The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  On May 29, 1941, Lorre signed a “Screen Actors Guild Minimum Contract for Free Lance Players” at a salary of $2,000 per week, with a minimum five-week guarantee and featured billing. Trilling snidely noted to Jack Warner that the actor was short of cash “for some reason, which appears prevalent” and had requested a partial advance of “500.00—or more if we would so grant it to him—against his first salary. Will that be o.k. with you?”

  Production began on Monday, June 9, 1941. Huston stuck to the story. In The Maltese Falcon, he said, “I attempted … to transpose Dashiell Hammett’s highly individual prose style into camera terms: i.e. sharp photography, geographically exact camera movements; striking, if not shocking, set-ups…. As the book is told entirely from the standpoint of Sam Spade so also is the picture.” He asked his cast to study Hammett’s novel and thoroughly familiarize themselves with the characters. Huston posted sketches of camera setups, entrances, and exits on a large board: “About half the time they would themselves fall into the set-ups that I’d designed, and about a quarter of the time I’d have to bring them into those set-ups. The remaining quarter of the time, what they showed me was better than what I had drawn.” He also commandeered a closed set for rehearsals—unheard of. Run-throughs meant few takes and an express schedule. Shooting pretty much in sequence, he invested the gathering momentum of the filming into the narrative action, trailing Hammett as closely as the censors permitted.

  Spade’s quick paging through Cairo’s passport tells moviegoers he was born May 5, 1903, in Lepanto, Greece, and is a professional “Traveler” who now resides in San Francisco. Apparently indifferent to the political consequences attendant upon King Alexander Koryzis’s consent to the landing of British forces in Greece, Huston did not heed the suggestion of Carl Schaefer, head of foreign publicity, “that the ‘heavy’ character … not be identified as Greek and therefore that no insert or close up be made of his passport.”

  Joseph Breen, watchdog of the nation’s morality, read the temporary script for The Maltese Falcon in May and found the basic story acceptable. However, he warned, “certain objectionable details” must be eliminated before the picture could be approved. Since drinking apparently offended audiences, he recommended it be kept to an absolute minimum necessary to the development of the plot.

  Expletives—Spade’s “damn” and Gutman’s “by Gad”—were also objectionable. Intimation of illicit sex between Spade and Iva, and also between Spade and Brigid, had to go.

  Cairo’s homosexuality posed one of the biggest obstacles to securing overall approval of the picture. Hammett didn’t mince words in the novel. “This guy is queer,” says Sam Spade’s secretary as she hands him an engraved card bearing his name—Mr. Joel Cairo. He speaks in a “high-pitched thin voice,” carries “gaily colored silk handkerchiefs fragrant of chypre,” and walks in “mincing bobbing steps.” Introduced as a “gorgeous young customer” to an unwitting Spade in the pre-Code 1931 version of the film, Otto Matieson’s “Dr. Cairo” comes across merely as a starched sophisticate. Arthur Treacher, a tall, lanky English actor who specialized in impeccable butlers, including Jeeves to David Niven’s Bertie Wooster in Thank You, Jeeves (1936), played Cairo for a wacky Wodehouse-type humor in the post-Code Satan Met a Lady. Hal Wallis realized that American audiences—not to mention the Hays Office—were not ready for a candid look at homosexuality, which traditionally drew laughs and jeers out front.

  “We cannot approve the characterization of Cairo as a pansy as indicated by the lavender perfume, high pitched voice, and other accouterments,” Breen wrote Jack Warner. “In line with this, we refer you to Page 148, where Cairo tries to put his arm around the boy’s shoulder and is struck by the boy for so doing. This action, in light of Cairo’s characterization, is definitely unacceptable.” After reading the final script a few days later, Breen also noted his objection to Cairo’s effeminate behavior in scenes 21 and 155, where he rubs the boy’s temple.

