The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Lorre narrates the second story, building to a fevered, guttural pitch:

  Fill the Yankee Stadium in New York with one hundred thousand people. If there isn’t room for that many, no matter, jam them in and shut the gate. Let them wait there. Go to Chicago. Take Chicago Field. Jam another one hundred thousand into it. Lock the gates…. Go to the Sugar Bowl … to Cleveland, San Francisco, New York, six hundred thousand people, some relatives, neighbors, friends, most of them strangers, but people drawing breath as you do…. Give a signal. All at once turn machine guns on these people (sound of gunfire). Kill them. Kill the people. Spray the bullets around the stadium, into the faces of the girls…. Listen to the screams, but don’t stop … never stop until they are all dead, until not a groan is heard, until the mass of flesh is silent and the only sound you hear is the rush of their blood as it pours down the cascades of the seats and gurgles into the gutters right to where you stand.

  “That is my last horror story,” concludes Oboler, “but I haven’t written even that. It happened already. Yes … the place, the ghetto of Warsaw.”

  It happened also in Budapest in 1944, after a Nazi coup put the Fascists in power and the lives of one-half million Hungarian Jews, including Lorre’s own family, at risk. Recalled Francis Lorant,

  During the war, as you can imagine, we were not in a very good situation being right in the middle of Budapest after the Nazis took over. One fine day my grandfather and aunt were dragged off in front of the Gestapo. My father was in a forced labor camp somewhere at this stage and my poor mother was landed with the responsibility of trying to manage the family to the best of her ability. Anyway, the story goes that Peter was making some anti-Nazi speeches on the American short wave, which of course we didn’t hear because we didn’t have any of those privileges, but obviously the Nazis did. My aunt was dragged off to Auschwitz, but got sick on the long march towards the Austrian border and fell by the wayside and was too ill to continue. So that probably saved her life, for the time being, anyway. And my grandmother, who was very, very upset by the whole thing, tried to commit suicide, unsuccessfully, but at least having landed in the hospital at that stage we prevented her from being dragged in front of the Gestapo.

  On June 5 Lorre reported for his last tour of duty in the Warner Bros. armed services. He began his third year under contract with an adaptation of Confidential Agent, Graham Greene’s story about an antifascist Spanish Republican agent on assignment in England. The studio had originally set Humphrey Bogart and Eleanor Parker to costar but recast Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall in the leads. By May, late in the preproduction stage, Lorre also had joined the cast.

  Topical then, dated now, Confidential Agent (1945) was, by the standard of the times, an excellent spy melodrama. The Motion Picture Herald singled out Lorre, who “tops almost all his previous portrayals in one high-tension fit of hysteria.” When the confidential agent (Boyer) corners Contreras (Lorre) and accuses him of murdering a young girl, the actor unleashes his extraordinary vocality in a jagged crescendo of anxious flutters, torrential gasps, and raspy whimpers as his hand anxiously spreads across a face convulsed with frenzy: “I swear to you I wasn’t there when it happened. It was Maria. It’s her you want. She did it…. DON’T—DON’T FRIGHTEN ME! I have a bad heart. The doctor has only given me six months to live…. WAIT! LISTEN TO ME! If you only had six months to live and no hope at all, wouldn’t you choose a little comfort and respect? … WAIT! HEAR ME OUT!”

  His breakdown dead-ends in a heart attack on the bathroom floor, “which he executed beautifully,” said director Herman Shumlin, after “I described to him the way I saw the scene and the way I wanted it to happen. I think he felt that I should have taken it for granted that he would know how to do it effectively. When I described how I wanted him to fall and how I wanted him to lie as he died, he looked at me expressionlessly and said, ‘Show me.’ It was a deliberate challenge, so I showed him, falling and lying on the dirty floor.”

  Co-worker Dan Seymour recalled that Lorre also tested cinematographer James Wong Howe. “He used to drive Jimmy nuts,” said the corpulent character actor, “because he was always smoking cigarettes and when he looked through the camera, he’d always hold his cigarette in back of him. Peter used to have a little eyedropper with water in it, and he’d put a drop of water on the end of the cigarette. Jimmy would blow his top. He couldn’t figure out why the cigarette would go out and why it tasted so bad.”

