The improvised scene, which they did in one take, put Lorre in a good mood. “He laughed a lot,” said Trowe, “and constantly fed the cats, which already had eaten a lot of herring.” The tenants at the apartment house in the St. Pauli district, where Lorre shot the scene, “said yes, such a nice man and he is not so mysterious after all.”
Rothe decides to catch the last train home, where he meets his second victim. Helene (Lotte Rausch), a lusty, gregarious woman, laments the difficulty of the times with two small boys and a husband at the front. His annual eight days’ leave is inadequate, she complains, and adds invitingly, “I’m just too spirited!”13 Rothe plays with a Hampelmann—an homage to M or blatant borrowing?—pulling the strings just as forces beyond his control manipulate him. Suddenly, an air raid siren sounds. Passengers take shelter in the station and the train moves into the open. Rothe stays behind with Helene, who rationalizes that everyone’s time will come. She alluringly rearranges her blouse and strokes her stole. As Rothe lights his cigarette, he stares at her, the burning match illuminating his face. The deadly intensity of his expression terrifies her. He drops the match. His rising form blackens out the frame, and Helene screams. Another passenger discovers her body in an overhead luggage rack: “To flee was of no use…. I didn’t want to do it, and yet I did do it. And now I was walking through the night, blind, deaf and verloren (lost).” In the “Arbeits” script, he also confesses to feeling “like an animal, an animal that wants to hide in distress in its cave.”
Returning to his apartment, Rothe sees a light in Inge’s old room. He whispers her name, then bursts in on Ursula, who bolts upright. He checks his urges and exits, restraint masking his face. Here, Bartning remembered “pinching something from [Fritz] Lang, from M, a little trick. Lang had a technique in M, at a certain place toward the end, to produce more tension. He shows an empty room and a man goes through the room and the room again becomes empty. Always empty to empty. I remembered seeing this twenty years earlier. So I said to Lorre, we have to do that also. I don’t know if this was in the final print. In any case, one sees the empty street in the camp and he comes walking through it and the street is empty again.”
The Lorre team made effective use of this technique at several points, most dramatically after the second murder. When Rothe passes out of frame, the camera coldly stares down a dark, deserted street. Similarly, after Rothe leaves Frau Hermann, the viewer sees an empty room and watches the door slam. Like a specter, Rothe has passed through unseen.
“Even though I find suicide objectionable, cowardly and inexcusable,” Rothe voice-overs from the present, “there was no other way out.”
He returns to the institute and burns his research notes. But for one cigarette, Rothe tells a groggy Hoesch, who, he warns, will soon be able to sleep as long as he wants, he would not be alive today. Ransacking his assistant’s desk for a cigarette, the doctor discovers “these strange letters from Inge.” He also pockets the revolver: “You had to come along. One single time in my life, I wanted to kill—kill with a purpose.” When Hoesch learns that Rothe is looking for him, he sets out in search of the doctor, who stumbles onto a political conspiracy at Winkler’s villa. With the Gestapo outside and the resistance fighters inside, Rothe finds himself in “a detective novel.” A chase down Hamburg’s Seewartenstrasse ends at the Bismarck Monument; one conspirator is shot. Rothe and Winkler watch “the grown-up Indian game” from a bridge tower. The Colonel returns Hoesch’s gun, which he had earlier taken from Rothe. “For Hoesch,” says Winkler; he disappears. In soulful solitude, Rothe stands holding Hoesch’s pistol.
Back at the canteen, a matching shot shows Rothe clutching the gun. “Yes, unbelievable,” he says, looking back. “The bombing night was over. Thousands were dead. Thousands who wanted to live. Only I. I was still alive. Unbelievable.” In another flashback, Rothe returns to Frau Hermann’s apartment in the Magdalenenstrasse (just one of the streets on which Lorre lived during filming), only to discover the building has been destroyed and its inhabitants are dead.14 Rothe decides to bury his past with the others and adds his name to the blackboard outside, marking a cross next to it. “So Dr. Rothe was dead without having died,” narrates Rothe.
“I perhaps could have believed the past was buried in the rubble of the Magdalenenstrasse,” he tells Hoesch, “until you showed up this afternoon…. Then I knew there was no forgetting. That’s not possible.”
