Der Verlorene fell flat with French audiences, but it found its big supporter in French film historian Lotte H. Eisner, who felt the language barrier blocked understanding of Lorre’s message. She defended his vision in a review essay for Cahiers du Cinéma: “The ‘lost one’ does not blame the Nazis for his own fall, but for not having acted ruthlessly against him after the murder, for not having judged and executed him. He blames them for disguising a murder victim as a suicide because it serves their own dirty ends…. Perhaps the case of Peter Lorre’s film is as complex as that of Limelight, which had to be re-seen and re-seen before all its layers of hidden beauty could be penetrated and some of its more bewildering aspects could be understood.” In her classic work L’écran demoniaque (1952), which reached English-speaking audiences (in a revised edition) as The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (1969), Eisner further spelled out her critical approval: “Lorre gives evidence of very personal inspiration. He has matured, his physique has improved with his art, he knows how to avoid false pathos and overemphasis, and how to give full weight to silences…. There is not a single slip, a single forced contrast, or a single false value.” In a postwar cinema stagnated by mechanical comedies and smothering dramas, said Eisner, Der Verlorene recalled the best of the past and looked to a brighter future. With its failure, she lamented, “the German cinema lost for some years all its hopes of renewal.”
In August 1952, six months after returning to the United States from Germany, Lorre put Jonas Silverstone to work negotiating the American release of Der Verlorene. However, sorting out the tangled foreign rights for a film that had little chance of finding an audience at home proved doubly discouraging. Silverstone took a cue from Lorre’s growing resignation in the face of commercial reality and lost heart. Armed with ready answers for his reluctance to bring the picture out over here, he expressed concern that it would be “simply treated as a psychological shocker” rather than as “the only anti-Nazi picture made in Germany, a story of times without law.” Political considerations, he later elaborated, persuaded him to keep it under lock and key, adding, “I must be out of my mind—I own 60% of it.”31 Putting a public-spirited face on his decision to “not ever bring it out over here,” Lorre stated that “it would probably make money too. But there are times when an actor should know enough not to make money. I don’t think the State Department would like me to indict any other country’s politics.”
Although German film clubs dragged Der Verlorene out of the closet from time to time, the picture did not reach American audiences until 1983. Centering more on form than content, critics singled out the same strengths and weaknesses as their German counterparts had thirty-two years earlier. Once again, they credited Lorre with delivering one of his best screen performances. “He reached new heights as a master of gesture, mood, symbolic image and significant silences,” wrote Prairie Farkus in the Daily World, the only Marxist daily newspaper published in the United States. New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it “an interesting expression of the frustration of Lorre’s creative personality,” touching on an aspect of his history that seemed to evoke sympathy from American critics. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner noted that the actor moved through the film “with an almost palpable weariness and despair.” He “looks tired, weary of life, drawn,” added Shawn Cunningham in the Villager. “There’s a heaviness in each footstep and in each drag on the chain smoked cigarettes.” Despite the “authentic note of internal suffering that cannot be questioned,” for most critics, Lorre’s “carefully controlled, intense performance” was far more impressive than his film. Critical opinion of Der Verlorene ran the gamut from a lukewarm “evocative” to a damning “platitudinous.” For all the subtlety of Lorre’s “natural” acting style, as a filmmaker he neither resolved the story’s moral dilemma nor managed a meaningful political statement.
Comparisons between Lang and Lorre seemed inevitable. Only one reviewer noted the difference between their geometric and allegorical directing styles. Another credited Lorre with breathing “freshness into the expressionist style, while showing a great deal of restraint.” Most, however, thought Der Verlorene derivative of Lorre’s most notable screen success in M and suggested that he depended too much on Fritz Lang for inspiration. Twenty years later, they pointed out, he had paid his debt to the past in the deflated currency of an “inwardly tortured psychotic murderer who is really a good guy at heart.”
