The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941)

Evelyn Keyes and Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask

Cast: Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, John Tyrrell, Cy Shindell, Stanley Brown, James Seay, Warren Ashe, Charles C. Wilson, George McKay. Screenplay: Allen Vincent, Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson, based on a radio play by Thomas Edward O'Connell. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Sidney Cutner. 

A real sleeper, Robert Florey's The Face Behind the Mask performed poorly at the box office and was critically dismissed on its release, but over time it has gained admirers. Florey and cinematographer Franz Planer do what they can with the movie's scrawny budget, achieving some haunting expressionistic images and telling the story with great economy: The film runs only 69 minutes. It's a showcase for Peter Lorre, who plays Janos Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to the United States whose naïve enthusiasm is smothered when he's horribly scarred in a fire. (We get only a brief glimpse of his scarred face, but it's enough to make what follows plausible.) Trained as a watchmaker and skilled with his hands, Janos is unable to find work. Then a chance encounter with a small-time thief (George E. Stone) sets him on the road to crime. Trying to earn money for plastic surgery, he becomes the head of a small ring of jewel thieves, using his expertise to break into safes and circumvent burglar alarms. (It's a sign of the small budget, and of Florey's narrative economy, that we never see him and his gang at work.) They make enough for Janos to have a rather creepy mask made to cover his disfigurement, but on learning that surgery can never fully repair his face he becomes despondent. Then he meets a blind woman (Evelyn Keyes) who doesn't care what he looks like, and they fall in love. It's a rather soppy twist to the story, and Keyes is never able to make her character other than a saccharine cliché, but the film takes a darker turn that undercuts the sentimentality. Lorre is terrific throughout, as Janos ranges from meek to menacing to heroic. 

Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935)

Peter Lorre in Mad Love

Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive, Ted Healy, Sara Haden, Edward Brophy, Henry Kolker, Keye Luke, May Beatty. Screenplay: Guy Endore, P.J. Wolfson, John L. Balderston, based on a novel by Maurice Renard. Cinematography: Chester A. Lyons, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin.

Peter Lorre's American debut made him a specialist in creepy roles. He's Dr. Gogol, a mad physician, obsessed with a lovely actress (Frances Drake) married to a concert pianist (Colin Clive) who, when his hands are injured in an accident, allows the doctor to operate on them. But the doctor replaces the pianist's hands with those of a murderer, a specialist in knife-throwing, who has just been guillotined for his crimes. Naturally, this means that the pianist can't play anymore but develops a new talent for throwing sharp objects. And so on. It's a pretty well made piece of hokum that gained some late notoriety when Pauline Kael accused Orson Welles of stealing from it when he made Citizen Kane (1941), largely because both films had the same cinematographer, Gregg Toland.

Three Strangers (Jean Negulesco, 1946)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sydney Greenstreet in Three Strangers

Jerome K. Arbutny: Sydney Greenstreet
Crystal Shackleford: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Johnny West: Peter Lorre
Icey Crane: Joan Lorring
Bertram Fallon: Robert Shayne
Janet Elliott: Marjorie Riordan
Prosecutor: Arthur Shields
Lady Rhea Belladon: Rosalind Ivan
Junior Clerk: John Alvin
Gabby: Peter Whitney
David Shackleford: Alan Napier

Director: Jean Negulesco
Screenplay: John Huston, Howard Koch
Cinematography: Arthur Edeson
Art direction: Ted Smith
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Adolph Deutsch

This is the movie in which Peter Lorre gets the girl, though not the leading lady played by Geraldine Fitzgerald. Instead, Lorre's Johnny West winds up with Icey, the woman who adores him and even perjures herself to save him from being hanged. It's all the result of a rather charmingly tangled and entirely improbable plot cooked up by John Huston with the aid of Howard Koch and kicked around Warner Bros. for years until it finally settled in the hands of director Jean Negulesco. Like The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941) it teams Lorre with Sydney Greenstreet and features a mysterious artifact as something of a MacGuffin. Instead of a priceless black bird, the artifact in Three Strangers is a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin. Legend has it that if three people, strangers to one another, make a wish on the statue at the lunar New Year, the wish will come true. So Fitzgerald's character, Crystal Shackleford, lures the solicitor Jerome K. Arbutny and the down-on-his-luck Johnny to her flat, and the three agree that the only thing that will solve their problems -- she wants to win the love of her husband from whom she's separated, Arbutny wants to become a barrister, and Johnny just wants to own a bar -- is money. so they place their bets on a sweepstakes ticket. Sure enough, despite the skepticism of Arbutny and the comparative indifference of Johnny, Kwan Yin comes through. And equally sure enough, nothing goes right for the trio, with the possible exception of Johnny, who does, as we said, get the girl. Alfred Hitchcock had once expressed interest in the screenplay, and we might have gotten something great if he had settled on it, but Negulesco doesn't put much of an interesting spin on the material. But Lorre and Greenstreet, together or apart, are always fun to watch.

Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944)

Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace

Mortimer Brewster: Cary Grant
Abby Brewster: Josephine Hull
Martha Brewster: Jean Adair
Elaine Harper: Priscilla Lane
Jonathan Brewster: Raymond Massey
Dr. Einstein: Peter Lorre
O'Hara: Jack Carson
Mr. Witherspoon: Edward Everett Horton
Teddy Brewster: John Alexander
Lt. Rooney: James Gleason

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein
Based on a play by Joseph Kesselring
Cinematography: Sol Polito
Art direction: Max Parker
Film editing: Daniel Mandell
Music: Max Steiner

This may be Cary Grant's worst performance. Certainly director Frank Capra put no restraints on Grant's lurching, mugging, groaning, and whinnying as he tries to portray Mortimer Brewster's reaction to the discovery that his beloved maiden aunts have been killing old men and burying him in their basement. But then Capra doesn't bother to restrain anyone else in this too-frantic version of the very popular Broadway farce. It's a film in which nobody listens to anyone else, producing complications that are supposed to be hysterically funny but are just hysterical. The Epstein twins do a fairly good job of adapting Joseph Kesselring's one-set stage play into a slightly opened-out movie -- though some scenes, such as the opening baseball park sequence and the bit at City Hall where Mortimer and Elaine get their wedding license, seem to be staged just for the sake of getting out of the confines of the Brewster house. No one covers themselves with comedy glory here, with the possible exception of Peter Lorre, who remains on the fringes of most of the action, providing a wry, restrained point of view on the nonsense. The film was made in 1941, but was held from release for three years because it couldn't be exhibited before the play had ended its Broadway fun.

Beat the Devil (John Huston, 1953)

Humphrey Bogart called John Huston's Beat the Devil a "mess," which it is, but much of the messiness is due to Bogart's presence in the film. His tough-guy persona, for which Huston himself was largely responsible after casting Bogart in roles like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), puts him tonally out of sync with the rest of the cast of eccentrics in Beat the Devil. Bogart doesn't seem to know how to play Billy Dannreuther, an American trying to recoup his fortunes by playing along with some rather oddball crooks and grifters: the florid Peterson (Robert Morley), the German-Chilean who calls himself O'Hara (Peter Lorre), the lugubrious Italian Ravello (Marco Tulli), and the fascist Maj. Jack Ross (Ivor Barnard), whose name almost suggests his character -- a humanoid Jack Russell terrier with a hair-trigger temper. Moreover, Dannreuther is rather improbably mated with the scheming Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) and equally improbably wooing the compulsive liar Gwendolen Chelm (Jennifer Jones). That Bogart has no chemistry with either actress, both of whom give delicious performances, further drags the film down. Jones made two films with Huston, this one and the little-seen We Were Strangers (1949), and they are two of the most interesting performances in her career, making me wish that Huston had been able to release Jones more frequently from the clutches of David O. Selznick. Everyone, including Edward Underdown as Gwendolen's husband, Harry, does delightful comic work except Bogart, who glumly and blankly delivers lines he doesn't seem to be trying to understand. That may be understandable, given that the screenplay was being written by Huston and Truman Capote -- and the uncredited Peter Viertel and Anthony Veiller -- pretty much on the fly while the film was being made. The result is a collection of very amusing moments pieced together with a lot of cobbled-together nonsense about uranium deposits in Africa -- in short, the stuff of which cult movies are made. I'm not a member of the cult, but I happily watch Beat the Devil every now and then, especially for the performances of Jones and Morley and Lorre, while wishing that Huston had cast someone more skilled than Bogart -- Grant? Stewart? Cooper? -- at working amid chaos and nonsense.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934)

