The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  In his film debut, “Kentaro” Moto is also supremely sinister, a skilled hunter who kills without compunction. When a ship’s steward pulls a knife, he hurls him overboard with studied cold-bloodedness. Foster believed that the actor’s “unusual sinister quality” tallied nicely with Moto’s shadowy image. Lorre explained this threatening edge to a studio publicist:

  Menace in nature always is silent. Sometimes it is beautiful. A copperhead snake has little or no facial expression, yet it needs only to raise its head to strike terror into the heart. The famous Gila monster, native American lizard, resembles a beautiful beaded bag. Yet its bite is more deadly than most of the poisons known to mankind. Therefore, Mr. Moto, as I see him, is the character who never quite lets anyone know what he is going to do next. He completely fools the rest of the cast as well as the audience in the theatre—they don’t know whether he is on the side of crime or is an ally of justice.

  Moto’s prowess as a killer is unnerving. In Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937), the second installment in the series, the Japanese detective is attacked one night in the Gobi Desert. He stabs an assailant three times and buries the body in the earthen floor of his tent. “If I was casting a horror picture,” added a remarkably straight-faced Chick Chandler, speaking of Lorre as Mr. Moto in Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (1938), “I’d have him play the murderer.”

  In the first Moto film, Foster kept audiences guessing. Only after he is suspected of narcotics smuggling does Mr. Moto reveal that he is the managing director of the Dai Nippon Trading Company and a detective by hobby. In the second, however, he emerges as a confidential investigator for the International Association of Importers and an international policeman. Finally, his own popularity and the Chan legacy curbed Moto, bringing his shadowy form into clear focus. Foster and coauthor Philip MacDonald firmly tied Moto to the International Police, as Agent No. 673, in Mysterious Mr. Moto (1938). With wholesome respectability, the body count fell off, although not his glibness in the face of murder and the cold intensity of his violence. Shelving the clutter of Lorre’s menacing screen persona, the Moto-makers forged a Hollywood hero that was human and likable, if a more conventional protagonist. The publicity department, for reasons of its own, resisted the whitewashed Moto. Even after the character had metamorphosed into something more salutary, it clung to the mercurial Moto. A trailer for Mr. Moto’s Last Warning proclaimed, “KILL TO LIVE BECAME MOTO’S MOTTO!”

  “Instead of wrecking the series with poor production, as was done in the ‘Jeeves’ series with Arthur Treacher,” wrote Douglas W. Churchill, Hollywood reporter for the New York Times, “Fox has promised to embellish the J.P. Marquand yarns to make them first string entertainment, and in between give Lorre vehicles worthy of his talent.” Four months later, he observed that

  shooting is characterized by a happy indifference impossible in the more imposing epics…. Mr. Moto’s personal jungle is located just outside the stage where a political rally in “In Old Chicago” was taking place, and just as the players were in the mood of the eons of jungle silence, “The Blue Danube” from a healthy brass band would crash upon them. But if they have their limitations, they also have a latitude not possible in films made for more discriminating customers. Action had taken place beneath a tree in one scene and the next was a wider shot showing the tree and a man emerging from the temple. The camera man looked through his finder and said, “You’ll have to move either the tree or the rajah.” So they moved the tree.8

  Although Foster fiercely denied modeling one series after the other, the Chans—three of which he also directed—set the pace for production. “In those days, those were ‘B’ pictures,” pointed out Leon Ames, a co-worker on Mysterious Mr. Moto and Danger Island.

  It was sort of plotted for you from the head office and you just kept your schedule and finished the picture…. There was no great depth of characterization you had to do. You did your day’s work and went home at the end of the day and came back the next morning and did the next day’s work. There was no great creative requirement in the Motos. It was all spelled out and you did your job the best you could. You didn’t get any great histrionic things from anybody. They hired very proficient actors and you got them done on schedule and that’s it.

