Gimpy toots his horn, makes day and night owl faces—a bit of business added by Lorre—and roams the hangar spouting his own quirky version of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Hidden in the verbiage is a poetic wit that is discrepant with Gimpy’s reputation as a nitwit: “Madness … is a very common malady. Can it be that they are mad themselves who call me mad? If you only knew what was going on in this head of mind. If you only knew …”
Behind closed doors, however, Gimpy trades giddy for grave when he assumes his true identity as master spy Baron Rudolf Maximilian Taggart, a coldblooded operative who bribes world-famous pilot Ace Martin (Brian Donlevy) into stealing the blueprints for a newfangled airplane propeller.
In the final scenes aboard a cracked-up airship, blown off course in a raging storm over the Atlantic, Gimpy and John P. Fleming (Ralph Morgan), whose company built the plane, race paper sailboats—again, Lorre’s own idea—in the flooded cockpit. With water rising, the self-exposed spy, the disillusioned-in-love airplane manufacturer, and the double-crossing pilot—each a failure in his own way—chum up for a last smoke, three on a match.
Crack-Up was, by all accounts, a weak entry in the single-feature circuit. Critics complained that the director had put Lorre on too short a lead, tugging him back into conventional stereotyping. More freedom, they argued, would have earned its own reward in a greater show of versatility. Hollywood had “not got within a mile yet of Mr. Lorre’s special quality,” reproved film critic C.A. Lejeune in the London Observer. “For that matter, as long as they go on taking carbon copies of ‘M indefinitely, each fainter and more derivative than the last one, I can’t see that they ever will.”
If Fox had not handed Lorre a blank check, it at least had asked something new of him—comedy. Discharging a debt to his screen past and at the same time unleashing his comic instincts, Lorre’s dual role bore the stamp of his best performances. First as Gimpy, then as the Baron, he demonstrated his range, disjoining good and evil and ultimately absorbing them into a human whole in death.
The studio pushed production of Crack-Up—compressing its schedule to eighteen days—enabling Lorre to check out early. On October 26 he hopped the “Chief’ and headed to New York to begin rehearsals for Napoleon the First. Before leaving, however, he took time to file a “Certificate of Alien Claiming Residence in United States,” the next bureaucratic step toward becoming a citizen. Darryl F. Zanuck urged the actor to postpone his appearance on Broadway until he had made several pictures under the new agreement.2 No longer the babe in the woods who trustingly swallowed the sugarcoated promises of studio chiefs, Lorre said no and insisted on a clause that would allow him to remain with the play to its finish and to accept the title role in a possible film version, even if it were acquired by a rival studio. Unless Fox bought the rights to Napoleon, his contract gave him the option of indefinitely postponing his return to the West Coast.
Ferdinand Bruckner had been collaborating with Lorre and Sidney Kingsley on the Napoleon script between film assignments: an original story for Sylvia Sidney, Lucretia Borgia for Marlene Dietrich, and a screenplay from Hotel Imperial for Ernst Lubitsch. Actually, Lorre had not followed the development of the play since their early discussions. Bruckner had worked on the play alone, devoting only his spare time to it. In an interview for the Los Angeles Times, the actor had optimistically stated that the play was “marvelously written,” though it is doubtful he had read a complete draft. Closer scrutiny told a different story. “We had anticipated a fine play,” lamented Kingsley, “but it was slipshod. We were very disappointed in the play and with Bruckner,” whom Lorre had earlier cited as his favorite author.
One need only read the surviving manuscript to understand their letdown. Napoleon the First is an ungainly and contorted jumble of scenes that falls woefully short of its goal of presenting a psychological study of the dictator projected through the medium of his private life. Far from preserving his greatness, Bruckner’s pitiably clay-footed hero staggers between the bedroom and the council room like a lovesick schoolboy.
When he arrived in New York, Lorre learned firsthand that further complications threatened to hand this Napoleon his Waterloo. Kingsley had been unable to cast the role of Josephine. Tallulah Bankhead, Judith Anderson, Fay Bainter, and Ruth Chatterton were all under consideration, but each was busy elsewhere. Gladys George, his last hope, had also turned down the part. With ten thousand dollars invested in costumes, set design, and advance payments to Lorre and Bruckner, Kingsley postponed the production in late November. Although his option on the play had another three months to go, Napoleon the First definitely was not for the l936 season.
