But he had not outflanked his Austrian creditor, Dr. Samek, who was becoming impatient with his habitual excuses, solicitations, and broken promises. When the attorney threatened to take legal action, the cracks began to show. “I can’t give you a time when I can send money,” pleaded Celia, “because I just don’t know in or out.” She explained that the studio spread Peter’s twenty-week pay period over one-half year. Instead of earning $500 per week, he was actually making only $380. Worse yet, he brought home only $160 per week. The rest went for agents, insurance, and support of family and friends in Europe. Celia hoped they could send $100 per month and repay most of the loan by October, but she couldn’t promise. She could only assure him that they would do everything in their power to square accounts. “It is hugely depressing,” confided Celia, “that we have nothing for ourselves. We can’t even put away a dollar for times of need or sickness.” She hung all her hopes on his first American film: “It’s a very big work on which everything depends.”
The big work was, of course, Mad Love. Budgeted at $217,176.53 and scheduled for twenty-four shooting days, the picture began principal photography on May 6, 1935, under the direction of famed German cinematographer Karl Freund, who had compiled a list of impressive credits behind the camera during the 1920s, including Der Golem (1920), Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924), and Metropolis (1926). His innovative moving-camera technique had opened the door to the dramatic possibilities of the new medium. In 1929 Freund immigrated to the United States, bringing his genius to Universal Pictures, where he further distinguished himself on Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), besides directing seven pictures—most notably The Mummy (1932)—for that studio between 1933 and 1935. In early 1935 the “great master” moved to MGM, which gave him license to “specialize in unusual themes.” Mad Love marked the end of his directorial career and the renewal of his original vocation as cinematographer.14
For atmosphere, Freund looked to a past that he had helped to make, steeping Mad Love in German tradition rich in dark, brooding imagery. Before the picture even begins, the ominous shadow of Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre) passes over the opening titles. Suddenly a fist draws back and knocks out the glass on which the credits are printed, setting the stage for what is to follow—a miscellany of sinister shadows, oblique angles, staircases, and reflections. After gently pulling his audience into a fantastically macabre Theâtre des Horreurs, past hideous masks, a hanging dummy, and a headless hat checker, Freund shows Dr. Gogol sitting alone in his box seat. A shadow vertically splits his moon face and gleaming bald head, masking one side of his divided psyche. Later, Gogol returns to his operating room, whose walls Freund had painted black and brown to heighten the fantastic shadowy effect. Attired in a surgical cap and mask, which letterbox Lorre’s bulging eyes, the doctor tensely brushes his hand across his dripping forehead. Unable to continue, he pulls away the medical disguise and peers in the washroom mirror, which reflects the personification of his evil impulses.
Veteran horror scenarist John L. Balderston (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy)—who shared screen credit with Guy Endore and P.J. Wolfson—took another page from the same book. Arriving late in the process, he continued writing three weeks into filming, polishing dialogue and tailoring the starring role to Lorre. Described as “a mixture of saint and devil, fiend and child,” Gogol harks back—very loudly—to M. One moment the doctor comforts a lame girl whom he will make walk. The next, he witnesses a guillotining with sadistic satisfaction. Later in the script, the screenwriters, capping the point, instructed Freund and Lorre: “As he says these last two lines, and actually starts his strangling, his ‘M’ look, the ecstasy of the moment of murder, is on his face; his eyes protrude.”
Lorre balanced the constraints of the script against the independence allowed him by Freund, who, according to costar Frances Drake, “couldn’t leave the camera alone, which suited Peter very well.”15 Untethered from the director’s control, he sought to inject elements that set Gogol apart from any character he or anyone else had ever played.
“I believe the low-spoken villain,” explained the actor,
who is absolutely blasé about what he does, who works out a murder like a mathematical problem, for instance, is a much more terrifying fellow than the human fellow who commits a murder in a fit of anger. That type of villain is really not a villain at all—only the fellow whose temper got the better of him, and more to be pitied than anything else…. But at the same time this fellow is kind and tender to little Cora Sue Collins. He only is dangerous to a person when there is a reason for it. He does not hate mankind. But he is willing to ruin anyone to gain his ends. If being dangerous to a person doesn’t pay, he can be perfectly kind.
