“My dear,” answered Lorre, “the good fortune of men who look like you and me is that there’s no accounting for women’s tastes.” Still, as Mrs. Jonas Silverstone pointed out, “Peter loved women. He loved the adulation that women gave him. He wanted them at his beck and call.”
Lorre cast himself as director and rather reluctantly as actor. “I’d be a better director than an actor,” he had told a Paramount studio biographer several years earlier, “but I can’t live without acting.” In his “Peter Lorre Picture,” he did both and collaborated as producer and screenwriter as well.7
Lorre set his story in Hamburg, which afforded both financing and film production facilities, equally hard to come by in postwar Germany. Through its long history of independence, the second largest city in Germany kept its feet on the ground and its nose to the grindstone. Temperamentally, the Hamburger was restrained and resolute, much like the Englishman with whom he had preserved trade links for centuries. As a city of merchants, Hamburg maintained stronger commercial ties to London than to Berlin. Politically, it also kept its own political conscience, giving Hitler 40 percent of its vote, 5 percent below the national average. In 1943 the R.A.F. had rained down 8,344 tons of bombs on the Hamburg area—with the stated directive of devastating “the morale of the enemy civilian population”—reducing the once cosmopolitan city to rubble and killing more than 45,000 people and destroying 253,400 dwelling units. Ironically, claimed the inhabitants, the anti-Nazi areas of the city suffered most while the pro-Nazi districts were spared.
The “Peter Lorre Film of an Arnold Pressburger Production” began shooting in what Bartning called, with telling prescience, “a dark period in November.” Every stifled and creative idea and impulse of Lorre’s past experience welled up, anxious to be recognized and expressed in his new film. From the “New Objectivity,” a realist movement of the Weimar years, he drew a “palpable actuality” in which “artistic creation and ‘true’ reality flow imperceptibly together.” This “unmade-up portrait of reality, a picture without retouching,” so the pressbook advertised, realized a new “Lorrealismus,” which looked past jackboots, swastikas, and “accent” players shouting “Sieg Heil!” at a raw, gray world of little people in the midst of their daily lives, coping with food rationing, air raids, and street rubble. “It shall be a Reportage-Spielfilm, with artistic solidification,” Lorre told Hamburg’s Die Welt. “We will attempt to create a new realism.”
Hofer remembered that Lorre wanted no “film beauties” in the picture. “The cameraman told me he would like to photograph me from my best side,” she said, “but he wasn’t allowed to. Lorre was naturally correct.” By keeping the photography stark, simple, and gimmick-free, he felt he could better concentrate on the story. He also believed black and white was more useful in artistic construction and provided a more intense effect than color, “comprehending the human and his world in fine and clear detail.”
Der Verlorene also owed a debt to American film noir, itself rooted in German expressionist cinema. During his Hollywood tenure, Lorre had appeared in no fewer than eleven pictures that wear this style. Stranger on the Third Floor, The Maltese Falcon, The Mask of Dimitrios, Three Strangers, and The Chase are all open textbooks for anyone willing to learn. The lessons are all there: voice-over narration, tilted camera and tightly framed close-ups, intertwined destinies, characters bound to the past by flashbacks, and nightmarish atmosphere. Clearly, Lorre had kept an open mind, letting the noir mood and tone, as well as its visual techniques, percolate into his aesthetic consciousness.
