Late in 1938 Universal sought to borrow Lorre from 20th Century–Fox to costar, as Baron Wolf von Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in Rowland S. Lee’s grimly expressionistic Son of Frankenstein (1939). However, Lorre turned down the role because, explained the Hollywood Reporter “he has left the menace field since he became the popular, sleuthing Mr. Moto and doesn’t want to take a chance on another meanie.” Universal recast Basil Rathbone in the part.
In January Variety reported that Lorre would “go comic” in The Gorilla, an “old house” thriller, starring the Ritz Brothers. To sidestep the popular movie subgenre in which murder walks the halls of a gloomy, rain-swept mansion, the actor produced nothing short of a note from his doctor—he supposedly had been ordered by his physician to take another month to recuperate from “pneumonia”—forcing 20th Century–Fox to hire Bela Lugosi for the role of the mysterious butler. By summer he was well enough to collaborate with Hans Rameau on a scenario titled Jack the Ripper. The project apparently progressed no further.
After six idle months, Lorre was given an okay on his bid for release from 20th Century–Fox. In mid-July, the Hollywood Reporter announced that the actor wanted out of his contract “because of too few parts since dropping of the ‘Mr. Moto’ series.” Lorre hoped that freelancing might steer him around the typecasting rut. Over the next four years, he found himself in constant motion between the back lots of MGM, 20th Century–Fox, Columbia, Republic, Warner Bros., Universal, and RKO. Hollywood now arranged his career in installments—one, two, or three films at a time. He lived an existence as marginal as that of his screen persona. Pushed out of starring player status at Fox, he increasingly landed in featured and supporting character work. His next twelve assignments followed no pattern, unless it was that his services as a specialist in menace and mayhem were routinely recycled in low-budget pictures. He stood in the shadow of his screen past, relegated to the edge of the film frame, where his malevolent presence is more felt than seen.
Offscreen, Lorre had assumed another persona. A member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) since May 1936, he was elected to a three-year term on the board of directors in September 1938. The actor faithfully attended the first few bimonthly meetings, then disappeared from the minutes until July 1939, when racketeers made an abortive attempt to “kidnap” the actors’ unions. Among the stars who made a pledge, cast a vote, and signed a petition that defended the right of representative unions to govern themselves democratically was Peter Lorre.
During his tenure on the board, he also brought the plight of Adolph Eisler, former head of the Austrian Actors Union, to the attention of Associated Actors and Artistes of America. Being “very anxious to see if something can be done to get him out of the country,” Lorre suggested that Eisler might be valuable to one of the guilds here. Despite his efforts, the actor remained in Europe and was last heard of appearing in a German documentary in 1988.
In October 1939 Lorre returned to MGM to put his stamp on yet another villainous role. Strange Cargo (1940), a “Devil’s Island” tale with a religious twist based on the novel Not Too Narrow … Not Too Deep by Richard Sale, presented Lorre as the loathsome stool pigeon M’sieu Pig, who informs on Clark Gable and lusts after Joan Crawford.22
On the recommendation of director Gregory Ratoff, who believed Lorre quite capable of turning in an exceptional comic performance, 20th Century—Fox recalled the actor in December to appear in I Was an Adventuress (1940), a comedy-melodrama about a motley trio of jewel thieves played by Erich von Stroheim, Peter Lorre, and Vera Zorina. After finishing work on Strange Cargo at noon on December 19, Lorre immediately reported to work at Fox, where he put in fourteen-hour days, returning to Metro nights and Sundays for retakes and added scenes. The actor played a charmingly dim-witted pickpocket. “I guess I’m just a pathological case,” says Polo, confessing to a kleptomaniacal bent. Accused of endangering their operations with his small-time thieveries, the pop-eyed idiotic lout ingenuously purrs, “I am a weak character. So is my whole family.”
“I hope the movie fans will laugh at me,” said a hopeful Lorre. “If they do, maybe Hollywood will give me another chance to be funny. This horror business, you know, gets rather tiresome, and no fellow ever particularly enjoys seeing himself constantly as a heel on the screen. He’d rather be a clown once in a while.”