Peter Lorre, Leslie Banks, and Nova Pilbeam in The Man Who Knew Too Much

The first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which he remade in 1956, was Alfred Hitchcock's breakthrough film, a critical and popular success that also established Peter Lorre as in international star. It was Lorre's first English-language film; in 1933 he had left Germany, where he had made his reputation in M (Fritz Lang, 1931), because of the rise of the Nazis. He is said to have learned his role in Hitchcock's film phonetically. His performance is perhaps the most memorable thing about The Man Who Knew Too Much, which sometimes feels slack and disjointed, as if Hitchcock hadn't yet mastered the technique of seeing the film as a whole. Hitchcock told François Truffaut, "The first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional." Lorre plays Abbott, the mastermind of a group of radicals who are plotting the assassination of the leader of a European country -- the politics are the film's MacGuffin, a vague motive that spurs the action. When Bob Lawrence (Leslie Banks) accidentally learns of the plot, his daughter (Nova Pilbeam) is kidnapped to prevent him from going to the police, but his wife (Edna Best) manages to foil the assassination by screaming when she spots the killer at the point in a concert at the Royal Albert Hall when a cymbal crash is supposed to cover the sound of the gun. Even so, there's a lot of action left as Lawrence frantically tries to rescue his daughter while the police shoot it out with the bad guys. Banks and Best are a rather pallid couple -- he's given to "stiff upper lip, old girl" exhortations, and although she's a champion sharpshooter who fires the shot that kills the assassin, she has little to do the rest of the time but dither and emit that crucial scream -- so it's no wonder that Lorre steals the film.

The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

"By gad, sir, you are a character," says Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), with what Greenstreet's co-star Mary Astor once described as "that evil, hiccupy laugh." He is speaking to Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), who is certainly a character, if decidedly not a man of character. There aren't many other films so full of characters, but so lacking any with what one might call a moral center. Spade, for one, proves that you can be both misogynistic and homophobic -- as if proof of that were needed. Does he do the right thing at the end when he sends Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Astor) up the river? Perhaps, but he does it with such relish that it's hard to ascribe any probity to the act. The Maltese Falcon is one of the greatest examples of hoodwinking the censors of the Production Code, which among other things forbade depictions of homosexuality on screen. But does anyone miss the fact that Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) is meant to be gay -- from his fussy little perm to his teasing fondling of the handle of his umbrella to the scent of gardenia that Spade finds so amusing? And probably only the ignorance of Yiddish on the part of the Catholics in the Breen office allows Wilmer (Elisha Cook Jr.) to be called a "gunsel" -- a word that originally meant a young man kept  by an older man for sex. Actually, it was Dashiell Hammett who slipped that one by the watchdogs in the original novel -- John Huston kept it, doubtless smiling the sly smile of someone who knows what he's getting away with. Even today, most people probably think like the Breen office and Hammett's editors, that it means a gunman. But Huston also got away with the clear indication that Spade had been having an affair with Iva Archer (Gladys George), the wife of his partner, Miles (Jerome Cowan). And is there anyone who doesn't realize that Spade has slept with Brigid? This was Huston's first feature as a director, and the result of all this Code-dodging, as well as his unwillingness to sentimentalize his characters, made him a formidable directorial force in the years to come, one of the few Hollywood directors who knew how to make movies for adults.

M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Point of view is everything in a thriller. Let the viewer see events through the wrong eyes, and suspense goes out the window. The remarkable thing about Lang's great thriller is that the point of view changes so often. It starts with that of anxious parents, knowing that a child-killer is on the loose, then narrows to one particular parent, waiting for her daughter to come home from school for lunch. But then we see the object of her fears, her daughter, making contact with a strange man, and our suspense builds as we return to the worried mother. But as strongly as we sympathize with the mother, we also eventually learn to focus our anxieties elsewhere: on the beleaguered police, on innocent victims of people's suspicions, on the criminal underworld harassed by the police, and eventually even on the murderer himself. There are even moments when, as he becomes the object of the manhunt, trapped in the attic of a building swarming with the criminals in search of him, we find ourselves semi-consciously rooting for him to escape. Then we find ourselves rooting for the criminals to capture him and to escape being caught by the cops. And then, when he is put on trial by the criminals, we root for the police to arrive and rescue him. In short, the movie is a study in the ways in which sympathy can be manipulated. Lang and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Thea von Harbou wrote the screenplay, and the atmosphere of the film is superbly maintained by the cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner and the sets of Emil Hasler and Karl Vollbrecht. But none of it would work without the presence of some extraordinary performers, starting with Peter Lorre as the sniveling, obsessed Hans Beckert: a career-defining performance in many ways, considering that Lorre had been known for comic roles on stage before Lang made him a movie star. Then there's Otto Wernicke as Inspector Lohmann, whose performance was so memorable that Lang brought him back as the same character in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), stereotyping Wernicke as a cop for much of his career. And Gustav Gründgens, the imperious leader of the criminal faction, who later became identified with the role of Mephistopheles in stage and screen versions of Goethe's Faust (Peter Gorski, 1960) -- not to mention in Klaus Mann's 1936 novel, Mephisto, based on Gründgens's embrace of the Nazis to advance his career.