The downhill run had gained more momentum than Lorre knew. On January 16, 1956, the Hollywood Reporter announced that The Black Sleep would star Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney, John Carradine, and Bela Lugosi. According to its director, Reginald LeBorg of Bel-Air Productions tried to get Lorre for the part of Odo, the gypsy, who “was supposed to act as comic relief from the horror…. but he wanted too much money. If Lorre had been in it, we would have built the part up.”16
Remembering how well Peter Lorre and Edward Arnold had clicked in Crime and Punishment, AIP producer Alex Gordon thought to pair them as an evil hypnotist and a money-hungry promoter in The She-Creature (1956), about a beautiful woman who is regressed to a past life as a whiskered, horned, and armor-plated prehistoric monster. Director Eddie Cahn, who had worked with Arnold in Main Street after Dark at MGM and Afraid to Talk at Universal, seconded the idea. Gordon kicked around figures with the William Morris Agency, which chose to consult Arnold before committing him to appear in a small independent production. On good terms with the actor, Cahn felt a personal pitch would be more persuasive, allowing him to trade on their pleasant working relationship. When he tried to contact Arnold, he learned that the sixty-six year-old actor had died only days earlier. In Lorre’s case, the Sam Jaffe agency shortcut the process, committing him before he had read the script, which he dismissed, in Gordon’s sugarcoated words, as “a piece of junk.”
“He hated it,” recalled Gordon. “He wouldn’t act in such a cheap film.” Jaffe was having none of it. “If they’ll pay your fee,” he told his client, “you’ll do it.” Rather than accept the assignment, Lorre left the agency.17
At a party for Lester Salkow, the actor once hung up a skeleton with a note that read, “This is what you would look like if Lester Salkow were your agent.” Salkow did his best to keep Lorre working during these lean years, although it inevitably required him to recycle the actor’s threadbare image in secondhand parts. In The Sad Sack (1957), a zany Jerry Lewis feature, Lorre, as an Arab heavy, was obliged to push his villainous screen persona to the limit. With requisite understatement, he comforts his knife, “Patience, my angel. We will not lose him.” In another of his few scenes, he softly queries, “Please, can I kill him now?”
The same year he appeared as a greedy, dissolute French commissioner in Hell Ship Mutiny (originally titled Captain Knight of the South Seas), an obvious attempt to resurrect the menacing Lorre of earlier days. The actor ran the gauntlet, yielding to audience expectations and salvaging what he could from an uncertain career.
As television displaced radio, Lorre’s performances over the airwaves had dwindled to a trickle until 1953, when he stepped into the role of host, or rather “exciting guide to terror,” of Mutual’s Nightmare, a poorly plotted horror series, which aired weekly from October 1, 1953, to September 29, 1954. On April 27, 1958, the actor stood before the mike a final time, joining Boris Karloff, Alfred Hitchcock, and singer Julienne Marie on Easy as ABC’s “O is for Old Wives’ Tales.” Presented by United Nations Radio and broadcast by CBS, the thirteen-week series celebrated the work of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).
Although he is regarded as “one of the worst things that ever happened to filmed science fiction,” producer and director Irwin Allen was perhaps one of the best things that happened to character actors who could not afford to be choosy. In his nearly thirty years of film and television production, he claimed to have hired virtually everyone in the industry, including Peter Lorre. Besides finding him a warm and compassionate person, the kind of man he was interested in knowing better, Allen considered Lorre a “cinema genius,” a master of timing, and stood in awe of that remarkable face, over which the actor exercised uncanny control. Nevertheless, he asked nothing new of Lorre when he cast him in four of his “all-market” Cinema-Scope-Deluxe movies. The first, The Story of Mankind (1957) brought to the screen Hendrik Van Loon’s bestselling children’s history of the human race. Through his independently owned Cambridge Productions, in cooperation with Warner Bros. (whose vault he drew on for stock footage), Allen promised to put the punch back into history. He selected key characters from the past—both good and bad—and matched them with giants in the film world—Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc, Harpo Marx as Isaac Newton, Edward Everett Horton as Sir Walter Raleigh, and Dennis Hopper as Napoleon. Working with Charles Bennett, he slapped a contemporary outlook over the juvenile narrative, vulgarizing Van Loon with gags and gimmicks in a tongue-in-cheek charade.
