The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Lorre felt there must be some higher motive for moviemaking than boxoffice receipts: “There are many actors who consider pictures merely as an easy way to make big money. Acting, if money is its only object, is a childish, undignified work.” The actor believed that life’s struggle had qualified him to play Raskolnikov. Like Dostoyevsky’s character, he had kept company with a guilty conscience. And like Dostoyevsky, he had kept faith with the idea that through suffering came understanding. Chemical dependency had sent him on an odyssey in search of himself. Lorre tried to come to grips with his drug problem through psychoanalysis, “though he never had any formal knowledge on the subject,” said noted psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson, whose thirty-year friendship with Lorre fed a profound understanding of his dreams and demons.22

  Peter was uneducated, yet he was an intellectual who had a marvelous intuitive grasp. Intuition—this is how Peter felt—empathy, psycho-mindedness, and rigorous intelligence. He analyzed himself because one, he wanted to help himself. He didn’t want to be put in the position of a patient. And two, he didn’t believe that enough was known to help him. He believed that no one could help him. He never could abide anything orthodox and made fun of all psychoanalysts. Peter was hostile to Freud early in his life. Freud seemed to have the answers and Peter couldn’t abide anybody that knew the answers.

  Lorre’s quest for self-understanding put him in touch with himself and the characters he played on screen. The actor felt that by helping himself, he was helping others. “There is great satisfaction,” he said, “in the thought that you may be helping people to understand their fellow men, even if these be monsters such as I played in ‘M.’ And people did understand that poor creature—at least thousands and thousands who wrote to me said they felt a certain amount of pity for the man who suffered himself as he became the victim of his pathological abnormalities.”

  With Brecht six thousand miles away and his chemical addiction as close as his own shadow, little wonder that psychology informed his acting style. “An actor, to be good, must be a psychologist,” declared Lorre. “He must outstrip the professional psychologists, who concern themselves only with a few phases of a subject’s mind. An actor must be a hundred percent psychologist—for he takes his character apart and reconstructs ALL his emotions. Then he takes those emotions into himself, becomes that character, be the character mad or not.” Sounding more like a disciple of Stanislavski—though he scorned “method” acting—than a student of Brecht, Lorre stated that the “actor must be the character, utterly.” Lorre repeatedly compared acting to an addiction: “Acting is like a drug and I’m an incurable addict.” He admitted that it was “the only thing I am really serious about. I’d get sick if I didn’t act. I need it for my nerves, just as others need stimulants.”

  Through the lyrics of facial expression, Lorre invited his audience to enter into the lives of the characters he portrayed on screen. To Lorre, the face “was an entrance way to some human being,” said Greenson. “It was the face that let you into the soul.” Corinne Calvet, a co-worker on Rope of Sand (1949), observed that “Peter Lorre’s mind was like a puppeteer, controlling the strings that pulled each of his facial muscles individually, setting the perfect expression for his role.” Lorre’s eyes told most of the story. Wide-eyed glances, minatory gazes, and baleful looks gave him, in one writer’s words, “the appearance of a Buddha contemplating the mysteries and miseries of the human soul.” Writers described them as bulging, protruding, globular, and poached.23 Writer and producer Hal Kanter said they were “very far apart, like a hammerhead shark.” One day, explained Kanter, he and Lorre dropped by the Key Club across the street from NBC on Sunset and Vine for a loosening libation after rehearsals for The George Gobel Show. While sitting at its horseshoe bar, they looked in the mirror and noticed a man glance up and down.

  “There’s a guy to my right,” said Peter, “who wants to engage me in a stare-down and make me blink. Wherever I go, people try to do that to me, like a gunfighter who goes into a small town. You watch this guy. I’m going to turn and look at him and I guarantee you he’s going to blink first.” Suddenly he turned and engaged this guy’s eyes and stared at him. It took about twenty seconds and the guy got up and left. Peter said the secret is that no one can stare him down because his eyes are so far apart.

  “I defy you to look into both of my eyes at once. You can’t do it. Now when I worked with actors that I liked—Bogie was a prime example—I taught him how to act with me: ‘Just pick one eye and look at it. The camera will never know the difference.’”

