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TCM Schedule for Friday, August 24, 2018 -- Summer Under The Stars -- Peter Lorre
Day Twenty-four of Summer Under the Stars, with Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein, on June 26, 1904, in Rózsahegy, Austria-Hungary (now Ruzomberok, Slovakia). The not-so-mini-bio from TCM:A product of Berlin's post World War I experimental theatre scene, Peter Lorre honed his craft in plays by Shakespeare, Goethe and Shaw, but achieved international fame as a child killer in Fritz Lang's incendiary "M" (1931). After making his English language debut for Alfred Hitchcock in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934), Lorre was lured to Hollywood with the promise of a studio contract. Warehoused for a year by Columbia Pictures, Lorre was loaned out to play more maniacs in "Mad Love" (1935) and "Stranger on the Third Floor" (1940). Against the better judgment of the Warner Brothers front office, first time filmmaker John Huston took a chance on Lorre by casting him as the villainous Joel Cairo to Humphrey Bogart's steely shamus Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941). Lorre and Bogart became frequent co-stars in such World War II era fare as "Across the Pacific" (1941), "Casablanca" (1942) and "Passage to Marseilles" (1944). Despite playing the occasional heroic role, Lorre remained typecast as misfits and miscreants. Plagued by ill health and drug addiction, Lorre capped his career with a run of tongue-in-cheek horror films, including "The Raven" (1963) and "Comedy of Terrors" (1963) with horror kings Boris Karloff and Vincent Price. Dead at 59, Lorre's legacy survived him, due to his roles in iconic Bogart films and the devotion of horror film fans who echoed the late actor's designation as The Lord High Minister of All That is Sinister.
Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in the town of Rózsahegy in northern Hungary on June 26, 1904. Lorre's father, Alajos Löwenstein, was the bookkeeper for a textile company and a reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1908, Lorre's mother died of blood poisoning. Alienated by his father's second marriage, Lorre developed into a withdrawn child, even as the family relocated several times due to his father's business ambitions and his military service. Lorre acted for the first time in a school production of "Snow White," playing one of the dwarfs. While in middle school, he was chosen to appear in an evening of one-act plays staged at the Vienna Kammerspiele, after which he expressed to his disapproving father his desire to become an actor. After obtaining a business degree, Lorre worked briefly as a bank teller. Prone to tardiness, he allowed himself to be fired so that he could pursue acting full-time. With Vienna's economy in ruins after the First World War, Lorre lived an itinerant life, sleeping on park benches. Unable to pay for theatre, he worked as an unpaid audience extra, clapping on cue. Theatrical impresario Jacob Moreno invited Lorre to join his experimental theatre troupe and provided him with the stage name he would carry through life: "Peter" from the late poet Peter Altenberg and "Lorre" from the German word for parrot.
Honing his craft in Breslau and Zurich in Switzerland, Lorre headed to Berlin in 1927. During this time, he underwent surgery for a burst appendix. When complications arose, revision surgery was performed and Lorre was prescribed morphine for pain. This led to a lifetime addiction to narcotics for the actor, who borrowed increasing amounts of money to pay for his habit while even resorting to forging prescriptions. In 1929, playwright-theatre director Bertolt Brecht cast Lorre in productions of "Happy End" and "Man Equals Man." He made his film debut in "Die verschwundene Frau" (The Missing Wife) (1929), one of the last silent films made in Austria. Lorre kept his participation in the film a secret, preferring to let the official record show that he made his cinema debut for director Fritz Lang in "M" (1931). Inspired by the crimes of German serial killer Peter Kürten, Lang cast Lorre as Hans Beckert, a man compelled to abduct and murder young children. Only weeks after the film's premiere, Kürten was executed by guillotine while Lorre became an international celebrity, admired at home by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and abroad by silent film star Charlie Chaplin. Though he would play comical and even heroic roles throughout his career, Lorre was largely associated with horrific and supernatural themes for the rest of his life. With the rise of the Third Reich, Lorre joined the first wave of Jews fleeing Europe in 1933. With his fiancée, actress Celia Lovsky, Lorre traveled to Czechoslovakia and then on to France. In Paris, the actor received an invitation from England to appear in a film being produced by the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation.
