Tag: Peter Lorre

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Taking a Name for Yourself: The Strange Case of Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre

If only my father had been a serial killer. That’s what I thought, one afternoon, when I called the government office in charge of name changes. Regulations were so strict in Germany, the reason of doing away with your old moniker had to be something close to murder in the family. “We can only hope” is what I said to the bureaucrat on the other end of the line and, hanging up, gave up on the idea. I was just about to move to the United States and thought that it might be easier for me not to be “Harry Heuser” and face the prospect of being called “User,” as “Heuser” is so often mispronounced.

Now, I had no fancy alternative in mind; “Hauser” (as in Kaspar Hauser) would have done just nicely. I certainly did not try to free ride on someone else’s fame, faded or otherwise. That is what happened in the strange case of “Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre,” a radio play by Michael Butts based on The Lost One by Stephen D. Youngkin; it premiered on BBC Radio Four this afternoon (1 September 2008) and was available here for listening until 7 September 2008. Having long had a fascination for the aforementioned Lorre, as well as onomastics, I was all ears.

“Peter Lorre Vs. Peter Lorre” is concerned with the final stage of the actor’s career, which coincided with those dark years in which aging Hollywood players found themselves crushed under the rubble of the old studio system that had cast them into stars. The 60s were cruel indeed; and many of the once highly paid players were reduced to accepting parts in low-budget horror films, about the only genre open to them. Sure, they could stop acting; but, for those who had made a living of it, this meant a kind of death; which is why many settled for gradual decay. In the case of Peter Lorre, who had been in the thriller business since his breakout role in Fritz Lang’s M, the decline had been more gradual still; he had been typecast so early in his career that he was soon reduced to caricatures. Just when Lorre was trying to push for a remake of M to restore the name he had made for himself, someone else was trying to claim it.

“Some fruitcake has filed a deposition,” his agent, Lester Salkow, informs Lorre, “He wants to use your name.” Determined to have this threat to his identity “stopped,” Lorre was puzzled nonetheless. “Why would anyone want to be me?” The “anyone” in question was Eugene Weingand, a Hollywood-based real estate salesman born in Germany in 1934.

“How would you feel,” the judge asks Weingand, “if your name was Peter Lorre and someone came in and wanted to use that same name after you developed it for a period of over thirty years?” To this Weingand made no reply; but, as Butts’s play has it, it got Lorre thinking and caused him to re-examine the worth of his name, not merely as a handle for salables but as a synecdoche of the self.

Weingand’s petition was rejected; yet, after Lorre’s death in 1964, he took the actor’s name for appearances in film and on television (in Get Smart, for instance), eventually settling for colourful parodies of Lorre’s ghoulish screen persona in cereal commercials. Weingand even claimed to be Lorre’s son, adding “Jr.” to his assumed name. Having just fast-forwarded through Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) and spotted him in the scene shown above, I cannot deny the resemblance.

Nor can I deny the resemblance of Lorre’s voice to that of British character actor Stephen Greif, who is remarkable in one of the two title roles. So torn and identity crisis tormented is the aging Hollywood star he portrays that you might as well say that Greif is heard in both of the title roles. “Strange,” Lorre comments on Weingand’s story, whose statements he reads, slipping into the role of the deluded man to whose ambitions his life in the public eye gave birth.

 “I feel I know him,” Lorre tells his agent. Having so long played roles he would rather disown, Lorre could not bring himself to calling his namesake an impostor.

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“. . . said the spider to the fly”

Just about anyone can walk into your parlor, give it the onceover and imagine you out of the way. That is something you have to put up with when you put your home up for sale, as we have done a few weeks ago.

Last Friday, we were supposed to have moved into town, but the deal fell through earlier this month after our buyer pulled out; and now we are trying to attract others without having any place else to go at present. I do not thrill to the prospect of having to be ready at a moment’s notice, or even a day’s, to make way for a parade of strangers traipsing in, to get cobwebs out of corners and the lawn neatly cropped only to vacate the premises to facilitate the inspections.

Yesterday, a rather po-faced lady from England stopped by for a viewing of our Welsh cottage, gliding across the threshold like a dark cloud. Her parting words, the remark that we should not have any trouble selling the place, only underscored what her dour expression could not cover up. She hadn’t found what she was after. Her crystal, she later told the estate agent, just did not swing the right way.

As it turns out, she was after something very particular, indeed: the very place she once called home. Now, last summer, we’ve had someone stopping by all the way from Pittsburgh, showing up unannounced and claiming that her ancestors had once dwelled under our roof. She had no intention to buy the house; but we gladly bought her story, until we eventually proved that she had been mistaken. The dame with the crystal, on the other hand, was not simply catching up with her past. She was on a mission to find the house she had inhabited . . . in a past life. Who sent her? Shirley MacLaine?

As I said, you have got to be prepared for all sorts. In view of such strange visitations and the negotiations that may ensue, I began to wonder whether I am to be the spider or the fly, the one that catches or the one getting caught. I was a latchkey child, so yarns spun from such material have always made a great impression on me. Grimm’s “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” was an early favorite. I, of course, cast myself in the role of the littlest kid, hiding inside the grandfather clock while my older sister was being devoured by a predatory trespasser whose entrance did not so much depend on brute force but on the slyness (and the piece of chalk) with which he altered his voice to impersonate a trusted caregiver.