  Sensitive to the criticism that he fell headlong into the clichés of the Chans, Foster claimed he worked hard to set Moto apart from his Chinese cousin. Each Chan plot, he pointed out, contained a raft of red herrings, a series of clues and coincidences, a stoic Chinese conversant in Confucianism, and often an impetuous offspring. The Chinese gumshoe systemically plodded his way to the resolution of a mystery, whereas Moto watched, waited, and sprang. Often working undercover and assuming an assortment of imaginative disguises—peddler, Mongolian camel driver, ancient guru, curio dealer, archaeologist—he most often played a lone hand. Moto collaborated only twice and both times in pictures without Foster at the helm. In Mr. Moto’s Gamble, a readapted Chan directed by James Tingling, Moto teamed up with Lieutenant Riggs (Harold Huber) to solve a boxer’s murder. Even Charlie Chan’s son, Lee Chan (Keye Luke), and “Knock-out” Wellington (Maxie Rosenbloom), students in Moto’s criminology class, manage to stumble onto a few clues, as well as a few laughs. Again, in Danger Island, directed by Herbert Leeds, the dimwitted “Twister” McGurk (Warren Hymer) tags along with the graciously chagrined Moto.

  Feeling that the same Fox contract players turned up again and again in the Chans, Foster went out of his way to people the Moto movies with new faces, such as Virginia Field, Dick Baldwin, Chick Chandler, and Amanda Duff—and established character actors, such as John Carradine, Sig Rumann, Joseph Schildkraut, Douglass Dumbrille, and Leon Ames, just to name a few. Foster prided himself on presenting as fresh a format as possible.9

  In 1938 a magazine fan writers poll tagged Lorre as “poor copy.” Whether or not Fox believed it, the studio went to work on his screen image. In his autobiography, The Name above the Title, director Frank Capra wrote that “95 percent of Hollywood’s ‘news’ originates in studio publicity departments.” Publicity director Harry Brand blitzed readers with stories of the actor’s immersion into Japanese culture, all in preparation for his role as Mr. Moto. “A stickler for realism,” he claimed, Lorre frequented Japanese restaurants, interviewed Japanese laborers in the fields, and read Japanese novels and poetry and the religious writings of Buddhism and Shintoism.

  Brand also endowed the actor with a mastery of martial arts. Overnight, Lorre became a jujitsu expert under the tutelage of Professor Haiku Watsutu: “The first guy he tossed about was Foster himself … [who] landed on his back, right in the middle of the set, without having the remotest idea how he got there.” Lorre and actor Warren Hymer reportedly “attended the professional heavyweight matches to get ideas for their own clash before the cameras” in Danger Island. The actor even “invaded the gymnasiums in the Oriental section of Los Angeles and matched his skill against one of the Judo students.” Because he “performed all the accepted movie stunts himself” in the Moto movies—including wrestling 220-pound Sig Rumann and having bullets pumped at his steel vest in Think Fast, Mr. Moto—the Stuntman’s Association, whose members had purportedly coached Lorre in jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, and acrobatics, accorded him active membership in their select organization.

  None of it was true, of course, but the invented bruises, falls, broken fingers, torn ligaments, and nervous breakdowns, all incurred on behalf of the physically demanding role, nicely explained his retreats to area sanitariums, where, in reality, he wrestled with his chronic drug addiction.10 Years later, in a statement to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in New York, Lorre maintained that after two and a half to three months in the West Hill Sanitarium, he “came out of it completely cured” and that he did not again resort to narcotic drugs until November 1946. His memory had failed him. He had not, as he claimed, stayed completely free of addiction during his years at Fox. In 1936–37, Lorre reeled between the “on and off” prescription of Dilaudid and what he termed
“fast cures” at various sanitariums. Before undergoing treatment in New York, a doctor had “furnished me with narcotics by means of injections in his office and by issuing prescriptions to me … always in my own name, Peter Lorre.”

  One day Harvey Parry walked into the actor’s dressing room as a doctor stuck a needle into his arm. Lorre looked up, but said nothing. Parry turned away and left. Later, Lorre invited the stuntman to lunch at Fox’s Café de Paris.

