In 1960 Lorre renewed, rather indirectly, his association with Alfred Hitchcock. Three years earlier he had appeared—with curled locks, looking like a plumped up version of the General in Secret Agent—on Alfred Hitchcock Presents as a wily detective in a black comedy titled “The Diplomatic Corpse.” Far more memorable is “Man from the South,” telecast January 3, 1960, in which Lorre wagers his shiny new convertible against Steve McQueen’s little finger that his cigarette lighter will fire ten times in a row. Cleaver in hand, the actor’s expressions of glee and disappointment rise and fall with his own expectations and the metallic song of the lighter.20
Hitchcock delegated most of the work on the series to trusted associates. Paul Henreid directed “The Diplomatic Corpse” and Norman Lloyd (who also co-produced the series from 1957 until 1965) helmed “Man from the South.” A gap in his schedule, the right story, or the opportunity to work with a favorite actor put Hitchcock in the director’s seat on 20 of the 365 episodes. However, he exercised only script approval for the episodes that starred Lorre.
If the commercial application of Peter Lorre had become commonplace, his use in commercials had not. Celebrity selling had taken an upswing in the 1940s. Joe E. Brown pushed Calox Tooth Powder in 1944. Harold Peary backed Blackstone Cigars that same year. In 1949 Pat O’Brien and Humphrey Bogart sold A-S-R lighters, while Basil Rathbone peddled Fatima Turkish cigarettes. Lorre, too, got in on the advertising act. Far from featuring his “forbidding” screen image, however, Regent Cigarettes magazine ads promoted a practical person who enjoyed badminton, Ping-Pong, and crushproof cigarette cases. In 1954 Virginia Dare cleverly played both sides of the Lorre label by contrasting his “reputation for international wickedness” with his down-to-earth taste in wine. “Fancy wine experts slay me,” says an offended Peter Lorre, as he scornfully looks over his shoulder at a wealthy wine connoisseur and his valet tasting from their well-stocked table. “There’s no boring, pompous talk about good years and bouquets in my house,” he assures his fans. “All I know is Virginia Dare Wine sure tastes good!”
Magazine advertisers apparently credited their readers with enough intelligence to cope with other sides of Lorre’s personality, but television ad men did not. In the early 1960s, the actor did for Speidel what he had done for directors since 1931—menace his victim with glee. “I get tremendous satisfaction destroying things,” purrs Peter Lorre the destroyer. “Doesn’t everybody?” Lorre twists, turns and ties the seemingly indestructible watchband into a knot. “But I can’t destroy it,” he laments, looking adorably sad. “Twist-O-Flex, by Speidel.”
Credited with outdoing DeMille with his disaster spectacles, Irwin Allen pioneered catastrophe kitsch on a global scale in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), a highly improbable sci-fi adventure about two navy scientists (Walter Pidgeon and Peter Lorre) who save the world from being charbroiled by snuffing out the Van Allen Belt of radiation with a Polaris missile fired from the atomic submarine Seaview.
“It was just a job,” recalled actor Frankie Avalon of Lorre’s performance as Commodore Lucius Emery. “He was just there. Peter was definitely a frustrated man at that point, knowing he had to do this film and there was really nothing there for him to do. I think at that point he was just having fun with himself. He would do little things that weren’t in the script and add little things to his character, and he would get a kick out of it.”
As Emery, Lorre created an intense hostility toward Zucco, a rival scientist played by Henry Daniell. “Any time they mentioned the name Zucco, he went crazy,” said Avalon. “That was his fun.” When Zucco challenges Emery at an international congress, the Commodore growls in a vaguely threatening tone, “Oh, he irritates me!”
One thing he didn’t invent was the sweat-soaked look of his clothing, which was achieved with a finely-tuned seltzer bottle. Resentful of being misted for verisimilitude, Lorre grumbled, “The hell with realism” and led a crew member on a chase through the Seaview sets. Given the actor’s poor health, one imagines that he was easily run aground and sprayed. He also reportedly—one supposes somewhat belligerently—refused to extinguish his cigarettes, which he smoked throughout the picture. That, along with Pidgeon’s cigars, clouded the issue of the picture’s scientific accuracy.