  If Lorre looked like a tadpole, he behaved like a chameleon, able to adjust himself to any director’s style, whether expressionist, epic, or method. While speaking a gestic language in Mann ist Mann for Brecht, he had crawled under the skin of a child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M. He was, in a word, adaptable. In America, his “psycho-minded” acting methods, which showed not only the influence of Jacob Moreno, but also the stimulus of his inner demons, had crystallized almost overnight. Fortunately for the actor, he made his first two appearances in literary properties—Les mains d’Orlac, a French novel, and Crime and Punishment, a Russian classic—that had a built-in tolerance for traditional acting styles. Lorre seemed at times stiff and mannered in his early American outings, but as the past receded and he became more comfortable with his new home, his outlook relaxed and his acting became more spontaneous.

  Others were not so lucky. Many émigré actors carried their European backgrounds in their voices and gestures, like so much cultural baggage. “Closely obliged to their spiritual origins,” they felt the need to preserve the past. Breaking with tradition became one of the most difficult steps in the integration process. What they failed to understand was that in America, acting was as much an attitude as an art. Lorre’s theatrical training and experience had been more avant-garde than classical, allowing him a flexibility denied others. He had never developed the histrionic flair and overprojection of silent film actors. A perceived staginess stigmatized European actors and, rightly or wrongly, relegated prominent actors—Fritz Kortner, Alexander Granach, Curt Bois—to minor roles. Having “an inborn gift for the naturalistic style, an inexhaustible imagination for the details of modern life,” American actors behaved informally, independently, and freely, all qualities that encouraged Lorre to steer his own course.24

  By the time Lorre had the opportunity to assess critical reaction to his performance in Crime and Punishment, he was no longer in the country, having left for London three weeks prior to the film’s release. In April Michael Balcon had signed him for the role of the “Hairless Mexican” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936). Even before von Sternberg had finished his rough cut and shot retakes, Balcon was cabling and telephoning Harry Cohn daily for a clearance decision on the actor. Unless Lorre arrived at Gaumont-British within the week, threatened Balcon, he would recast Conrad Veidt in the role of the tittering assassin.

  The Lorres, along with Billy Wilder, who planned to visit his mother in Vienna, climbed aboard the Santa Fe Chief on October 21. Wilder looked forward to an evening repast, a pleasant reunion. “That was the plan,” he recalled. But the next morning a sharp rap on his compartment door woke him.

  It was Celia Lovsky, and she seemed very agitated.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Peter is in trouble. He’s taking a medicine and we need help right away because he is in very bad shape.” Whatever the medicine was in—she didn’t describe it to me—had broken.

  “Well, have you got the prescription?”

  She gave it to me and I went to the conductor and I told him to radio to the next stop. And I told him there was a very sick man and he needs this medicine. Then I went back to the compartment and Celia was trying to calm Peter down, hold him down. He was in excruciating pain and absolutely suicidal. If he would have been able to open the window, he would have thrown himself out of the train, so we pacified him. Now the train is slowing down and I go out and it
stops and there is a man. I instantly recognize by the little satchel in his hand and his straw hat that this must be the doctor. So I identify myself.

  “Let’s go,” I said, “because we only are stopping here for five minutes. Did you bring the medicine?”

  “I did not bring the medicine,” said the doctor, “and I cannot help this man because the prescription is for morphine.”

  I begged and pleaded, but he said that he absolutely could not do it. The train started again, and again we had to calm down Peter and it was not an easy task. He was just like a mad man. Then Cilly and I decided to send a wire to the next stop, which was Albuquerque, to have an ambulance ready for him. There indeed was an ambulance. And there were two nurses and a doctor. It was a Catholic Hospital [St. Joseph’s] and we got him off the train with Cilly and their luggage. And I went on because I knew this man needed hospital attention.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve lost my chums and I’ve got to go alone.”

  Now we dissolve and I’m on the boat, and lo and behold there’s Celia and Peter.

  “How is this?”