“Peter had definite ideas as to his character portrayal,” confirmed co-worker Keye Luke. “He was careful that his character had a sense of reality and vitality.” Where a gesture or look more economically expressed emotion, the actor scrapped dialogue. Likewise, when grease paint got in the way, he uncovered himself. “Make-up’s an excuse for an inability to act,” stated Lorre. “You can cheat people with a lot of make-up. An actor should find his expressions in his naked face. I would rather depend on facial expressions and the right shading of light to get the effect I desire, instead of resorting to the actual methods of disguise.” He even took credit for shaving his head, explaining, “It gives the idea that this character thinks of his science only and not of personal appearance.” These techniques, he allowed, didn’t apply so well to actresses. “They must be their beautiful selves,” said Lorre, “and lights and shadows do not beautify. But for the character player it is a perfect method.”
Although Freund and Lorre reportedly spent a day observing surgery at the Lutheran Hospital, the actor researched his role from within. “I never look at a person with a view of using his characteristics in a role. I don’t believe in imitation,” he explained. “My trick is to imagine. I imagine I’m the character, figure out what it would do, and thus live the role in a way. It may sound foolish—it is a certain strain. Other actors may work differently but I find that in my case it’s the best way to get what I want. I like to feel that I have really given the picture something, and don’t feel that way unless I am completely absorbed in the character.”16
Lorre credited his imagination with introducing a new kind of villainy to the cinema. However, he balanced that menace against a soft vulnerability that was more real than imagined. “Peter was a very complex man,” said Drake, “who had a pathetic, sad quality about him. He wanted to meet me before his head was shaved so as not to scare me. My impression was that he was a very sensitive person, easily hurt.”
Like so many of his female friends and co-workers, handwriting analyst Shirley Spencer also diagnosed this aspect of his personality in his penmanship, which offered “an explanation of his ability to assume characters so utterly different from his own.” His signature reflected “his finesse, his subtle mind, his cleverness, and intriguing, unconventional imagination…. There is so much sympathy revealed in Mr. Lorre’s writing that I wonder he can hide it at all. He is warm-hearted, ardent, quickly responsive, and has a great desire to help others.”
Mad Love (subsequently retitled The Hands of Orlac, but previewed under its original title) opened at New York’s Roxy Theatre on August 2. As a satirical homage to the horror film, it bit a little too hard, falling “right in the middle between Art and Box Office.” Even by the horror-hyped standards of the day, the sexually frustrated Gogol, like Hans Beckert before him, struck a perverse chord. Public rejection of the “sick” picture, more horrible than horrific, registered at the box office, where it earned a domestic gross of only $170,000. Even with the better foreign earnings—it took in $194,000 abroad—MGM still lost $39,000. All the more reason for the studio to put Mad Love behind it.
Billed as the “Screen’s Strangest Sensation,” Lorre could not as easily forget his “first American production” in which
he “triumphs superbly in a characterization that is sheer horror. That is the important thing. Unfortunately, the picture is neither important nor particularly compelling, but it should serve to build a new star for American pictures…. His face is his fortune … his subtle changes of expression make it a fortune to be conjured with in no mean terms.”
The actor’s sharp-edged delineation of aberrant behavior was a tour de force that critics could not ignore, regardless of their opinions of the film. “With any of our conventional maniacs in the role of the deranged surgeon, the photoplay would frequently be dancing on the edge of burlesque,” wrote Andre Sennwald in the New York Times. “But Mr. Lorre, with his gift for supplementing a remarkable physical appearance with his acute perception of the mechanics of insanity, cuts deeply into the darkness of the morbid brain. It is an affirmation of his talent that he always holds his audience to a strict and terrible belief in his madness. He is one of the few actors in the world, for example, who can scream: ‘I have conquered science; why can’t I conquer love?’—and not seem just a trifle silly.”