With the cancellation of the play, Zanuck ordered Lorre to return for a supporting role in Nancy Steele Is Missing (1937), a prison melodrama starring Victor McLaglen, already in production. At Fox awaited the role of an erudite extortionist by the name of “Professor Sturm,” who admits going to the funeral of his last victim, not out of sentiment, but curiosity: “I was curious to see what they could do about that hole in his head.” On November 29, the latest of several projected opening dates of the play, the disappointed actor boarded a plane for Los Angeles. “A number of times in Europe I was scheduled to portray ‘Napoleon,’ and something always came up which necessitated canceling the production,” Lorre told a reporter in late December. “I’m not a superstitious man, but I am beginning to think insofar as Napoleon is concerned, I’m a jinxed man.” With production of the play tentatively scheduled for the next year, he still looked to fulfill the chief ambition of his life, to play Napoleon. “Will I ever get to do it?” he reflected. “I don’t know.”
On December 14 Fox set Lorre for a featured role in Slave Ship (1937), an action-drama starring Wallace Beery and Mickey Rooney that was scheduled to begin shooting the following week. At the last minute, however, health problems forced the actor to drop out. During production on Nancy Steele Is Missing, Lorre had taken a fast cure for drug addiction in Culver City. Barely able to complete the picture, he collapsed at the end of filming. In February he retired to Palm Springs for what the Hollywood Reporter euphemistically termed a ten-day rest, ruling out any immediate film appearances.3
In 1925 playwright and novelist Earl Derr Biggers introduced the Chinese sleuth Charlie Chan in a serialized version of his novel The House without a Key, published in the Saturday Evening Post. Hollywood wasted no time in converting the popular stories to celluloid. Pathé Studios released a ten-chapter serial of The House without a Key under the same title in 1926. Two years later, Universal produced the second Charlie Chan film, The Chinese Parrot, directed by Paul Leni. The popularity of the Chinese detective soon caught the attention of Fox Film Corporation (which merged with 20th Century Pictures in 1935 to form 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation). Between 1929 and 1942, the studio produced twenty-nine Chan films, cornering the market on Oriental detective pictures for more than a decade. Only after Chan’s tired legacy moved to Monogram Pictures in 1944 did his appeal begin to fade.
Biggers’s death in 1933 sharpened the public appetite for Oriental fiction. Not to be outdone by Collier’s, which was serializing Sax Rohmer’s “Fu Manchu” stories, the Post sent John P. Marquand, a well-established contributor to popular periodicals, to Peking in search of, in the author’s words, “a new Chinese character and a Chinese background,” with the idea that he translate his junket into a series of short stories for publication. “With the ignorance of a complete stranger, where every sight is strange,” Marquand recorded in his notebook, he traveled extensively throughout China, Korea, and Japan.
In the summer of 1934, one month after returning from the Orient, Marquand completed Ming Yellow (1935), a mystery novel rooted in firsthand impressions and secondhand anecdotes of bandit adventures. The next year he blended memory and imagination into No Hero, which introduced a counterespionage agent named Mr. Moto.4 Like Biggers’s celebrated Honolulu policeman, Marquand’s “Japanese G Man”—supposedly based on an ingratiating detec
tive caught shadowing the author in Japan—captured the public’s imagination. What the author had planned as a single spy story quickly developed into a series of detective thrillers. From 1936 to 1942, the Post and Little, Brown, and Company, which brought out trade editions of Marquand’s novels, inundated its readers with Moto tales.
To say that Marquand attached little importance to his Moto stories is something of an understatement. Like his critics, he denied them the title of literature and dismissed them merely as “carpentry work.” Although their obvious deficiencies—contrived plots, stock characters, and happy endings—argue against their artistic merit, Marquand’s biographer rightly singled out their redeeming strengths: the stories are well written, evoke a strong sense of place and history, and ring with the sights and sounds of the Orient.
Mr. Moto’s growing popularity also demanded a wider audience. In October 1935 Warner Bros. picked up the screen rights to No Hero for contract player Pat O’Brien. Variety also reported—incorrectly, as it turned out—that Metro had purchased Think Fast, Mr. Moto in July 1936.5
On January 11, 1937, Marquand signed a contract with Fox that committed him to submit “two stories … which we have the option to purchase for $5000 each” and provisioned an “additional $2500 for each story so purchased if the same is published in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST prior to the general release date of our motion picture based upon the same.” Marquand also gave Fox the right to create its own staff originals, for which the studio agreed to pay him three thousand dollars. To keep their agreement alive, the studio had either to purchase one of Marquand’s original story outlines or exercise the right to “make one picture based upon an original story utilizing the character created by our staff writers.”