  “I’m absolutely marvelous,” said Peter, “just fine. Those were wonderful people there in that hospital. In fact, I think I’ve got enough medicine to get me to Europe.”

  Peter had been provisioned by the nuns at the hospital. Naturally, he charmed them all. He gave me the long story about his operation and why he needed the morphine…. So, we were on the Berengaria and he was in high spirits, winging it, innocently.25

  By the time Lorre arrived in Southampton on November 1, Secret Agent was well under way at Shepherd’s Bush. Montagu had met the actor when the ship made an interim stop at Cherbourg, France, and briefed him on the story and his role in it. He and Hitchcock had been assigned by Gaumont-British to make a film from Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden stories, based on the author’s own experiences as an agent of the British Intelligence Division of the army in World War I.26 They chose to develop “The Hairless Mexican” and considered Lorre ideal for the name part. Maugham’s “hairless Mexican” is just that, hairless and Mexican. However, in the film he is called that “chiefly because he’s got a lot of curly hair and isn’t a Mexican.” Lorre was glad he would not have to make the supreme tonsorial sacrifice twice in six months. “In any case,” he said, “the hairless Mexican is the name of a dog in America—a nasty, naked looking little animal.” The makeup man joined the train at Southampton and curled the actor’s hair.

  Deeply grateful to Balcon, Montagu, and Hitchcock for launching his career in the English-speaking world, Lorre was anxious to show his appreciation. He especially enjoyed the sense of continuity at Gaumont-British, where he would work with the same unit that had made The Man Who Knew Too Much, from the director to the electricians.

  In Secret Agent, Richard Ashenden (John Gielgud) is charged with the mission of preventing a German agent from reaching the Middle East and enlisting Arab support in World War I. Finding no glory in sanctioned murder, he is fraught with moral doubt about killing in cold blood. Elsa (Madeleine Carroll) has been assigned by British Intelligence to pose as Ashenden’s wife, a role she plays with stereotypical vacuity. They are assisted by the General (Lorre), a professional assassin to whom murder is child’s play. Sporting oiled locks, gold earring, wing collar, king-size carnation, and capacious checked overcoat, he splits the difference between pantaloon and pander, with heavily accented pidgin English to round out the paradox. Both cherub and imp, he impulsively plots assassination one moment and scuttles after his companions like a lost waif the next.

  “When we wanted for ‘Secret Agent’ a potential murderer,” said associate producer Ivor Montagu, “engaged by a British spy to kill a suspected German spy (and finally killing the wrong man by mistake) in Switzerland during the First World War, a very difficult part, we all (Hitch and I especially, Balcon too) wanted Peter. Because we had got on with him so well and knew what he could do.” Hitchcock put Lorre’s “extremely deceptive” screen personality to use. Knowing that humor made his menace more powerful—and ambiguous—the director and his screenwriter Charles Bennett wittingly built on the legacy of sexual pathology in M and The Man Who Knew Too Much.

  Hitchcock introduces the General as a notorious womanizer pursuing a young girl from a cellar during an air raid. “I’d rather be upstairs with the bombs than downstairs with some people,” she squeals.

  “A lady killer, huh?” queries Ashenden.

  “Not just ladies,” answers R (Charles Carson), his boss.

  The General is beguiled by Elsa, “beautiful woman—lady—girl!” Infuriated that Ashenden and not he has been assigned a wife as part of his cover, the General rampages through the bathroom. Only after he has pawed wildly at a roll of toilet paper, mussed his hair, wrenched his tie, and swept the shelves of bottles does his tantrum subside. He is a whimpering child once again. Later, the realization that Elsa is not married to Ashenden renews his hope that “maybe affections of beautiful lady are free for me? Completely free?”

  Ashenden and the General discover that their Swiss contact has been strangled in a church. The corpse’s hands rest on the organ keyboard, producing an eerie drone. Initially impressed by the job, the artful assassin offers a professional critique with an innocent smile: “Nice work! Very neat!” However, after finding a button from the murderer’s coat in the victim’s hand, he recants: “Not so neat after all…. Me better, much better.” Throughout the scene, he plays with his knife as if it were a toy, like a youngster who has no conception of good or evil.