A stiff and rambling script soaked with plot contrivances and stock characters fatally flawed Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Critic Howard Thompson aptly noted in the New York Times that “Mr. Lorre, as the world’s foremost physicist, keeps growling, ‘Now wot?’ and making the most sense.” Lorre mustered even less enthusiasm for 20th Century–Fox’s publicity department when he politely told them that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was one of his favorite films: “I get to play a good guy. After playing top brass in every enemy army in the world I get to play a United States Commodore in this. Also, I have a leading lady all to myself. Her name is Bessie. She’s a shark, it’s true, but she’s all mine.”
Lorre looked for something to do, something to break the monotony, something to insulate himself from the sad truth. He was often the first to arrive on the set and the last to leave. Within a few days, he got to know the cast and crew. He extended the gift of friendship and soon moved into their lives. Around him he gathered an audience to lend an ear to his repertoire of anecdotes about a time when making “family” pictures was fun. His personality was infectious, his approach disarming. “He had a unique sense of humor in that it was very quiet humor,” said director Joseph M. Newman, who had worked with Lorre on The Big Circus. “His voice was soft and musical. His eyes would dance with merriment and at the most tense moments, he would invariably lift the bleak atmosphere with a delightful utterance.” Part of Lorre’s daily routine during the making of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was lunch with co-workers Barbara Eden and Walter Pidgeon. He fought for the check after every meal, practically to the floor. “He had a little bit of the devil in him, with kindness,” said Eden, “and every square inch of him laughed when he laughed, every round inch.”
Behind the elfin twinkle lurked the glint of insurgency. The fear of being wasted motivated Lorre to salt and pepper his bland roles. As best he could, within the guidelines of the stories, he sabotaged dreary, dead-end parts and brought to them something of himself, some bit of unorthodoxy to fracture the dull uniformity of his situation. A shrug, a frown, or a bounce wrought life from tired dialogue. Turned corners of the mouth or just a faraway look said that he was listening and reacting. He was full of creative and constructive ideas, making him, in Joseph Newman’s opinion, “a director’s actor.”
In 1951 Newman had looked to cast Lorre as Massine, an Italian investigator, in Lucky Nick Cain, based on William James Hadley Chase’s novel I’ll Get You for This and starring George Raft. For whatever reason, the British actor Charles Goldner played the part. Said Newman: “Goldner … was quite a well-known actor on the British stage, and gave an adequate performance, and [was] an interesting guy, but he wasn’t Peter Lorre! I mean, you know, there was just ONE Peter Lorre, and Peter Lorre would have made a great difference in the film, because there was that PARTICULAR character.”
“Peter believed in the spirit of man,” said Allen, “and to that end he was interested in how normal human beings respond and act and if it didn’t smack of reality, the reality of human emotions under specific conditions, then he would think of that as fraudulent and would not want to do that or at least gently suggest we do something else.” With “great feeling and great good voice,” and without being offensive, the actor logically, softly, and intelligently registered his ideas. Allen noted that he responded to Lorre’s suggestions and advice during read-throughs of the scripts and during production “with warmth, with thanks, with open ears, with open heart.”
Asked if he liked being an actor, Lorre told Mike Wallace that he could not live without it. “And I think that is about the only excuse to be an actor, when you are a grown up man,” he explained. The need to work, to keep busy, was a narcotic to which he was de
sperately addicted. “I think [acting] carries a certain obligation to work at it,” said Lorre, “and this is one of the reasons why I don’t agree with most actors, or don’t like their way of doing things, because talent alone to me doesn’t mean a thing.” In their bedroom he kept a large blackboard. “Before Peter shoots the next morning,” Annemarie explained to Ludwig Veigel, “he puts his lines down there. Then he wakes up and reads the blackboard. He falls asleep again and then he reads it again and the next morning he is ready for his lines.” What mattered most went on behind the scenes: planning, preparation, production. “I’ll grab a project and work at it, not feeling very sure whether it can be realized or not,” said Lorre. “I am perfectly willing to throw it away if it doesn’t work out. But it keeps me busy…. As long as you can work at a thing, it interests me. Once it’s finished, it doesn’t interest me at all.” Listening to him, one might think the final product was incidental to the effort that went into its creation. He wanted no baggage, only the exercise in carrying it. His film roles were precious parts of himself, which, in the end, he disowned.