Indeed, Lorre had some of his finest comic moments in I Was an Adventuress. While posing as Nicholas, the cousin of Tanya (Zorina), he is asked: “Are you a White Russian?”
“No, I cannot say that I am white.”
“Oh, then you must be Red.”
“No, no, no—I cannot say that I am red.”
“Well then, what are you?!”
“Pink! I am pink, yes? A pale, pale pink! In other words, a conservative.”
The London Times noted that “Mr. Peter Lorre has a part in this film, and the pity is that it is not a more substantial one…. Polo has the air of a changeling, a faintly malicious sprite, not quite of the world in which he makes so lucrative a living by indulging in his own peculiar talent. It is a subtle and unusual piece of acting.” Critical praise notwithstanding, I Was an Adventuress has been all but forgotten and in Lorre’s case overshadowed by a darker and much larger body of work.
When Columbia executive Irving Briskin, who headed the studio’s B-picture unit, got wind of Lorre’s availability, he assigned producer Wallace MacDonald to develop a starring vehicle for the actor. On March 20, 1940, Lorre went into production on Island of Doomed Men (1940), in which he played a “fastidious connoisseur of human suffering,” who, advertised the trailer, “cannot bear the sight or sound of physical torture.” He recruits paroled convicts to labor on Dead Man’s Isle—the film’s original title—where he pays them off with a pine box. Working undercover, a government agent instigates a breakout that climaxes in the stabbing death of the “gentle fiend” by his servant and the emancipation of his long-suffering wife.
If the use to which Columbia put Lorre smacks of budget banality, the use to which the actor put himself prevailed in an unoriginal situation. Island of Doomed Men reveals the ready crystallization of the actor’s psychological canon. He is never a garden-variety sadist; his villainy is never matter-of-fact. Playing amiable ends against a maleficent middle was, to his mind, as predictable as human nature.
After shooting a government agent, he takes his place in a crowd of spectators.
“What happened, sir?” he innocently asks a bystander.
“Oh, but that’s shocking, isn’t it?” Lorre purrs, underlying his expression of moral outrage with an obliquely sinister rhythm.
He supervises the flogging of enslaved men with cold courtesy, then lets the melancholy nocturnes of Chopin calm him. Only the sight of his servant’s pet monkey breaks his icy control. After shooting it, however, his rage gives way to remorse. Throughout the film, Lorre’s movements, in their choreographed stiffness, suggest a form of Brechtian enactment.
To be at the same time cruel but gentle, diabolical yet genial, loathsome and pathetic took tightrope balance. However infinite the weighed possibilities of doing two or more things at once, Lorre’s trademarked duality invited one contemporary reviewer’s sweeping indictment that since M “Hollywood has used his tricks but not his talent.”
When director Charles Barton learned he would be working with Lorre, he told MacDonald, “I think we should give him a little freedom to let him say the same thing, only in the words he wants to use.” Barton maintained that Lorre was “a very good screenwriter. He could write lines for himself that the writer couldn’t write. He would take a line in the script or a whole scene and he’d work it out pretty well his way, not that he was domineering or anything, but he just thought it was for the best, and he did very well.” Barton and Lorre listened to each other, lending an easy understanding to the assembly-line pace of production. “If I didn’t lay it out right, or bring it up to what he thought,” recalled Barton, “he would very nicely, very gen
tly, but not loud in front of everybody, say, ‘Charlie, I’d like to do this with it.’”
Of course, it worked both ways. Barton felt that if “Peter wasn’t natural, if he was trying to ham it up, he was no good at all. He agreed with me on that, because you take sixty minutes of pounding, pounding, pounding and you won’t get anyplace. A couple of times he’d go overboard, and then when we’d finish, I’d say, ‘Cut—well, alright now, Peter, now we’ll do it my way.’ And he just looked at me and laughed like hell.”
According to Barton, Lorre understood that his role in Island of Doomed Men would strengthen his screen identity as an arch villain. He also knew that these “thrown-together quickies,” as he pejoratively put it, kept the Front Office happy and paid the bills.