Hitchcock cast Lorre in the role of a scar-faced political assassin in the classic "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934). Not yet able to speak English, Lorre learned his lines phonetically. Taking a break from shooting that summer, Lorre married Lovsky in a civil ceremony, having arrived at Westminster's General Register's Office wearing his ghoulish make-up. Featured prominently in posters for "The Man Who Knew Too Much," Lorre drew rave reviews and received an invitation from Hollywood. Armed with the promise of a contract from Columbia Pictures, Lorre sailed to America but had to wait for a year before he was cast in an American film. Unsure of what to do with his latest acquisition, Columbia head Harry Cohn eventually loaned Lorre to MGM for "Mad Love" (1935). Sporting a bald pate that made his naturally wide eyes seem ready to pop from his skull, Lorre delivered an immortal performance as the obsessive Dr. Gogol, a brilliant surgeon unhinged by his love for another man's wife. Lorre agreed to the loan-out on condition that Columbia foot the bill for an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, to star himself and to be directed by Josef von Sternberg. Cohn kept his word, but the film was both a box office and critical failure.
Lorre rebounded by returning to England to work for Hitchcock again, playing another assassin in "Secret Agent" (1936). At Twentieth Century Fox, Lorre stepped into the role of a cunning Japanese crime fighter in a series of whodunits beginning with "Think Fast, Mr. Moto" (1937) and ending after eight installments in 1939. At MGM, Lorre appeared with Joan Crawford and Clark Cable in Frank Borzage's South Seas melodrama "Strange Cargo" (1940). Though he had turned down the lead in "Son of Frankenstein" (1939) because he wanted to distance himself from menacing roles, Lorre was back in form for the eerie "Stranger on the Third Floor" (1940) and "The Face Behind the Mask" (1940), appearing in the latter as a gentle immigrant who turns to crime after being disfigured in a boarding house fire. At Warner Brothers, Lorre was cast as the flamboyantly gay criminal Joel Cairo in John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), opposite Mary Astor and Lorre's soon-to-be frequent co-stars, Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. Though a proposed sequel to the hit film never got off the ground, Bogart and Lorre were reteamed in Vincent Sherman's "All Through the Night" (1941) and again, with Greenstreet, in Michael Curtiz's "Casablanca" (1942). Though Lorre's role was small and his character killed offscreen well before the film's midpoint, the success of "Casablanca" was greatly enhanced by his sweaty portrayal of the cut-rate underworld parasite Ugarte. By this time, Lorre had become such a popular cultural touchstone that his appearance was parodied in Loony Tunes shorts and his voice mimicked by Paul Frees in Spike Jones' novelty cover of "My Old Flame." Lorre worked with Bogart and Greenstreet again in the wartime adventure "Passage to Marseilles" (1944) and was paired with Greenstreet in atypically heroic roles in "The Mask of Dimitrios" (1944) and "The Verdict" (1946).
Lorre returned to villainous form in the classic noir "Black Angel" (1946) and in the psychological horror film "The Beast with Five Fingers" (1946), directed by Robert Florey. He had by this time separated from Lovsky, though the two would remain friends throughout the rest of his life. Lorre's second wife was German actress Kaaren Verne, but the union lasted only five years. Lorre scored a rare shot at a comedy with the Bob Hope vehicle "My Favorite Brunette" (1947) before he returned to Germany to direct and star in "Der Verlorene" (The Lost One) (1951), as a vivisectionist who murders his unfaithful wife and spirals into homicidal mania. Twenty years after "M" and too close to Germany's defeat in World War II, the film was unsuccessful. To the delight of fans, John Huston reunited Lorre with Bogart in "Beat the Devil" (1953), filmed in Italy and the United Kingdom. That year, Lorre married for the third time and fathered a daughter. In 1954, he played the first Bond villain in a TV production of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, adapted for the CBS anthology series "Climax!" (1954-58).
With the bulk of his assignments amounting to little more than rent-paying gigs during this period, Lorre did enjoy his role as a singing and dancing Soviet commissar in MGM's Technicolor musical "Silk Stockings" (1957) opposite Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman revived Lorre's career by casting him in the omnibus thriller "Tales of Terror" (1962), in a blackly humorous retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado co-starring Vincent Price. Corman would use Lorre and Price again in "The Raven" (1963), co-starring Boris Karloff, while Jacques Tourneur would reunite the three for "Comedy of Terrors" (1963) as unscrupulous morticians who resort to murder when their business takes a dive. Dubbed by magazine editor Forrest J. Ackerman as "The Lord High Minister of All That Is Sinister," Lorre made his final film appearance in "The Patsy" (1964), starring Jerry Lewis. Separated from his third wife and in poor health, Lorre suffered a fatal stroke in a rented apartment on Hollywood Boulevard on March 23, 1964, at the age of 59.