Lorre stayed on in Germany through late fall and early winter of 1951 in hopes that Der Verlorene would catch on and generate film offers. “We sat in his small dreary hotel room on Munich’s Karlplatz,” recalled Manfred George, a reporter for the American German-language newspaper Aufbau. “He told of his disappointments. He was tired and depressed and times were far off…. Peter Lorre sat and waited for the hotel clerk to call and announce the arrival of film producers, backers and distributors. No one called.” Neither the producers, who had taken pot shots at “an outsider and emigrant [who] was already a thorn in the side” because he proved artistic films could be made with limited means, nor National, which he accused of making cuts without consulting him, prompting a knife-twisting clarification that independent production was impossible without independent distribution.
He took it personally. “The defeat of The Lost One almost crushed my father,” said daughter Catharine. “It was a miscarriage. He felt the film worked. It was every part of his creative ability. A lot of energy was gone.” Of his postpartum mood, Irving Yergin remembered that the film’s failure left Lorre hurt, bitter, and depressed. His staged comeback in his homeland had backfired. Like Beckert and Rothe, he stood on the outside looking in, a stranger in what had become a strange land.
In an earlier letter to Elisabeth Hauptmann, he had replied, albeit somewhat belatedly, to Brecht’s invitations to join his ensemble with veiled overtures indicating that “the winter sleep and swamp time ended long ago.” Interested in reestablishing contact, he asked Hauptmann to send him some of Brecht’s poetry. However much he wanted the verse, Lorre used the opportunity to put out feelers about a position. “I don’t want to be a nobody forever,” echoed an actor desperately anxious to renew his options in Germany. “It would mean so much to me if you could dig up something for me—I would be very grateful to you.” But Brecht turned over nothing for his friend.
When reporters asked Lorre what he had in mind for his next picture, he called upon “Kaspar Hauser” for a ready answer. He might have put a more definite face on the future had he known of Alfred Neumann’s intentions to cast him as the mentally disturbed Zar in a film production of his novel Der Patriot (The Patriot). In a letter of March 20, 1951, Neumann had informed director William Dieterle that he had optioned their proposed film projects based on Der Patriot and Der Teufel (The Devil) to producer Rudolph Cartier, of Telecine Films Ltd., London.32 Dieterle accepted Cartier’s offer to direct both pictures. But the plans for the Anglo-American-German production fell apart even before they had fallen together. Cartier admitted that although Neumann was a great author, he lacked experience in the film business. Otherwise, said the producer, he would have chosen Orson Welles for the role of Zar. In June Dieterle advised Neumann to cancel the option because of Cartier’s undependability.33
Like Brecht, Lorre also voiced thoughts of updating Shakespeare. The idea of translating MacDuff, Duncan, and Macbeth into contemporary Germany fascinated him “just as every story fascinates me where inner conflicts and suffering form the center of a human being.”
The foreign press reported that RKO had offered Lorre the position of European director for its planned distribution of Der Verlorene, which it also intended to produce in an English-language version before the winter theater season began. Press reports also stated that German and Italian producers sought his services for salaries up to seventy-five thousand deutsche marks. If it sounded too good to be true, it was.34
Another project at least held the possibility of
materializing. German response to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano had been very warm. Ernst Klett Verlag, Lowry’s German publisher, had sought to obtain the film rights to the novel in fall of 1950. One year later, Clemens ten Holder, his translator, informed Lowry that Klett was interested in negotiating a movie version with a German company, possibly Arnold Pressburger Productions. The financial potential of such a plan, perhaps with Peter Lorre in the main role of the Consul, he added, was great and would increase sales of the book. Although earlier efforts from American film companies had, according to Lowry, fallen through “for fear of censorship,” the author attached more importance to a German production. As a student of expressionist cinema, Lowry told Klett he “would rather have it produced in Germany than in any country in the world.” That same day, Lowry wrote to ten Holder in “a complete dither of excitement” about the possibility of a film. He felt that the book would make a great picture. Believing that he had “many excellent ideas for its transposition into the cinematic medium, which [he could not] help but feel would be valuable,” he stated that he and his wife, Margerie, wanted a hand in writing the scenario. Several weeks later, possibly anticipating Klett’s reluctance to involve Lowry in the script development, ten Holder tried to put the brakes on the author’s careening enthusiasm with news of Der Verlorene‘s disappointing show. He also raised the larger, more difficult issue of financing films in postwar Germany.