Columbia had no second thoughts. Parading Lorre before the public as a deranged sadist in an overcharged ad campaign made box-office sense:
Beauty and the Beast
Men die under the lash … of his TORTURING WHIP …
Women SHUDDER at the touch … of his CRUEL CARESS!
There’s no escape … from his FIEND’S PARADISE of torture!
ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN
Paroled prisoners ENSLAVED … in a tropical TORTURE TRAP!
A beautiful woman … THE VICTIM … of this connoisseur of
CRUELTY!
Charles Barton did not see Lorre again for many years. Standing under an arch on Fifth Avenue in New York during a blizzard, he felt a hand touch him on the shoulder: “‘Meet me in the Casbah.’ I almost died,” exclaimed Barton. “It was Peter. He quickly walked away and I had to run after him.”
After completing Island of Doomed Men, Lorre signed a nonexclusive contract with Columbia, commencing August 1, that guaranteed him $3,500 per week (with a three-week guarantee) for two more pictures.
In August 1939 J.J. Nolan, vice president in charge of studio operations at RKO, had sent two stories, “The Eyes of Max Carridos” and “International Spy,” to Frank Orsatti, who, along with the William Morris Agency, owned Lorre “fifty-fifty.” Busy trying to line up properties for his client, Orsatti agreed they would be “great” for him. A cautious Lorre wanted story approval, however, leading executive producer Lee Marcus to size up the actor as a prima donna. “After all,” he wrote Nolan, “he is not a Cary Grant or a Carole Lombard, and if he has not sufficient confidence in us and enough knowledge to realize that if we invest our money in the story, we’re going to try to do it well, I anticipate difficulties with this young man.” On top of this, Lorre was asking for the same salary he had received at Columbia.
Marcus looked for another property, keeping in mind that if the idea grew too expensive, RKO would drop the project. By the following May, he had settled on Frank Partos’s unpublished scenario Stranger on the Third Floor.23Lorre liked it but still held out for his normal fee. RKO and Lorre’s agents struck a deal. On May 29, 1940, the actor agreed to appear in two pictures at a weekly salary of $3,500 for a guaranteed total of six weeks.24 Perennially short of money, Lorre arranged personal advances totaling $4,000 between June 13 and July 26. The William Morris Agency negotiated top billing in the first picture (Stranger on the Third Floor) and first feature billing in the second (You’ll Find Out). Contractually bound to complete both pictures within six months, or between June 15 and December 20, RKO set production to begin on or about June 20 and asked the actor to report to the Stills Department on June 1.25 Filming began June 3 and ended July 1. RKO’s timetable frustrated Universal’s plans to put Lorre in the top spot in The Mummy’s Hand, which was scheduled to go into production the last week of May. The role—presumably that of Professor Andeheb—was ultimately played by George Zucco.
Stranger on the Third Floor is set in an “urban nightworld” of restless, sweatsoaked dreams that blur the border between reality and illusion. When newspaper reporter Michael Ward (John McGuire) becomes a key witness in a murder case, he earns a raise and a byline. However, misgivings gnaw away at his confidence in the testimony on which a man’s life hangs. Haunted by guilt that the condemned man (played by Elisha Cook Jr.) may be innocent, Ward dreams that a web of circumstantial evidence incriminates him for the murder of Meng, his prying “third-floor” neighbor.
Ward’s repressed fears take shape in a paranoid dreamscape of “light-and-shadow effects and unique angle treatments said never before to have been seen on the screen.” A distorted skyline hovers over Jane (Margaret Tallichet), his girlfriend; two-foot-high newspaper headlines scream “MURDER!”; a forest of oblique lines silhouette Michael’s cell wall; the figure of blindfolded Justice hangs over the courtroom; an electric chair casts its giant shadow against a wall barred by diagonals.
When Ward awakens, he discovers that the petulant tenant has indeed been murdered, his jugular vein cut. He claims to have seen a stranger (Lorre) with an “evil face” hanging around the building on the night of the killing. Convinced that the stranger committed both murders, Ward points out to the police the similarities between the two killings, but he overlooks the most obvious coincidence: he discovered both crimes. One by one, the events in his nightmare come to life, from implication to arrest.