It was to the actor’s range that writer Graham Greene so eloquently spoke in an article titled “The Genius of Peter Lorre,” which appeared in World Film News, July 1936:
To Lorre alone we owed the goodness, the tenderness of the vicious man. Those marble pupils in the pasty spherical head are like the eye-pieces of a microscope through which you can watch the tangled mind laid flat on the slide: love and lust, nobility and perversity, hatred of itself and despair jumping out at you from the jelly. His very features are metaphysical…. He is an actor of great profundity in a superficial art. It will always be his fate to be cramped, not only by the shortcomings of directors, not only by the financiers with their commercial demands, but by the Board of Film Censors [which threatened to ban Mad Love in Britain]. The financiers are not interested in psychological truth, and the Board do [sic] not recognize morality.
Beyond crediting Mad Love’s “very good” photography and direction, Lorre failed to muster any kind of endorsement for the film. On the contrary, he told one interviewer he didn’t think it a good picture and added that he did it only because he was tired of being idle. Asked if he enjoyed making it, the actor dissembled, “Well, that’s a tough question. I enjoy being myself more than I was permitted to in that film. I made it while we were preparing the script for ‘Crime and Punishment’—so my mind wasn’t entirely free for it.” Such reservations ran a distant second to the need for exposure. All he asked of his American debut was audience recognition. Unfortunately, the actor made too big a splash—and in the wrong pool. Overnight, he became one of the “horror boys” … “a one-man chamber of horrors” … “a pint-sized Boris Karloff.” Metro’s lurid ad campaign added insult to injury:
A WOMAN’S LOVE WAS WHAT HE CRAVED … and could not have! To win her, he would stop at nothing this side of Hell! Not since Lon Chaney, has the screen seen a performance to top this for soul-shattering thrills! Brilliant Star of “M” AND “THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH.” NOW … THE SENSATION THAT TOPS THEM ALL! Phantom of the Opera, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dracula, Frankenstein. To the great character creations of screen history … add the most amazing of them all! Peter Lorre, as the mysterious Dr. Gogol … feared by men … fascinating to women … achieves the acting triumph of years!
Silver Screen’s Whitney Williams predicted that “this offering of terror will climax all horror films.” Horror!—there was that word again. Lorre hated the sound of it. He took a strong stand, the first of many, and challenged Hollywood’s definition. “The way I feel about it,” he said, “is that the situation, not the acting, is what arouses the excitement and terror in a horror story. You can get the effect by means of inanimate objects just as well: a shadow on the wall, for example, or the sound of footsteps on a dark street. You could take my barber and put him in a horror story and, if the events were frightening enough, he would frighten the audience.”17
Lorre disliked horror films and thought that the recent spate of pictures in that genre appealed to base instincts:
I hold no brief for the purely horrific film. I agree, with its critics, that its appeal is essentially evil. The average horror film from Hollywood is either absolutely obvious and silly, or else it appeals to the sadistic emotions of the audience by showing scenes of torture, whippings, etc. It is not only the horror film which does this. Certain films purporting to be historically accurate make it their business to stress licentiousness and cruelty. Something should be done to prevent film producers from deliberately setting out to appeal to base instincts by glorifying depravity…. There is all the difference in the world between a film which is uncanny and fascinating because the psychology of evil has been carefully studied; and the entirely worthless effort intended merely to bring shekels to the box-office. Although I condemn the latter, I do think that, just as there is room in literature for imaginative horror, so there is room for it in films.
But Lorre’s war of semantics fell on deaf ears. As late as 1963, he still protested his association with horror movies: “How this image always remains I don’t know, but it does remain. I have never played a single horror picture, as far as I can remember. I somehow got into that category, but it’s actually psychological terror I used to play, or do play.”18
Lorre likewise labeled himself a psychological actor who, paraphrased Variety interviewer Cecilia Ager, “gets his effects from within, intuitively—like an artist—not from scientific observation.” His portrayals, he pointed out, were realistic, not fantastic; intellectual, not physical. Nor did he resort to cosmetics to simulate disfigurements, and held that actors coated in latex were no more than impressionists. Makeup, he reminded, should characterize, not scare.
