior were required. Celia preferred to wait, but Peter insisted. Just before noon on June 22, 1934, she appeared at the General Register Office in Westminster and quietly waited for Peter to arrive from Lime Grove Studios, where Hitchcock had kept him overtime shooting The Man Who Knew Too Much. They had twenty-five minutes to obtain the license and be married. (Hitchcock later claimed to have allowed Lorre two hours off in the middle of a scene.) In costume and full makeup—purple smoking jacket, frosted hair, and a three-inch scar created by an astringent that puckered the skin—Lorre rushed off the set and hailed a taxi. Combing his hair over the scar apparently failed to soften his sinister image. “It petrified the official who married us,” recalled the actor. “He didn’t look at us, at first. He just read out of a book. Then he looked up, and nearly dropped the book.” The brief ceremony ran its official course, but not without a hitch. Celia spoke no English and had to carefully repeat the vows of matrimony. When the groom realized he had forgotten the wedding ring, a friend slipped his own band to Celia. Afterward, the newlyweds hurried back to the set, where Hitchcock greeted them in mock outrage: “THIS IS A SCANDAL! THEY’VE BEEN LIVING TOGETHER FOR FIVE YEARS! LIVING IN SIN!” It was all in fun and Hitchcock soon dared to call Celia “Untier” or “Untie” for short.

  Before leaving for America, Lorre invited his father to London. “You will be surprised to learn,” said Francis, “he even sent him a ticket.” Alajos spent “a beautiful fortnight” there, but Peter had to cable Francis for money to send his father home. “That was my brother, Peter,” said Francis. “But then, of course, he was already world famous and we could easily follow his career in the newspapers. I am sure that this invitation to London was not only out of love for his father, but to impress him.”

  During the 19
20s, the Hollywood movie moguls, men of business who traded in the written word, the moving image, and the human soul, began dispatching their emissaries far and wide in search of European film talent. They wanted not only box-office returns but also critical recognition. They wanted “art” and with it respectability. in Europe they could buy both. Agents canvassed the Continent for art and culture, ferreting out those who could be bought. Trophy hunting, the studio sport, netted a bagful of “highbrow” properties, among them Swedish actress Greta Garbo, German actor Emil Jannings, and directors Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, and E.A. Dupont. Hollywood quickly weeded out those who would not accommodate art and commerce, or failed to make the transition to sound. Some fell afoul of the studio star system and quit America to seek greater artistic freedom elsewhere, while others stayed on in diminished capacities.

  Although Harry Cohn had no assignment for Lorre, he urged him to report for duty as soon as possible.4 The mogul’s hunting instinct was unmistakably American—to shoot first and ask questions later. Certainly, he knew little about his prey. M (1931), Schuss im Morgengrauen (1932), and Was Frauen träumen (1933) had received only limited exposure in the United States. At New York’s Mayfair theater, in April 1933, M grossed $15,000 its first week, $11,300 in a second, and $8,000 in a third—a nice showing, but not good enough to hold it over a fourth week.5 In Los Angeles it played to a negligible take at The President, a second-run house offering its first first-run film, and bowed out after a two-week run. Audiences, claimed the press, found the grisly nature of its subject material shocking and offensive. “Why so much fervor and intelligent work was concentrated on such a revolting idea is surprising,” wrote New York Times film reviewer Mordaunt Hall. Columbia looked past the actor’s screen image—first that of a compulsive killer, then that of a smiling villain—and focused on his international stature. M was art and Peter Lorre a classic actor.

  On Wednesday, July 18, 1934, one week after obtaining visitors’ visas at the American Consular Service in London—and just one day after wrapping up production at Gaumont-British—Peter and Celia boarded the Cunard White Star Liner Majestic in Southampton and sailed “First Cabin” for New York. In preparing his “Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” the ship’s officer grilled the Lorres with a long list of perfunctory but provocative questions. Asked the name of the “nearest relative or friend in country whence alien came,” Lorre unhesitatingly answered Sidney Bernstein. He described himself as being five foot, eight inches—chalking up three inches to creative license—having a fair complexion, fair hair, and brown eyes. He also responded that Columbia had paid his passage, that he possessed at least fifty dollars, that he planned to spend six months in the United States, that he had never been in prison or an insane asylum, that his mental and physical health were good, that he had not been supported by charity, and that he was neither a polygamist nor an anarchist. Asked if he planned to return to England “after engaging temporarily in labor pursuits” in the United States, Lorre answered yes. Moreover, he and Celia stated that they did not intend to become American citizens and—incorrectly it would seem—that they had not come “by reason of any offer, solicitation, promise, agreement, expressed or implied to labor in the U.S.” Although Lorre had high hopes for Hollywood, in the past year, he had, like Brecht changed “countries oftener than our shoes.” He now exercised a caution that told him to forge ahead without burning his bridges behind him.

  Six days later Peter and Celia stepped off the gangplank at the West Fourteenth Street dock. Camera bulbs popped. Lorre was not the “repellant spectacle” the press had expected. “The pathological murderer in ‘M,’” described a reporter for the New York Times, “is a round-faced, smiling young man of 30 years.” And questions flew. Lorre reflected on his work with Hitchcock and his future in the American cinema. “If it were not for M,” he said regretfully, “I would have started on my trip to Hollywood long ago.” On the matter of reconciling marriage and career, Celia said she would give up acting, at least for now. “Both of us feel this will make for matrimonial happiness,” echoed Peter, showing his true European colors. “It is not a case of possible jealousy. But a man does like to see his wife when he comes home at night.”

