In the mid-1930s, Charlie Chaplin called him the “greatest living actor”—in fact, hardly any actor’s biography from the period of transition between silent films and talkies oscillates so dazzlingly between entertainment and high art as that of Peter Lorre.
Lorre was the first Bond villain in film history (in 1954 as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale, opposite Barry Nelson, the first James bond impersonator); among lovers of classic horror films, he enjoys a similar cult status to Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who, like Lorre, were written off as historical film relics by the 1950s and thenceforth appeared mainly in genre parodies and B-movies: Lugosi for Ed Wood, Karloff and Lorre in Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963).
In Hollywood, Lorre became known in the 1940s through the Dashiell Hammett adaptation The Maltese Falcon (the first movie directed by John Huston), which co-founded the film noir genre, and the anti-fascist melodrama Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz, in both cases alongside Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. He appeared with Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace in 1941, with Kirk Douglas in the 1953 Disney production 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and made the last appearance of his more than 40-year acting career in Jerry Lewis’s comedy The Patsy (1964).
Lorre’s portrayal of the child murderer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), his participation in the Hitchcock films The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Secret Agent (1936), made when Hitchcock was still working in England, as well as Josef von Sternberg’s film adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which he played Raskolnikov (1935), all fell into the era of early sound film.
Before Hollywood, Lorre was an integral part of the Berlin theater avant-garde of the late 1920s and early 1930s, counting Walter Benjamin among his fans.
Lorre not only featured in 80 films but was also a sought-after stage actor, who enjoyed renewed success on Broadway in the 1950s. But before all this, he was an integral part of the Berlin theater avant-garde of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He fascinated Walter Benjamin with his portrayal of Moritz in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, played Alfred in Ödön von Horvath’s Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931), St. Just in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and became one of Bertolt Brecht’s favorite actors, who cast him in various productions.
M
Peter Lorre was born László Loewenstein in Rosenberg (now Ružomberok, Slovakia) on 26 June 1904 and grew up in the Hapsburg Empire. After the death of his mother, the German-speaking Jewish family moved to Vienna in 1913, where Lorre earned his living as a bank employee in the mid-1920s, in accordance with his parents’ wishes. However, he was drawn to the city’s theaters every evening; working as a claqueur gave him access to the performances. He provoked his dismissal at the bank and became a self-taught actor.
Lorre gained his first experience in street theater and on the stage (alongside Hans Moser and Marlene Dietrich, among others) and made the acquaintance of Karl Kraus, Lotte Lenya, and the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. At the end of the 1920s, he moved to Berlin, where he was soon discovered by Brecht, with whom he developed a friendship that lasted twenty years. Lorre’s acting influenced Brecht’s conception of epic theater; conversely, Brecht’s acting theory (“distancing effect”, gesture) shaped Lorre’s interpretation of roles, insofar as he refined the art of improvisation and impromptu performance in line with Brecht’s intention to break up traditional naturalistic-psychological empathy by distancing and by demonstrating the artificiality of the performance.
Lorre’s international breakthrough came in Germany in 1931, when he was cast by Fritz Lang in the leading role in M. His interpretation of the child murderer Beckert contributed significantly to the success of the film, although Lorre is rarely on screen. The film centers instead on something that is still provocative today: a collective manhunt by the police and underworld—the latter embodied by the later Goebbels favorite Gustav Gründgens —as an alliance of mob and elite, which is in the wrong even when it acts against the original perpetrator.
M centers on something that is still provocative today: a collective manhunt by police and underworld—the latter embodied by the later Goebbels favorite Gustav Gründgens—as an alliance of mob and elite, which is in the wrong even when it acts against the original perpetrator.
In a second provocation and a break with conventional depictions of the criminal, the murderer’s mental illness does not appear solely as a sign of evil. Rather, the latter is aware of it himself and suffers anguish from it. In his final appearance, when the underworld criminals put the captured child murderer on trial in a disused liquor factory, in which an improvised courtroom and theater are combined, Lorre, as his biographer Felix Hofmann writes, “not only plays the frightened child murderer, he plays beyond the concrete figure — [an abstract representation of] being persecuted, being afraid”.