  In 1944 Warner Bros. paid $13,500 to RKO for the motion picture rights to Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery, first published in 1892 in England and three years later in the United States. Originally brought to the silent screen as The Perfect Crime by Film Booking Office of America (FBO) in 1928 and again as The Crime Doctor by RKO in 1934, the Victorian whodunit underwent another refashioning by Warner Bros. scenarists Peter Milne and Barre Lyndon, resurfacing as “The Open Verdict.”

  After making the Academy Award-winning Star in the Night (Best Two-Reel Short of 1945) and Hitler Lives (Best Two-Reel Documentary of 1945), second unit director Don Siegel—who had done montage work for Casablanca and the mutiny and escape-from-Cayenne scenes in Passage to Marseille—held out for a feature assignment. Jack Warner gave him The Verdict, a mystery built around the pitfalls of circumstantial evidence, with Joan Lorring as a music hall entertainer; Sydney Greenstreet as George Grodman, superintendent of Scotland Yard; and Lorre as Victor Emmric, an artist who is partial to young women and old bottles.

  Finding a ghoulish little man with a macabre interest in painting cadavers—“I can do corpses exquisitely”—was easy, claimed a Warner Bros. publicist. Peter Lorre, the “pocket sized menace man” and Greenstreet’s foil, was the obvious choice. “Come on, Victor, I have a delightful stabbing for you to illustrate,” invites Grodman, who is writing a book about his famous cases.

  “Oh, no, I’ve done three stabbings in a row,” whines Victor. “How about a nice strangling for a change?”

  Emmric knows more than he cares to tell. With sardonic mirth, he plants false clues and casts sinister gazes, throwing audiences off the scent. “No one could be as guilty as he is made to seem,” wrote Jack Grant in the Hollywood Reporter. Just as often as Lorre secretes himself in a dark closet or lurks in the shadows, he trots out his affable lush. It is a good trick, playing on public expectations, then turning around and casting himself against type, all smoothly done in the same film.

  Peter and Joan Lorring picked up just where they had left off in Three Strangers. Lorring was self-conscious about wearing tights in a song-and-dance number. Always the psychologist, Lorre sensed her fears and soberly remarked, “Oh, you should never show those [her legs]…. You don’t even have them screwed in right. You’ve got the left one on the right and the right on the left.” Lorring laughed and felt better: “By the end of that movie, I had such a crush on him. I couldn’t stand it. I have to tell you that my skirt got shortened [and] I didn’t wear jeans … or slacks as much. I got other dresses and they were shortened. Now, how this looked, I can’t tell you.”

  Lorre kept Greenstreet on the hot seat, too. At one point in the film, the bulky actor rises from a chair and says, referring to the angling George Coulouris, “He’s already made one [mistake]; he’s misjudged the size of my britches!” Then his massive backside moves to black out the frame. Indeed, it was Greenstreet who persuaded Siegel to shoot him from behind at a low angle. When the director voiced doubts about using the scene, Lorre, with a devilish grin, piped up, “If I had been asked to do that shot, it would have been much more difficult.” After all, he pointed out, the “old man” had managed his bulk so well.

  In the final moments of The Verdict, Grodman laments that “things over which we have no control have come between us.” He was more right than he knew. Playing with Greenstreet was “one of the most satisfying times in my life,” said Lorre, but “we didn’t want to end up like Abbott and Costello.” The Verdict rang down the curtain on “the little man and the fat man.
”

  On December 4, 1945, Siegel brought in The Verdict eighteen days behind schedule. No one blamed him. In October the studio’s union employees had struck over low wages and poor working conditions. Riots broke out between opposing guilds. Pickets marched and rocks flew. Armed guards reconnoitered from rooftops. Hired goons wielded clubs and leather straps. Siegel remembered being the only director working during what became known as the Battle of Burbank. He fought his way into the studio without knowing from day to day who would be his cameraman or which members of the cast might show up.