Lorre and Lowry shared much more in common than names that sounded the same (a fact that fascinated Lowry). Their respective cinematic and literary efforts grew out of “a great hash” concocted from every hidden, repressed, and pigeonholed experience from pasts that haunted presents: exile, isolation, loneliness, despair, damnation, remorse, redemption, tragic self-awareness, and the loss of identity.35 In a letter to his English publisher, Lowry wrote that his novel was “concerned with the guilt of man, with his remorse, with his ceaseless struggling towards the light under the weight of the past, and with his doom.” That “the part [of the Consul] might have been written for him [Lorre]” speaks to a perception that went well beyond admiration.
Darker parallels existed between the two men. Both were addicts whose chemical dependencies stemmed from their own frustration and failure. Tortured by personal demons, many self-inflicted, Lowry and Lorre journeyed into emotional labyrinths and lost their way. Rediscovery became a series of dizzying regressions that spiraled out of control, blurring the line between art and autobiography. Like the scorpion in the story, not wanting to be saved, they stung themselves to death. Form followed theme. If Lowry, who did a stint in Hollywood, wrote in cinematic terms, Lorre thought in them. Both visualized the machinelike qualities of fate, the one in the mechanized, circular image of a carousel, the other in the relentless rotation of the locomotive’s wheels. These images are reminders that “the present cannot escape the past, that the impotence of man’s present merges with the guilt of his past.” It is hardly surprising, then, that novel and film are both circular: prologue is epilogue. The central characters rush downhill toward death and damnation. Likewise, both stories run their course in a day, with frequent use of flashbacks. Using mirrors, staircases, and shadows to achieve a degree of “expressive emphasis and distortion,” Lowry and Lorre each paid homage to the German cinema. Interior monologues and metaphoric language also darkened an already “stifling, doom-laden … overwhelming and all-encompassing vision of decay, despair and self-destructiveness” that characterized the men and their works. And like Lowry, Lorre (more so in the early script versions) cast “the autobiographic consciousness” as the hero of his story.
Although Lorre apparently still needed to be sold on the idea, Lowry was convinced that they could make a film so great that “God knows what it might lead to eventually.” The idea that Lorre, “one of the greatest actors who has ever lived,” might play the Consul and possibly even produce the film, kept Lowry’s head in the clouds. He confided to Harold Matson, his agent, that he had
a real regard for Lorre’s art, which by the way has rarely been seen here at its highest, not even in “M.”—Chaplin said he was the greatest living actor too, by the way, and Chaplin is probably right.—But the point is the public has tended to think of him as a sort of Mr. Yamamoto-cum-horror doctor. There couldn’t be a better part for him than the Consul, though an enormous amount depends on his director. Not even Fritz Lang did well enough by him perhaps. And even Paul Fejos—an even greater, if possible, director—did not do right by him, or himself.36
By late November, with Der Verlorene all but driven out of the theaters, and Lorre looking for another German production, Klett succeeded in interesting the actor in making a film out of Under the Volcano. Reportedly “fascinated” with the project, Lorre even read from Lowry over Radio München before returning to New York. Though Klett had offered to strike a fifty-fifty deal on profits from a film version one year earlier, problems arose when the publisher indicated that it preferred to “go around” Matson and deal directly with Lowry, whose “say in the treatment and scenario” remained to be settled to his satisfaction. Although he refused to sign a film contract, Lowry nonetheless nurtured hope that the project would not fall through. In December 1951 he even suggested keeping Lorre’s “interest hot” by writing a letter that would be personally delivered by Matson in New York. Matson replied that in his judgment the “whole tangle” seemed “very unlikely of a profitable outcome … and I wonder if it’s worth pursuing unless there’s something persistent and definite forthcoming from Klett.” As late as October 1952 Lowry still held out the possibility of a German film starring Lorre.