Hoesch accuses Rothe of being an amateur, who, unlike himself, never cultivated the most important survival skill—the ability to “spring to the side.”
“Now, you spring to the side,” says Rothe, pointing the pistol at Hoesch and shooting.
“That’s yours,” he adds, and tosses the gun on the floor.
He then removes the cigarette pack from Hoesch’s hand, takes one, and throws the container on his chest. It falls to the floor.
“Belongs to you.”
Bartning recalled that they tested this scene many times. “Then during the filming,” he said, “I know that because my heart stood still—Lorre improvised that. He didn’t disclose that before, that he throws the cigarette pack down and adds, ‘Belongs to you.’ In any case, that wasn’t in the script. It wasn’t ever planned. But it was a crazy moment. Yes, a crazy moment.”
Rothe puts on his coat and walks to the gate, accompanied by a dog. As he leaves the fenced enclosure, the pet, his last worldly attachment, turns back, leaving him to complete the circle alone. Trudging through the forest of oblique lines that opens the film, he walks onto the railroad tracks. His back to an oncoming train, Rothe puts a hand over his eyes.15
Lorre later told American International Pictures (AIP) set designer Daniel Haller that the crew asked itself how they were going to make this scene look genuine. Lorre had an idea. “There were several tracks,” he said. “As we laid out the scene, I walked above an over cross and along the railroad tracks. I was on the mark, with my back to the train, which was to switch tracks before reaching me. The camera was locked off. I could feel the train coming. It really put a believability in it.” It also instilled a real sense of fear in both the engineer and the actor, who afterward expressed their mutual discomfort.
Lorre’s experience as an actor gave his directing a personal style that, said Lotte Rausch, “was very rare and has died out today. He did not place us under the dictation of technique, but rather arranged the technical into the artistic exercise.” Nothing, it seemed, ran true to form. “The way he worked was very, very different from the usual hectic ways of the studios,” recalled the actress. “He started mostly around 12:00 noon! For those of us who were used to being at the studio at 7:00 a.m., it was a novelty, which, by the way, we appreciated.” Sensitive to noises, Lorre held frequent script conferences in a soundproof cabin in the studio, where he also invited his actors to discuss their roles, raise questions, and offer suggestions. “This happened to me,” continued Rausch, “when he warned me about the scene [cut from the film] in which he strangles me, that he would probably really hurt me and apologized for this ahead of time. Naturally, I was afraid of this at the time of the filming and was able to bring this very well into expression.”
As a director, Lorre kept his input low-key. “I never heard a loud word out of him, not on any occasion,” said Bartning. “He had a very strong personal radiance about him and there were people who talked with him the very first time, they loved him at once.” Lorre turned any discussion into a conversation between friends. “Because he knew how to direct actors masterfully and how to explain his intentions to his cameraman,” said Rausch, “in my opinion, a great career as a director stood before him. He never commanded; he convinced. He listened to other opinions and discussed quietly, almost excusing himself when he was of another opinion. He won them as friends.”
Lorre forged a “unity of spirit” that embraced the members of his company, especially his female leads, whom he gently aligned into a kind of planetary rotation around his own charismatic core. “He
loved his players,” said Rausch. “He was very worried about them and this worrying naturally came back to him in the form of an echo.” This mesmeric warmth, said Trowe, “loosened self-consciousness…. You have the feeling that he listens extremely well and then you begin to open yourself, but you don’t feel rejected or naked or, in a mean sense, observed. This was the most important part of his work, to me at least … where you had the feeling that it originated, in the moment, at the most honest and truthful situation.” Taking a page from Brecht, Lorre encouraged his players to show what they felt. This maximum of closeness to the material, he believed, precluded the possibility of cheating. “If you listened to him,” concluded Trowe, “you weren’t able to lie.”
The pressbook featured a story ostensibly authored by Renate Mannhardt titled “Peter Lorre war mein Regisseur!” (“Peter Lorre Was My Director”). In it, she noted that
working under Peter Lorre was hard, but wonderful. That was a new apprentice time, so to say. There was no false accent which he did not feel and which he didn’t know through suggestive guidance to place weight on. Each sound had to be true to the human who was supposed to be portrayed. With a patience which I have never yet experienced, he tested further and further, until one gave oneself up almost unconsciously in order to be the human that one had to portray. And this remarkable engulfing aura of the great actor-director encompassed everyone already during the morning walk into the studio.