Allen cast Lorre on the debit side of history as Nero: “twisted by endless orgies, this madman knew no end of violence, no limit to lunacy. He arranged the suicides of most of his closest friends, had his mother clubbed to death … poisoned a lot of the people he knew and sought out similar amusements.” Belted by bacchanalia, Lorre sits, head in hand, depraved and woeful by turns. “Let the wine flow,” he exhorts, “for tonight, tonight Nero celebrates his greatest triumph!” Dropping his goblet, he wearily shuffles to the balcony and strums a lyre while Rome burns.
Sketches and caricatures had suggested Lorre as Nero’s contemporary likeness. If so, it flattered neither of them. The actor looked in poor health. Like tallow melting from a stubby candle, his flesh drooped from his bones; his bloated face and foreshortened figure physically expressed the deformity of the character he portrayed.
By this time, Allen and Lorre saw a good deal of each other socially. On Sundays, Peter often brought Annemarie and Catharine over for brunch and a swim. One day, the conversation turned to Allen’s new circus picture. Lorre loved clowns. His discourses about the dramatic possibilities of the funnyman underlined the serious thought he had given the subject. “Playing a clown, a real facemaker, fascinated him,” said Vincent Price. “It was his definition of acting.” Lorre enthusiastically read the script and told Allen, “Hey, this is something I should do.”18
“I thought it was simply marvelous to have this man,” recalled Allen, “this great, pathetic face, this great villainous face, to play a clown. It was the coup of all time to me.”
Lorre had not played a clown since the ill-fated stage production of Der Dompteur at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1931. As Skeeter in The Big Circus (1959), his globular eyes and melancholy expression form a natural mask that appears all the sadder because it has nothing to do. In makeup, he is just part of the scenery. Out of makeup, he is crusty but benign, his frustration subsiding into boredom. Certainly, his poor health posed an obstacle to the performance of physical, clownlike antics. Little wonder that friend and co-worker Gilbert Roland found Lorre as apathetic on-screen as off. The actor seemingly saved the best of his clown characterization for publicity shots, which gave him more time for development than the few fleeting moments on-screen.
When Lorre wanted to add something to his role, he would direct his comments to Victor Mature, who, besides having script approval, “had 10% of the gross, plus a bunch of money up front.” These the actor forwarded to Allen, who, in turn, passed back the word, “Fine, tell him to do it.” After coming up with a coat and hat for Skeeter, costume designer Paul Zastupnevich tried to think of a little gimmick that would give Lorre something to work with. “Could I have a little yellow bird?” asked the actor. Zastupnevich not only perched a yellow canary atop the hat, but also put three eggs beneath it. Like a child with a new toy, Lorre was delighted with the simple prop.
Charles Bennett, who scripted the picture, described a Peter Lorre who perhaps did his best work behind the scenes: “To me he was a great performer, somebody who enjoyed his work immensely, gleeful, and always eager to come up with gags, ideas, constructive comedy suggestions, not only for his own part but for the other parts around him. In The Big Circus it was Peter Lorre who suggested that a nice comedian (Howard McNear, now famous as Mayberry’s Floyd the Barber) should be trapped in a cage directly alongside a wildly fierce lion; one of the best laughs in the movie and nothing to do with Peter’s part.” Lorre took obvious delight i
n the situation, borrowing his best line—“Softly, softly, catchee monkey”—from Mysterious Mr. Moto.
Not all of the technical innovations that Hollywood employed to keep moviegoers coming back were qualified successes. In the 1930s Hans Laube, a Swiss osmologist who had devised a method for cleansing the air in large auditoriums, was struck with the notion of putting odors back into the air. He worked on the idea of adding scents to movies and in 1939 exhibited a film accompanied by a variety of smells at the New York World’s Fair. In cooperation with several companies pioneering in American television, Laube worked to bring “smell-action” to the small screen. However, when the process proved impractical, it was abandoned.