  They locate their target. Delighted, the General mimes the cutting of a throat. When Ashenden declines to participate, he eagerly takes over. Later Ashenden and Elsa sit soberly at a village celebration, while the General teases a buxom native girl, tossing a chocolate croquette down her décolletage. (In the script, she “waves a comically deprecating finger at him … he offers to get it out for her, but she shakes her head as she inserts her fingers to retrieve the chocolate.”) News that the agents have assassinated the wrong man numbs Ashenden and Elsa, but for the cackling General, the mistake is a great joke. In a later scene, a sharply focused Ashenden grapples with clear moral issues. Behind him looms the murky image of the General, who is unburdened by his conscience.

  Bound for Constantinople on the Orient Express, Ashenden, Elsa, the General, and Marvin (Robert Young), the enemy agent, confront each other only minutes before the troop-filled train on which they are traveling is derailed in a bomb attack. Trapped beneath the wreckage, the mortally wounded German agent pleads for a drink of water. Incautiously, the General puts down his pistol, reaches into his coat pocket to retrieve a flask, and is shot in the back by the dying spy.

  The shooting script of Secret Agent contained alternative endings. In the first, the General responds to Marvin’s cry for water with a flask of brandy and then with a grin shoots the entrapped spy in cold blood. Grabbing the flask off the floor before it runs out, he wipes the mouthpiece and offers it to Ashenden and Elsa, adding, “This job take much long time, my friends, maybe perhaps I am getting old.” They both turn away “shudderingly,” and the General, “with a show of nonchalance, proceeds to drink the brandy himself.” The picture fades out. In the second, the General aims his pistol at Marvin, but the spy dies before he can shoot him. On this note Ashenden cries, “He’s beaten you—thank Christ, he’s beaten you!” as Elsa breaks down, sobbing, into his arms.

  According to the press, the British Board of Film Censors refused to allow the General to murder Marvin in cold blood.27 But Balcon, Montagu, and Hitchcock did not recall any problems with the scene. Montagu maintained that “Mich [Michael Balcon] would never have liked to be so rough as the first ending (which shows Peter grab the falling flask after the shot Young has dropped it, and drink from it himself). We probably shot both and however much we may have preferred it realized it wouldn’t do for GB…. I do not think the censor ever saw the first ‘rougher’ alternative.”

  During shooting
, it also occurred to Montagu to make the train crash more realistic. He asked Len Lye to hand-paint the trade-show copy of the film, so that

  at the moment of the crash, chaos resulted on the screen, sprocket holes flashed about and then tongues of red and yellow (hand-painted fire), then darkness a moment, before the scene resumed with various characters dead or alive amidst the wreckage. Hitch was a bit reluctant at first, but in the end, when we got it ready and viewed our handiwork in the projection theatre we had an instant triumph—too much of a triumph, because the projectionist instantly stopped projecting and when he’d examined the film and found out what we’d done he came down out of his box into the theatre and threatened to break both our heads. There was a bit of a barney afterwards. I wanted to keep it in and at least see how it went at the trade show. Mich hesitated. Eventually at the eleventh hour, Mui Diche, in charge of negative cutting and lab work etc. prevailed on Mich to order it taken out. Neither trade show nor censor, nor anyone else ever saw it, except ourselves.

  Although “this part [the General] was much more important and unusual,” said Montagu, “Peter interpreted it excellently. No acting problems or disappointments—Hitch, I and he understood each other easily and there were no directing or acting problems between us.”

  Memory failed the associate producer: there was one problem—Lorre’s drug addiction. “That Lorre needed his shots, there was no doubt,” recalled studio manager John Croydon, who had the unenviable job of keeping a lid on the actor’s addiction. Negative publicity would have tarnished the studio’s image. Hugh Finlay, publicity chief at “the Bush,” was assigned the task of handling car transport at the end of the day’s shooting, when he smuggled Lorre to and from a Harley Street specialist for injections of morphine. Croydon believed that the production high flyers never caught on, although the unit knew of the frequent trips.