The Lost One

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The Lost One Page 56

by Stephen D. Youngkin


  Lorre received a letter from Paul Kohner in March asking if he would be interested in starring in Robert Thoeren’s Autobanditen (released as Banditen der Autobahn, 1955), scheduled for shooting in May (it didn’t get under way until fall) under the direction of Géza von Cziffra, who had specialized in comedies at UFA during the late 1930s. However, back-to-back television commitments—he appeared in nine shows by the end of the year—confined the actor to the small screen.

  One of the more memorable but least remembered roles was that of a beleaguered complaint department clerk whose morbid outlook discourages refunds in “The Sure Cure,” an episode of The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theatre, broadcast May 2, 1955. When his doctor diagnoses a fear of humor and prescribes a course of smiling, Lorre counters, “Wouldn’t surgery be easier?” He reads and tells jokes, both ineptly, and wears a Hitler moustache. Nothing works, until he overhears his ex-girlfriend tell her new husband that her mother is going to live with them. A cheered Lorre lets out a hearty laugh.

  By now, Lorre’s movie persona provided a point of reference, giving visual context for a string of pejorative images—scary, horrific, sinister. In J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), a young woman sees Peter Lorre, “The movie actor. In person. He was buyin’ a newspaper.” Her idea that he is cute invites the obvious rebuttal that she is a moron.

  In Richard Matheson’s science fiction tale “Shipshape Home,” a three-eyed janitor who looks and sounds like “Peter Lorre” conspires to rocket a city block of young couples to another planet. “The man is a creep,” intones a suspicious wife, prompting an understanding husband to reply, “Hon, what can the poor guy do about his face? … Heredity. Give him a break.” When the story made its way to television as Studio 57’s “Young Couples Only,” who better to play the janitor than Peter Lorre himself (outfitted with a none-too-convincing third eye in the back of his head)?9 Afterward, a small production company at Republic Pictures hired Matheson to expand the concept into a feature film that would star Lorre. “I tried,” said the writer, “but it was literally impossible. At the end, he was going to get on the rocket ship with the aliens and go to their planet and all that stuff. It didn’t seem to work and never got made.”

  During this period of yawning gulfs in his film career, television afforded more substantive roles—and often higher billing—than movies. Climax‘s “A Promise to Murder,” which aired in November, got its start as Oscar Wilde’s “Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime.” In the one-hour drama, Lorre played Mr. Vorhees, a palm reader whose prophecies bear a sinister fulfillment. His scenes in a boy’s playroom, where he dreamily retreats into memories of his own deprived childhood and rediscovers the magic of youth, display the sort of hand-to-glove fit that characterizes the actor’s best performances. Regrettably they are all but forgotten today, overshadowed by mediocre films that enjoy years of endless repetition on television.

  On December 10, 1955, he returned to NBC for Rheingold Theatre’s “The Blue Landscape,” in which “for a welcome change, I play a gentleman who is on the side of the law. In fact, he is the law.” Lorre also welcomed the opportunity to work with the fifth-billed Celia Lovsky, with whom he had last shared the spotlight in 1932.

  When Hollywood finally called on Lorre—nearly two years after the release of 20,000 Leagues under the Sea—it asked the actor to play himself in an unbilled guest appearance in Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956), an MGM musicalcomedy. At a blackjack table, opposite dealer Oscar Karlweis, Lorre intoned his one and only line—“Hit me, you creep”—with faint malevolence.

  During the 1950s the American film industry underwent enormous change. In 1944 the Justice Department reactivated the Paramount case, which had charged the five major studios—Paramount, MGM-Loew’s, RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century–Fox—with conspiring to restrain trade and monopolize production, distribution, and exhibition. A three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in the Southern District of New York ruled that vertical distribution violated the Sherman Act but found divorcement unnecessary and ordered a system of competitive bidding for films. Both sides appealed to the Supreme Court, which affirmed divestiture but remanded the case to the District Court to reconsider its decision about breaking up the vertical integration of the motion picture industry. In July 1949 the lower court found divorcement of exhibition from the production-distributions branches of the industry a necessary remedy.