Lorre made Irwin Allen laugh. Warmly willing to let him delight others, he offered the actor a comedy role in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962). Lorre got caricature instead, humor at his own expense. In this loose telling of Professor Fergusson’s (Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s) hot air balloon expedition to plant the Union Jack on the East Bank of the Volta River and lay claim to a vast area of West Africa, the actor played Ahmed, a roguish slave trader. Along with fez, billowing pantaloons, and Muslim slippers, he wears a mortified grimace as he delivers his witless dialogue: “What about breakfast? Don’t you see I’m fading away!” As a “caricature of a slave trader,” wrote A.H. Weiler for the New York Times, “Peter Lorre is simply tired.” Sensitive to the very perceptible toll on his figure, the actor sweetly suggested to Paul Zastupnevich, “I know my back is not perfect. If you can give me a little jacket or a little vest.” Nothing else was said. The costume designer tailored Lorre’s outfit to disguise his rounded shoulders.
“From an actor’s viewpoint, the dealer wasn’t exactly an endearing character,” wrote screenwriter Charles Bennett in a profile for Close-Ups. “Yet in spite of his viciousness, Peter immediately established himself as ‘Mr. Adorable’ and remained so until the movie’s fade out. Looking back, I’m not sure that the screenplay intended it that way.”
The creative spark flickered, but it never went out. Lorre knew exactly what he was doing and why. He girded his sense of reality and pitted his professional best against the inconsequential parts. Red Buttons observed:
There was a serious artist under all that, but he put it in perspective. His attitude was that all of this was childish nonsense. He was funny on the set, saying some outrageous thing … like Peck’s Bad Boy, mischievous, with a twinkle in his eye, clowning his way through life, but underneath it I felt the turmoil. What he said and how he said it was always shocking. He tackled everything with an amusing and jaundiced eye. I think he missed his calling. He had a fantastic sense of humor, a comedy in his attitude that he carried along with him, a nonchalant attitude. He was a very iconoclastic person. I think they misused his talents. Had he been given the opportunity, he would have been known as a first-rate comedic talent. No doubt about it.
In 1959 Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson, cofounders of American International Pictures (AIP), an independent production company specializing in low-budget exploitation films, decided to discontinue the “small” black and white horror pictures—The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1956), Voodoo Woman (1956), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), and so forth—which they had parleyed into a successful staple. By the early 1960s, scores of horror movies flooded the market once cornered by AIP. Double-billing was scrapped. “Just the mere appearance of a combination in the newspapers,” said Arkoff, “made it obvious that these were not expensive pictures.” Arkoff, Nicholson, and independent producer and director Roger Corman sat down and kicked around new and different concepts of horror. “We came across the name of Poe,” recalled Arkoff, “a writer who was universally known, and didn’t—like the new writers still alive—cost us a hundred thousand, or more.” A fan of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination, Corman suggested they film “The Fall of the House of Usher” in color and CinemaScope, double the budget, and triple the shooting schedule to three weeks. Arkoff and Nicholson gave him nearly three hundred thousand dollars—by far the biggest budget to date for an AIP picture—and fifteen days.21
AIP has not won much respect. “In one of its less charitable moments,” Arkoff related in his autobiography, Flying through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants, the New York Times “referred to the early days of AIP as having about as much status in the American film industry as the fellow who sweeps up the elephant droppings after a circus parade.” Accustomed to ignoring reproachful critics, Arkoff and Nicholson preferred to read audience reaction at the box office. But the “pseudointellectual” axe never fell. House of Usher (1960) was a commercial and critical hit, touching off a cycle—eight pictures between 1961 and 1965—of Poe adaptations directed by Corman, who reinvigorated the waning genre of the American horror film, imbuing it with a sense of the fantastique. His vision served the allegorical dimensions of the stories as well as their gloomy gothic beauty. On a more practical level, he stretched the production dollar, giving better than he got. Stylizing the Poe canon, however, involved a four-way collaboration. Richard Matheson, best known for his extensive science fiction and fantasy credits, including novels I Am Legend (1954) and The Shrinking Man (1956) and numerous teleplays for The Twilight Zone, adapted Poe’s stories for the screen, preserving the author’s conception as well as his narrative form. Working on a shoestring budget, art director Daniel Haller created fitting ambiences with his macabre and eerie backgrounds. And using a repertoire of sensuously warm sepulchral tones courtesy of Pathecolor (“Pepsi Cola Gothic,” said film critic Vincent Canby), cinematographer Floyd Crosby, who in 1931 had won an Academy Award for his work on the Murnau-Flaherty semidocumentary Tabu, added the final atmospheric touches.
