The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  During filming of You’ll Find Out, Lorre turned in his only performance as a leading man, not for the movies, but on a baseball diamond. The annual charity game benefiting Mt. Sinai Hospital and free medical clinic matched the Comedians (including Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Andy Devine, Buster Keaton, the Ritz Brothers, Edgar Kennedy, and Leo Carrillo) against the Leading Men (including Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Fred Astaire, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Peter Lorre, and others) before a capacity crowd of 37,700 at Wrigley Field on August 8. Paulette Goddard captained the comics and Marlene Dietrich the principals. Milton Berle announced and Kay Kyser, James Gleason, Chico Marx, and Thurston Hall umpired. Lorre apparently lost himself in the “charity fracas,” which advertised the Jack Benny-Fred Allen rivalry (Allen: “Did you warm up?” Benny: “Yes.” Allen: “I thought I smelled ham burning.”) turned “first-class riot,” which was broken up by the Keystone Cops. Although Boris Karloff (dressed as Frankenstein, but not listed in the lineup for either team) scored a home run, the Comedians beat the Leading Men 5 to 3.

  You’ll Find Out reached American audiences on November 22, 1940. Seven days later, Lorre made an unbilled appearance in what German film historian David Stewart Hull calls “the most hideous three-quarters-of-an-hour in film history.” Der Ewige Jude: Ein Dokumentarfilm über das Weltjudentum (The Eternal Jew: A Documentary about World Jewry, 1940) is one of three anti-Semitic movies that looked to prepare the German populace for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.”26 This anti-Semitic pseudodocumentary is a “black masterpiece” of racial hatred. Compiled primarily of newsreel footage from the Warsaw ghettos, it profiled the poorest segment of Jewish society in its “natural state” of squalor. Maps and supporting footage of rapacious rats chart what is described as a plaguelike spread of Jews across the face of Europe. Driven out by civilized nations that will not tolerate the “pestiferous” people, says the commentator, they learned to assimilate themselves camouflaged as Aryans. But the most effective disguise cannot hide the “inner being” of the “vilest of parasites,” which design to rule the world of commerce and degrade the hardworking Aryan with their degenerate art. Contrasting the ordered lives of the German people, underscored the Illustrierter Film-Kurier, “leaves the visitor grateful to belong to a people whose Führer has fundamentally solved the problem of the Jews.”

  Dr. Franz Hippler, who headed the film division of Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, scripted the film. Based on “an idea by Dr. Eberhard Taubert,” The Eternal Jew indicted every segment and strata of Jewish society, including theater and film folk, for being “instinctively interested in everything that is abnormal and depraved.” Singled out for censure were “stage dictator” Max Reinhardt and actors Curt Bois, shown performing in drag in Der Fürst von Pappenheim (The Prince of Pappenheim, 1927); Fritz Kortner (introduced by his original name, Kohn), pictured committing a brutal murder of an old man and the rape of a young woman in Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (The Murderer Dimitri Karamasoff, 1931); and “the Jew Lorre in the role of a child murderer with the notion that not the murderer but the victim is guilty. Normal judgment is twisted by a sympathetic portrayal of the criminal to gloss over and excuse the crime.” Ripping out Lorre’s final confession from M, a film that had been banned in its entirety by the National Socialists, served a doubly diabolical purpose. Besides accusing Jews of being incapable of checking their compulsive desires and hence posing a danger to “moral society,” The Eternal Jew appealed to a paranoid perception that, for Jewish actors, person and persona were one and the same.

  In November Lorre returned to Columbia to appear in the first of two pictures signed away earlier in the year. Promoted—again somewhat erroneously—as a horror film, The Face behind the Mask (1941), based on the radio play by Thomas Edward O’Connell, promised to be a routine programmer. According to the trailer:

  Men see and shudder!

  Women look and scream!

  You’ll see it … and GASP!

  THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK

  Why must the underworld’s most hated man of mystery always wear this mask?

  Is it fear of his enemies?

  Is it to hide a strange secret?

  What fiendish fury lurks behind this mask?

  What WEIRD VENGEANCE is brewing?

  Peter Lorre … man turned monster.

  The underworld’s PHANTOM TERROR.

  The preface to the film sent a more prosaic message:

  Just a few years ago—

  when a voyage to America

  meant adventure and

  not flight …

  When a quota was a number—

  and not a lottery prize to be captured by

  a lucky few.