  After seeing Lorre’s first day’s work, Wallis dashed off a memo to Huston: “Don’t try to get a nancy quality into him, because if you do we will have trouble with the picture.” Huston bent to Breen’s will. In the film, secretary Effie Perine (Lee Patrick) presents Cairo’s calling card to a bemused Spade, who holds it to his nose.

  “Gardenia,” says Effie.

  “Quick, darling, in with him,” replies Spade.

  The rest Huston left to Lorre’s subtlety and the viewer’s imagination.

  Wallis kept a close watch on production with a mind to polishing the rough edges. He found need for improvement all the way around. Lorre, he said, needed to enunciate, to round out his words. Greenstreet likewise. Wallis felt the film’s tempo was too leisurely and singled out Bogart, with his “suave form of delivery,” for dragging out the scenes: “All of the action seems a little too slow and deliberate, a little labored and we must quicken the tempo and the manner of speaking the lines.”

  The svelte 137-pound Lorre who stepped before the camera on June 18 seemed younger, fitter, swifter. More was asked of him and he asked more of himself. It was partly a change in attitude. Lorre’s stuntman, Harvey Parry, drew this analogy: “I would say it would be like you’re going to be a clerk at Woolworth’s 5 & 10 cent store, and suddenly you get moved to Saks Fifth Avenue. So now you put on a tie and you’re a little cleaner and your diction is a little better. You say, ‘Good morning, may I help you?’ where before you said, ‘What do you want?’”

  The role of Joel Cairo was the best of its kind to come his way in years, and Lorre knew it. He kept it that way by deftly cross-graining layers of subtle characterization. Fastidiously arrayed in a black three-piece suit, wing collar, and bow tie, the actor articulates with delicate exactness as he mindfully fondles his umbrella, suggestively brushing the phallic handle across his lips. Each nuance finds its own pose and posture; meticulously gaited movements pause his body language; his forehead furrows, rustling his greasy curls; groomed fingers ceremoniously smooth a white glove over the brim of his upturned hat; the lines of his mouth bend to a shy intimacy, then twist to a silkily menacing grin. But his malevolence, veiled behind guileless eyes, is benign. After telling Spade he intends to search his office for the falcon, Cairo orders him at gunpoint to clasp his hands together at the back of his neck. Spade easily disarms him, punches him in the face with his own right hand (not once, but twice), then jabs him onto a couch. Minutes later, Cairo comes to and steps to the mirror to assess the damage to his appearance. “Look what you did to my shirt,” he pitifully whines.

  When Gutman chips the enamel coating on the falcon and uncovers the lead beneath, Cairo squeals in rage: “You! It’s you who bungled it! You and your stupid attempt to buy it! … You—you imbecile! You bloated idiot! You stupid fat-head, you!” Sobbing, he collapses into an armchair, his tantrum spent. With hearty truculence, Gutman announces that the quest will take them to Istanbul. Cairo’s mewling tapers off and his face brightens. “Are you going?” he whimpers. Roused by the Fat Man’s resolve, he meekly proposes to go with him.

  “I’d often shoot a scene with Peter and find it quite satisfactory, nothing more,” recalled Huston.

  But then I would see it on the screen in rushes and discover it to be far better than what I had perceived on the set. Some subtlety of expression was seen by the camera and recorded by the microphone that the naked eye and ear did not get. He’d be doing little things that the camera close on him would pick up that standing a few feet away you wouldn’t see. It was underplaying; it was a play that you would see if you were close to him, as a close-up, as a camera is close. Things would flicker there and burn up slightly, like a lamp, and then dim down, and come on again. You’re watching something as if it were in motion.

  Behind the scenes, Huston nurtured a family feeling. “You felt you were working in an atmosphere of love,” recalled Patrick. “You were with a director who loved every one of you and wanted everyone to be good in his own way. He made everything very intimate to you. Wha
t he had to say to you was very quiet, in your ear. He could illuminate just what he wanted with a few words. He made you feel somehow that you were so important to the picture. And it only led to good performances.”

  Members of the crew likewise felt this warm embrace. Script supervisor Meta Wilde, William Faulkner’s mistress, recalled in her autobiography that when Lorre learned she spoke a smattering of German, he delighted in engaging her in conversation on the set.