The soft-spoken, smooth-talking outsider who draws you in or cajoles his way inside is a figure cut out for radio drama. Yes, radio drama. If that cooky cat can dangle her crystal, let me romance a whole set. The long-running Suspense program, for instance, offered its listeners some memorable updates of the lupine intruder sneaking in and the arachnoid charmer sneaking up on its prey.

“To Find Help” comes to mind. In it, homeowner Agnes Moorehead is being harrassed by young Frank Sinatra (18 January 1945) and Ethel Barrymore struggles to fend off Gene Kelly (6 January 1949). It is an edge-of-your-contested-porch melodrama commenting on and deriving its poignancy from the post-war demobilization and the subsequent housing crisis (a contemporary edge removed from Beware, My Lovely [1952], the inferior screen adaptation starring Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan).

On this day, 30 August, in 1945, it was Peter Lorre’s turn to come a-knocking. Co-written by Academy Award nominated Herbert Clyde Lewis, “Nobody Loves Me,” is a slight yet ideal vehicle for the aforementioned Mr. Lorre, who inhabits the role of an armed man forcing himself inside a police station to relieve himself of a burdensome tale many of the folks he encountered did not live to tell. Leave it to Lorre to make the wolf sound like a poor kid, to give the spider the qualities of a hapless fly.

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On This Day in 1943: Peter Lorre Gives Voice to "A Moment of Darkness"

Well, I am generally slow to catch up. As the broadcastellan maxim—”Keeping up with the out-of-date”—suggests, I am forever belated in my response to the news of the world, food for thought I tend to chew more slowly than the dinner on my plate. Having just learned from a fellow web-journalist that the mind of ousted American Idol finalist Mandisa might be considerably less broad than her frame, I thought of other occasions on which the message of a voice seems out of tune with the messenger, moments in which timbre and text, sound and image, appear to be at odds. One such occasion was “A Moment of Darkness,” a radio play by noted mystery writer John Dickson Carr that aired on this day, 20 April, in 1943.

“A Moment of Darkness” is one of Carr’s ambitious but far from satisfying attempts to make up for the inadequacies of the medium by complicating the kind of plots that radio is least successful in rendering: the “whodunit.” The murder mystery is a genre best suited to novels, page-turners that permit the confounded to do just that: turn the pages, forward and back. On the air, such puzzles are often marred by a lack of pieces, or red herrings, due to the limited number of suspects and clues a listener can be expected to tell apart and pick up within the short time allotted for the drama.

In the fall of 1942, when Carr became the head writer for a fledgling US radio program titled Suspense, he devised alternate ways of mystifying his audience, of casting doubt about the outcome of his thrillers.

As I discuss it in Etherized Victorians, my study on so-called old-time radio, Carr not only asked listeners “whodunit,” but “how done,” by presenting posers involving locked rooms, less-than-obvious weapons, as well ingenious acts of committing and concealing crime. Unlike the reader, the listening audience is rarely equal to this double challenge of guessing the “who” and “how,” considering that there is no chance to recap or retreat in order to evaluate the (mis)information provided. The likely response is that of utter dumbfoundedness, a puzzlement of the least intellectual sort that, in turn, may trigger feelings of exasperation or indifference.

Later Suspense dramatists well understood and expertly solved this problem by emphasizing the “most dangerous game” of the manhunt or exploring the mental state of criminal and victim. Determined to trick his audience with surprises rather than tease them with suspense, Carr decided to heighten the element of doubt and suspicion, to exploit the prejudices of the listener in ways that sounded entirely radiogenic: foreign accents suggesting fiendish acts. In “The Moment of Darkness,” as in Carr’s “Till Death Do Us Part,” such a foreign-tongue twist was delivered by the enigmatic Peter Lorre.

During World War II—and for many years thereafter—harsh Germanic tones often sufficed to taint or undermine a speaker’s message, to make listeners question the sincerity of the utterance or the motives behind it. His Teutonic tongue made Lorre a formidable wartime villain; and his voice, which could be disconcertingly oleaginous, sly, or sinister, inflected with hysteria and madness, only fueled the imagination of Americans prejudiced against foreign influences.

Given the diversity of US culture, however, the networks did not altogether endorse the exploitation of accents—particularly European accents—as reliable signposts of a certain, unmistakable nationality, a mother tongue bespeaking the fatherland of the enemy. Radio writers like Carr were advised not to use voices as a means of identifying—and disqualifying—a speaker as un-American. According to the logic of pre-Political Correctness, Lorre’s character, a sham shaman, is not at all what he sounds, a vocality/locality mismatch that not so much teaches the audience to question their prejudices but to distrust their ears altogether.

There is no such thing as accent-free speech, of course; but those, like me, whose first language is not the one in which they primarily speak are often self-conscious about the sound of their voice, or at least keenly aware of the doubt and derision it might provoke.