Nevertheless, Lorre soon wearied of the hackneyed plots and characterizations. In interviews he pressed the point that repeated casting bored audiences and demeaned actors. He feared, and rightly so, entrapment in another persona. People everywhere greeted him as Mr. Moto. No one, it seemed, missed an opportunity to lend credence to his identity as the Japanese sleuth. According to his brother Andrew, one day someone at the studio removed the actor’s identification from his wallet and substituted phony documents, including a card that read, “Mr. Moto—Japanese spy.” Stopped for speeding, Lorre unwittingly produced the false I.D. Fortunately, the officer recognized the actor and realized he was the victim of a practical joke.
Parry knew Lorre had reached the breaking point when he said he was not going to do Mr. Moto anymore. “I’m tired of Mr. Moto,” he told Parry. “He gives me a pain in the ass.” Toward the end of the series, Lorre bumped into Lotte Lenya in New York. They had not met since Berlin. When Lenya asked what he did in Hollywood, Lorre replied, “Nothing, I make faces.”
“Mr. Moto was fine for a while,” he said later. “But the role is really childish. I’d rather play any kind of part in a picture with a good dramatic story.” Over the years, his bemused intolerance turned to outright hostility. When someone brought up the subject during a rehearsal for Spike Jones’s Spotlight Revue in 1948, Lorre exploded. “He hated the Motos,” said head writer Eddie Brandt. “Thank God I didn’t say to him it was my favorite thing he did.” The actor told a reporter for Omaha’s Evening World Herald in 1963 that he had “found the Mr. Moto arrangement was much harder to get out of than into.” Referring obliquely to his treatments for addiction, he added, “It was so hard that I had to become ill for at least six months around contract time and I had to utilize the services of many good doctor friends while I was ‘sick.’”
“We’re like a couple who have been married too long,” Lorre wearily remarked to Foster one day.
“Want a divorce?” replied the director.
In early December 1938, just before starting production on Danger Island, the final Moto picture, Lorre had “inked a new ticket,” trade talk for renewing his contract. Given his obvious—and vocal—discontent, it was a surprising move. The studio had promoted him from thirteenth ranking in its “featured” player category in 1937 to number nine in its “star” list in late 1938. As his stock rose, however, his salary had stayed put. In Crack-Up, the actor had earned $2,500 per week, with a four-week guarantee. Nearly three years—and a hit series—later, Fox still held him to $10,000 a picture, making him one of the most underpaid actors at the studio. Warner Oland pulled down $40,000 per picture as Charlie Chan. If he read the trades, Lorre learned what he probably already suspected, that according to a 1938 exhibitor’s poll, his dollar value as a supporting player ranked second only to Walter Brennan’s.13 Despite starring in nine Fox titles, he reverted, quite inexplicably, to “featured” status in 1939.
Whether star or featured player, Lorre knew he wasn’t making ends meet. Chronically short of money and long on bad luck, the Lorres had good reason to fret about finances. Legal threats and promises of payments still passed between Dr. Samek and Celia. Finally, in 1937, Lorre turned the matter over to his business manager, Eli Leslie, who bought more time with a request for a full accounting, which, with interest, had climbed to 3,609.28 schillings (approximately $866). Demands for full payment by July 1 fell on deaf ears. The best Lorre could do, explained Leslie, was regular payments of $45. This was unacceptable to Samek, who “was very sorry that Peter Lorre doesn’t know in what unheard of ways he misused my good will.” After emigrating to America, Samek eventually received the full amount, but Lorre’s delinquency in discharging the debt irreparably damaged the friendship.
One and a half years after returning from England, Peter and Celia also grappled with outstanding obligations to Ivor Montagu and Dr. D. Hunter, London Hospital, Whitechapel, stemming from drug treatments. Leslie regretted the delay but felt certain “that we can now start sending you sums at regular intervals and alternate each time with Dr. Hunter.” In a personal letter to Montagu on Fox stationary, Lorre asked forgiveness
for not having sent my money yet—but things were very, very tough—and still are!
(Untier was very ill, had operation but is better now—etc.)
Here are my first 50-Dollars and I will keep sending more in regular short intervals….
Ivor dear, I only write very shortly to day [sic]. (I have a little bronchitis.)
