“Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond?” Price solemnly declaimed to his feathered visitor. “Shall I ever hold again that radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?”
Rather than “quoth … Nevermore,” Lorre, as the bird, cracked, “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune teller?”
Lorre custom-fit the role after Matheson laid out the pattern. “He’s the only actor who sort of winged my lines and it didn’t bother me,” said the screenwriter. “In every other case, it aggravates the hell out of me when somebody blats out a carefully worked line any way they feel like it.” Corman also remembered that Lorre “didn’t spend much time learning his lines, but he knew his great strength was the vitality and humor and energy he brought to his scenes.”
“I felt that he was enjoying every moment of playing comedy,” recalled Court. “It was like another window had opened up for him. That was a joyous thing.”
“Peter loved to improvise,” said Price. “His acting technique was improvisation.” Lorre stretched the point in an interview published in the San Francisco Chronicle in February: “Often on a script he [Matheson] merely writes ‘Lorre speaks’ and I then supply the line. I’m in the situation. It works out well.” Leaving “enough blank space either side” of the script pages, indicated Lorre, gave him room to spread out. Adjusting to the actor’s looseness stressed old friendships. “With Boris and Peter,” explained Corman, “there was tension and an incredible clash of acting methods. Boris frankly did not like Peter’s way of doing things. It made him nuts and threw off his memorized reading of the lines. He told me a couple times he was not happy with his scenes with Peter.” At one point, Lorre made a shambles of a scene with his extemporizing. Price became exasperated and sharply scolded, “For Christsake, Peter, just say the lines!”
“You want me to say the lines, old boy?” uttered a stung Lorre.
“Yes, say them,” implored Price, “let’s get on with it.” Lorre said the lines, which he knew perfectly. Before long, however, the actor had rallied and struck off on his own once again.
“You would do a scene,” commented Court on Lorre’s playful behavior before the camera, “and it wouldn’t be quite the same when you did the take. You had to be just one jump ahead of him, knowing that he might do something different. He wouldn’t necessarily stick to the camera techniques of being exactly on the spot. It didn’t appear to worry him whether he’d get his lines or not, and yet I guess he always did.”
She had to stay one jump ahead of him behind the camera as well. Court laughingly told Vincent Price biographer Lucy Chase Williams that Lorre “was always pinching me on the behind! Today, he’d be sued.” Asked if she minded, “No-o-o-o, of course not!”
Lorre’s “bits of business” are easy to pick out, even without reading the script. Inquiring after the ingredients of the recipe that will restore him to his rightful form, Dr. Bedlo asks for “Dried—or evaporated—bat’s blood!” At another point, he follows Dr. Craven through a cellar corridor encrusted with cobwebs. “Hard place to keep clean, huh?” he offhandedly ad-libs. When Craven offers him a glass of warm milk, the actor comes back with one of his favorite expressions—“How vomitable!” In another scene, Craven warns Bedlo, “You’ll need something to protect you from the cold.” Bedlo scurries to fetch another glass of wine, prompting Craven to chide, “No, I meant clothes!”
A young Jack Nicholson played Lorre’s son Rexford. Between scenes, he listened with rapt attention to the old master’s stories of Bogart, Brecht, and Nazi Germany. Lorre must have sounded like little more than a ghost haunting the past, yet Nicholson found him “one of the most sophisticated men I ever knew.” He no doubt also noticed, even admired, the liberties Lorre took with his lines. Instead of squealing the scripted “Now will you kindly get off my chest” when Nicholson wrestles him to the floor, Lorre extemporized, “Don’t sit on my chest. I’m not an armchair, you idiot!”
During a duel of magic with Scarabus (Boris Karloff), Bedlo invokes the power of his wand to cast a spell. As he nears his rival, Scarabus zaps him with an electric charge. “You’re defending yourself, you coward!” retorts Bedlo. After a second thrust, Scarabus melts the weapon, provoking him to ad-lib, “Oh, you! You dirty old man!”