The first year Fox purchased two of Marquand’s stories, That Girl and Mr. Moto, which became Think Fast, Mr. Moto, and Thank You, Mr. Moto, and created one staff original, Look Out, Mr. Moto. To get Mr. Moto off on the right foot, Zanuck promised to pump up production on Think Fast, Mr. Moto. Kenneth Macgowan, an associate producer with a string of A productions to his credit, was the man for the job. But kicking off what had the earmarks—and trappings—of a budget serial meant a step down the studio ladder. When Macgowan spurned the assignment, Mr. Moto became grist for executive producer Sol M. Wurtzel’s “sausage factory” B unit. Norman Foster, an actor turned writer-director who had been relegated to low-budget features, fell heir to the project. Thirty years later the benevolent director, who was loath to harm a fellow writer or to malign a dead one, admitted that the first draft screenplay for Think Fast, Mr. Moto horrified him. He set to work rewriting it, retaining only the story’s main figure, the names of several characters, and in the broadest sense, the setting. If the revised scenario bore little resemblance to the original screenplay, he thought it a good thing.
Foster was troubled by more than a second-rate script. To fill the starring role of Mr. Moto—described by Marquand as a “small man, delicate, almost fragile”—Wurtzel cast Peter Lorre, whose penchant for understated and subtle characterization seemed consistent with the Oriental ideal of philosophic calm. Foster felt that Lorre was utterly unsuitable for the part. “Peter was so unlike the Japanese,” he complained. “Everything was wrong with him, except the eyes.” Something else was wrong with him. When Foster asked to meet Lorre, he learned that the actor was undergoing treatment for drug addiction at West Hill Sanitarium in New York’s Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. A trip east confirmed his worst fears that Lorre was physically no match for a leading role in an action-adventure picture.
Foster counted on makeup and a stuntman to transform, albeit superficially, an ailing actor with a European accent into an athletic Japanese detective. With hair blacking, eyeliner, a blending of grease paints, and steel-rimmed glasses (the teeth were his own), the makeup department attuned cosmetic detail to current stereotypes. Except in scenes where Moto appears in disguise, Lorre resisted paint and putty, preferring to create his character from within. “Acting comes from the inside. As you think, so you look and so you appear,” he told a studio publicist. “Mr. Moto is a Japanese, a clever, swift-thinking, rather suave person. Well, then, I become that person and what I do is right. I do not need to study a real Japanese man to know what to do. That is wrong. There is a typed idea of each nationality and actors think they must imitate that idea, as if Japanese or Chinese men were not as varied as we are ourselves! All Chinese do not clasp their hands and run about with a jumpy step. Each man moves according to what he is. When you have imagined what he is, you must move as he does.”
Think Fast, Mr. Moto (1937) went over big with its preview audience. Wurtzel had wisely instructed Foster to build up the jujitsu and action sequences, elements lacking in the more methodical Chans. Harvey Parry was engaged to lend the character a vitality Lorre could not summon. Regarded by his peers as the “Dean of the Hollywood Stuntmen,” Parry (1901–85) was a living legend whose career spanned the Keystone Cops to Airplane II: The Sequel (1983). In over sixty years—and some six hundred-plus film and television credits—he worked for every major studio in Hollywood. During that time he stunted for such screen notables as Harold Lloyd, Tom Mix, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, to name only a few. Think Fast, Mr. Moto gave the stuntman plenty to do: he leapt over a counter, mixed it up hand-to-hand, and hurled bodies through the air. Lorre’s attachment to the wiry, self-effacing stuntman and the popularity of Mr. Moto’s gymnastics assured Parry’s future as the actor’s on-screen alter ego. Parry not only stunted for the actor at Fox, but also, on Lorre’s request, later at Warner Bros. and American International Pictures.
“At first it wasn’t supposed to be a series,” said Foster, who aspired to bigger and better productions. “The whole thing was done tongue-in-cheek. The producer didn’t know we were kidding.” Whether naive or simply resistant to the Moto hysteria gripping Fox, Foster definitely was ill-informed. Even before Think Fast, Mr. Moto went public on July 27, 1937, Variety served notice that the studio planned to plot Moto through Chan’s successful footsteps, facetiously predicting a cavalcade of Moto movies: “‘On Your Toes, Mr. Moto,’ ‘Be Lively, Mr. Moto,’ ‘Come Quickly, Mr. Moto,’ and ad infinitum until [the] inevitable climax of ‘Charlie Chan at Mr. Moto’s.’” Variety even carried news of Wurtzel’s upcoming trip to the Far East to draw out reaction of the Japanese government to the characterization of their fictional countryman by the “Continental horror specialist.”