By April 1939 things had only gotten worse. Celia wrote Mrs. Montagu:
You must know Peter is away since 2 months, and I am opening all his letters to see whether there is something important among them.
Please forgive if I am not able to send you the money now, although I know that you are in need of it. Peter has a contract, but he is in ill-health and had to take a leave of absence. Since the beginning of January he is without salary because of illness. You never heard from us because the last years have been very hard for us owing to illnesses and great excitement about the happenings in Europe where our people lived. Six months ago we had a terrible caraccident and I had broken in a very complicated way the wrist of my right hand.14
I was ill for 4 months, and Peter, who was under the car at the time of the accident, had a terrible schock [sic], and hat [sic] to work at the same time.
Please keep it only to you and Ivor, but I am very much worried about Peter’s health, and the Motos are really hard work. P. is expected to be back at the end of May and to start work at the beginning of June. I promise you to do everything in my power that you should get a payment every week. It will be, however, impossible to send all the money at once, as taxes and everything had to be postponed to lst of June when P. will start to work. Please write me a line that I might know you are forgiving us.
Lorre would not have needed to run over to Metro’s David Copperfield and consult Mr. Micawber to know that “annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” Working so hard for so little heightened his awareness that the studio had fallen short of meeting his financial needs.
The actor’s salary problem was symptomatic of other, larger issues. He believed Fox had, in the words of friend and later publicist Irving Yergin, “sold him up the river” in more ways than one. The Front Office realized that “there was something fermenting,” said Leon Ames, and weighed the possibility that his ripening disenchantment with the Moto series might prompt him to do something rash—namely check off the set. Anticipating a walk-out on Danger Island, the last film entry in the series, Fox headed Lorre off. “We were signed and put on salary immediately for some legal, technical reason, to force Lorre to go to work,” said Ames. “They locked the cast in. He didn’t refuse. He was just bored.”
History played into Lorre’s hands, accomplishing what he was unable to do. Rising anti-Japanese sentiment in the late 1930s dealt Mr. Moto his final blow, at least until after the war. Under the “Here and Now” column in the Anti-Nazi League’s Hollywood Now (formerly Anti-Nazi News) for February 19, 1938, appeared the entry “THINGS WE WOULD LIKE TO SEE: That Japanese boycott button in Peter Lorre’s buttonhole. Especially when he’s all dressed up for his part in ‘Mr. Moto’—as a Japanese.” Actually, the Hollywood Reporter’s “Rambling Reporter” had caught the “Motoing” Lorre wearing a “Don’t Buy Jap Goods” button several weeks earlier. Charlie Chan “continued solving high society murders” during the war years, wrote Number One Son Frank Chin. “His effectiveness as an anti-Japanese tool depended not on his exploits but his being visibly and actively not Japanese with all his heart and soul.” With the series pictures petering out, Fox disclosed in January 1939 that it was abandoning four of its seven series, retaining only The Jones Family, Charley [sic] Chan, and Mr. Moto, the success of which the studio attributed to attractive characters and good stories.15 By June, however, Mo
to was “Outo,” according to Variety, which carried news that Fox had shelved three Moto pictures slated for production over the next two years.16 On December 4, 1939, Wurtzel wrote to E.C. Delavigne that “we would like to pass up the entire Marquand contract as we will not make any more MOTO’S in the future.”