It happened to me here for the first time that a director was capable of breaking through the thin hardened layer with which you surround yourself for protection against the injuries of an outer world that has become hopeless, and which has bared a new human being, one previously undiscovered in oneself.
I stood in the studio and did not possess any more the least feeling of myself, but was simply my role, “Inge,” as Peter Lorre wanted her to be—and have been probably never more than in this time “I.”
When my work on this film ended, the daily life was not able to weaken the strength of the impressions I felt. Whosoever has worked together once with Peter Lorre will always be captured by the power and accomplishment of his artistic intentions and will always remember again and again the suggestion of his direction and acting as his partner.
Other co-workers, however, remembered different intentions. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong with that film,” reflected Fred Pressburger, who took over production of the picture after his father died, “including Peter’s resorting to drugs.” Of all the crises and contingencies that plagued the production of the picture, Lorre’s drug use topped the list. Contemporary medical texts describe the typical addict as “a worried, troubled, and harried individual” who suffers from “a poor self-image, and feelings of ineptness and being unappreciated, disapproved of, and disrespected.” Did Lorre feel life’s share of tragedy, frustration, and failure more keenly than others? Were his rationalizations a real or imagined smoke screen to hide human weakness? Correlating episodes of drug use and freedom from addiction with the ups and downs of his personal and professional lives is hopelessly contradictory. During his first productive years in England and America, he relied heavily on morphine, Dilaudid, and Pantopon to cope with the stress and strain of filmmaking. Yet a healthy, athletic, drug-free lifestyle characterized his successful tenure at Warner Bros. during the early and mid-1940s. Only after 1946 does his case history begin to conform to the textbook profile. Morphine put the depressed and exhausted actor in “a state of mind which is characterized by freedom from pain and worry and by a quickened flow of ideas.” When the drug wore off, however, his eyes began to close and his voice slur. “He would suddenly, totally disintegrate,” said Fred, “and then he would say, excuse me a moment, and he would go to the toilet and he would come back absolutely full of energy.”
Fred had discouraged his father from getting involved with a “dope addict,” but Arnold assured his son Lorre was a “different man.” “When he left the sanitarium he said he wouldn’t ever touch the stuff,” said Fred, “but I don’t think that lasted very long.” Lorre himself reassured Fred that he had the upper hand on his habit, “saying that when you use drugs you have to space yourself, otherwise you will just be lost.” To those close to him, his dependence was very evident. “Although he never complained about it,” said Rausch, “it never remained hidden from us.” After late-night consultations with his writers, he often arrived in the morning unshaven. “He didn’t want to see himself in the mirror,” said Bartning, who scrambled to line up a barber. The ups and downs of well-being and withdrawal fell into a well-worn pattern. Even those cast and crew members not privy to the secret commented on his apparent sickness and the noticeable presence of a doctor by his side. He rarely ventured out, keeping to his apartment. “He had fully withdrawn himself,” recalled Bartning, “and there was no company, besides just a couple, Eggebrecht and Jacobson.”
One day, Lorre and Bartning were sitting in his dressing room when, recalled the editor, “in came a ripe blonde lady and theatrically fell down at Lorre’s feet.” He looked at her in the mirror but didn’t get up.
“Oh, yes,” Lorre finally whispered.
The blonde was Inge Landgut, who had played Elsie Beckmann in M some twenty years earlier. She had stopped by to say hello after learning he was filming in Hamburg. “I was happy, nearly relieved when I shut the door myself and stood outside in the fresh air,” she recalled. “My impression was that it wouldn’t have made any difference who was standing before him. However, in order to judge something one must know what was going on inside of him. I cannot judge it, but saw at that time only the eerie one before me.”