In 1954 producer Michael Todd and his son Michael Jr. first witnessed a similar process designed to synchronize the projection of odors with the action on film. The Todd Company financed further experiments to inject odors into theater auditoriums in hopes that the process would be ready for Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), but their expectations were premature. Convinced of the superiority of Laube’s design, Todd Jr. contracted with his company, Scentovision Inc., and provided the scientist with a laboratory at the Todd Cinestage in which to further develop his process.19
Laube called his device a “smell-brain.” Each unit consisted of more than thirty metal vials containing 400 cc of highly concentrated synthetic odors, or enough for 180 performances. A plastic pipe connected to an outlet at each seat. On cue, about 2 cc of a specified essence was released, reaching one thousand viewers. The “smell-brain” exposed moviegoers to a wide range of odors: roses, perfume, tobacco, wine, peppermint, lemons, leather, gunpowder, garlic, shoe polish, and more.
In January 1959 with Laube’s machine tested and proven, Todd planned for its commercial use in a feature film titled, appropriately, Scent of Mystery (1960). He strove for maximum effect and arrayed an arsenal of technical innovations with which to assault the senses, including a 70 mm Todd Process Camera with distortion-free lenses and a refined depth of field and an eightchannel Todd Belock sound system with a 360-degree projection area and a new wider frequency. Believing that odors could titillate audiences and supply clues for solving the mystery, Todd assigned William Roos to tailor his screenplay as much to “smell-action” as to the Spanish landscape. Enamored of the gorgeous locales, he chose to shoot Scent of Mystery entirely on location, meshing the scenery with special effects.
Throwing money at the screen, however, did not compensate for the film’s inherent shortcomings. Scent of Mystery is a film out-of-balance that reads better than it plays, something the television premiere of this “lost” film in 1986—complete with scratch-and-sniff clue cards supplied at local convenience stores—so strikingly underlined. The working script is an innocuous and amusing whodunit whose crooked characters and plot twists and turns gel into tangible comedy-suspense. However, comparisons to a Hitchcock thriller—a notion planted by the publicists—caused Scent of Mystery to suffer miserably by comparison. Jack Cardiff directed with an eye to scenery rather than substance, with the Spanish locales and the Smell-O-Vision cues pushing the story and characters into the background. Hitchcock intensified his suspense with humor; Cardiff diffused his mystery with holiday charm. The result is a pedestrian travelogue paced by an olfactory sense instead of a cinematic one. “It is an artless, loose-jointed ‘chase’ picture,” blasted the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther, “set against some of the scenic beauties of Spain, which, indeed, are the most attractive and rewarding compensation of the show.”
Lorre’s role as Smiley, the sardonic cabby, is a study of the film in microcosm. His part was “an intentional light-hearted caricature of his typical screen image,” claimed Todd. “A possibly sinister, shadowy figure who may be in league with the bad guys while appearing to help the hero…. he is only projecting a facade of mystery and underworld connections to maintain an image.” Reading the script it is easy to imagine Lorre scratching at the already thin veneer of villainy and exposing the humor in Smiley’s inane gabble. “Fifteen years ago in Marrekesh [sic] when I was still driving a camel, there was a girl,” he blathers. “Lucky for me I came to my senses. I sold my camel … and I have not been back to Marrekesh since. Otherwise today … and I shudder to think of it … today I would be a happily married man. And it could happen to you…. it can happen to anyone if he isn’t careful. You must have friends who got married…. Let them be a lesson to you. [a short time later] … Every man should have a wife. I once stole the wife of a friend of mine in Casablanca…. He had two. I only took the small one.” But these scenes are gone in the finished film, as are many others whose dialogue ideally suited the artless and off-center waggery of the “Good Soldier Svejk.”