Hollywood had not heard the last of the ubiquitous detective. Earlier in the year, Warner Bros. had satirized Mr. Moto in Porky’s Movie Mystery, starring, of course, Porky Pig as the Japanese gumshoe “Mr. Motto.” On August 10 Lorre reprised the role for radio opposite vaudeville comedian Lou Holtz on The Royal Gelatin Hour. The following week, after turning in a detective sketch on George Jessel’s Celebrity Program, Lorre coolly announced, “To everyone who was good enough to see the Mr. Moto pictures, I would like to say this: that tonight you have heard me play Mr. Moto for the last time…. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no more Mr. Moto.” But shedding his movie-made persona wasn’t as easy as he supposed. Lorre again stepped into the role in October, this time working alongside other great detectives on The Texaco Star Theater. In August 1942, 20th Century–Fox announced plans to bring together Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler), Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan), Philo Vance (Warren William), and Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto in The Four Star Murder Case, but the collaboration of the celebrated sleuths did not materialize. In a comic turn, Lorre—as Moto—and comedian Fred Allen—as One Long Pan—competed for the title of World’s Greatest Oriental Detective in “The Missing Shot” on The Texaco Star Theater, January 3, 1943. The following June, the actor uttered his final “Oh, so” when Mr. Moto and One Long Pan again faced off in “More Murder on the Fred Allen Program.”17
In the midst of Moto-mania, the studio seemingly lost sight of its commitment to supply Lorre with a variety of screen roles. Jimmie Fidler expressed what was on the actor’s mind in his column “Movie Medley” for the Chicago Sunday Times:
Peter, apparently, has been doomed to an endless and disheartening succession of ‘Mr. Moto’ pictures…. He didn’t want to play such pawkish roles, but, ordered to do so, he put his shoulder to the wheel like a real trooper and did the best he could with the material at hand…. Peter ought to be given an opportunity if for no other reason than it’s a crime to waste his talent. And if that argument needs reinforcement, I submit that since he has worked like a trojan in a thankless task and made money for the studio—it is no more than sporting that his willingness should be rewarded with a role into which he can sink his teeth.
In another column, which Lorre kept in his scrapbook, the Hollywood columnist again went to bat for the actor, stating that
the way he’s been kicked about from pillar to post, overlooked whenever a great role suiting his particular type was to be awarded, and finally shunted aside into a nonsensical series of ‘Mr. Moto’ quickies, is puzzling.
In simple fairness, the powers that be ought to give Peter Lorre a decent break. He was signed with the assurance that he would be tendered fine acting roles, would be an important star.
He didn’t want to play those Mr. Moto parts, which he could have been excused for considering an insult to his ability. He played them simply because he’s such a non-temperamental, obliging person that he refused to fight.
He’s done his part. How about giving him a deserved reward?
An ad in the Hollywood Reporter belatedly boasted that “Peter Lorre, as the famous Saturday Evening Post sleuth, has steadily become a more firmly established boxoffice asset” and promised that “added impetus will be given his popularity by the stronger material afforded him in 1939–40.” However, the studio’s guilty conscience was a case of too little, its good faith a case of too late.
In April 1937, shortly after Think Fast, Mr. Moto finished shooting, Zanuck had set Lorre to star in Life of a Lancer Spy (released as Lancer Spy), a World War I spy melodrama, scheduled for immediate production under the direction of Gregory Ratoff. Philip Dunne wrote the screenplay from the novel by Marthe McKenna: “I had him [Lorre] play a civilian. I was in effect trying to say here was a pre-Nazi Nazi, that there were already Nazis in Germany and this was the type, sort of a Goebbels. He was the principal villain…. There was already talk of putting Peter in the part. He still carried the aura of M around with him. That may have colored a bit of what I did with it thereafter.”
One day before the scheduled shooting date, Zanuck yanked the film so that the story could be extensively rewritten—unbeknownst to Dunne—ostensibly to get a steeper budget after revision. Meanwhile, Lorre went to work on Mr. Moto Takes a Chance. Lancer Spy got under way several weeks later. “When I saw the film,” recalled Dunne, “and I never saw all of it, I walked out. Peter turned out in a uniform and it spoiled the whole character for me; it made him just one more German in uniform.” Lorre’s featured role had been cut to little more than a cameo—as a staff underling in the Kaiser’s Imperial Army—that any bit player might have filled.18
Wedged quietly among the Moto films was I’ll Give a Million (1938), originally budgeted at one million dollars, with John Ford directing. Walter Lang ultimately stepped in, settling for much less. In this parable of wealth and poverty, Lorre played Louie the Dope. Described in a press release as “somewhat mentally disordered, the ‘philosophical knight of the road’” jumps to a drowning death, only to be rescued by a disillusioned millionaire who exchanges identities with him. Louie bumbles through the story with lamblike innocence, dumbfounding local journalists who seek the real identity of the millionaire and confounding restaurateurs, from whom he orders “lobsters with thermidor.” Although Lorre delighted audiences as another “little man” in the Švejk mold, I’ll Give a Million made far too imperceptible a splash to rank him as a comedian.