Lorre needed money for drugs. “He wanted money, money, money, and he would do anything to get it,” recalled a frustrated Fred Pressburger, who blamed financial pressures for pushing his father over the edge. Lorre put the bite on almost anyone who would listen. His ability to buy a fix often depended on the success of his line. “I remember still a Saturday I brought him from the firm two or three thousand marks,” said Bartning, “and on the next Monday he asked me if I could loan him money. I gave him 200 marks.” Pressburger recalled that Lorre then approached Mainz. “Look, you have nothing to do with this picture,” he told the credulous producer, “but I bet you could make money if you could distribute it abroad. Lend me $5,000 and you can have the rights because I am a partner.” When Mainz learned that Lorre did not own the foreign distribution rights, he wanted his money back. He appealed to Pressburger, who told him, in short, he was out of luck, and pocket.16 “How he did that, I don’t know,” marveled Bartning. “Anything was possible with Lorre. Anyway, we were amazed. This occurred on a Sunday. On Monday I came to him and he came smiling toward me and reached into his pants pocket and gave me the 200 marks. In such matters, he would not have let me down. Apparently, he had let other people down.” In addition to finagling a fifty-thousand-deutsche-mark loan “on condition he repay the sum twenty-four months after the opening of the film,” Lorre received a generous expense account. “He had, I believe,” recalled Bartning, “about 200 marks for expenses per day. I still remember that we had the feeling this was unheard of, but the money was always gone.”17
Lorre made no attempt to hide his other addiction from either his coworkers or filmgoers. By now, the cigarette—and its attendant smoke—had become indivisible from his screen image, as suggestively sinister as his menacing purr and globular eyes. “Without it, he couldn’t function,” said Jerry Lewis, who later directed Lorre in two feature films. “His cigarette was his greatest prop … how he lit it, when he lit it, how he smoked it and when. It was an adjunct of his personality.” When Lewis made The Patsy in 1964, he and several actors conspired to concoct a scene in which Lorre’s cigarette would be grabbed out of his hand. “Lorre came to me in a panic and said, ‘I will do anything you want, but please don’t take my cigarette.’”
“He didn’t just smoke,” said Robert Cummings, “he was never without a cigarette, seemingly a
n endless chain, lit in the dawn and not going out until the next dawn.” Or so it seemed both on and off the screen. Behind the scenes, Lorre’s cast and crew criticized his chain-smoking, which they found unbearable. It was an unrealistic cinematic accessory, given the scarcity of cigarettes during wartime. They also marveled at his extravagance; American cigarettes cost roughly $2.50 apiece. Critics also took note of Lorre’s smoking, pointing out that some viewers laughed at his perceived affectation, while others diagnosed a case of acute nicotine poisoning. If the cigarette symbolized the murderer’s “timely nervousness,” as one reviewer supposed, for most it simply got on the nerves.
Lorre’s state of mind—one minute melancholy, the next rallying at full tilt—not only paced the production by fits and starts but also set the mood of the picture. Fixing his camera on Rothe, Lorre framed his own image, that of a lost and lonely man locked in a dark struggle, looking for a way out. Herbert Timm, writing for the Bremer Weser Kurier, described “the tired sadness of his eyes, the resigned twitch of his mouth, which can no longer smile; a lost gesture, a hopeless raising of the shoulders” and noted how “he plays his Dr. Rothe, sparse in his movements, tearing open the abyss with a tossed off word and building a world out of the seemingly unimportant.” Lorre’s portrayal was a self-portrait of a man who sought to sever his connection with the past, only to learn there is no escape.
Obscuring the thin line between reality and illusion blurred Lorre’s artistic vision. His co-workers weren’t sure what the film was supposed to say. “The main problem was the script,” claimed Pressburger, “because it wasn’t quite clear what the film was supposed to be about.” What had begun as a simple altruistic note had swelled into a cacophony of discordant sounds. “Lorre wanted just everything,” said Bartning, “everything was supposed to be included.” De Maupassant was there, winding in and out like a dark undercurrent. Lorre even drew on Friedrich Schiller, further mixing his message. He saw much of the German dramatist’s “tragic hero” in Rothe, and perhaps in himself. Lorre believed that the doctor deserved both admiration and pity because, caught in the conflict of irrational forces, he repents of his transgressions and through his self-sacrifice in the refugee camp summons moral resistance to his suffering, invoked by the “stress of circumstances.” In keeping with Schiller, after exercising his free will to reach a moral end, Lorre’s selfstyled “psychopathic hero” conquers fate by acquiescing to it, willing his own destruction. This act of self-liberation shows the sublime and noble human character. In death, Rothe harmonizes free agency and passion, thereby achieving the state of der schönen Seele (beautiful soul).
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