By now, the tailoring of part to player had become part of the formula. Matheson understood Lorre better than he knew, scripting a “more grotesquely droll than menacing” character that came very close to bringing the private figure into public view. In The Raven, and possibly more so in the screenplay, the phlegmatic sorcerer is a pitiable clown, hounded by the specter of failure in his professional life as a magician and tormented by overbearing women in his private life, situations that he seeks to escape through drink. “All my life I’ve been of little consequence,” Dr. Bedlo reproaches himself in a working copy of the script. “Everything I ever tried—I failed at. That’s why I turned to magic; hoping to find, in it, an answer to my lack of purpose; a meaning to my life.” Bedlo’s melancholy confession, which Lorre trimmed and softened, is out of keeping with the mood of the picture. Perhaps it struck a personal chord. If he saw a connection, however, he didn’t show it. He was having too much fun playing out Bedlo as a cherubic imp, innocuously pathetic. “I’m too sweet and gentle, that’s my trouble,” the actor whimpers in the film’s last line. “There was something very soft and nice about him at that age,” Matheson later reflected, “so you couldn’t make him vicious in the pictures he was in.” As comedy masked tragedy, so art imitated life.
Lorre’s sense of humor said a lot about his attitude toward the Poe pictures. “As a serious actor” who could “appreciate the ridiculous of the profession,” said Price, Lorre attached little importance to the AIP “quickies,” as he termed them. Privately, he even dismissed the pictures as “awful” and reluctantly made promotional appearances, preferring to leave that to Price: “I don’t have the talent Vincent does. He knows how to chat with the ladies.” Arkoff said that Lorre “used to be quite jovial about the fact that some of our Poes weren’t as pure as they might have been. He had kind of a wicked sense of humor in that respect.” It wasn’t that Lorre thought he was too good for horror films; he simply didn’t care for them, at least until, like The Raven, he and Price had turned them into comedies. What bothered him were the “frequent calls by people looking to get somebody who had name value for a horror picture that wouldn’t cost too much.” Such offers called into question his credibility as an actor.
Generously—for AIP—budgeted at $350,000, The Raven won favor with critics and moviegoers alike, who enthusiastically shared the sense of fun enjoyed by the players. Perhaps, as some reviewers suggested, Poe might turn over in his grave. Even he was not above parodying his own popular horror tales in “The Sphinx” and “Some Words with a Mummy.” Commercial acceptance was, as it is now, the order of the day. With characteristic wit, the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote, “Strictly a picture for the kiddies and the bird-brained, quote the critic.” That’s all it was meant to be, “low grade” fun, unpretentious and entertaining. Film and theater critic James Powers, then married to Karen Verne, wrote in the Hollywood Reporter: “Price, Lorre and Karloff perform singly and in tandem like what they are, three seasoned pros who can take a gentle burlesque and play it to the end of its value without stretching it past the entertainment point. They are performances, in their way, that are virtuoso.” With some makeshift slapstick comedy and imaginative special effects in the duel of magic, AIP created an ingenuous picture well suited to the studio’s mainstay—the younger moviegoing audience.
If the “Triumvirate of Terror” had tripled the terror (and humor), it had also tripled the theater returns. Pandering to public taste, AIP planned more pictures with “production values and a comedy slant in keeping with current audience response.” The studio would go to the well as long as Price, Lorre, and Karloff appealed to audiences or, as it turned out, until the actors passed from the scene. The trades rumored term contr
acts for its horror roster—Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Basil Rathbone, and Peter Lorre—“all with the talent and stature to impart class and prestige to chill-and-thrill entertainment.” In January 1963, just after the release of The Raven, Lorre reportedly signed for eight more films over the next four years.25 Sam Arkoff, however, remembers it differently. Largely dependent upon the teenage trade, “we were always ready to shift gears.” With the exception of Vincent Price, AIP preferred signing its players to short-term agreements rather than binding them—and the studio—to multipicture commitments.