Think Fast, Mr. Moto secured a foothold in the public imagination, multiplying itself by eight. Between July 1937 and July 1939, Lorre appeared in Think Fast, Mr. Moto; Thank You, Mr. Moto; Mr. Moto’s Gamble (which began as Charlie Chan at the Ringside—a.k.a. Charlie Chan at the Fights—but was redesigned as a Moto after Warner Oland, suffering from poor health, withdrew from production and died soon after); Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (from the staff original titled Look Out, Mr. Moto); Mysterious Mr. Moto (originally titled Mysterious Mr. Moto of Devil’s Island); Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (originally titled Winter Garden, then Mr. Moto in Egypt); Danger Island, based on John W. Vandercook’s novel Murder in Trinidad (originally adapted as a Chan and then converted to a Moto and retitled Mr. Moto in Trinidad, subsequently renamed Mr. Moto in Puerto Rico, then Mr. Moto in Terror Island); and Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation. For the two years the films were in production, Mr. Moto’s public rivaled that of Charlie Chan, no mean achievement.6
As Marquand’s formula became more familiar, Fox decided it could give better than it got. In 1938 it accepted his Mr. Moto in the Persian Oil Fields (which it never made) but rejected his Mr. Moto Takes Them On and Mr. Moto Is So Sorry. The studio also created five staff originals.7 At least a dozen writers helped fashion the inexorable succession of Moto movies. Norman Foster exercised quality control over the six screenplays for the films he also directed. “The first Moto script that was given to me was terrible,” he recalled, “and so were the rest.” Before they reached the actors, Foster felt compelled to re
work them. The late-night revisions exhausted him. Nonetheless, he sharpened the narrative in the unwrought screenplays and created a more authentic background, one drawn from his own experience as a young vagabond traveling about the Far East on tramp steamers.
Marquand’s reading public may well have asked themselves what Hollywood had done with his Orient, which was supremely merciless and abounding in secrets incomprehensible to the westerner. It wasn’t there. Working around tight shooting schedules—usually three to four weeks—Norman Foster barely managed to preserve even a semblance of eastern flavor. To help what he described as a “ridiculous situation,” he spiced the pictures with documentary footage from Fox’s “Magic Carpet of Movietone” travelogues. In Think Fast, Mr. Moto he matched shots from a Chinese New Year’s celebration with the narrative action filmed on the studio’s Sound Stage 7. In this way, and by planting period details, such as a Cambodian temple in Mr. Moto Takes a Chance, Foster worked to heighten the Oriental atmosphere. Because Marquand set his tales in exotic locales, Foster likewise varied the settings, using as his background San Francisco’s Chinatown; Peiping, China; Angkor, Cambodia; Devil’s Island; London’s Limehouse District; Port Said, Egypt; and Puerto Rico’s Great Salinas Swamp.
Abandoned, too, was Marquand’s political forecast. His apprehensions about Japan’s surging military might and global designs of expansion carry a portentous weight in retrospect. The only film to take an anti-Axis stand was Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1939), which vaguely suggested that Fascist powers were up to no good in the Mediterranean. Inasmuch as Fox relegated Mr. Moto to a shoestring budget, discarding Marquand’s monitions caused no ripple in the writers’ pool. In the end, Fox salvaged little more than Mr. Moto himself, translating him from a supporting role in the novels to a leading character on the screen.
Marquand characterized I.A. Moto—an agent in the service of Japan—as suave, polite, self-controlled, resourceful, and inscrutably furtive. “Adventurer, explorer, soldier of fortune,” says actor Thomas Beck in Thank You, Mr. Moto. “One of the Orient’s mysteries. No one knows very much about him, except that whenever he shows up, something usually happens.” In Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1939), his dossier describes him: “Nationality, Japanese. Age 35–40. Short. Ju-jitsu expert. Uses various disguises. Adept at magic. Usually works alone. Has been known to use doubles.” The on-screen Moto is scholarly, dutifully ingratiating, improbably indestructible, stoically imperturbable, and fond of cats and milk. To compete with Charlie Chan, Foster and his cowriters also sharpened his sleuthing skills, which are almost nonexistent in the stories.
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