Goebbels later had this sequence edited into the propaganda film The Eternal Jew, because Lorre’s performance was seen as “an extraordinarily successful … self-portrayal of the filthy depravity and public danger of the unworthy Jewish subhuman”. Beforehand, Lorre had turned down film fan Goebbels, who initially wanted to use him for the film, in ignorance of his Jewish origins. As legend has it, Lorre’s telegram to Goebbels read: “There is no place in Germany for two murderers like Hitler and me”.
Beforehand, Lorre had turned down film fan Goebbels, who initially wanted to use him for the film, in ignorance of his Jewish origins. As legend has it, Lorre’s telegram to Goebbels read: “There is no place in Germany for two murderers like Hitler and me”.
Ignorance of Lorre’s Jewishness did not last long, however. Lorre, who like his film character had become the hunted, fled to Paris in 1933. However, there was no room for Lorre in the French film industry in the 1930s. Alfred Hitchcock then brought the unemployed actor to London to employ him in The Man Who Knew Too Much. This film secured Lorre a contract with a Hollywood production company, enabling him to move from France to the United States after his guest appearance in England.
Hollywood
In Hollywood, there wasn’t much for Lorre to do at first beyond photo-shoots; the studios wanted to publicize him and were looking for the right material and the right role with which to introduce him. Already well paid, he was able to take it easy materially and settle in. This period of “comfortable unemployment” ended after a year. His first two Hollywood films were Mad Love (1935) and Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment. After that, despite his rather poor English, he became a busy actor; between Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936, for Gaumont British) and the Columbia production The Face Behind the Mask (1941), he made 13 films for 20th Century Fox alone, including eight episodes of the popular Mr Moto series, in which Lorre plays the eponymous main character, a devious Japanese detective.
Lorre himself experienced psychological and financial crises throughout his career. His lifestyle was lavish and emphatically American in every respect, with a mansion and ranch, chauffeur and gardener, horses and dogs, memberships in tennis clubs and trade unions—but also an intermittently obsessive devotion to morphine.
Lorre’s lifestyle was lavish and emphatically American in every respect, with a mansion and ranch, chauffeur and gardener, horses and dogs, memberships in tennis clubs and trade unions—but also an intermittently obsessive devotion to morphine.
In the summer of 1941, when Lorre had just had his first success with audiences and critics for Warner Brothers with his performance in The Maltese Falcon, Brecht arrived in Hollywood with his entourage. Five years of regular meetings and intensive collaboration followed.
The friends not only spent time discussing political and aesthetic issues. Lorre also repeatedly supported Brecht in his half-hearted attempts to put his dramaturgical talent at the service of Hollywood. Like Brecht, Lorre wanted to get America interested in the Berlin avant-garde, in order to escape the corset into which Hollywood tended to force its actors. To this end, Brecht wrote film stories for Lorre that did justice to his repertoire (e.g. based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Coat), but for which no producers could be found. Apart from his involvement in the screenplay for Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (Hanns Eisler’s film music for which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1944), Brecht’s artistic and financial successes in the US remained modest.
Casablanca
It can always be argued against anti-Nazi films such as Casablanca that they reduce the barbarism of the real mass extinction of humans to sentimentality and scenery. One may complain of Casablanca in particular that, although the director, composer and screenwriters were Jews who grew up in America or emigrated there long before the rise of National Socialism, not a single one of the countless refugees in the film’s narrative is explicitly of Jewish origin—indeed, Jews are not even mentioned, which is generally interpreted as a concession to the assumed anti-Semitism of the American mass audience.
One may complain of Casablanca that not a single one of the countless refugees in the film’s narrative is explicitly of Jewish origin—indeed, Jews are not even mentioned, which is generally interpreted as a concession to the assumed anti-Semitism of the American mass audience.
However, the film does at least bring up the threat, if only in the background story, and the international and cosmopolitan crowd of refugees in Rick’s Café Américain was also reflected on the set of Casablanca—
In addition to the Americans Humphrey Bogart (Rick) and Sidney Greenstreet (Ferrari), the Swede Ingrid Bergmann (Ilsa) and the Brit Claude Rains (Renault), leading roles were played by Paul Henreid (as László), who—for the Nazis a “Jewish half-breed of the first degree”—had fled Austria, Conrad Veidt (as Major Strasser), who left Germany in 1933 because his wife was Jewish, and the Austro-Hungarian Jew Peter Lorre (as Ugarte). Supporting roles and extras (employees and visitors, officers and refugees in Rick’s Café) were also cast with emigrants: Trude Berliner (baccarat player) had emigrated in 1933, the couple Madeleine Lebeau (Yvonne, Rick’s neglected lover) and Marcel Dalio (croupier) fled France because of Dalio’s Jewish origins, the homosexual actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (German officer at Yvonne’s side) had already left Germany in 1930. At least eight minor actors of Jewish origin who fled Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Czechoslovakia also took part in the film and represented the cosmopolitanism of the movie.
