But Lorre didn’t change his mind. In fact, a supplemental agreement to his multiple-picture deal, dated September 9, 1943, indicates that he stood his ground and then some. His nonexclusive contract allowed the actor to work outside the studio in two A pictures annually. By committing himself to three pictures (instead of the original two), Lorre also won permission to direct one outside feature per year. “In such event,” casting director Phil Friedman wrote Roy Obringer, “the contract will be suspended and extended for a period equal to that consumed in connection with such directorial work.” However, Warner Bros. held the right to preempt outside work by serving twenty-one days’ notice on the starting date of his next picture. By invoking paragraph 26 of Lorre’s contract and rushing him into a new assignment, it kept a tight rein on his services. The arrangement forced Lorre to turn down offers to appear in Universal’s Her Primitive Man in October 1943, William Cagney Productions’ Blood on the Sun (1945) the following August, and Paramount’s The Private Eye in April 1946.23 Burgess Meredith also remembered thinking of Lorre for Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), which he coproduced, coauthored, and starred in. The director, Jean Renoir, was fond of him, said Meredith. “I know there was talk about seeing if we couldn’t use Lorre in Diary … but at any rate they didn’t want to get too many accents.”
Warner Bros. was so disinclined to allow Lorre to work for other producers that when Roma Wines proposed filming his August 30, 1945, radio broadcast of Suspense as part of an exploitation campaign, the studio jumped at the opportunity to further limit their employee’s outside activities. On August 17 Obringer disingenuously wrote the actor’s agent inquiring whether “Lorre plans to use this as one of his two ‘allowable’ outside pictures.” If so, continued the general counsel, the studio would not stand in his way by exercising its preemptive rights. The resulting 16mm filmed radio performance runs thirty minutes. While providing rare footage of Lorre behind the mike, it hardly qualifies as an A feature.
Warner Bros. even held a patent on Lorre’s “physical likeness,” caricaturing the actor in animated cartoons that depicted a baby-faced villain with bulging eyes and nasal whine. He had presumably signed away his screen image as early as 1941 when, on May 24, during preproduction on The Maltese Falcon, Warner Bros. released “Hollywood Steps Out,” which featured a gallery of stars, including Peter Lorre. Eying a naked woman clothed only by a bubble, he diffidently whines, “I haven’t seen such a beautiful bubble since I was a child.” In Dr. Seuss’s “Horton Hatches the Egg” (April 11, 1942), an incredulous “Peter Lorre Fish” spots the elephant atop a bird’s nest, pulls out a pistol, and shoots itself in the head, a scene later deleted by several television networks for its violent content. Other animated appearances included “Hair Raising Hare” (June 8, 1946) with Bugs Bunny, “The Birth of a Notion” (April 12, 1947) with Daffy Duck, and “Racketeer Rabbit” (September 14, 1946), in which he again shared the screen with Bugs Bunny—and an ersatz Edward G. Robinson.
Probably the most original appropriation of Lorre’s screen image appeared in a thirteen-week episode of a Batman and Robin newspaper strip entitled “The Two-Bit Dictator of Twin Mills,” which ran from October 30, 1944, to January 26, 1945. Drawing on the William M. “Boss” Tweed and the Tammany Hall scandals that rocked New York City in the 1860s, Al Schwartz (who went on to become a regular writer for the Superman strip) “wrote the strip like a film scenario, even describing how the characters should look.” The Lorre character, “Jojo the Flinker,” was “a good example of the way I would develop a personality,” explained the writer, by “having him use words in his own peculiar way and exaggerating certain personal mannerisms and idiosyncrasies.” Batman creator Bob Kane (who used W.C. Fields for his inspiration to pencil Tweek Wickham) gave his Lorre look-alike an old face and a new voice. The parted hair (on either side, depending on the frame), dangling cigarette, and sloe-eyed imperturbability were familiar to moviegoers. However, the voice was pure New York mobster, with “boid” for bird and “poifect” for perfect. Schwartz used another of what he described as “speech markers” to delineate Jojo: “flink.” The trigger man flinks birds from the hip and guys between the eyes. He practices his flink, makes a perfect flink, saves a flink for a doublecrosser. Both noun and verb, it meant sudden death by pistol shot.