  As the film opens, a young Hungarian immigrant (Lorre) practices his English: “Excuse me, please. Could I trouble you for a light? Thank you, I do not smoke.” Opportunity knocks when a dishwashing position opens up at a New York hotel. Asked if he can wash them without smashing them, he bursts with boyish enthusiasm, “In America, I can do anything!” His dreams go up in smoke when a fire horribly disfigures his face. No one will hire him. His hands outstretched, he cries pitifully, “I know, but my face makes no difference how I can work with my hands.” Driven to the brink of suicide, he turns to crime. A plastic surgeon creates a rubber mask for him. As the new face covers the old, so coldness conceals the warmth beneath. But his mask is like a palimpsest on which the old imprint can be written over but not completely erased. He collides with a woman on a city sidewalk and he reproaches her for her clumsiness, then realizes she is blind and tenders an apology. Coming face-to-face with his sinister mien is a disturbing revelation.

  “If you could see my face, you would feel sorry for me!” he bitterly confesses to her. “People who look at me, they see a mask, artificial, but the face behind the mask, it’s mutilated, a horrible nightmare out of which I can never awake!” She does not perceive the masked criminal, but senses the gentle person within. They decide to marry and begin a new life. When his old gang suspects treachery, they plant a bomb in his car, killing his wife by mistake. He hijacks their airplane and takes them to a remote desert spot. “Keep thinking, thinking your little brains out,” he declaims in cool resignation, “turning round and round in circles, looking for a way out, but you will not have the courage to take the way out yourself. Foolishly and vainly you will hope, hope that somehow you will be saved, and slowly you will surely die. For my sins, I have earned my punishment. I shall die too.”

  Lorre had only to give and withhold of his seemingly limitless reservoir of bodily and facial gestures. As an immigrant, he expresses the wide-eyed innocence of new beginnings. After turning to crime, his body language becomes taut, or as Brecht would have preferred, cooled down, and his face freezes into icy detachment. “I put on dead white make-up,” explained the actor, “used two strips of adhesive tape to immobilize the sides of my face, and for the rest of it I used my own facial expression to give the illusion of a mask.”

  The real face behind the mask had undergone a remarkable improvement since You’ll Find Out. In 1936 Fox had insisted on a “special provision” in the actor’s contract stating, “Artist agrees, at his own expense, to have such dental work done as may be necessary in the opinion of producer.” The studio even had reserved the right to cancel the agreement for noncompliance. Lorre had finally replaced his rotten, protruding, splayed teeth with dentures. “He had terrible pyorrhea when we played together,” recalled Leon Ames, recalling their work on the Moto films. “His teeth were shot and he hadn’t gotten them fixed yet, and it was just awful to even have him breathe in the same room with you.” Makeup departments hardly could have furnished him with a set of teeth more becoming his screen roles as repulsive, hideous monsters. Dentures incalculably improved his looks and softened his screen image. In The Face behind the Mask, they warmed his boyish smile. He was now less macabre, more suavely villainous; less mad, more smoothly menacing.


  In writing their screenplay, Allen Vincent and Paul Jarrico worked from the persona and not the person of Peter Lorre, whom they never met. “The role was ‘tailored,’ as I recall,” said Jarrico, “in the sense that Lorre had already been cast.” Yet their script is curiously biographical. As Lorre’s “typecast” restricted him to villainous roles, so the immigrant’s grotesque physical appearance bars honest work. Turning their “maskedness” to commercial advantage spelled a kind of suicide for both. More broadly read as an “eloquent statement on the failure of the American dream,” The Face behind the Mask portended for Lorre a sort of grim, apocalyptic vision of his future in Hollywood.

  Given his performance, it is disappointing to learn that, after all, it was just another job. “I don’t think Peter was very much impressed with The Face behind the Mask,” said actor Don Beddoe, who played Officer O’Hara. “His other successes, such as M, made him pretty blasé about this particular venture.” On a day of location shooting at the Oxnard sand dunes, the actor left his house on Havenhurst Drive in Hollywood in the early morning, only to arrive before the plane needed in the first scene. While waiting for filming to begin, he drank his breakfast, a glass of Pernod, then another mixed with a split of Moet. Disquieted, director Robert Florey sat and listened to Lorre joke about needing liquid refreshment to forget the silly dialogue and grimaces called for in the role. The actor promised to behave, said Florey, but “didn’t keep his word and he didn’t hold his liquor well. I could handle him till lunch time without much difficulty, but as the afternoon progressed Peter foundered into a world of his own, becoming gloomy or playful, melancholy or senseless, not taking direction but never hostile…. I tried to get all his important scenes photographed during the morning hours, which was not always possible.”