  “Were you surprised today?” asked Lorre.

  “What’s that?” replied Parry.

  “When you walked in and saw me doing that thing.”

  “I never noticed.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Well, Peter, it’s none of my business.”

  “I’ve got to do something to relax. I’ve made a couple of these things and they’re a little more than I imagined. The physical end of it bothers me, the running, the jumping, even driving a car—I’m a lousy driver. I’ve just got to get some relaxation and the doctor told me that this would help me.”

  Parry suspected someone at the studio of playing a little game to quietly discourage Lorre’s use of morphine. The Narcotics Bureau would receive an anonymous tip the actor had some “stuff” on the lot. Investigating officers would be promptly dispatched, but by the time they arrived, any trace of the drug had disappeared. Always, claimed Parry, someone on the inside had warned Lorre.

  During the making of the Warner Bros. film All Through the Night a few years later, Lorre balked at repeating a take that, to his mind, hardly merited another try. Vincent Sherman, the director, said to him, jokingly, “Don’t give me that, Peter. Don’t tell me that you’re so particular. How the hell did you make all those Mr. Motos over at 20th Century-Fox?”

  “I took dope,” Lorre solemnly answered.

  “Everybody laughed like hell at that,” said Sherman, who later learned it was true.

  Foster felt that Lorre’s addiction got in the way of his characterization of Mr. Moto.11 “Though Peter didn’t make Moto as believable as Oland made Chan,” he said in his defense, “he did his best to be like the Japanese. ‘Oh, so’s’ might not have made it, but it was a step in the right direction.” Where the actor fell short, Foster stepped in as writer and director. “Peter was very sick during the making of these films,” said Foster. “Only when I could con him into doing it did he do any judo or stunts. He was hardly able to run up the stairs. So we took many takes and wrote and rewrote.” In Mysterious Mr. Moto, Moto was scripted to perform a coin trick. “Peter couldn’t do this either,” added Foster. “I finally gave up stunts requiring manual dexterity because it was just too expensive.”

  Lorre’s chemical dependency put him on an emotional rollercoaster. On good days, he buttonholed cast and crew members into rounds of cribbage and gin rummy. Or made time for a little monkey business. Ames recalled that “Peter was not an attractive physical specimen to women, but he had a great sense of humor. He would say, ‘Do you think you could get used to my body?’ But I didn’t know whether he meant it or was kidding. He was a he-man as far as I knew in every respect because he was on the make for every broad in the picture, but he did it in kind of a funny, charming way.”

  On the downside, however, it darkened his disposition. During those times, the actor became anxious and depressed. “In the mornings on the set,” Robert Anthony Foster remembered his father telling him, “he would turn up his sad eyes like an abandoned waif: ‘Oh, Norman. Too early to be making faces.’” Between scenes, he retreated to his portable dressing room, where he listened—entranced, incredulous, dispirited—to Hitler assailing the Jews over the airwaves. Foster once interrupted him, saying, “I’m sorry, Peter, but we need you.”

  “The whole world is falling apart,” screamed Lorre, nose running, saliva dripping from his mouth, “and you want me to make a picture!”

  “Sickness?” said Parry. “Yes, you could tell Peter was sick for the simple reason he was sulky. He would go in a hole. He’d say, ‘I’m going to my dressing room.’ And he’d be there lying down on the couch and have a book, eyes wide open, and not be reading. His home life got bad and he didn’t call the people he used to.”

  Before the camera, however, Lorre left it all behind him. “He was a good actor,” said Leon Ames.

  He was a dependable actor and every scene we did was fun. He was very punctilious and he did everything by the book. He was very precise. All of his business and everything that he did in front of the camera was very studied. He was sharp. That man never missed a word or a line in his performance, ever. He was like a computer. That’s what threw me about him. If you had a scene that you’d rehearsed in a long shot, a medium shot, and a close-up, if he had a cigarette that was half smoked or if he had to do this or that, he never varied in matching the shots. He was an expert at it…. It was part of him. I saw no evidence of him ever being influenced by anything other than his job. He was a technical actor and you had to be good to cope with him.