As a writer, he had less to draw on. “Everyone was more or less convinced that the script was worthless,” said Bartning. “Lorre was also convinced of this.” His co-workers felt he knew where he wanted to go, but he didn’t know how to get there. Eggebrecht, who was now working for the Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Hamburg, came on board last but stayed to the end. He called Lorre “a fantastic constructor,” who “was always testing new starts.” During filming, a coterie of advisers, including screenwriter Walter Ulbricht, who coauthored the screenplay for Unter den Brücken (Under the Bridges, 1945) with director Helmut Käutner, offered suggestions that fed the uninterrupted production of new scripts. Lorre quickly converted this process to a filmmaking philosophy that disallowed need for the written word. To facilitate the intuitive development of the dialogue, the actors “talked about the story, thought about it and we used their own words,” said Lorre of his experimental team approach. In this way he attuned parts to players, maximizing the psychological nearness and naturalness of their acting. It also enabled his writing staff to stay one jump ahead of the camera. “A formulation in this film,” advertised the pressbook, “has not been forced upon any actor which does not fit him; the details of his text have been developed from case to case out of his own personal nature, in order to achieve the highest degree of authenticity.” When Karl John asked Lorre if he would be murdered in the film, he replied, “I won’t tell you, because if you knew that you maybe wouldn’t act as freely; that is not possible that someone knows: ‘I’ll be murdered.’” No less a perfectionist than Brecht, Lorre often threw out the six or more versions of the script, preferring to mold dialogue to his actors in a kind of spontaneous fit. Whatever conditioned “the kind of freedom which musicians exercise in a jam session”—immediacy, expediency, or both—it bought time to implement yet more changes. In his first—and as it turned out only—directorial outing, he aimed for visual and verbal perfection, tirelessly kneading the three columns of words, neatly divided into camera, set, and dialogue, on broad sheets he had cut for himself. “This was different from all scripts that I have ever seen,” said Eggebrecht. When he found a better way to say a word or express an idea, he reshot the scene, believing, like Lang, that there are no small details. A sign on a train, the opening of a door, a shadow, all had to be right.
In the midst of cinematic chaos, Lorre needed a “well-kept corner.” His love of office materials, which bordered on obsession, amused his co-workers. If he saw a file folder, he had to have it. In his flat, he kept what Bartning described as a large board supported by two sawhorses on which he piled supplies precisely arranged at right angles. On it also lay “dozens of pencils very strictly ordered parallel to each other.” If someone dared to sharpen a pencil with a knife, he would yank it away and hone it with his “main pride,” a pencil sharpener. “One could read out of this,” said Bartning, “all sorts of things.”
In the opening frames of the film, a preface superimposed on a brick wall reads, “This film is not freely invented. The factual reports from recent years underlie the events.” Willy Schmidt-Gentner’s demonic musical score swells and crashes over the credits, overlapping realist and expressionist styles that, for some, underlined the picture’s inability to decide what it wanted to be, a newsreel or a psychological drama.8 Just as quickly, the pounding melody, which plays less than ten decisive minutes in the film, trails off into the early morning hum of the postwar German refugee camp Elbe-Düwenstedt (the film was actually shot at a concentration camp for Ukrainians and Russians at Heidenau, ten miles southwest of Hamburg in the Lüneburger Heide). Out of the stark architecture of lines formed by a raised railroad crossing gate and towering telephone poles, Dr. Karl Rothe (Lorre) enters the fenced enclosure, which, like the brick wall, solidly stands between past and present, amnesia and acknowledgment. There, under the assumed name “Neumeister” (new master), the taciturn scientist practices medicine. It is Peter Lorre as audiences had never seen him—cool, distant, and seemingly as displaced as his patients. He wears his expressionless face as a mask. His dark overcoat cloaks him from the outside world. Inside the camp he loses himself in his work. When the prefect suggests that he hire an assistant, Rothe objects: “Leave me in peace. I am happy when I am alone.” But a chemist from Kattowitz soon arrives with a shipment of patients. Administering vaccinations, Rothe hears a familiar voice: “Keep your nerve, doctor. I’m Novak.” It is Hoesch (Karl John), once a
member of the Gestapo and now operating under a false name. Rothe’s face drains. The past has caught up with him. He rises and leaves the clinic. Outside the refugee camp, he walks along a railway embankment, his hands in his pockets. Shot from a low angle, he appears silhouetted against the gray sky, detached from earthly reality. He watches an approaching train, as hulking and unstoppable as his own personal destiny. After it passes, he follows the tracks, swept along the same course.
Back at camp, Hoesch asks Rothe for a “permanent and dependable settlement” to the past and confesses that angst (fear) is a habit he has developed in the last years. Now that he and Rothe are in the same boat and cannot climb out, reasons Hoesch, they can be friends. He discounts their wartime experiences as only accidental (zufällig). Rothe mockingly repeats the word.