Instead of emerging as a mischievous rogue, Smiley merely supplies a touch of local color. His taxi transports the hero—and thereby moves the plot—while he kills time with laborious one-liners. He is more catalyst than character; time didn’t allow for more. Denholm Elliott, the star of the picture, described Lorre as “very jokey, very amiable, not in the least bit grand or upstaging … who told jolly little stories about the early days of Hollywood.” But this Lorre is hardly visible on the screen. In those few moments, he offered some bits of business welcomed by his director. “If you put in an idea,” said Elliott, “he’d keep level with you. In the Malaga night fiesta scene, I caught some streamers in my mouth, so Peter followed along—if you’ll gag, I’ll gag—and caught them under his nose.”
Picking up the baton was an exception in a performance as unsound as the actor himself. “He looked like Tweedle-Dee or Tweedle-Dum,” said Elliott of the overweight actor. To cast and crew, he appeared ill during filming. When Elliott called to collect him for a dinner party, he discovered Lorre in an antique nightdress and cap, draped across the bed, snoring fitfully and obviously unwell. He summoned the doctor, who recklessly awakened him with a lumbar punch. The actor sat bolt upright. “Oh, no, Monsieur!” he squawked in pained disapproval.
Most of all, he complained about the heat. As spring turned into summer, temperatures rose above one hundred degrees, with the lights and reflectors adding to the discomfort. In June he suffered from what was later diagnosed as a sunstroke. “One evening in Cordoba, when I was having dinner in a local restaurant,” recalled Jack Cardiff in his autobiography, Magic Hour, “my assistant director dashed in, breathless with panic: ‘Jack, Peter Lorre is dying.’ There he was, unconscious, lying on a table in his hotel room, his face a pale grey and his belly weirdly enormous. His breathing was shallow, but every few seconds his body shuddered from huge spasms like colossal hiccups.”
According to Cardiff, five heart specialists all shook their heads and agreed that death was imminent. “No one,” said Mike Todd, “could diagnose the trouble or prescribe any treatment or medicine that produced any improvement in Peter’s condition, when another highly respected local doctor was called in and much to everyone’s dismay put leeches on Peter, who responded almost immediately and quickly and dramatically recovered. My staff and associates objected to the leech treatment but Peter [who later claimed the doctor had cut a vein and bled him] wanted to try it and the doctor proved right.” “Of course, he could no longer run in the chase scenes,” added Cardiff. “We advertised in the Spanish press for a double and luckily found a most realistic Peter Lorre II to do the running for him.”
One of the first persons to hear of the near-fatal tragedy was Lauren Bacall, who flew in from London to sit at Lorre’s bedside and administer a soothing sweetness that deeply touched him. Annemarie and Catharine arrived soon after, putting a crimp in Peter’s busy schedule of nightly dinners with young Spanish ladies. Asked later if his brush with death had changed his outlook on life, Lorre insouciantly said, “I didn’t die, so it didn’t change my outlook.” In less than two weeks, he was back before the cameras.
Despite his collapse, Lorre enjoyed what he described as a break from caricature roles and fed the press an enriched picture of Smiley: “I play a
very nice man…. On one hand I can count the times I’ve been a nice man. I enjoy being normal.” Lorre said he liked himself in Scent of Mystery. “That is most unusual, because I not only don’t like myself in many pictures; I don’t like many pictures.” His performance garnered a few accolades from the critics, including one from the caustic Bosley Crowther, who singled him out for faint praise: “Except for the job of Peter Lorre as a bored taxi-driver … the acting is downright atrocious.”
Smell-O-Vision fared less well than the movie itself. With inadequate ventilation and an ineffective air cleaner, aromas piled up in the theaters, triggering waves of nausea. “Whiff gags” (including the smell of booze Lorre puts in his coffee), as Cardiff called them, fell under sharp attack and an onslaught of puns and insults—“the Muzak of the olfactory system … this all-out attack on the public’s nose … assaults the nose as a mixture of paint thinner and dimestore perfume … a purifying agent … leaves a sweet, cloying smell reminiscent of an undertaking parlor.” Almost before the odors had time to dissipate from movie theaters, Scent of Mystery was forgotten, destined for obscurity. Plans to release an unscented version of the film under the title A Holiday in Spain never materialized.
The Lost One Page 58