The decision, in Arkoff’s words, to “lighten up” the Poe adaptations was mutual. “After you did a certain number of them,” he explained, “you almost had to because you can’t go along on any group of pictures without changing your direction. You can do that on television week after week, but you can’t do that in the theater. And we all liked humor…. it gave extra strength, an extra factor.” Matheson recommended adapting three short stories, each drawn from Poe, to be presented together as Tales of Terror (1962). So as not “to be consistently down-beat,” he wedged a mock-horror tale between the more or less straightforward retelling of “Morella” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” In 1962 Lester Salkow negotiated a one-film commitment for Lorre to appear in “The Black Cat,” the middle episode of Tales of Terror, loosely based on the story of the same title and “The Cask of Amontillado.”
Matheson cast Lorre as Montresor Herringbone (originally Montresor Lushingham), a swollen pixie of a man with a maniacal temper, who drives his long-suffering wife, Annabel (Joyce Jameson), into the arms of wine connoisseur Fortunato Luchresi (Vincent Price). Herringbone repays this effrontery to his pride by entombing them behind a cellar wall. His perfect crime is foiled when Annabel’s black cat, unwittingly walled in with the victims, begins to wail, betraying the murderer.
Presuming that audiences wanted to see the actor as they remembered him, as a menace, AIP purposely perpetuated Lorre’s screen image as a member of the horror elite. “Even though there might be a section in there that was played light,” said Milton Moritz, National Director of Advertising and Publicity for American International, “we would never really attach a tongue-in-cheek approach to the merchandising of the film. Once people came in and Peter used a little tongue-in-cheek or goo-goo’ed the eyes it was acceptable, but they would not necessarily come in on the pretense that he was going to be a comedy character, so more or le
ss everything we prepared in that direction played upon the villain of the past.”
AIP promised a faithful retelling of Poe. It was never meant to be, either in concept or execution. “I wanted to make good-humored comedy within the framework of Poe,” said Corman, stressing a point that must have seemed obvious even then. For this he depended on the cooperation of his cast, which “jointly entered into the creative process.” According to Jameson, “all of the actors had an independent hand in developing their own characters.” Being “more of a camera director [who] never worked with the actors or fashioned their roles,” Corman encouraged them to stick to the basic story line and build as a team, with the result that many of the ideas sprang from their dialogue. As the “most spontaneous and immediately inventive of the three actors,” Lorre enjoyed, in Vincent Price’s words, “lots of independence to improvise.” Restraining him was a lost cause anyway. “Peter abhorred dullness,” said Salkow. “If he could amuse or put mystery into anything, he was for that. He was always scheming to squeeze the most out of a scene. He always got away with it.”
“Peter said he wanted to work more in this type of comedy film,” confirmed Corman, “that he had gotten away from it and wanted to get back to it.” The young director gave him free rein to crawl out from beneath the weight of his creation and stop being “Peter Lorre.” The actor throttled his screen image in a comedy-hold, trading upon it as it had traded upon him. Arkoff counted on him to supply the broader laughs in the Poe picture. The actor had something more polished in mind. A “Poe type of sardonic humor,” he claimed, came naturally. “But don’t think that it is easy to mix fright and fun,” explained Lorre. “Not every type of comedian or actor can make it, it takes a fellow well versed in both laughter and violence…. It has an inbred difficulty consisting of the fact that if you get an audience laughing, then it takes something to make them stop. I don’t want to brag, but I can make people laugh and then be terrified.”22
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