By Richard Harland Smith
Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in the town of Rózsahegy in northern Hungary on June 26, 1904. Lorre's father, Alajos Löwenstein, was the bookkeeper for a textile company and a reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. In 1908, Lorre's mother died of blood poisoning. Alienated by his father's second marriage, Lorre developed into a withdrawn child, even as the family relocated several times due to his father's business ambitions and his military service. Lorre acted for the first time in a school production of "Snow White," playing one of the dwarfs. While in middle school, he was chosen to appear in an evening of one-act plays staged at the Vienna Kammerspiele, after which he expressed to his disapproving father his desire to become an actor. After obtaining a business degree, Lorre worked briefly as a bank teller. Prone to tardiness, he allowed himself to be fired so that he could pursue acting full-time. With Vienna's economy in ruins after the First World War, Lorre lived an itinerant life, sleeping on park benches. Unable to pay for theatre, he worked as an unpaid audience extra, clapping on cue. Theatrical impresario Jacob Moreno invited Lorre to join his experimental theatre troupe and provided him with the stage name he would carry through life: "Peter" from the late poet Peter Altenberg and "Lorre" from the German word for parrot.
Honing his craft in Breslau and Zurich in Switzerland, Lorre headed to Berlin in 1927. During this time, he underwent surgery for a burst appendix. When complications arose, revision surgery was performed and Lorre was prescribed morphine for pain. This led to a lifetime addiction to narcotics for the actor, who borrowed increasing amounts of money to pay for his habit while even resorting to forging prescriptions. In 1929, playwright-theatre director Bertolt Brecht cast Lorre in productions of "Happy End" and "Man Equals Man." He made his film debut in "Die verschwundene Frau" (The Missing Wife) (1929), one of the last silent films made in Austria. Lorre kept his participation in the film a secret, preferring to let the official record show that he made his cinema debut for director Fritz Lang in "M" (1931). Inspired by the crimes of German serial killer Peter Kürten, Lang cast Lorre as Hans Beckert, a man compelled to abduct and murder young children. Only weeks after the film's premiere, Kürten was executed by guillotine while Lorre became an international celebrity, admired at home by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and abroad by silent film star Charlie Chaplin. Though he would play comical and even heroic roles throughout his career, Lorre was largely associated with horrific and supernatural themes for the rest of his life. With the rise of the Third Reich, Lorre joined the first wave of Jews fleeing Europe in 1933. With his fiancée, actress Celia Lovsky, Lorre traveled to Czechoslovakia and then on to France. In Paris, the actor received an invitation from England to appear in a film being produced by the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation.
Hitchcock cast Lorre in the role of a scar-faced political assassin in the classic "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1934). Not yet able to speak English, Lorre learned his lines phonetically. Taking a break from shooting that summer, Lorre married Lovsky in a civil ceremony, having arrived at Westminster's General Register's Office wearing his ghoulish make-up. Featured prominently in posters for "The Man Who Knew Too Much," Lorre drew rave reviews and received an invitation from Hollywood. Armed with the promise of a contract from Columbia Pictures, Lorre sailed to America but had to wait for a year before he was cast in an American film. Unsure of what to do with his latest acquisition, Columbia head Harry Cohn eventually loaned Lorre to MGM for "Mad Love" (1935). Sporting a bald pate that made his naturally wide eyes seem ready to pop from his skull, Lorre delivered an immortal performance as the obsessive Dr. Gogol, a brilliant surgeon unhinged by his love for another man's wife. Lorre agreed to the loan-out on condition that Columbia foot the bill for an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, to star himself and to be directed by Josef von Sternberg. Cohn kept his word, but the film was both a box office and critical failure.