  The domestic picture grew dimmer. Wage and price regulations of the early and middle 1940s gave way to postwar inflation at the end of the decade and recession in the early 1950s. Annual theater attendance dropped off from 90 million in 1946 to an estimated 45 million by 1953. With block-booking and blind bidding struck down, extended runs fell off and output dwindled. As box-office returns steadily fell, the consumer price index pushed higher. The majors retrenched, cutting production, pruning staffs, and renegotiating salaries; stars became an unaffordable luxury. When contract options ran out, unemployed actors moved on to other studios, freelanced, or formed their own companies.

  The industry also lost its foothold abroad. In 1947, as part of a larger program of protectionist measures, Britain had levied an import duty on American films, trimming foreign earnings.

  And then came television. Soon the public of Milton Berle, Howdy Doody, and Lucille Ball rivaled that of the cinema’s top-ranking stars. Competing with television put the film industry in a desperate battle for survival. It was time to try something new. Hollywood fought back with technology, capitalizing on the medium’s strongest asset—the sheer size of the movie. The studios garnished tried and true recipes with technical innovations such as CinemaScope, Panavision, VistaVision, Cinerama, and 3-D that stressed the physical limitations of television and the spatial potential of the cinema. The trend nurtured some important scientific advances, but too often filmmakers depended on gimmicks to compensate for a lack of content.

  Postwar inflation, labor unrest, and the festering cold war with the Soviet Union fragmented the unity fostered during the 1940s. Blacklisting also continued to cast a shadow over the entertainment world, barring many artists from work. As a whole, the nation became more serious, its perspective more contemporary. An awakened public looked to an introspective cinema that tackled controversial subjects (A Hatful of Rain, 1957) and probed human feelings (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951). Independently produced “small films” shot in black and white and adapted from teleplays offered lifelike characters with everyday problems (Marty, 1955; The Bachelor Party, 1957).

  Expediency demanded that Hollywood shed its clichés. As the film industry replaced its stereotyped properties with unconventional ones, it relegated character actors to walk-ons in formula blockbusters. Being a star was no longer enough. Independent filmmakers sought fresh faces and new modes of thought and expression. When images gave way to individuality, Hollywood’s stock and staple went by the boards. Not wanting to display him in roles divorced from his screen persona as a bogeyman, Hollywood banished Lorre to the “lowbrow bonanzas” and bid him parade through like an everyday vaudevillian stuffed between the bigger numbers. Cinema with a social conscience—what the actor had sought in his own career—had finally come of age in America. He wanted in, to be part of the new trend, but he was not invited. The closed door was hard to take.

  Another entrance remained open, the trapdoor that dropped him into the role of Colonel Arragas, the local chief of police of “Congotanga … savage Africa’s city of outcasts!” Universal-International’s thirty-second radio spot for Congo Crossing (1956) promised “the renegade and the Tangier woman, each with a sin to hide, each with a crime to flee, each with a date they must keep in a rendezvous with terror!!” It delivered a plot as sluggish as the Nile, the undergrowth brimming with stock characters, a jungle repertoire of decrepit crocodiles, and an animated swarm of tsetse flies. There to lighten and amuse, as well as lend a mock sinister presence, Lorre fell back on an offhand duality, obligingly adding his stamp in a hastily mounted salvage operation. Behi
nd the guise of a toughly officious would-be menace, he is artless and well-disposed, more vacillating than villainous, casting a benign eye on all human foibles.10

  After putting in a cameo appearance as a Japanese steward in Michael Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Lorre accepted a slightly larger role in Paramount’s The Buster Keaton Story (1957), a specious film biography of the deadpan clown directed by Sidney Sheldon, in which the actor figured as a brutally sadistic film director.

  Lorre’s appearances on television now outnumbered those in feature films. Between game and talk shows and among the crooks, robbers, and thugs, he still had time for drama and it for him, but in a small way. In October 1956 he earned high marks for his performance as a rebellious garment worker in Playhouse 90’s “Sizeman and Son.” Jack O’Brian, writing for the New York Journal-American, saw a Lorre audiences had forgotten: “Peter Lorre played a presser with the sort of rich deep delicious and endearing implied power of the roles which first brought him to America, not the low-comedy horror nonsense which made every cheap night-club imitator feast on the more vulgar nuances of his broad delivery. This was the old Lorre of great feeling and intelligence and the very best practice of his more sensitive craft. Lorre was, in a word, great.”