The brandy gone, they retreat to the canteen. In his soft, singing Viennese rhythm, Rothe tells Hoesch, “The door is locked, the windows are closed, everything has stopped. All remains outside, also the fear. We are at the end. We are there.” The doctor admits liking him much better now that he too has known the feeling of fear. “I tell you,” he says, “fear kills all other feelings. All. Yes, one also kills out of fear of others.” Suddenly, Rothe produces Hoesch’s pistol, which he has carried since the war. The assistant only laughs. He tells Rothe that he wants something from him; “I’m on the run, but I don’t have papers. After all, I helped you once.”
“Well, debts must be paid,” replies Rothe with mock irony. “It must be tremendous, my debt! Tremendous! In any case, you helped me once and today I have to help you—It is simple…. I have to see that you find peace—on your flight. I must after all begin to pay back my debts…. It weighs me down, since December 8, 1943—with interest and interest’s interest.”
Rothe paces back and forth, transported to the past in the first of ten flashbacks. It is 1943. Hamburg. Bombs fall. As the director of a bacteriological research department at the Tropical Institute, he lives only for his work. (In the “Arbeits” [work] version of the script, Rothe, like Lorre, expresses an equal interest in literature, particularly Dostoyevsky, who “can tell us more about the human being than ten books about deep psychology.”)9 Hoesch assists him in his experiments. One day Colonel Winkler (Helmut Rudolph), of the Spionageabwehr (Military Intelligence), visits Rothe in his laboratory, where he nervously watches the doctor draw blood from a rabbit: “From a person, fine, but not from such a harmless animal.” Winkler informs Rothe that his research has recently turned up in London and identifies the leak as Fraulein Inge Hermann (Renate Mannhardt), the doctor’s secretary and fiancée. Out of suspicion, the agent followed her. When she made sexual overtures, he seduced her and in confidence learned of her espionage. Hoesch tells Rothe not to let it give him gray hairs: “End it. Simply end it.”
Rothe descends the stairs into the laboratory basement. Tormented by Inge’s betrayal, he loses himself in thought. His fingers aimlessly ambulate into some rabbit’s blood. (In the “Arbeits” version of the script, he absentmindedly finger paints on a bloody lab table.) Rothe’s hand tensely passes over his face, smearing it with blood.10 The music score wells up and over. In a scene suggestive of Beckert’s examination of his reflection in M, Rothe peers into the mirror and confronts his darkest thoughts. The image startles him. He red-handedly looks right and left, wipes his face, and leaves. In the first of several visually innovative transitions that erase the border between past and present, Rothe walks down the basement corridor and turns right, his shadow trailing up the steps and out of frame. He next appears ascending the inside stairs of Frau Hermann (Johanna Hofer) and Inge’s apartment building, where his coldly murderous form, accompanied by a dementedly beating score, methodically advances toward the camera until it fills the frame. Once inside, he is pensive and distracted. Through a glass door, Rothe and Inge watch each other’s shadowy form pace back and forth. Romantic and sinister musical strains struggle for the upper hand. When Inge attempts to light his cigarette, Rothe only looks at her with heavy-lidded hatred. She drops the match.
Back in the present, Rothe steps on a burning match, extinguishing the life symbol. He tells Hoesch that Inge confessed and begged for forgiveness. At that moment, the telephone rang: “All at once it was as if you stood before me in the room.” Rothe stares threateningly at Inge. His hands, seemingly under a life of their own, run restlessly over the furniture. Leaning against a mirror, Inge reflects a double image. She kneels before the transfixed Rothe and brings his hand to her face. As he softly strokes her cheek, she closes her eyes. He fondles her pearl necklace. The score works overtime. Staggering between pain and pleasure, Rothe closes his eyes and wraps his hands around her neck; his rising form blackens out the screen. According to Bartning, Lorre “played around with this scene terribly.” For the strangulation, he asked everyone but essential cast and crew to leave the studio, then squeezed a doll out of frame to find the proper facial expression.11
Rothe’s face and hands press against a window in the canteen. “What had happened could no longer be undone,” he tells Hoesch. “I still don’t know. In any case, I knew absolutely nothing, believe me…. I felt something between my hands. I played with it without knowing what it was.” Another flashback finds Rothe back at Inge’s apartment after the murder. He fingers her pearl necklace and studies his hands, which seem to have acted independently of his will. Hoesch and Winkler arrive at the scene and collaborate on a cover-up, but Rothe wants to confess his crime. “Your entire fanaticism for justice, what kind of reality is that?” ridicules Winkler. “Nothing more than sentimentality…. Our good Hoesch did you a favor…. Come to grips with the fact that you’re going to live.” Because his research is more important to the state than the life of a confessed traitor, Inge’s death is pronounced a suicide. Rothe “resigns himself to [his] fate,” a theme which plays a recurring role in the “Arbeits” script.