Lorre rebounded by returning to England to work for Hitchcock again, playing another assassin in "Secret Agent" (1936). At Twentieth Century Fox, Lorre stepped into the role of a cunning Japanese crime fighter in a series of whodunits beginning with "Think Fast, Mr. Moto" (1937) and ending after eight installments in 1939. At MGM, Lorre appeared with Joan Crawford and Clark Cable in Frank Borzage's South Seas melodrama "Strange Cargo" (1940). Though he had turned down the lead in "Son of Frankenstein" (1939) because he wanted to distance himself from menacing roles, Lorre was back in form for the eerie "Stranger on the Third Floor" (1940) and "The Face Behind the Mask" (1940), appearing in the latter as a gentle immigrant who turns to crime after being disfigured in a boarding house fire. At Warner Brothers, Lorre was cast as the flamboyantly gay criminal Joel Cairo in John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), opposite Mary Astor and Lorre's soon-to-be frequent co-stars, Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. Though a proposed sequel to the hit film never got off the ground, Bogart and Lorre were reteamed in Vincent Sherman's "All Through the Night" (1941) and again, with Greenstreet, in Michael Curtiz's "Casablanca" (1942). Though Lorre's role was small and his character killed offscreen well before the film's midpoint, the success of "Casablanca" was greatly enhanced by his sweaty portrayal of the cut-rate underworld parasite Ugarte. By this time, Lorre had become such a popular cultural touchstone that his appearance was parodied in Loony Tunes shorts and his voice mimicked by Paul Frees in Spike Jones' novelty cover of "My Old Flame." Lorre worked with Bogart and Greenstreet again in the wartime adventure "Passage to Marseilles" (1944) and was paired with Greenstreet in atypically heroic roles in "The Mask of Dimitrios" (1944) and "The Verdict" (1946).
Lorre returned to villainous form in the classic noir "Black Angel" (1946) and in the psychological horror film "The Beast with Five Fingers" (1946), directed by Robert Florey. He had by this time separated from Lovsky, though the two would remain friends throughout the rest of his life. Lorre's second wife was German actress Kaaren Verne, but the union lasted only five years. Lorre scored a rare shot at a comedy with the Bob Hope vehicle "My Favorite Brunette" (1947) before he returned to Germany to direct and star in "Der Verlorene" (The Lost One) (1951), as a vivisectionist who murders his unfaithful wife and spirals into homicidal mania. Twenty years after "M" and too close to Germany's defeat in World War II, the film was unsuccessful. To the delight of fans, John Huston reunited Lorre with Bogart in "Beat the Devil" (1953), filmed in Italy and the United Kingdom. That year, Lorre married for the third time and fathered a daughter. In 1954, he played the first Bond villain in a TV production of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, adapted for the CBS anthology series "Climax!" (1954-58).
With the bulk of his assignments amounting to little more than rent-paying gigs during this period, Lorre did enjoy his role as a singing and dancing Soviet commissar in MGM's Technicolor musical "Silk Stockings" (1957) opposite Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman revived Lorre's career by casting him in the omnibus thriller "Tales of Terror" (1962), in a blackly humorous retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado co-starring Vincent Price. Corman would use Lorre and Price again in "The Raven" (1963), co-starring Boris Karloff, while Jacques Tourneur would reunite the three for "Comedy of Terrors" (1963) as unscrupulous morticians who resort to murder when their business takes a dive. Dubbed by magazine editor Forrest J. Ackerman as "The Lord High Minister of All That Is Sinister," Lorre made his final film appearance in "The Patsy" (1964), starring Jerry Lewis. Separated from his third wife and in poor health, Lorre suffered a fatal stroke in a rented apartment on Hollywood Boulevard on March 23, 1964, at the age of 59.
By Richard Harland Smith
Enjoy!
6:00 AM -- THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941)
When a fire leaves him hideously scarred, an immigrant turns to crime.
Dir: Robert Florey
Cast: Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe
BW-68 mins, CC,
Part of the SON OF SHOCK package of 20 titles released to television in 1958, which followed the original Shock Theater release of 52 features one year earlier. This was also one of the 11 Columbia titles, the other 61 all being Universals.
7:30 AM -- ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944)
A young man about to be married discovers the two aunts who raised him have been poisoning lonely old men.
Dir: Frank Capra
Cast: Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane, Raymond Massey
BW-118 mins, CC,
The film was shot between October 20 and December 16, 1941. During 1943, the film was shown to the Armed Forces overseas. but went unissued domestically until its Manhattan debut at the Strand Theatre on September 1, 1944, followed by the nationwide release on September 23. Warner Bros. had been contractually required to wait for the Broadway play to finish its run, which finally occurred on June 17, 1944. By the time the movie opened, Priscilla Lane and Warner Bros. had ended their association.
9:45 AM -- SILK STOCKINGS (1957)
A straitlaced Soviet agent is seduced by Paris and a high-stepping film producer.
Dir: Rouben Mamoulian
Cast: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Janis Paige
C-118 mins, CC, Letterbox Format
Many consider the film version of Silk Stockings (1957) to be a decided improvement on the stage version because of the emphasis on dance, as no other mode of artistic expression could have so movingly and convincingly conveyed Ninotchka's transformation from Communist to Capitalist. Indeed, Charisse's solo interpretation of the title song, which charts the character's carefully preconceived -- and humorously concealed -- shift in allegiance, did not exist on stage, and emerged as the centerpiece of the film.