For the second of his two-picture agreement with AIP, Matheson decided to develop the comic possibilities of a rascally undertaker who was “so bad at what he did, the only way he could get customers was to kill them off himself.” He told his idea to James Nicholson and that, said Matheson, sold it. “Your Favorite Creeps Are Together Again,” advertised AIP. Matheson wrote The Comedy of Terrors with Price, Lorre, Karloff, and Rathbone in mind for the leads. On the writer’s recommendation, Arkoff and Nicholson hired Jacques Tourneur, whose polished direction of the Val Lewton productions Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1942) had earned him an exalted standing in the horror and fantasy genre.
In Comedy of Terrors, Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson) credits her unhappy marriage to Waldo Trumbull (Vincent Price), a crooked undertaker, with thwarting a brilliant operatic career. When the mortuary business falters, Trumbull presses his unwilling assistant, Felix Gillie (Peter Lorre), into helping him recruit new clients, namely his stuffy landlord, John F. Black (Basil Rathbone). The diffident and tone-deaf Gillie grieves for Amaryllis. She will sing for him, he tells her, like the nightingale. When he presses his affection, she entreats him to forbear. “I don’t know what that word means,” ad-libbed an overwrought Lorre, “but I can’t take it anymore.” Beneath a table, he draws Amaryllis close, but she pulls free. When he tries to stand, he hits his head.
“I’m so sensitive,” Lorre whimpers, improvising, so close to the end, a fitting epitaph.
Gillie hastily scrawls a farewell note telling Trumbull that he and Amaryllis “have fled into the night, driven onward by the madness of our all-consuming passion.”
In the pressbook for Comedy of Terrors, a studio publicist noted that “it took Peter over thirty years, but he’s finally made it as a screen lover after all those years as a menace.”
Reportedly “fierce and dogmatic,” Tourneur did not check Lorre, who stamped his portrayal with personal charm. Part and player made a good pair, like friends becoming reacquainted after a long separation. Their reunion called for plain speaking. The actor put away the nasal purr and dropped the grimace. Behind the mannerisms stood the man, full of warm and wistful humor. Gillie builds a lopsided, cross-slanted coffin out of old boards. “Pretty close,” ad-libbed Lorre, eyeing the unsightly handiwork. “Anybody would be proud to rest in this coffin…. I don’t like to see anyone buried naked.” Later, when Lorre and Price carry Rathbone’s body into the mortuary cellar, the actor extemporizes, “He’s pretty heavy for such a skinny bird.”
Richard Matheson dubbed Price and Lorre the “Laurel and Hardy” of black comedy. At one point, believing that Gillie has exposed their hand, Trumbull snaps, “A fine mess you’ve made of things again.” Their comic instincts formed an easy complement. By now, however, Matheson believed that Lorre “just sort of generalized his dialogue because he didn’t have any memory. That’s what they told me, that he just could not remember. But he was so charming as a person you just couldn’t get angry.”26 Whatever the reason for his improvising, Price sensed Lorre’s need to shed his horror image and “kept an open mind because he knew it was going to happen and he liked Peter. He just didn’t make an issue of it.”
Unhappy with Comedy of Terrors, Tourneur later skirted discussion about it. Having preordered a jaunty British comedy with brisk performances and clipped dialogue, he undoubtedly applauded the frail Boris Karloff’s suggestion that he exchange roles with the surprisingly robust Basil Rathbone. Whatever acceleration the British veteran lent the picture Lorre slowed with his relaxed delivery. “It probably bothered Tourneur,” said Matheson, “but I think he pretty quickly saw that it wasn’t something Lorre was doing to be nasty, so what could you do?” What Tourneur did not do, in Matheson’s words, was make enough use of Lorre’s “tremendous sense of comedy timing” or, according to Jameson, the camaraderie born of freedom given by Corman. Despite Tourneur’s heavy hand, the picture took on a life of its own through the easy ensemble spirit of its contract players.
Comedy of Terrors ran a poor second to The Raven at the box office and in the columns. A little baffled by this, Matheson believed that the juxtaposition of “comedy” and “terror” tended to work at cross purposes. Victorian grandiloquence and macabre drollery found a cool reception with critics and audiences alike. Rather than accept the film as a precocious spoof, they passed it off as an empty joke. Howard Thompson, writing for the New York Times, thought the picture should have been billed as a “chillerdiller—dill as in pickle” rather than as a “horroromp.” On the other coast, the Los Angeles Times’s Philip K. Scheuer said he felt “ashamed to watch once reputable actors hamming it up all over the place, making a mockery of whatever is left of their poor images.”