Sheltering as it did an ensemble of character actors, Warner Bros. held a strong attraction to the rootless Lorre. It was a studio built of specialists of every size, shape, and nationality. A haven for this human mélange, it was also a prison for the creative artist. The Front Office took few chances, seldom risking a backlash at the box office by casting against type. Pigeonholing was good business, but too often prototype gave way to self-impersonation. Repetition begat perfunctory portrayals and mechanical predictability. “They were always trying to latch on to aspects of a personality and use them just for commercial purposes,” said contract player Geraldine Fitzgerald, “use the person as a kind of product and not really give them a chance to develop, which in the long run would have made them much more interesting a product. They would try to cash in on us in an instant way.”
Celia said that Peter had been “happily unhappy” at Warner Bros. The simple contradiction nicely accommodated the extremes of his experience there. Character work assured a certain present, but threatened an uncertain future. Weighing prescribed stardom against creative confinement spawned nagging doubts in Lorre’s mind, although not about his appearance in cheap exploitation pictures. Before the ink had dried on his contract, and with Metro’s The Cross of Lorraine still in production, Universal announced plans for Chamber of Horrors. According to Variety, June 9, 1943, George Waggner, who was then directing Cobra Woman (1944), cooked up the idea of rounding up Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., George Zucco (all under contract to Universal), Peter Lorre, and other “goosepimplers” in a “ghostly rodeo with Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mad Ghoul, the Invisible Man and kindred spirits prowling into one cinematic nightmare.” The “Chiller-diller to end all chiller-dillers” progressed no further.24 RKO also failed to deliver Lorre, Karloff, and Lugosi in Star Strangled Rhythm—a play on Paramount’s 1942 Star-Spangled Rhythm—in which Boris and Bela’s movie-made horror personas take possession of their bodies.25
Having worked the anti-Nazi sentiment of the Casablanca cast into a successful advertising campaign, Warner Bros. went to the well again with Passage to Marseille (1944), based on Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s Men without a Country. The studio paid a whopping seventy-five thousand dollars for the novelette and set the “Casablanca kids” on French Guiana, now as convicts desperate to exchange their penal servitude for a crack at the Nazis.
“As you may already have discovered, mon capitaine,” Lorre, as the convict Marius, confesses, “I’m a very clever man and sensitive, sensitive down to my fingertips. In fact, these fingers made me the best safecracker in Paris and a virtuoso among the pickpockets.” Although Nordhoff and Hall fashioned Marius as “the worst rogue of the lot,” screenwriters Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt softened the role, giving Lorre a sympathetic bent. Hardly the knave in the story, Marius advertises his droll humor and dies for the cause behind a machine gun poised at the attacking Luftwaffe.
Warner Bros. pressed production on Passage to Marseille, intent on scheduling its release to coincide with the expected Allied invasion of France. But invasion talk, heavy in the air since 1942, proved a poor barometer of progress on the war front. When the offensive did not materialize, the studio delayed release until February of 1944, anticipating, though somewhat prematurely, the Allied landing in Marseille six months later.
Passage to Marseille was the fourth outing for Bogart and Lorre. Once again they teamed up with Michael Curtiz, whom they goaded to distraction with their practical jokes. For Lorre, however, the mood turned sour when the smoky battle scenes triggered his “house dust” allergy. The actor complained that he would not work under such conditions, prompting an assistant to repor
t to the Front Office: “I am very much afraid that we are creating a ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ by using doubles for PETER LORRE because you must not lose sight of the fact that there are other members of the cast in the same smoke, such as CLAUDE RAINS, SYDNEY GREENSTREET, etc., who, when they find out we are using doubles for PETER LORRE and HUMPHREY BOGART, will also demand doubles, and where in the hell will we be then—might as well shoot the whole picture with doubles.”
In late 1943 Warner Bros. decided that the hugely popular Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) might enjoy a repeat success. The studio assigned producer Wolfgang Reinhardt and writers Alvah Bessie and German émigré Leonhard Frank to update the story of a doctor whose research into the physiological reactions of criminals leads him into a life of crime. By giving it a new title, renaming the characters, and changing the setting—to nineteenth-century London—but keeping the story essentially the same, the Front Office hoped to pass the picture off as something new. It was clearly a matter of out-and-out theft, without being too obvious.
