Lorre was up to mischief behind the scenes as well. Each day the makeup man sat him down, tinted his skin with grease, and curled his hair into tight ringlets. Getting the actor to sit still for the primping was often a lost cause. Lorre just disappeared and wound his way through the sets or ran off to hide in the studio attics. Just as suddenly he reappeared, late but ready to take up the business at hand.
Hitchcock, who thought John Gielgud a bit of a “Shakespearean highbrow,” took a vicarious pleasure in Lorre’s misdeeds behind the camera. In rehearsals the actor was very nice to Gielgud, saying he reminded him of Gustaf Gründgens, who had played Schränker, head of the underworld, in M.28 He spoke his lines as written and kept to his marks on the floor. Then the camera rolled. Lorre put in odd lines and positioned himself so that the camera would favor him, stealing the scene. Gielgud had seen this done on stage, but new to filmmaking, he did not know it could be done on a movie set. He stood helplessly by, fascinated but a little chafed, since his own role had been cut down by Hitchcock to divide interest between Lorre’s and Young’s roles. Lorre’s pranks lengthened the already long shooting days. Close to five o’clock every afternoon, Gielgud grew anxious about getting away in time to the New Theatre, where he was directing Romeo and Juliet and alternating the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with Laurence Olivier. Hitchcock often urged him to stay for just one more shot. A good sport, Gielgud chalked up the minor irritations to experience, leaving a memorably pleasant recollection of his work with Hitchcock and Lorre.
Eventually, however, Lorre’s antics wore thin. One day the actor came onto the set wearing an intricately woven waistcoat of many colors, of which he was obviously proud. “He displayed it to Hitch,” recalled Croydon, “who was standing with a cup of coffee in hand and made no bones about his opinion—just uptilted the coffee over the waistcoat. Lorre’s reaction was curious. He was taken aback, for a moment did not react and then merely adopted that furrowed forehead and pained expression in the eyes, turned on his heel and left the set!”
In his article for Film Weekly titled “My Spies,” Hitchcock discussed every major and minor player in Secret Agent—except Lorre, whom he conspicuously did not mention.29 Years later, Montagu shot down reports in the Hollywood trades of a third picture: “Sheer rubbish…. Hitch would not at that time dream of engaging him again. Beyond saying cryptically that the circumstances were less for Peter’s fault than ours I shall say no more.”30
Critics reacted less enthusiastically to Secret Agent than to either Hitchcock’s Thirty-Nine Steps or The Man Who Knew Too Much, charging excessive dialogue, a faulty sense of continuity, and a heavy-handed treatment of the romance. Even Hitchcock felt that the picture was static, the natural by-product of a story whose hero had a negative purpose.
Mexican audiences took special exception to the “hairless Mexican.” Secret Agent was passed with deletions by the original Mexican censor and ran two weeks at the Teatro Rex in Mexico City. However, when protesters almost burned down a second-run house, the Department of the Interior censor withdrew the film from exhibition.31
To the actors went the accolades. Once again, in an important and unusual role, Lorre fared better than the film itself. Hitchcock gave him much to say, and he said it in spoken and unspoken ways. The comic aspect of his characterization, wrote Hitchcock, had in it “something of Lorre’s humorous personality as his friends know it,” both heightening tension to a nerve-wracking pitch and underlining the political implications of placing loaded guns—and knives—in the hands of mischievous children to whom right and wrong is an expedient rather than a moral choice.
As “rather a jolly little fellow with a sense of humour and a deep appreciation of murder as a fine art,” Lorre struck Britain’s Film Weekly as “Sinister—But with a Difference.” New York Times film critic B.R. Crisler did not fail to note that Lorre “plays one of the most amusing and somehow one of the most wistfully appealing trigger men since Victor Moore; a homicidal virtuoso, a student of the theory as well as the practice of garroting and throat-slitting, repulsively curly and Oriental in make-up.”
No reviewer sang his praises louder or more eloquently than the New Republic’s Otis Ferguson:
He is one of the true characters of the theatre, having mastered loose oddities and disfigurements until the total is a style, childlike, beautiful, unfathomably wicked, always hinting at things it would not be good to know.