Jane roams the streets in search of the stranger, described by Ward as a thick-lipped, bulging-eyed figure in a shabby overcoat and a long, dirty-white scarf. Weary and discouraged, she stops at a diner for a cup of coffee. When a stranger asks for two uncooked hamburgers, the proprietor jokes, “Kinda like the taste of blood, huh?” Jane follows him outside and watches him feed the meat to a stray dog, which he compassionately warns, “Don’t eat so fast, you’ll get a tummy ache.” Together Jane and the stranger stroll lonely streets lined with seedy tenements. She learns that he is an escaped lunatic who fears being taken back and locked up. “They send you,” he reasons, “because they know I would trust a woman.” Before he can harm her, he is run down by a truck. Death only seconds away, he confesses to the murders and then murmurs, “But I am not going back.”
In one scene, Jane describes the person for whom she is searching to a postman, who tells her that people are just names to him. Sometimes, he says, he thinks about what the names might look like as people, “but I never thought of anybody that would look like that!” And no one did, except Peter Lorre, whose pubescent fleshiness had given way to ghostly leanness. He moves in and out of the shadows, one moment skimming down stairways in furtive silence, the next rolling through the city streets like a phantom tumbleweed, at the same time sprung from the noir milieu and detached from it.
Stranger on the Third Floor owed a debt to the past that Lorre probably did not want to pay. Subtle differences notwithstanding, his urban stranger is an updated version of the murderer in M. “I remember that he referred to his work as an actor as ‘making faces,’” recalled co-worker Margaret Tallichet, “and I’m sure there was a bit of boredom and bitterness that he did always get the same type roles.” Frank Partos, who adapted the screenplay from his own story, tempered the repulsive elements of Lorre’s character with just enough sympathy to allow some understanding of the nameless stranger. Feeding stray animals and killing people evokes the ugly memory of the childlike Beckert, who kindheartedly offered his young female victims candy before murdering them. Even his menacing sexual presence harks back to M, although in a twist on the past, the only kindness he has known is from a woman.
Lorre worked five days with three days idle, punching in at the RKO Ranch in the San Fernando Valley on June 20 and checking out on June 28. On night shoots, he took a special lunch with him. “This snack,” said Tallichet, “invariably consisted of wine and the most smelly cheese one could find. So in the scene where Peter is trying to strangle me and I am shrieking—the agony came easier because the smell of mingled wine, garlic and smelly cheese coming from Peter was agony in itself.”
Critics found Stranger on the Third Floor confusing and pretentious, in a word, “arty.” (RKO, possibly sensing something of the sort, advertised it as a horror-thriller.) B movies ordinarily satisfi
ed the public appetite for a plain genre repast, palatable and instantly gratifying. Director Boris Ingster had served up something far more imaginative and important. The darkly original partnership of Partos’s grimly cynical story and script, Ingster’s Germanic direction, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca’s “visual italics,” and special-effects artist Vernon L. Walker’s spiraling miniature sets went almost unnoticed at the time. Today, however, film scholars consider Stranger on the Third Floor the “first true film noir,” demonstrating “the most overt influence yet of German expressionism on American crime films to that time.”
In August and September, Lorre fulfilled his second commitment at RKO, putting in forty-four days (twenty-seven working and seventeen idle) on You’ll Find Out (1940), a modestly budgeted musical-comedy-mystery about three confidence men intent on divesting a wealthy widow of her fortune. Director David Butler had suggested that RKO assemble, in his words, “three notable heavies” for box-office value. Together with Kay Kyser—for whom the picture was originally titled The Professor—and his band, he paraded out Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and Bela Lugosi in their horror guise, assuring the commercial success of an otherwise doltish effort. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther supposed that “the script writers were scared out of their wits by their own ideas, for the dialogue and plot developments indicate that little was devoted to them.” Word that sneak-preview reaction persuaded RKO to sign Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre as a comedy trio for the next Kay Kyser picture, with Butler producing and directing, was apparently premature.
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