The Lost One
Many successful immigrants and exiles in Hollywood left America (permanently or temporarily) under the impact of the HUAC’s communist hunt. Brecht, interrogated and humiliated by the committee for three hours on 30 October 1947, but finally “cleared”, would probably have turned his back on America anyway (like Eisler, who was deported). Charlie Chaplin, on the other hand (who was particularly targeted by Hoover), was forced out of the country and then banned from returning. Peter Lorre was a prominent opponent of this blacklisting policy, although he was not quite as vocal as John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Paul Henreid in his support for the “Hollywood Ten”—the group of directors and writers around screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who, after refusing to to testify before HUAC, were convicted for contempt of Congress in 1947.
Lorre was already under surveillance by the FBI, which found narcotics during a house search, and he ended up as one of 200 celebrities (alongside Bogart and Bacall, Rita Hayworth, and Kirk Douglas) on the so-called grey lists (“Stalin’s stars”), which Myron Coureval Fagan, another anti-Semite working in Hollywood, had been compiling and constantly updating since 1949.
Lorre was under surveillance by the FBI, which found narcotics during a house search, and he ended up as one of 200 celebrities on the so-called grey lists (“Stalin’s stars”), which Myron Coureval Fagan, another anti-Semite working in Hollywood, had been compiling and constantly updating since 1949.
Being on these lists did not mean a ban on employment, but could—as in Lorre’s case—lead to a noticeable decline in role offers. Financial losses and observation by the FBI, as well as the omnipresent possibility of denunciations, also made America increasingly unattractive for Lorre. But he turned down Brecht’s offer to follow him to East Berlin to resume the work they had once done together and “revolutionize” the theater. Instead Lorre went to West Germany and devoted himself to realizing his own major film project: The Lost One (Der Verlorene), where he both starred, and for the only time in his career, directed.
In the film, after the Second World War, two physicians who made careers under National Socialism and share a common history of guilt meet by chance while working in a resettlement camp under new names. They react in opposite ways to their country’s recent history: one is weak, broken, full of self-loathing and existential fear (Rothe, played by Lorre); the other, named Hösch, is still very much a “Herrenmensch“. Hösch has no sympathy for Rothe’s feelings of guilt, is proud of his own actions and wants to leave the past behind. At the end of the film, Rothe shoots Hösch and then commits suicide by walking onto a railway track and being run over by a train.
The Lost One is agonizingly haunting and yet distanced at the same time. It documents and demonstrates; there is not a trace of melodrama. There are none of the usual patterns found in films dealing with National Socialism before and after. There is no heroic resistance struggle, no purified follower, no touching victim story that invites empathy, no swastikas, marching boots or waving seas of flags that reproduce the aesthetics of National Socialism.
Lorre’s film is idiosyncratic and unwieldy, even implacable, in that it knows only two options for those involved: suicide or execution (as retribution beyond the law). It could hardly be more ruthless towards the needs of the Germans in the post-war years and beyond. Not only the major but also the minor perpetrators, the tolerators of great crimes, have forfeited the right to continue living if they lack all insight and remorse.
The Lost One premiered on 7 September 1951. After just ten days, the film disappeared from cinemas and into temporary oblivion. Although it was well received by some critics, the audience reacted with incomprehension for the most part; the press slated Lorre and his film—how dare a returnee who had no idea about the local situation tell the Germans about National Socialism and guilt!
Lorre returned to Hollywood utterly disappointed. However, luck got a hold of him again in the Dream Factory. He played alongside the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, and Jerry Lewis, and danced and sang with Fred Astaire. He particularly enjoyed making horror comedies for American International Pictures in the years 1962-1964 with Vincent Price and Boris Karloff under the direction of Roger Corman.
Peter Lorre died on March 23, 1964, of a brain hemorrhage.
This text was previously published in Casablanca – Texte zur falschen Zeit 1/2024.