  The following March, the actor appeared as a drunken has-been director in the Playhouse 90 production of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. “The ultra-reliable Keenan Wynn and veteran character thesp[ian] Peter Lorre were in there,” wrote Variety, “but they were mostly stock figures—or even caricatures—to give the Hollywood ‘production chief’ [Jack Palance] a backboard from which to bounce in one of Fitzgerald’s most brooding works.”

  In 1957 the producers of Climax! engaged Ellis St. Joseph to update Barre Lyndon’s “The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse” for Michael Rennie and Peter Lorre. The actor invited St. Joseph to dinner to discuss the teleplay, which had been sent to him for his approval.

  “I’m grateful you accepted it,” said the writer, anxious for a word of praise. “What did you think?” Lorre admitted he hadn’t read it. “When you are asked to jump into a barrel of shit,” he bluntly added, “you don’t ask if it’s feet first or head first.” St. Joseph recalled that he “crumbled” under Lorre’s critcism: “My ego fell apart. I just stared at him in dismay.”

  In an interview for TV Guide, November 2–8, 1957, Lorre observed that “television came into being before people knew what to do with it. Today it’s an industry and nobody has time to think about it.” However disparaging he was about the new medium, the actor jumped into a barrel of something far less odious than he supposed in St. Joseph’s “A Taste for Crime,” which gave him “a chance to say ironic lines, the kind that I liked to write and the kind that he could say.” In what turned out to be one of the highlights of his television career, Lorre played an elusive master criminal to Michael Rennie’s eminent scientist, who sets out to prove that glandular disturbances create the criminal mind.

  The actor’s availability and recognizability suggested him for a number of projected television series. The first, The Getter and the Holder, coproduced by Peter Lorre’s Falcon Productions and Sam Neumann from his own plays, and starring the actor and Francis L. Sullivan, yet another Sydney Greenstreet replacement, was reportedly—prematurely, as it turned out—scheduled to begin shooting in April 1953. The second, a comedy-horror show written by cartoonist Charles Addams and projected for the 1953 fall season, died on the drawing board. In early 1957 Hunt Stromberg Jr., an assistant program director at 20th Century–Fox, who had conceived the idea of Collector’s Item, a television series about two intrepid antiquarians, assigned screenwriter Herb Meadow to develop the concept and produce a pilot for the 1958–59 season. Meadow recalled reading a fanciful tale about golden horseshoes encased in black paint. From this germ, he developed “The Left Fist of David,” a story about an art collector and his assistant, a rehabilitated forger, who foil the theft of a priceless relic.

  Meadow found his leads by paging through a casting directory. Steady money, a dry spell of movie offers, and the chance to work with Vincent Price persuaded a reluctant Peter Lorre to have a go. The same could not be said of 20th Century–Fox, which, according to the writer, gave the new medium a cold shoulder. Stromberg drafted a first-time producer, who, in turn, hired a live television director whose inexperience in film left the actors in the position of having to direct themselves. Even the secretary complained that her sister mocked her because she had been demoted to the nadir of entertainment. Fox allocated a property storeroom for the principal set, scheduled shooting during the intense heat of the day—without a blower—because evening filming cost more, and failed to hire a policeman to maintain order. When a hysterical assistant executive-producer began calling the set every half hour for a progress report, Meadow had the telephone removed. Chaos reigned.

  Add to this Lorre’s and co-worker Thomas Gomez’s poor health. In a wrestling scene, the rotund actors looked to Meadow like two balloons clinging to each other: “They were laughing until suddenly they stopped, both of them, because they had both lost their wind and were so distressed we had to stop. Lorre was very quiet. He just sat, looking off into space, recovering his breath. Gomez was terribly red in the face. I was afraid he was going to have an attack of some kind.”