His style is most happily luminous in the intense focus and supple motion of movie cameras, for the keynote of any scene can be made visual through him. In close-ups, it is through the subtle shifts of eyes, scalp, mouth lines, the intricate relations of head to shoulders and shoulders to body. In mediumshots of groups, it is through his entire motion as a sort of supreme punctuation mark and underlineation. A harmless statement is thrown off in a low voice, and it is felt like the cut of a razor in Lorre, immediately in motion—the eyes in the head and the head on his shoulders and that breathless caged walk raising a period to double exclamation points. Or the wrong question is asked, and the whole figure freezes, dead stop, and then the eventual flowering of false warmth, the ice within it.
In the endpaper of Celia’s diary, Lorre had written, “Dear Untier, for 1936, the memorable year in which the fairylike rise of the owl begins,” and signed it with a sketch of an owl. Peter and Celia now called Santa Monica home. They needed only to formalize their two-year romance with America. On January 10, 1936, the Lorres declared their intention of residing permanently in the United States and applied for “Quota” immigration visas at the American Consular Service in London.32
By the end of the month, however, Lorre found himself in a Wellbeck nursing home, once again pursuing a fast cure for his addiction. Gaumont-British generously stood the cost of his treatment and Celia’s hotel bill at the Mayfair. The weekly checks of sixty pounds, along with his monthly earnings from Columbia, dutifully recorded in her diary, even allowed them to repay some of the money borrowed from Paul Falkenberg during their Paris sojourn. They also loaned two pounds (approximately 140 dollars in today’s currency) each to Marcus and Leo Mittler, whom Lorre credited with discovering him at the Stegreiftheater and putting him on the Breslau stage eleven years earlier. Though Peter was “very sick” and “without a chance to make money,” she wrote Dr. Samek on February 5, “we tell everyone that we are very well and that [he] went back into a sanitarium for a rest, because if people knew the truth, it would hurt him very badly in this business.” (As far as the public knew—at least those who read the trade papers—a case of the flu had delayed the actor’s return to Columbia for three weeks.) What she penned to Samek was the confidential truth. The studio payments were not enough to cover expenses. In a nutshell, they didn’t have a “Heller.” Taking legal action against them, she said, would do no one any good, especially Peter, whose condition couldn’t withstand such agitation. In four weeks, Celia assured the attorney, he would be healthy and ready to accept “some great offer here as well as in America.” Once he was again under contract, “we will pay.”33
Lorre was apparently well enough to attend the British premiere of Crime and Punishment at the Plaza on March 13. With some time to spare before their scheduled sailing from Southampton on April 22, the Lorres railed to Vienna, where the actor “showed his original face” to the public at the opening of his “Raskolnikov film.” While there, Peter and Celia also saw Franz Theodor Csokor and Karl Kraus, for the last time, as it turned out.34 They also stopped off in Budapest to visit Melanie and Alajos, still employed with Steyr-Werke, before returning to England and boarding the SS Washington, which docked at West Fourteenth Street in New York on April 30.
On May 7 Lorre gave his first American radio performance on Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann Yeast Hour, broadcast from the NBC Studio in Washington, D.C. “Doctor Mallaire,” wrote Variety, “gives both Jean Hersholt and Peter Lorre equal opportunity to shine in the sort of roles to which they are best suited.” Kindly playwright Hersholt creates
a medico (Lorre) so ghastly that he takes his own life in order to rid himself of his creation. Overnight, the course of his movie career had found its correlate in radio. With a voice as recognizable as his face, Lorre was a natural radio talent. The actor later joked to Bob Hope on The Pepsodent Show that he was born in a library and that’s why he talked in a low, quiet voice. Indeed, several years later, a movie pressbook featured a promotional piece titled “Bogey Lorre on Radio Kiddie Hour” that claimed the actor’s voice had been chosen from a recent survey of recorded deliveries as “best suited for child audiences” because it combined “soothing and calming qualities most likely to instill confidence and quiet at the approaching bed time hour.” Whispering menace, childlike mewling, frantic inflections of an unhinged mind—all and much more comprised his vocal repertoire.