  Harvey Parry agreed and thought that Lorre enjoyed the characterization: “I would hear him sit down with various people, whether it be Foster or the fellow he was doing the scene with, and he always referred to, ‘This is how I think he lives. This is what I think he’d do. I don’t think this man would do this.’ So he was studying the character. He was serious. It wasn’t a case of trying to duck something, then let the writer put it in.”

  Lorre, perhaps naively, credited the sustained popularity of the Moto series to “brain above brawn.” More realistically, it was plenty of action that spelled success at the box office. Although he performed few of his own stunts, the actor played along with anyone gullible enough to believe he did. Lorre and Parry were discussing the previous day’s shooting when they were joined by a writer who didn’t recognize the stuntman without his makeup.

  “Harvey,” said the actor, “you tell this gentleman what Peter Lorre did yesterday.”

  Parry related Mr. Moto’s adventures, which included a car chase, a foot race, an underwater fight, and fisticuffs on a pier.

  “Jesus, Peter, weren’t you tired?” marveled the writer.

  “I’ll never do it again,” quipped Lorre.12

  Lorre actually saw more action than audiences supposed. In Mysterious Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective, disguised as a convict, and Paul Brissac (Leon Ames) escape from Devil’s Island. Ames recalled the scene, which Foster shot on the Fox back lot:

  This particular night we were escaping in the jungle and the swamp. The guards were shooting at us and we were in this boat and all of a sudden we saw little splinters of wood and some things happening in the water that were too close for comfort. We stopped the scene and said, “Just a damn minute here. What the hell’s going on?!”

  “Don’t worry,” said Norman, “we’ve got expert marksmen.”

  They were getting pretty damn close and those were live bullets.

  In addition to using real ammunition, the prop department dug deep holes in the set floor. “All of a sudden,” said Ames, “you would step in this hole and you’d go underwater. Tricky little people they were in those days.”

  In Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation, Parry jumped from a second story window, inadvertently turned in the air, and dislocated his shoulder when he landed. The accident-prone Lorre fared little better in the scene. For one of the film’s close shots, Foster directed him to step from a table, over another stuntman’s head, and fall to the floor. Lorre planted his foot squarely in the stuntman’s stomach, tripped, and twisted his shoulder, separating the joint.

  Like the original stories on which they were based, the Moto pictures shared obvious strengths and weaknesses: they were exciting, fast-paced, and suspenseful, yet wildly melodramatic and farfetched. Since the pictures didn’t take themselves too seriously, neither did the critics. “In the long run Mr. Moto’s adventures … are of the kind that breeds soft tolerance in a reviewer,” wrote the New York Times critic B.R. Crisler.

  What is to be gained, after all,
from swimming against a trend apparently as well established as the Gulf Stream? Therefore we herewith formally and for all time accept the phenomenon of Mr. Moto, together with his invariably able supporting cast, and the fact that Providence, or its equivalent in Shinto or the Shogunate, has enabled him to be (1) everywhere at once (2) aided by almost supernaturally mysterious allies in all parts of the world (3) unsusceptible to ambush, espionage, riot, hail, tornado or falling aircraft and (4) invincible, when the issue descends to anything so vulgar as physical assault.

  Even the roster of civic and censor-minded women’s groups, which found the pictures overdosed with “horror, brutality, and murder,” endorsed them for “mature” audiences.

  Variety speculated that “Peter Lorre was presumably cast in ‘Think Fast, Mr. Moto’ as a trial balloon to determine whether his screen work as an Oriental would click with audiences.” It did. Audiences liked Lorre in the role of Moto and welcomed—as he did—his departure from villainous roles. “As Mr. Moto I have been given the opportunity of gaining popularity which otherwise would have taken years longer,” he was quoted as saying. “The following which would have come to any actor selected to star in the Moto adventures will enable me, I hope, to play parts to which I have looked forward for many years.”