  Faced with the option of shrugging off the fiasco and collecting his check, or of giving his professional best, the actor dug in. “I think he had an innate artistic intelligence,” said Cliff Robertson, who worked with Lorre in “The Cruel Day” on Playhouse 90. “He was so good he seemed to have that security and ease only an experienced, usually older actor displays. You had a feeling that it was kind of rolling off his back.”

  “Almost all of his lines in the script,” said Herb Meadow, “are his suggestions. He knew what he was best at, and while the lines themselves did not come out as brilliant lines—because they couldn’t, since he was not the star—they came out as an expression of personality which was slowly building into something that was Lorre’s best.”

  Behind the scenes, the actor played a more challenging role, that of peacekeeper. Location shooting took the company to a palatial Bel-Air estate bristling with statuary. “We were standing near the Greek Classic, ‘The Wrestlers,’” related Meadow.

  Price, Lorre, the director, the cameraman and I were having quite an argument. I was ready to fight because the thing had gotten completely out of hand. Everybody was doing what he wanted to do and I had lost control of my company. At the peak of this thing, there was one of those inexplicable silences as everybody tried to decide who was going to hit whom first. Pointing to the statue, Lorre said wonderingly, absolutely straight, as though he really meant it, “Do you know, the last time we passed here the other one was on top.” Now it was typical of what he would do. His funnies always had a purpose. It struck us as terribly funny, and that’s all that was necessary. So he saved us for another few hours.

  What Meadow expected would take a few weeks ran nearly four months: “We were wading through a mess and all of us were terribly relieved when it was over. We were all sick of it…. The pilot was no damned good. We knew it wouldn’t sell [and] that we had not been allowed somehow to do our best.”

  While Price praised the pilot episode, he damned a second one (“Appraise the Lady”) without faint praise: “It had a very bad script and character and structural problems. Both Peter and I told the producers that we didn’t know why they were wasting their money.”

  Although the series was not sold and never aired, “The Left Fist of David” began turning up in the fine print of mail-order video catalogs in the 1980s. The production has a last-stand look about it. With no time for heroic measures, the actors determinedly squared off against the labored script and disjointed direction. Serving the right wine, as it were, Lorre insinuated mock irony into his throw-away lines, but it was not enough to ease a painful situation. Even Bernard Herrmann’s gothic music score sounds hauntingly suspicious of the p
roceedings.

  On May 25, 1961, Lorre signed with Moffett Enterprises Inc. to host and possibly appear in Peter Lorre Playhouse, thirty-nine half-hour—later changed to one-hour—mystery telefilms scripted by actor-writer John Trayne.11 Producer-director Phil Tucker created the series format, but Trayne took credit for introducing the actor, whom he sat behind a desk, back to the camera, wearing a bowler hat and facing a giant spider web. Looking like a plump arachnid, Lorre slowly turned toward the audience as he spoke his lines.12 One month earlier Moffett Enterprises had arranged for the use of the production and editing facilities at KTTV in Los Angeles. With the pilot completed and production scheduled to resume in August, Moffett negotiated with Paramount—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to finance the series for syndicated release.

  Time and uninterrupted appearances on quiz shows, comedy-varieties, and dramas did not soften the actor’s attitude toward television, which, he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Elwood Glover in 1962, was a medium without an apparent need for expression: “One criticism that I have to make, that is seldom made, is that you should go the other way around. You should now try to find out what can we express in that instead of imitating theater, which we still do.”

  In short, he did it for the money. Or so he made believe.

  Co-worker Cliff Robertson felt that Lorre survived TV “in spite of fine talent through a delightful philosophy of irony and good humor.” Loath to turn in anything clichéd or hackneyed, and feeling that the bits of business he delighted in creating might amuse audiences, he instinctively added, embellished, and enriched his performances. If his director rebuffed him, he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Well, I tried.”

  “He was a buoyant little cork,” said Robertson, “that just went over those big waves, troubles, aches and turmoil and just bobbed right over them. He didn’t try to go crashing head on into things. You got the feeling that if there was any kind of heavy discussion about the character, he’d be the first to say, ‘Well, O.K., if that’s the way you want it,’ which was in one way charming and in another way rather sad, because more times than not he was right.”

 

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