  On Thursday, July 26, Peter and Celia stepped aboard the Twentieth Century Ltd. When the train pulled into Chicago the next morning, switchmen uncoupled the sleeping cars and tacked them onto the rear of the Santa Fe Chief, which rolled out the red carpet for the Hollywood celebrities who routinely crossed the country by rail. Deluxe accommodations featured plush drawing rooms trimmed in wood paneling, private bathrooms, spacious observation decks, and gourmet dining. While rolling plains built to rocky mountains and then fell to desert expanse, the passengers observed the scenic wonders, talked shop, and partied into the early morning hours. The lull of the track seductively beckoned them to the end of the line, where, as actor Clive Brooks observed, “The links of our chains are forged not of cruelties, but of our luxuries.”

  News of Lorre’s arrival in Los Angeles had preceded him by over a month. “In all of the newspapers here, we read of his coming,” Elisabeth Hauptmann wrote Walter Benjamin in Paris. “One has to congratulate the man who engaged the ‘genius actor.’” Hollywood extended a warm welcome to the Lorres. Invitations summoned Peter and Celia to lavish Viennese and Tyrolean dinner parties, where they mixed with old friends such as Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Billy Wilder, and Franz Waxman and met new ones, among them Jean Negulesco, Delmer Daves, Paul Muni, and Olivia de Havilland. The Friedrich Hollaenders also enrolled Lorre—along with Ernst Lubitsch, Conrad Veidt, and Josef von Sternberg—for their Sunday afternoon Ping-Pong tournaments.

  Soon after his arrival, Lorre found himself at the Brown Derby, a popular watering hole for film celebrities. Several tables away sat Charlie Chaplin, flourishing his menu in an effort to catch the actor’s eye. Chaplin confessed that he had seen M three times and later said of Lorre: “There is much of the born poet in Peter Lorre. His is a fresh and original talent. He is endowed with such intuitive, emotional and imaginative powers that he impresses me as one of the greatest character actors. I look forward to seeing him make a genuine contribution to the art of acting on the screen.” Compliments came in no greater size. Lorre told one interviewer he kept a clipping from the Los Angeles Times in which Chaplin had called him Europe’s greatest actor. He even returned the favor, citing the silent clown as his favorite film star.

  Lorre again met the celebrated pantomimist at a dinner given for Chaplin and Paulette Goddard by King Vidor. They instantly hit it off and entertained each other with some facemaking; Lorre recreated tense moments from M, nearly frightening his audience of one to death, and Chaplin improvised a skit about a blind man. The two men also traded ideas for pet projects. Feeling that Chaplin, who had played a hapless private in Shoulder Arms, would share his enthusiasm for Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy Dobrého Vojáka Švejka za), Lorre told him he held an option on the novel and one day hoped to portray the soft-headed batman in a film version of the World War I comedy.6

  Just as there was much of Hasek in Švejk, there was also some of Švejk—both real and imagined—in Lorre. Hasek described “the good soldier” as a short stocky figure who is quiet, unassuming, and shabbily dressed, with the “kindliest of smiles” and the gaze of a “guileless lamb.” However, Hasek makes it clear that Švejk “is no mere idiot and that his innocence is only simulated.” Pretending to be “a half-wit for the sole purpose of concealing his rascality under the mask of imbecility” is his modus operandi. “The little man is indestructible,” wrote Czech literary critic F.X. Šalda of Hasek’s anonymous hero. “Švejk’s … idiotic cunning protects him more and is of more use to him than the greatest imaginable acumen and ingenuity.”

  Lorre identified with people, especially writers, who actively represented views that he inactively subscribed to. Who better th
an Hasek, who also out of necessity had clerked in a bank before pursuing avocations—as anarchist, atheist, rogue, mischief-maker, hoaxer (before losing his job as editor of a magazine called the Animal World, he had advertised “thoroughbred werewolves” for sale), vagabond, satirical caricaturist, writer of sketches and feuilletons, and above all, “idiot of genius.” No one was immune to his “epic phlegm.” He ridiculed do-gooders, the nobility, the church, the police, marriage, school teachers, children, censors, professors, experts, and so on.

  The Austrian Army called Hasek to arms in 1915. After being taken prisoner on the Eastern Front and spending several years in a Russian POW camp, he enlisted in the Czech Army. Hasek encapsulated his army experiences in his Švejk stories, which first appeared in Karikatury (Caricatures) in 1911. Six years later, Slav Publishing House in Kiev brought out a second series of stories titled The Good Soldier Švejk in Captivity (DobrÝ voják Švejk v zajetí). Between 1921 and 1923, Hasek completed three of four projected volumes of The Good Soldier Švejk before dying at age forty. Lorre undoubtedly latched onto the Germanlanguage version, which was published in 1926.

  At close view, Švejk is pure propaganda aimed at winning support for the Czech national struggle and at pillorying the Austrian military machine, whose gross mismanagement of the war took little account of human suffering. However, the novel’s enduring importance lies in its pacifist message. Described as a deeply unhappy man, Hasek treated serious subjects humorously. “By seeming to make fun of its horrors,” wrote Cecil Parrott, author of Jaroslav Hasek: A Study of Švejk and the Short Stories, “he draws attention to the ghastly waste of human life in a way that no one can fault.” Saying one thing and meaning another, Hasek, like Švejk, “shows up the world war in all its infamy, idiocy and inhumanity so vividly … He stood above it from the very beginning. He just laughed at it.”