“Don’t you understand?” he tells Hoesch in a passage that might well have remained in the finished film. “I couldn’t live on. I was not supposed to live on. … Do you have the slightest inkling what you did when you let me live?” Not allowed to atone for his sin, Rothe will kill until fate demands a reckoning.
Later, at the laboratory, he asks Hoesch to peer into the microscope: “Notice the three single ones [bacteria] there. Then give a name to the first one…. We will call it Oberst Winkler, the second we will name Hoesch and the third, Rothe. But if you take any one of these and put it into the blood of a healthy person, he will not remain healthy.” In the same breath, he pulls out a pistol he found in Hoesch’s desk. The doctor gives it back, adding that he admires it.
Rothe returns to Frau Hermann’s apartment. Since Inge’s death, he has played the surrogate offspring for the doting mother. There he meets Ursula Weber (Eva-Ingeborg Scholz), a new boarder (whose height forced the crew to build a platform to elevate the shorter Lorre). Baffled by her fountain pen, she turns to Rothe for help. They chat, he serves coffee, and she unwittingly brings up Inge’s suicide. As she goes to fetch some gingerbread, he sees her shadow through the glass door, which once again unleashes his pathological impulse to kill. He pulls Inge’s pearl necklace out of his pocket and begins to fondle it, deriving a sensual, almost erotic pleasure. However, at the last moment, he withstands the urge to kill and leaves. “Something had happened to me,” says Rothe in the “Arbeits” script, “something for which I had no clear name … because I still was not able to look in the face of truth—a truth which as a doctor I should have realized …”
At a bar, he buys a prostitute (Gisela Trowe) a drink. They leave together and walk to her apartment. The light in the stairway goes out as she fumbles with her keys. “Lorre said to me very exactly,” recalled Trowe, “that he would lightly nudge me when I should put the key into the lock of my apartment. And then I should only look at him and then something will come into my mind—and his mind too—and that I should only react to him.” She asks Rothe to turn on the light, then tells him, “Yo
u’re rather strange.” He hesitates. “And then he looked at me and here it happened,” continued Trowe, “and then I felt really weak.” The prostitute looks into the face of a gentle madman, whose mixed expression of tenderness and evil appears free-floating against a black background. “So you’re that kind,” she screams. “Totmacher! (death maker). Totmacher!”
Trowe was not certain who coined the word Totmacher. “I don’t know if it was written in the script, if Lorre mentioned it at the preliminary discussion, or if I said it out of anxiety,” recalled the actress. “That was the only thing he said to me: ‘Because she is a prostitute she notices it sooner … that [Rothe] doesn’t only want to sleep with her, there is something else.’ Afterwards it was said ‘Totmacher‘ is a new word. Lorre said, ‘This we have invented.’ He said it again and again.”12
Lorre asked her to quickly descend a dark winding staircase reminiscent of German expressionist cinema. When Trowe voiced her concern about running down the steep steps in a tight skirt and high heels, he replied, “It doesn’t matter how you come down the stairs. Just look that you don’t fall.”
Her shrieking awakens a disgruntled neighbor, more curious than concerned about the racket: “You’ve never seen anything like it! I tell you that is one, a murderer!” Scanning the staircase above, another tenant sees only a hand slither backward over the banister and out of sight. Accustomed to such goings-on, what has become a group of onlookers dismisses the incident as simply another episode in the prostitute’s nightlife. Rothe slowly descends the stairs. Confident no one has taken her screams seriously, he calmly explains that the woman had nothing to eat and too much to drink. Back on the street, he throws Inge’s pearl necklace into a garbage can. “Now I knew it,” he says in a voice-over. “What I had refused to admit to myself. She screamed it right in my face. Totmacher. I was saved in the very last moment.”
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