Other projects fell by the wayside, among them Love under Fire (1937), a romance-adventure set against the Spanish Civil War, with Lorre as “Captain Delmar.” When he became ill, John Carradine stepped into the role. Frank Capra had also considered Lorre for a role in Lost Horizon (1937). That year Darryl Zanuck refused to allow Lorre to play opposite Miriam Hopkins in Wine of Choice, a Theater Guild production set for Broadway in December 1937. Lorre was too busy as Mr. Moto, it seemed, to parade around as anyone else. His name also came up in casting discussions for International Settlement (1938), a smuggling yarn starring George Sanders and Dolores Del Rio.
Lorre’s appearance is credited in a cast list for 20th Century–Fox’s Four Men and a Prayer, directed by John Ford. It was not so, although the actor had figured in the picture at one point, as script revisions testify. Today, Four Men and a Prayer looks as if two directors, working independently from different scripts, had crudely interspliced their work. With the sophisticated charm of The Thin Man in mind, Zanuck had wanted to treat the story “with a delightful sense of humor instead of as a melodramatic thriller” and wrote Lorre’s “monk-like, odious character” out of the script. John Ford, however, held out for the dramatic ending to David Garth’s novel, which was restored, along with Lorre’s role. Two weeks into filming, Zanuck suddenly rewrote the script, substituting his own ending and cutting the supporting role to a bit part, played by Paul McVey.
Why Zanuck recast the role is difficult to say. Always eager to plug his contract players into as many holes as time and tide permitted, he would have thought nothing of relegating Lorre to a mere cameo. Nor does a scheduling conflict appear to have ruled him out. After temporarily canceling production of Charlie Chan at the Ringside on January 17, 1938, the studio had decided to rework the stalled project into Mr. Moto’s Gamble, starring, of course, Peter Lorre. However, the picture was completed well before Ford began shooting the secretary role for Four Men and a Prayer.
Ironically, the actor’s best offers of substantive roles came not from Fox, but from MGM. In August 1937 Lorre and Oskar Homolka tested for the role of Louis XVI—originally set for Charles Laughton—in Marie Antoinette, opposite Norma Shearer. They lost out to Robert Morley.
Soon after, gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported tha
t Lorre had satisfactorily tested for the role of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at Metro.19 This part, wrote Fox publicist Harry Brand, satisfied one of the actor’s two great ambitions, the other being to play Napoleon. Lorre claimed he had earlier turned down the role because Lon Chaney’s portrayal was too fresh in the public mind.20 Apparently, he had thought better of it. “Chaney’s results were gained through painstaking experimentation with make-up,” a Fox publicist quoted Lorre as saying. “My method is to study the character psychologically. I try to bring my characterization from within and for that reason I feel that my portrayal of the part would be different.” In the end, Charles Laughton captured the coveted role.
One of the most interesting unproduced projects was War Is Declared, an original story by Waclaw Panski, in which news that war has been declared—a hoax perpetrated by a neurotic wireless operator—divides passengers aboard a luxury liner into hostile camps symbolizing democracy versus fascism.21
In September 1934 Paramount had submitted for approval an early draft of the script for S.O.S. (the film’s original title) to the Hays Office. Four months earlier, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), under the leadership of former postmaster general Will Hays, had created a self-regulatory code of ethics governing the film industry. The “Hays Code,” which took effect July 1, 1934, with Joseph I. Breen as director of the Production Code Administration (PCA), set standards of good taste, regulating sex, violence, and language in the movies.
With the exception of two minor changes, Breen found nothing “reasonably censorable” and approved the script. There the matter sat until February 1937, when producer B.P. Schulberg, apparently convinced the timing was right, wrote Breen, “I think at the moment the world is clamoring for a picture with pacifistic doctrine.” Breen reported back the next day: “There is a thought in our minds that a number of European countries are not likely to allow the exhibition of any picture, which graphically suggests the outbreak of another European war…. The British board has a more or less standard policy of refusing to approve pictures, in which characters are shown to be demented or crazed for any reason.” Although Lords Max Beaverbrook and Valentine Castlerosse offered to publicly sponsor the highly timely picture and even get it past the film censors, Paramount decided to abandon the project for “international political reasons.”
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