The availability of Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet gave the writers an idea for an “interesting (and pathetic)” twist. As Clitterhouse, Greenstreet would be in love with a young girl who treats him “like a dog,” but feigns affection in exchange for expensive gifts. “We added some new characters and cast Peter Lorre in the role of a feebleminded gangster called Willie the Weeper,” wrote Bessie in his autobiography, Inquisition into Eden, “who was constantly trying to snitch Greenstreet’s whisky, so that Greenstreet would whack him on the back of the hand with a ruler and roar, ‘Whisky’s not for children!’—and Willie would weep.”
Five or six weeks later, they showed their treatment to Reinhardt, who gave it an enthusiastic nod. Audiences would never remember where they had seen it all before. At a story conference, however, Steve Trilling threw the manuscript on the desk. “Greenstreet in love with a young girl?” he raged. “That’s disgusting!” Bessie explained they were going for the pathos in the situation, but Trilling said audiences would laugh it off the screen. “Now look! We’re going to remake The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse,” he exploded. “It was a very successful picture. It made a lot of money…. I want exactly the same picture—word for word!”
Bessie and Frank went back to work, writing a treatment that differed only slightly from the original screenplay. Trilling was livid. If he had wanted the same picture, he screamed, he would have re-released the original picture. “I don’t want to make a picture about a crazy man!” he finally bellowed. “Forget it!” He assigned the project to two other writers, who resurrected Bessie and Frank’s original treatment, only to have it shelved for good.
When John Huston made The Maltese Falcon, he had unknowingly pulled the project out from under Jean Negulesco. He later apologized and told Negulesco that the studio owned a book every bit as good if not better than The Maltese Falcon in Eric Ambler’s popular novel of international intrigue and espionage, A Coffin for Dimitrios. “Take it to Henry Blanke,” advised Huston. “Just do the book page by page.”
Negulesco broached the idea of filming the story in a memo to Jack Warner, who was bent on cultivating a crop of young directors capable of operating on small budgets. Frank Orsatti, Negulesco’s agent—also Lorre’s—did the rest.
Negulesco and Blanke, the film’s producer, took a copy of the book and cut and pasted up the individual pages, improvising a script as they went. Because, in his words, he “respected character actors more than stars,” Negulesco wanted only featured players in the picture. For the darkly sinister Dimitrios, he got newcomer Zachary Scott, whose screen debut earned accolades from Lorre. Negulesco credited himself with the idea of costarring Lorre and Greenstreet in their own movie. Blanke approved the casting and arranged for the actors to test for the leads.26
“Let’s do a scene,” said Negulesco. Lorre and Greenstreet rehearsed their lines. The director heard giggling. “Go to it, boys,” he instructed. The actors clowned their way through most of the test. Negulesco said nothing, just letting them go. Anything to be different. “I saw the rushes,” Blanke scolded the next morning. “They are terrible. I want to tell you something, Jean. This is your first chance to make a picture. But if the first day’s rushes are as bad as the test I’ve just seen, you won’t be doing the film.”
“It was a great gamble,” said Negulesco. “They were fooling around, improvising from their characters. It was a test of what they should not do. Fortunately, next day I had quite a good scene. They liked the rushes of that and the picture proceeded smoothly.”
In The Mask of Dimitrios, Lorre uncomfortably wears his departure role as a diffident Dutch mystery writer swept up in a real-life mystery. “It’s hard to break old habits,” the actor joked about his performance, which is uncharacteristically wooden. “I can’t control my leers. My glowers get out of hand. I snarl when I should be wincing with fear. That’ll last only for a few days, at least I hope so, and then we’ll be making better time.”
Negulesco, however, credits him with saving the picture. “Lorre was the most talented man I have ever seen in my life,” said the director. “If you watch The Mask of Dimitrios, you’ll find that the whole picture, its entire mood, is held together by him. Without him, you’re a little bored by it. I think his chief asset lay in the element of surprise. When you expected him to be quiet he was loud. When a scene in The Mask of Dimitrios threatened to run down, for example, this little man would shout for no reason at all; and as you were slowly recovering from the shock he’d say mock-innocently: ‘Did I scare you?’”
Indeed, the director thought him so perfectly cast that when Orson Welles considered remaking The Mask of Dimitrios and playing Greenstreet’s role, Negulesco could suggest no one to play Lorre’s part.