In the realm of psychological terror, Lorre’s tastes inclined toward Poe. “It is a shame that people know so little about Edgar Allan Poe,” he lamented. “They all recognize his name, of course, but how many people today have read much of Poe? His achievements as a critic were great, and his sarcasm and wit are qualities of which few are aware.” On the Producers Studio set, the actor halted production of The Raven for one minute of silence on October 7, 1962, in honor of Poe’s death exactly 113 years earlier. “I cannot find any expression for my respect for the poor wretched life of that man,” he said, “and what [we have] to thank him for.” Lorre was especially grateful for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which crosscut his interest in psychoanalysis: “Poe never heard of psychoanalysis, or modern psychology, but he knew about it, just the same. The double symbolism of the ‘eye’ and the ‘heart’ in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ anticipated Freud by many years. You can find a ‘scientific’ explanation of that tale in Freud, but Poe was nearer the truth, because he knew that psychoanalysis is not, as Freud said, a ‘nature study,’ but an expression of the deepest secrets of the heart and mind.”
Lorre talked of bringing the tale to the screen. He noted that Poe had portrayed a murderer who was “perfectly harmless and inoffensive” under normal circumstances. Said Lorre: “But he was not responsible for his highly strung personality, which snapped under the strain. It was because this young man was perfectly ordinary that the story became terrible. This is the sort of horror we should aim to show in the cinema. The only way I can describe it is to say it is psychological horror.”19
Above all, Lorre wanted people to know that he did not want to become typed, as anything: “I am less complicated than anyone I know. My interests and instincts, I am afraid, are strictly normal, but I have always had, even as a child, a fanatical absorption into getting into people’s character—in trying to unmask them and their motives. This, I suppose, is what has interested me so much in playing pathological roles, but has not, I want to say emphatically, circumscribed my ambitions, for I want to play all kinds of parts. I don’t care whether it is tragedy or comedy if it is an authentic portrayal of life.”
His words were swept away by the landslide of public opinion. “Lorre hopes that he will not become ty
ped for horror roles,” wrote Kate Cameron in the New York Sunday News, “but since he seems to possess an uncanny power for projecting horror, I’m afraid Hollywood will have little else for him to do.” Lorre’s plans to make his mark in a literary classic had backfired. The shrewd strategist had outsmarted himself. Hollywood was ready for him, but only on its terms; if it could not sell the actor, then it would market the image.
Mad Love had finished production on June 14. Lorre barely had time to grow out his hair before beginning work on Crime and Punishment. Already he had been sitting in with S.K. Lauren, who was working on the screenplay. Now, in the last week of June, he went into a script huddle with his director, Josef von Sternberg.
At that time, von Sternberg enjoyed the reputation of a temperamental artist-poet who painted his pictorial canvasses with broad strokes of light and shadow. “The screen was his medium,” wrote Aeneas MacKenzie, “not the camera.” Von Sternberg looked high and low for abstract human emotion; in gutters and palaces he found the spiritual power for his visual ideology. Many felt that von Sternberg had surrendered to self-indulgence in his Hollywood pictures with Marlene Dietrich and charged the “Leonardo of the Lenses” with wallowing in feminine mystique, drawing exotic—and erotic—fantasies from his own private dream world.
Von Sternberg also had earned a reputation as a vicious autocrat. In his mean-spirited and self-serving autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, he fed his image as a martinet—and a neglected genius. He possessed “an irresistible need to create and to carry alone the weight of his creation,” wrote Jean de Baroncelli in Le Monde. When von Sternberg exercised creative control, he accepted full responsibility for the outcome. Similarly, he disowned anything he felt didn’t carry his signature. He utterly repudiated Crime and Punishment:
The Lost One Page 18