  Budgeting time to direct his players was a luxury Florey could not afford with his twelve-day schedule. He concentrated on the narrative, which he told with masterful economy, and on the subtle handling of “masked” themes and images. By costuming Lorre in a long black overcoat with a turned-up collar and a dark scarf that concealed his neck, the director, in essence, severed the actor’s head from his body, symbolically cutting the character off from his own feelings. Ten years later, Lorre employed a similar technique in his own film, Der Verlorene. Pernod notwithstanding, Lorre delivered a deeply empathetic performance that earned him critical praise, especially from Florey, who credited the actor with “one of his best creations since the unforgettable M.” With a host of strong supporting performances, The Face behind the Mask was a cut above the usual assembly-line picture. It played well enough at the box office to merit re-release two years later, something unusual for a B picture. It also earned Lorre the number one rating—ahead of second-place Boris Karloff—on Columbia’s “Featured” player list in 1941.

  Lorre closed this fragmented and frenzied time of filmmaking with two cameo performances. Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the longrunning radio program Mr. District Attorney, which had first broadcast over NBC in 1939, Republic Pictures acquired the motion picture rights and projected a continuation of the series on film. In February 1941 the actor lent his name and his screen presence as the sinister “Mr. Hyde” (who is shot by his wife) to the studio’s Mr. District Attorney (1941).

  In May he briefly stepped before the camera in Metro’s They Met in Bombay (1941) as Captain Chang, a mercenary freight skipper who double-crosses jewel thieves played by Clark Gable and Rosalind Russell.

  Lorre wanted out, but he had nowhere to go. He feared betraying himself and his future by acquiescing to public expectations and studio obligations, but he gave nothing less than his creative best—sometimes in spite of himself. By taking his assignments one at a time, he kept his perspective and his sense of humor, which “was wicked, frequently obscene, but always in good taste,” said Beddoe. “His was a wonderfully wry humorous touch, well salted with the comical scatological rejoinders. He had a rare bawdy approach to life that was never offensive that swept you along with his realistic appreciation of the ‘lovelies’ who were never outraged by the tongue-in-cheek forthrightness of his glistening-eye approach.” Above the moment, Lorre kept the spirit alive.

  5

  Being SLapped And Liking It

  When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.

  —Humphrey Bogart to Peter Lorre, in The Maltese Falcon (1941)

  I’ve played mostly badmen—killers—but the audience loves me. You know, I can get away with murder.

  —Peter Lorre

  Fed up with losing control over his work, John Huston, who had coauthored his way into high standing at Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, asked his agent to write a provision into his contract that said if the studio took up his option, he would be allowed to direct a film. After scripting High Sierra (1941), Huston told Henry Blanke, his producer on Jezebel (1938) and Juarez (1939), that the time had come. He wanted to direct.

  Asked what he had in mind, Huston replied, “The Maltese Falcon.” After all, the studio owned the rights to the best seller, which it had acquired from Dashiell Hammett and Knopf Inc. for $8,500 in June of 1930, and it could be shot on a limited budget, perhaps for $300,000 or less. Blanke warned Huston that he would have little luck in putting it over. Warner Bros. had filmed the book twice before, with little success.

  In May 1931 the studio had released The Maltese Falcon, directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly, Dudley Diggs as Gutman, and Otto Matieson as Joel Cairo.1 Huston’s attitude toward this version—from simple disapproval to downright virulence—is hard to understand, given its straightforward if somewhat stagnant retelling of the story. The Maltese Falcon, however, lost its way in the deluge of crime and detective films that inundated moviegoers in the early part of the decade. Five years later, Warner Bros. disguised the original story by substituting an eighth-century hunting horn for the jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon. William Dieterle’s eccentric and heavy-handed Satan Met a Lady—produced, coincidentally, by Henry Blanke—bordered on burlesque, with Warren William refashioning Spade into a flamboyant rake and Bette Davis, who later referred to the movie as one of the worst turkeys she had ever made, anxiously looking for an exit from the set.