Broke and without solid prospects, Lorre raised the red, white, and blue flag. Surrendering to America, however, did not mean yielding to Hollywood. According to the German press, he planned to conquer Broadway as the crippled French painter Toulouse-Lautrec in a stage play of Pierre La Mure’s novel Moulin Rouge, adapted by the author and actor José Ferrer, who would also direct the production for the Plymouth Theater. Lorre reportedly signed a two-year contract for fifteen hundred dollars weekly and 7.5 percent of the earnings and committed to a film version of the play for RKO.37
“Strange to say,” said José Ferrer, “I know nothing whatever about Peter Lorre being involved with Moulin Rouge. I suspect that this is the work of Pierre La Mure, who was apt to say anything to anyone if it suited his mood of the moment. I bought the dramatic stage rights to Moulin Rouge with the idea of presenting the play that Mr. La Mure had written. The play was flawed, in my opinion, but I felt that there was enough material in the novel to make a good dramatic presentation. Unfortunately, Mr. La Mure was most intractable and refused to change a word of his play, so I was hopelessly stuck with something I could not seem to be able to manage. It was at this point that John Huston called me up and asked me if I was interested in making the film (Moulin Rouge, 1953) and naturally I was, and that was the end of the plan for producing Moulin Rouge as a play.”
At the first of the year, an American officer in the Special Services offered Lorre a free flight home in exchange for showings of Der Verlorene at U.S. Army bases in Italy, Greece, and North Africa. After receiving triple typhoid and tetanus vaccinations at the 18th Field Hospital in Nuremberg, Lorre boarded a DC-4 Air Force transport out of Frankfurt’s Rhein Main airport on February 16, 1952. The plane was bound for Westover Air Force Base in Springfield, Massachusetts. He took with him only a toothbrush, a washcloth, a razor, and a 35mm print of Der Verlorene, allegedly stolen, since he had no permission from National to keep a copy of the film. Annemarie waved goodbye from the tarmac.
9
ELEPHANT DROPPINGS
With occasional interruptions, I’ve been killing my way through life. It’s that simple.
—Peter Lorre
I need the hum of the cameras and the illumination of the spot-light. I will make films until I die.
—Peter Lorre
Disappointment awaited Lorre in America. Wasted and unable to generate
interest in Der Verlorene, the defeated actor-director-writer returned from his lonely mission empty-handed. He had sought to listen and to learn, and perhaps to help himself by helping others. His countrymen had paid him back in indifference, “with interest and interest’s interest.” Friends felt that he also wanted to shout down those who doubted he could rise above the studio star system by proving that he could write, direct, and act. No one heard him. Now he picked up where he had left off, as if Der Verlorene had never happened.
Back in New York, Lorre visited the Silverstones in Pleasantville, then checked into Beekman Towers at the corner of Forty-ninth Street and First Avenue to be nearer NBC, which guest-spotted him on The Big Show on March 9, 1952. Tallulah Bankhead sugarcoated Lorre’s reintroduction to the American public: “And now, darlings, making his first appearance in the United States after a year’s absence abroad, where his most recent triumph he directed, produced and starred, in one of Europe’s most sensational pictures, the distinguished artist, Mr. Peter Lorre.” He opened on a familiar note: “I started my career in the theater as a romantic actor (laughter), but against my will they put me into horror pictures. I always wanted to be the actor who got the girl, but in my pictures by the time I get the girl, she’s dead. Well, I’ve struggled to get away from playing with monsters, but I guess it is my fate, because here I am today with Tallulah Bankhead.”
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