What The Mask of Dimitrios lacked in budget, it made up for in production value. Negulesco put his talent as a painter to good use, sketching scenes beforehand, crowding his canvas with Balkan backgrounds. Art directors Ted Smith and Harper Goff “had to make it look like Constantinople, Sophia, or wherever by using stock backings. But if the door swung the wrong way, so that it got in the way of the camera or the entrance, we literally could not rehang it. We took the set as was, moved in and went to another set.” The potted palms, louvered doors, circular fans (“to give a sense of heat”), and a cosmopolitan cast—including Steven Geray, Kurt Katch, and Victor Francen—gave The Mask of Dimitrios a strong international flavor.
Negulesco directed his first full-length feature with deliberate care, integrating the numerous flashbacks without cost to the narrative action. The picture drew generally favorable reviews as “a strange, absorbing drama of crime, intrigue and vengeance” and has since earned a footnote in the noir canon—primarily for its somber, low-key visual style. Ambler thought “it wasn’t that bad; and bits of it, those in which Sidney [sic] Greenstreet could compel an audience to overlook the miscasting of Peter Lorre, were almost good.” Los Angeles Examiner‘s Sara Hamilton thought it much better, including Lorre, “who is so much more an actor than a mere personality … he can play anything.”
Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are inseparably linked in the public mind as the Laurel and Hardy of the crime set. “There seemed to have been what the Italians call simpatico between him and me,” said Lorre. “That was self-evident from the outset.” For Don Siegel, who directed them in The Verdict (1946), the secret of their appeal “was that they were like a marriage of a beautiful girl and an ugly man. They appeared to be diametrically opposite—and opposites attract.”
Greenstreet savors crime, making a hearty repast of its sinister flavors. He is father to the boy, master to the pupil, affectionately paternal, benevolently corrupting. Lurking in a dark corner, peering out with bulging eyes, Lorre whines and feeds on the scraps. Whereas Sydney is openly civil, belching cordiality, Peter is secretive, reckoning his masks in layers. He is infernally friendly, warily effusive, always the droll and deadly schoolboy. Somewhere in the musty film vaults must lie a lost scen
e of the two actors walking away from the camera side by side, Greenstreet waddling with jaunty grace and Lorre mincing in youthful tread, the one jovially guffawing, the other tittering in 2/4 time. The contrast of the pixie and the behemoth has taken on a dimension that is larger than life and one their films cannot fully document. Paired or pitted against each other, they formed a celebrated complement.
Behind the camera, they gave shape to another contrast, one of working styles. Greenstreet, claimed Siegel, was deadly serious about rehearsing. Steeped in formal training, the disciplined actor knew every period, comma, and dotted i in the script and expected exact cues. And then Lorre arrived on the set, apparently unfamiliar with his lines, the scene, the film, even the studio, and as giddy as his partner was grave. “So this is the script,” Lorre casually mused, holding it upside down. Gay, voluble, spontaneous, unflappable, uninhibited, and not temperamental, he was everything Greenstreet wasn’t—except professional.
“He used to tell me how he drove Sydney Greenstreet up the wall,” remarked Richard Matheson, who scripted a series of horror-comedies for Vincent Price and Peter Lorre at American International Pictures in the early 1960s. “Greenstreet was this theater trained perfectionist and he would deliver a line and Lorre would just throw something back at him that seemed to have no relationship to the picture.” When the cameras rolled, however, Lorre was letter-perfect. Greenstreet marveled at Lorre’s sangfroid and heaved a sigh of exasperated relief. “It was all a game to Peter,” said Siegel, who felt a happy set was a relaxed set. “He knew the script and had studied it.”
In their game of cat-and-mouse, Lorre did the stalking. When Greenstreet warned him he would cut off both his hands if he did not stop projecting himself into his scene, Lorre amiably checked, “Fine, then I’ll play the scene with stumps and steal the whole show.” Irving Yergin said that Lorre loved to tell of being on the set of The Conspirators (1944) with Sydney Greenstreet and Hedy Lamarr, who was wearing a low-cut dress. “Hey, Sydney,” he joked, “you’re the only person on the set with a pair of tits.” According to Lorre, production was held up for two hours while Greenstreet and Lamarr chased him around the set, no doubt fitting one reviewer’s description of the actors as a “Pekingese and a great dane out for a romp.” Lorre wrapped his take on one of his favorite stories with Jack Warner fining him ten thousand dollars for the delay.
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