12:00 PM -- YOU'LL FIND OUT (1940)
Kay Kyser and his band fight to save a young girl trapped in a haunted mansion.
Dir: David Butler
Cast: Kay Kyser, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff
BW-97 mins, CC,
Nominee for an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song -- Jimmy McHugh (music) and Johnny Mercer (lyrics) for the song "I'd Know You Anywhere"
Filmed August 8-October 11 1940, the 7th of 8 features to star Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and the only time that fellow Hungarians Lugosi and Peter Lorre ever shared the screen.
2:00 PM -- ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT (1942)
A criminal gang turns patriotic to track down a Nazi spy ring.
Dir: Vincent Sherman
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Kaaren Verne
BW-107 mins, CC,
The scene in which Gloves (Humphrey Bogart) and Sunshine (William Demarest) confuse a room full of Nazi sympathizers with doubletalk was not part of the original script, but was invented by Vincent Sherman, who filmed it despite the objections of Hal B. Wallis. Wallis ordered it removed from the film, but Sherman left a small segment of it in, and when preview audiences reacted positively to it, Wallis backed down and told Sherman to put the entire scene back in.
4:00 PM -- THE COMEDY OF TERRORS (1964)
A dishonest undertaker and his sidekick create their own customers when they cannot find willing ones.
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Cast: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff
C-83 mins, CC, Letterbox Format
Peter Lorre died only 2 months after this film's release.
5:45 PM -- SCENT OF MYSTERY (1960)
A vacationing Englishman stumbles upon a plot to kill a young American tourist in Spain.
Dir: Jack Cardiff
Cast: Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre, Beverly Bentley
BW-109 mins, Letterbox Format
This film was shown as a "Smell-o-Vision" movie. The theatre was equipped with a system that gave off various odors in sync with the film. The opening scene involved a butterfly flitting through a rose garden, with accompanying delicious odors. Later on, a barrel of wine fell off a cart going up a hill, and rolled down the street only to smash at the bottom, again to the accompanying odor. The "Smell-O-Vision" gimmick did not work as intended. Moviegoers in the balcony said the aromas reached them too late to coincide with the onscreen action. Some said the scents were much too faint. Negative word-of-mouth and reviews doomed the movie and the gimmick.
TCM PRIMETIME - WHAT'S ON TONIGHT: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: PETER LORRE
8:00 PM -- M (1931)
The mob sets out to catch a child killer whose crimes are attracting too much police attention.
Dir: Fritz Lang
Cast: Peter Lorre, Theo Lingen, Otto Wernicke
BW-110 mins,
Although he was thrilled to play such a major part, Peter Lorre came to hate it later as people tended to associate him with being a child murderer in real life.
10:00 PM -- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (1935)
A young student murders for money then tries to escape his guilt and a brilliant detective.
Dir: Josef von Sternberg
Cast: Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold, Marian Marsh
BW-88 mins, CC,
Josef von Sternberg was contractually obligated to make this film, and he disliked it, saying in his autobiography that it was "no more related to the true text of the novel than the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Gower is related to the Russian environment."
11:45 PM -- THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944)
A meek novelist investigates the mysterious death of a notorious scoundrel.
Dir: Jean Negulesco
Cast: Sydney Greenstreet, Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson
BW-96 mins, CC,
First film of Zachary Scott.
1:30 AM -- THE VERDICT (1946)
A retired Scotland Yard chief tries to prove his friend is innocent of murder.
Dir: Don Siegel
Cast: Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Joan Lorring
BW-86 mins, CC,
Based on an 1892 novel titled "The Big Bow Mystery" by Israel Zangwill.
3:15 AM -- MAD LOVE (1935)
A mad doctor grafts the hands of a murderer on to a concert pianist's wrists.
Dir: Karl Freund
Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive
BW-68 mins, CC,
Charles Chaplin called Lorre the screen's best actor after seeing his performance in "Mad Love." This was Lorre's first American film.
4:30 AM -- ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN (1940)
A government agent infiltrates a prison island to build a case against its corrupt, sadistic warden.
Dir: Charles Barton
Cast: Peter Lorre, Rochelle Hudson, Robert Wilcox
BW-67 mins, CC,
The scenes of miners performing slave-labor for Peter Lorre were filmed in L.A.'s Griffith Park inside an area known as Bronson Canyon.