  Lorre put his personal safety and the stigma of being called a scab ahead of Steve Trilling’s instructions to report to work. “He said he was afraid he would have to refuse,” reported Trilling on October 19, “[and] would not cross the picket line no matter how few the number.” Trilling reminded Lorre that “he had been passing picket lines for the past six or seven months; that he had come through the picket line last night at 5 p.m. with no threats or any intimidation.” The set was ready. The director, cameraman, and crew were waiting. The stand-ins were standing by. Even a call from Siegel—with William Jacobs in attendance—did not budge Lorre, whom Trilling characterized as one of the “timid guys.” The guild had told its members to be careful: “If there is mass picketing, if there is any threat of violence, don’t go through.”

  Siding with the union against Warner Bros. ran true to Lorre’s liberal form and at the same time twisted a knife in the sides of the patriarchal echelon. Moreover, his guild-sanctioned absence nicely covered an upswing in his drug problem. The mists, hazes, and banks of fog required by the story—and needed to cover the sets that did not fit the period—were produced by dry ice fumes, burning cans of charcoal, and vaporizing mineral oil. Lorre blamed the artificial fog, earlier a problem on Passage to Marseille, for triggering “what I think is now called ‘house dust’ allergy, which affects the sinus.” For his “very great pain and misery,” he sought out an allergy doctor, whose treatment did not include the use of narcotic drugs. “That was the time I found out I could not stand the suffering anymore,” Lorre told federal narcotics inspector Theodore J. Walker and agent Samuel Levine. “I didn’t think I could even finish the picture.” In November, complaining of “headaches, hay fever, severe attacks of pain in the region of his liver, and a marked depression,” Lorre visited Dr. Louis I. Sokol, who had treated him for addiction in 1939. His physical examination confirmed fever, migraine, biliary dyskinesia, and depressive psychosis. Among other things, said Lorre, Sokol “gave me at first Dapirin with Codeine; then when that did not work any more he slowly and reluctantly gave me Dilaudid, knowing full well that I was in danger of becoming addicted. He gave me approximately 6 to 10 prescriptions in my own name which I had filled at Turners, on Sunset Boulevard.” Lorre took his first injection of Dilaudid with the understanding that he would travel to New York after the finish of the picture and take a cure.

  Lorre’s health threatened to close down production, but Greenstreet’s actually did—for two weeks without pay. With the second lead down with pneumonia, Lorre and Siegel took off for sunny Palm Springs, where they vacationed at the B-Bar-H Ranch. When Siegel admitted that he didn’t know how to ride, Lorre offered to teach him.

  “You’re too effete to ride,” replied Siegel.

  “All Hungarians ride horses and women,” Lorre proudly returned.

  Siegel recalled that Lorre taught him standard corrective technique: “‘If the horse wants to go left, make him go right. If he wants to stop, make him move forwards. If he wants to go forwards, make him stop. It’s that simple.’ Believe it or not, it worked. In half an hour, I was in control of the horse. Peter rode superbly. I never saw him with a woman.” Back at the studio a tanned Lorre teased a pallid Greenstreet that he “must have lost at least a pound.” Greenstreet, recalled Siegel, just patted his protruding belly and chuckled.

  Siegel and producer William Jacobs ran the picture for Jack Warner, who registered genuine surprise—and consternation—at the last-minute revelation that Greenstreet was the murderer.

  “You can’t make Sydney Greenstreet the killer,” objected Warner.

  “You know the story,” countered Siegel. “We just followed the book.” Siegel and Jacobs were delighted that they had fooled Warner, but they were up against a brick wall. Warner had fingered Lorre for the killer and felt that audiences would do the same. To avoid confusion, he instructed Siegel to insert several clues pointing to Greenstreet’s guilt.

  Overwritten, overplayed, and overdirected, The Verdict was, in the minds of contemporary critics, overconstructed with well-worn materials. Variety complained that the picture’s “heavy-handed” treatment offered no relief from its “sombre monotone,” completely overlooking the comic touches gently prodding the story. Greenstreet lightened his sinister machinations with levity, even making sport of his own girth. When he is not satisfying audience expectations, Lorre cuts a dapper figure who is tenderly charming and immensely likable for all his faults. Returning from a night out with Lottie (Lorring), Emmric savors the moment with a satisfied smile and an impromptu bump-and-grind. It is Peter Lorre as few audiences saw him and as he wanted to be. According to Lorring, he was “thrilled” to be playing a leading man. Lorre swept up Siegel with his energy, input, and versatility. With the director’s blessing, he struck off in a new direction, if only momentarily.