  Huston set up an open table by the pool at the Lakeside Country Club across from the studio. He kept attendance voluntary and the spirit festive. Ahead of schedule, the company took long lunches, leaving shop talk behind. After shooting, the bitter-enders—Huston, Bogart, Lorre, Astor, and Ward Bond—reassembled for a few drinks and stayed on until midnight.

  The camaraderie nurtured by Huston fed a repertory spirit among the cast and crew. In 1962 Lorre reminisced that filming was “one of my happiest memories and [a] very nostalgic one, because for a few years we used to have a sort of stock company, an ensemble…. It was a ball team…. Each one of those people, whether it was Claude Rains or Sydney Greenstreet or Bogart, or so on, there is one quality about them in common that is quite hard to come by. You can’t teach it and that is to switch an audience from laughter to seriousness. We can do it at will, most people can’t.”

  As the cast grew more comfortable with each other, the line between work and play faded, setting the stage for an elaborate practical joke called “Shock the Tourists.” “We didn’t want people around watching us,” wrote Astor in her autobiography, A Life on Film. “We had an odd childlike territorial imperative about our set. It was hard work, and we didn’t want anyone looking over our shoulder, so to speak. Also, we had a sneaky feeling that we were doing something different and exciting, and we didn’t want to show it to anyone until it was finished.”

  Each player had a move. The arrival of starstruck onlookers prompted Huston to call out “Number Five.” Bogart would suddenly launch into a prepared harangue, calling Greenstreet a “fat old fool” and viciously berating the actor for upstaging him. In a mock attempt to check Bogart’s temper and quell the racket, Huston would intervene. Lorre, too, had his charade. “Whenever VIPs would come on the set to witness the shooting,” said Huston, “Peter would slip into Mary Astor’s dressing room and come out buttoning up his fly as people were passing. This was a regular procedure. Peter loved to shock people.”4Their “goddam gags,” so called by the long-suffering publicity man, put an end to gaping visitors. Huston got his closed set.

  “The combination of Huston, Bogart and Lorre was very fast company in the wit department,” wrote Astor.

  There was a kind of abrasive, high-powered kidding-on-the-level thing that went on, and you joined in at your own risk…. I did the best I could for a while, but it was more than I could handle. I got sort of backed into a corner: “Then you admit you don’t like pointillism, that the Fauves were a bunch of jerks?” “I didn’t say that, I just said—” My eyes started to smart and I whimpered, “I just can’t keep up with this!” Bogie laughed his head off, along with the rest and then got up and came around the table to my place. He wiped my tears with elaborate care. “You’re O.K., baby,” he said. “So you’re not very smart—but you know it and what the hell’s the matter with that!” Although it was still on a kidding level, Bogie really meant what he had said. “Be yourself. Be yourself and you’re in.”

  Huston wrapped production at 2:00 a.m., Saturday, July 19, two days ahead of schedule and at a cost of $327,182—$54,000 under budget and only $50,000 above the production costs on the 1931 Del Ruth version. Undergoing several title changes—preproduction as Knight of Malta and postproduction as The Gent from Frisco—The Maltese Falcon was released October 1, 1941.

  “It was not the effort,” Lorre said of the film, which he cited as his best, “but the form which was unforgettable.” Huston is foremost a storyteller respectful of his source material. Beyond a simple fitting and trimming, he took few liberties with the novel. His sharply stylized images, oblique compositions, and comic-strip economy charges Hammett’s world with energy and visual wit without intruding on it. His hand as director was only heavy enough to keep Hammett and Hollywood apart, upholding the fidelity of the living language in the author’s crisp dialogue and the hard-edged realism of his noir mood. Holding down the clutter of gloss, gimmicks, and generic trappings, he stepped behind the scenes and into Sam Spade’s shoes. His eyes rove, seeking to uncase and react, to know all the angles and report all the facts. He adjusts the tension through the camera’s lens, seeing all, one moment downright equivocal, the next pressing his specimens behind glass, defined in captive space. His is a subjective and often cynical view, commenting and caricaturing, seeing in and through, all told drawing a curtain on a dark underworld of greed and treachery.