  Huston told author Gerald Pratley that Warner Bros. indulged him: “They liked my work as a writer and they wanted to keep me on. If I wanted to direct, why, they’d give me a shot at it and, if it didn’t come off all that well, they wouldn’t be too disappointed as it was to be a very small picture. They acted out of friendship towards me, out of good will. This was Jack Warner [vicepresident and head of production], but largely Hal Wallis and Henry Blanke.”

  Believing that the earlier film versions hadn’t kept faith with the story, Huston told Blanke, “We’ll do the book as it is.”

  According to office-mate Allen Rivkin,

  One day [Huston] came in, tossed a book on my desk, took a stance, pointed a finger at the book and said, “Kid, Warner said if I can get a good screenplay out of this Dash Hammett thing, he’ll let me direct it.” …

  … “Let’s go,” I said, eager for another assignment. “Fine, kid, fine. But first, before we do that—let’s get it broken down. You know, have the secretary recopy the book, only setting it up in shots, scenes and dialogue. Then we’ll know where we are.” …

  About a week later, John ambled into my office, looking very puzzled. “Goddamnedest thing happened, kid,” he said, giving each word a close-up. My eyes asked what. “Something maybe you didn’t know,” he said. “Everything these secretaries do, a copy’s got to go to the department. This Maltese thing our secretary was doing, that went there, too.”

  Jack Warner read the breakdown and told Huston to start shooting within the week.2

  Huston’s casting coups nicely served the spirit if not the letter of Hammett. When George Raft refused to work with a first-time director in an unimportant picture, Huston fell heir to Humphrey Bogart for the role of the �
��blond Satan,” Sam Spade. A veteran of countless gangster roles, Bogart was well prepared to play a hard-boiled detective whose wry grin walked hand in hand with his gritty integrity. Casting submitted the names of seventeen actresses (including Olivia de Havilland, Loretta Young, Rita Hayworth, and Paulette Goddard) for the role of Brigid O’Shaughnessy. When Geraldine Fitzgerald, Huston’s first choice, was unavailable, he went with Mary Astor, who breathed credibility into her congenital liar by hyperventilating before going into her scenes. Blanke and Huston found their “Fat Man” appearing in Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night at the Biltmore Theater in Los Angeles. Sydney Greenstreet, a veteran of the British and American stages, made his first screen appearance in The Maltese Falcon at age sixty-one. Jowly, gregarious, phlegmatic, there is more of Pickwick than of rogue in his portrayal of Kasper Gutman. On May 19, 1941, Warner Bros. casting director Steve Trilling submitted the names of twenty-four actors for the role of Joel Cairo. Among them were Peter Lorre, Sam Jaffe, Curt Bois, Gene Lockhart, Oskar Homolka, Conrad Veidt, J. Carroll Naish, and George Tobias. Lorre also ranked fifth on the list for the part of Wilmer Cook, right under Elisha Cook Jr.

  Much as Alfred Hitchcock had rescued Lorre in Paris, transforming imminent anonymity into international fame, John Huston now saved the actor from fading into the world of B movies and beyond—including overtures from Monogram Pictures for the role of a zombie-master in King of the Zombies (1941)—by casting him in The Maltese Falcon. Warner Bros. tacitly expressed little interest in Lorre as a versatile character actor. To the studio, he was a curiosity, a freak whose scope and ability had been circumscribed by repeated casting. John Huston disagreed. The actor’s performance in M had left a strong impression on him, and although he had not seen Crime and Punishment, he had heard about it. “The flight of his talent was just unlimited,” said Huston. “Peter could do anything. He had himself such a rich and varied personality that he could incorporate anything into it.” Huston saw no one but Lorre in the role of the malefic milksop Joel Cairo, whose real-life counterpart had been picked up by Hammett (then working as an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency) on a forgery charge in Pasco, Washington, in 1920. “Peter just seemed to me to be ideal for the part,” recalled Huston. “He had that international air about him. You never knew quite where he was from, although one did of course.” Like other directors before him, Huston also caught on to the possibilities of the natural duality of his screen personality: “He had that clear combination of braininess and real innocence, and sophistication.3 You see that on screen always. He’s always doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else. And that’s when he’s at his best.”