  In December 1942 Warner Bros. had purchased the screen rights to W.F. Harvey’s short story “The Beast with Five Fingers” from the author’s widow for two hundred pounds. The property kicked around the studio for several years, with more than one writer failing to come to grips with it. Finally, screenwriter Curt Siodmak solved the problem of the Harvey story, which was, in his words, “not big enough or interesting enough for a motion picture,” by creating a screenplay about a murderer whose guilt is manifested in hallucinations about the severed hand of his first victim.35

  Siodmak said that he was thinking of Paul Henreid, who was starring in Casablanca at the time, when he wrote the screenplay. “Paul didn’t go for it,” said Siodmak. “He told me that he wouldn’t play opposite a bloody hand. My idea was to make the murderer inconspicuous—one would never suspect a leading man like Paul to kill the pianist…. Paul was wrong, and that is still my opinion.”

  The Front Office, however, decided on Lorre for the role of the demented bibliophile Hilary Cummins. Before the actor had time to groan and roll his eyes, studio publicists had announced, “Peter Lorre continues to be the busiest little ‘horror man’ in pictures, with new assignments piling up before he can finish up the old!”

  Director Robert Florey expected better of Warner Bros. than The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) after bringing in The Desert Song (1944) and God Is My Co-Pilot (1945), both box-office successes. Adamant in his dissatisfaction with Siodmak’s screenplay as well as the shooting schedule, he took a three-month suspension. But when he returned to Burbank, Jack Warner stuck him with the same assignment.

  “I read it,” Lorre greeted Florey in his office. “Don’t worry. Since you are in trouble I’ll keep two Pernod bottles in my dressing room.”

  Florey decided that the only way he could possibly make something out of the story was to “shoot it as seen through the eyes of Hilary Cummins.” He designed and photographed the sets in an expressionistic style and edited the film accordingly, “as I conceived my adaptation of ‘Frankenstein,’ and wrote and directed ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ at Universal in 1931.” Florey discussed the idea with Lorre. Interested in his conception, he accompanied Florey to the producer’s office. William Jacobs dismissed the project as “commercially unthinkable.”

  “A glimpse of what The Beast with Five Fingers might have been,” said the director,

  remains in the sequence in which Hilary, alone in the library, sees, then struggles with, the cut-off hand. He is terrified as the hand comes at him again and again until it becomes apparent that there is a bizarre connection between the hand and
the crazed astrologer who nails the hand to his desk—it escapes and Hilary chases it. This sequence and a series of quick flashes cutting to inserts of objects and shadows in the room and flashing back to distorted angles of Hilary’s face and close shots of the severed hand crawling—weird sound effects and strange music being recorded later—strident sound when a string is snapped from a mandolin hanging on the wall—each motion of the hand synchronized with a jarring shrill sound—the picture would have been a success if entirely directed as I visualized.

  The finished screenplay was not what Siodmak had envisioned, either. “When a writer has finished his screenplay, everybody gets into the act and improves on it. I told Peter that I was the worst writer in the world, everybody can do it better…. Peter fooled around with that screenplay after he got the part. It lost, in my opinion, its brittleness and menace. A threatening Paul Henreid would have been something new and with much more impact than bug-eyed Peter, whom everybody suspects anyhow to be the monster.”

  Filming got under way at the Warner ranch in Woodland Hills in November. Lorre swung between emotional extremes that were undoubtedly symptomatic of his growing frustration at Warner Bros. Humor mediated his highs and lows. On the second day of shooting, co-worker Andrea King went to put on her bathrobe: “I always had to be careful when I went to my dressing room. THAT HAND could and would be somewhere in my drawer or pocket of my dressing gown, I never knew. But I did know it was Peter.” It “was really an ugly, hideous thing and he fell in love with it. Well, the first time that I’d had this happen was [when] I went to put on my bathrobe while the hairdresser was fixing my hair. I put my hands in my pocket and of course here was this hideous hand. I threw it across the room, with catsup falling everywhere. And then you’d find it in your dressing room drawer [or] squished in your shoe.”