  Nominated for three Academy Awards—Best Picture, Sydney Greenstreet in Supporting Actor category, and John Huston for his screenplay—The Maltese Falcon lost on all counts. Spurred by public favor, Warner Bros. projected The Further Adventures of The Maltese Falcon, with Huston writing and directing and Bogart, Astor, Greenstreet, and Lorre reprising their roles. Plans for a sequel, however, never materialized.

  Lorre also figured in casting discussions for a stage dramatization of The Maltese Falcon, set for fall of 1949. Dashiell Hammett wrote his sister in Pleasantville, New York, that the play would proceed “if we can get a good script and if we can get a good cast.” Both Howard Duff, who had starred in The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective on radio, and Fred MacMurray were favorites for the gumshoe. Instead of reprising the role of Joel Cairo, Lorre was under consideration for the part of Kasper Gutman. “I think we’ll ignore the written-in-fatness,” wrote Hammett. “He should do a pretty good job on it, used to be a fine actor.” The play was not produced, with or without Lorre.

  Lorre had shuffled from one studio to another for years, displaced and unanchored, always for hire. Separated from Celia, he now lived alone. The vacuum drew him to an extended family that embraced him as one of its own. Physically, Warner Bros. was on the small side, more intimate and cozy than Metro or Fox. From the moment a player passed through the gate, where he was met with a warm greeting from the guard, to the time he entered makeup and gulped his hot coffee and donuts, the sense of familial surroundings was reinforced. Overnight, Lorre became a fixture at the studio. In the Green Room, the noncafeteria part of the commissary reserved for actors, directors, and executives, sports fans crowded around Pat O’Brien for the latest scores, while those with a psychological bent attended Lorre’s discussions on extrasensory perception, congenital memory, and déjà vu. “He was a font of knowledge,” recalled set designer Harper Goff, “or at least knew about things in that vein. People who leaned toward that huddled around Peter.”

  Lorre labeled his Warner Bros. cohorts “journeymen” actors. It was an exclusive club of peers built on mutual respect and shored up by fierce loyalty. They lost patience with no-talents and slackers. No matter how bad the hang-over—or the picture—they showed up on time.

  “Peter was a director’s dream,” confirmed actor Bob Cummings, a coworker on The Chase (1946). “He arrived prepared and ready to shoot, and was very facile at converting the director’s ideas quickly and efficiently into usable film with seemingly no effort. He knew his trade and was skillful in his ‘under’ playing of the part. If asked to ‘give’ more to heighten the tension of the film moment he was capable of supplying the extra projection…. There was nothing pretentious or up-stage about him.”

  “Peter was glad to be working,” recalled producer-screenwriter Milton Sperling. “He was an actor with grease paint on his collar and that was the way to be…. We were just a bunch of working stiffs who were going from picture to picture and there was no sense of history involved, or giant contributions to cinema being made.”

  Working with Humphrey Bogart represented the best of times for Lorre. They became good friends during filming of The
Maltese Falcon. Bogart barely survived his stormy marriage to the irascible Mayo “Sluggy” Methot, an actress of little stature with a fiery temper and a fancy for Scotch. After their bouts, he found a neutral corner at Lorre’s house.

  “One night Mayo walked out on Bogey from my house and Bogey stayed with me,” Lorre told columnist and critic Ezra Goodman over martinis at a San Fernando Valley hash house in the early 1960s.

  Finally, I got fed up with Bogey and threw him out. He disappeared into the night. He was making the rounds.

  At 6 a.m. I got a phone call. It was Bogey’s voice or the remains of it. “Pick me up and take me to the studio,” he said and gave me a certain telephone number. I didn’t know the address. I finally phoned and got the address. The place was two blocks from me in the Hollywood hills.