Even Lorre took a hand in overlapping the mediums. Shortly before guest starring on the MGM Radio Movie Club on November 20, he telegrammed Fritz Lang (“Dear Mole”) and asked permission to perform the monologue from M over the airwaves. Lang shot back his okay.35
Back in Hollywood, the actor was long on plans but short on work. On May 12 the Hollywood Reporter announced that Paramount Pictures—after having failed to interest John Barrymore or Paul Muni—had signed Lorre to star in The Monster, the next Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur film, adapted from Frederick J. Thwaites’s novel Mad Doctor, about a mentally twisted physician who murders his wives. Three days later, the trade paper reported that casting difficulties had put the skids to the planned production. When Michael Balcon denied rumors that Paramount would make the movie for Gaumont-British at its studios in Astoria, New York, The Monster was, to quote the trades, all washed up.36
The Pariser Tageblatt even rumored that Lorre and Paul Graetz would costar in a Hollywood production of Max Gorki’s Nachtasyl (Night Refuge).37
Lorre also figured in casting discussions for Cecil B. DeMille’s Dimitri, the story of an ambitious Cossack captain who passes himself off as Dimitri, the son of Ivan the Terrible and rightful heir to the throne, and becomes the czar of Russia.38 DeMille had worked the idea into a play as a teenager and later, with historian Harold Lamb, had set to work on a book.
By 1936 the director felt the time was ripe for the Russian Pancho Villa. “Dimitri is a character that American audiences will understand,” he told a conference of Paramount executives headed by studio head Adolph Zukor on August 23. “He is a Russian cowboy and will do all the things that our cowboys do.” DeMille said he wanted to forgo spectacle and bring the film in on a modest budget, without a star. Eliminating elaborate—and expensive—battle scenes, he argued, would allow him to concentrate on the intimate story of Dimitri, caught between two women’s love. “It is from rags to riches and back to rags, with a happy ending,” enthused the director. But Zukor pressed for a big cast. Without star backing, he cautioned, selling “a piece of Russian history that nobody knows about” would prove difficult. For the role of the dashing and courageous Dimitri, they talked Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, and Frederick March; and for the female lead, Claudette Colbert and Marlene Dietrich. Lionel Barrymore came first to mind for the part of the hated Boris Godonov, who murdered the real Dimitri. Zukor reminded them that Barrymore had been ill, looked bad, and would not do. Anyway, he was too old. They settled on Peter Lorre for the role, but like so many story ideas, this one died on the conference table.
The trades also rumored that Paramount had engaged Lorre for A Gun for Hire, an English murder mystery in the impressionistic style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which would be directed by Robert Florey.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, September 19, 1936, a fan poll encouraged Universal to go ahead with plans to remake The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Lorre as the probable star, nudging out Frederick March, Paul Muni, Ronald Colman, and Lionel Barrymore. This project, too, failed to materialize.39
Realizing full well that Columbia’s commitment to his film career had flagged, Lorre turned to the stage and a special project dear to his heart. Napoleon Bonaparte conquered the performing arts in the 1930s—it seemed that most actors secretly yearned to strut. Claude Rains, who had portrayed the “Little Corporal” on stage in The Man of Destiny, reprised his role in the Warner Bros.’ Hearts Divided (1936). The next year Metro released Conquest, with Charles Boyer playing Napoleon to Greta Garbo’s Countess Walewska. After acquiring the screen rights to Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon, Warner Bros. also announced—prematurely—that it had set Edward G. Robinson to star in a film version of the popular novel. Even John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, and Dick Barthelmess, reported the Los Angeles Times, had set their sights on the coveted role.40
Because of his striking physical resemblance to Napoleon—in height, weight, and beam—Lorre claimed that at least thirty theatrical producers had urged him to play the Corsican general. “I have wanted to play or rather to be Napoleon for many years,” he told a reporter for the Indianapolis Times.