Behind the camera, Lorre once again cast himself in the role of teacher, confidant, and philosopher, always ready to give more of himself. People listened to him, to the soft strength in his voice. He summoned authority and attention. “The world isn’t going to end just because you didn’t get that particular picture,” Lorre told a disappointed William Campbell, who crossed paths with the actor at Schwab’s Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. “You’ve got to put things in their proper perspective. You know what I do. I always remember that in the motion picture business, you’re in the toy department. You got a toy, you play with it, you put it aside and you go on to the next toy.” Arkoff said that he and Lorre shared the same attitude, that “this is a whore’s business in part and really a very amusing business as long as you keep your sense of humor.”
“Peter was very gentle, always the charmer, very sweet,” remembered Court. “He was always kind of above the moment, so knowledgeable. I found him much more intelligent than one really thought of him…. He had a need for other things in life besides just coming on set and doing his work. He seemed to care very deeply about everything in the world, but not in a boring way. Every day we learned something from him…. He always made you feel good.” Price felt that “he was a magnet” who “drew people to him with his sad eyes. There was a great sadness about him, like a sad, cuddly teddy bear. The crew especially adored him—he was just fun to be with.”
Often the actors gathered round to reminisce about the past. One day, between takes on Comedy of Terrors, Price, Karloff, and Salkow listened to Lorre talk about his days at UFA. Rathbone approached the group. “Peter always threw out little shockers for Basil,” Salkow reminisced, “which he didn’t realize were for him. ‘For a while, it was very tough making films in Germany,’ said Peter. ‘Of course, after Hitler came to power, may he rest in peace, …’” Rathbone declared that he could not remain present and stormed off. Lorre seamlessly sandwiched throw-away lines between the meat and cheese of his stories. He pulled the same trick on reporters, who cleared their ears with the eraser end of their pencils and muttered, “What’d he say?” But Lorre had moved on.
All of the Poe features were shot at Producers Studio on Melrose Avenue with pretty much the same crew carrying over to each picture. AIP offered the veteran actors the respect and dignity they felt for each other, fostering a happy, healthy, family atmosphere. “It was kind of old home week,” Matheson said of the feeling of camaraderie on the set of Comedy of Terrors. “They were all delighted to be together. They were all pros, congenial, charming—nothing egotistical about them.” The shared feelings of comradeship enfolded Lorre in a warm embrace, drawing him into the team. When production drew to a close, Arkoff
and Nicholson always threw a big party for which everyone turned out, from the biggest star to the lowest grip. They stayed on late into the night, reluctant to leave, knowing that tomorrow the household would break up and go its own way.
In March 1963 Lorre appeared on The Hy Gardner Show. Asked how he liked himself in the movies, the actor repeated the question: “How do I like myself in the movies? I have to like myself. I have to feed a daughter.” Such nonsequiturs came easily to one who just wanted to change the subject. Lorre coldly declined to do the “opening-night bit,” as he called it, “because I only get paid for making [movies], not for looking at them.” The actor had felt this way, he told Gardner, since the first time he entered a projection room: “I don’t like to look at myself on the screen, as beautiful as I am. I find that completely narcissistic. I don’t understand actors that see rushes and dailies…. It doesn’t apply to all actors, but some actors; it pertains to me. Bogart was that way, for instance. We are bad audiences. And I have a feeling there is some chemistry that makes some people act and some other people watch it.” In fact, he confided that he rarely went to the movies. When, in 1960, had he last seen a movie? “I hate to tell you the truth,” he admitted to Mike Wallace. “I might never get a job again. I think the last movie I saw, altogether, in one compact session, was Gone with the Wind. It was a rainy day in Palm Springs and some friends dragged me there.” For the actor, movies had become a mind-set: “This is one of the good things about our profession, that it keeps you young. Maybe it’s because you make up your mind to be childish and not to grow up, so you don’t age.”
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