In the spring of 1936, he finally threw his bicorn hat into the ring. While in Vienna in early spring, Lorre had renewed his acquaintance with Ferdinand Bruckner, a poet and playwright and founder of the Renaissance Theater, and learned he was working on a play about the French general. To play Napoleon on stage or screen, he maintained, would satisfy one of his three great ambitions, the others being to play “the good soldier Švejk” and to assume the title role in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Moreover, the actor was bent on alternating stage and screen and claimed that “for full artistic development, as well as for fun, the actor should work in both.” He and Bruckner talked it over. “Ironically I was the one man who shied away from the part,” explained Lorre, “because the figure of Napoleon has been so standardized, even unto his gestures and every small characteristic. All the existing plays held no surprises.” Lorre thought that any production about Napoleon would need a “new angle.” That angle, as Lorre put it, was the man behind the myth. “Most Napoleon plays tell the story of his rise to power,” said Bruckner. “Mine starts as Napoleon reigns and tells about the man—unfortunate in love and private life—the man who suffered—the man who died, disillusioned. I have tried to do that without taking away from his greatness—for he was a great man.” Lorre predicted that the role would take him “a long way from the torture man I am becoming on the screen.”
On April 30, after arriving in New York at midnight, Lorre telephoned playwright Sidney Kingsley and discussed the play until four in the morning.41At noon the next day, Kingsley sailed for Europe to see Bruckner. He called on the playwright in Paris and paid him an advance to complete Napoleon the First, which he would adapt, produce, and direct for the fall season in New York.
Well before Bruckner had put the finishing touches on his play, the trades speculated about the when and where of a probable film version. Several studios, they announced, were negotiating with Kingsley for screen rights. Paramount, which had put Bruckner under contract, even contemplated assigning Ernst Lubitsch to direct a film version at its Astoria studios. Louella Parsons also noted that Warner Bros., which had abandoned its Napoleon picture, was negotiating the sale of the Emil Ludwig script to Columbia, where Josef von Sternberg had just finished shooting tests of Lorre as Napoleon.
While Kingsley managed the logistics, Lorre gave thought and voice to his approach to the role: “If I were going to do Napoleon, I would look at his portraits and read about him—especially his letters—to get the feel. I would do my hair as his was done and wear his clothes, but otherwise I would merely put myself inside him.”
In the midst of preparations for the play, Lorre won release from his Columbia contract. Clearly, Harry Cohn did not know what to do with him. To the studio chief, Lorre was little more than an overspecialized actor for whom casting presented a persistent problem. In a year and a half, he had loaned him to Metro for Mad Love and agreed to Crime and Punishment, Lorre’s own idea. The actor longed for lighter roles to balance the darker side of his screen persona. But he was no match for the moguls. In Novembe
r Darryl F. Zanuck, vice president in charge of production at 20th Century-Fox, lured him into another long-term contract, again with the promise to showcase his versatility in a variety of screen roles. Lorre believed him. Even before the studio had time to retail the actor, it marketed his image as one of the “horror boys” in One in a Million (1936), a musical comedy introducing Norwegian Olympic skating champion Sonja Henie and featuring the Ritz Brothers as Karloff, Laughton, and Lorre (“I tell you! It’s not me! It’s the parts they give me!”).
4
SOFTLY, SOFTLY, CATCHEE MONKEY
In a company of fools a mental giant always sounds ridiculous.
—Peter Lorre in Crack-Up
I made the “Moto” series purposely. I wanted to get the flavor of M out of the cinema palate of the American fan.
—Peter Lorre
Lorre wanted to play comedy. 20th Century-Fox, which had accepted him—and he it—on a trial basis, met the actor halfway with a dual role in an actionmelodrama. Director Malcolm St. Clair had reportedly read the screenplay for Crack-Up (1937) and then sketched his ideas of what the characters might look like. Following his drawings, the casting department came up with Lorre for the role of Colonel Gimpy, the apparently feeble-minded, bugle-blowing mascot of an airship factory.1 “Colonel Gimpy was a character worth any actor’s while,” explained Lorre. “He’s just this side of sinister, but real, with a sense of humor and a fanatical fidelity to his code. I studied the role very carefully before accepting it, as I wanted to be sure that it was not the type to horrify audiences.”
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