Entry tags:

movies, peter lorre

We are such gentle people, Sydney.

(pic from here)

My crush on Peter Lorre continues unabated.  Evil, lovable, and funny: three great tastes that taste great together.  This has to be a record--it's been more than a month now, and not only do I still love him, I have yet to see him give a performance I don't like.  Okay, I've only watched five or six movies featuring him, because it's hard to find a lot of his stuff, but that's still a good record.  It's like he's been blessed by Loki.  Hammy?  Yes, sometimes, in the very best way.  Over the top?  Once or twice.  Inappropriately good in the midst of an otherwise lousy cast?  Occasionally.  Dull or uninteresting?  Never.  I could look at him all day. 

I also find old, fat, debauched Lorre just as likable as young, dapper, cute Peter Lorre.  (Yeah, I'm in love.)  The problem is that he isn't in anything good in his later years.  I watched a little bit of "The Raven" on YouTube, and there was a fairly entertaining sequence with him doing the voice of the title character, but it goes downhill from there.  They couldn't think of anything clever to do with him once his character appears in human form, so they just have him stand around and be short.  I don't think I like Roger Corman movies.

So far, I've been consciously avoiding finding out anything about Lorre's life outside of acting.  This is because, when you get to like an actor and then you check what they were like in real life, you always seem to find out: he beat his wife, she did drugs, he was a lush, she treated her fellow actors like serfs, he abandoned his family, she pushed her husband out a window.  It always seems that the personality behind the face you've come to like will turn out to be thoroughly unpleasant.  Now, this ought not to matter at all.  Movies are just acting, characters are fictional, they're not real people and it's ridiculous to expect actors to be anything like their characters.  We should just enjoy the fiction, and the private lives of that fiction's creators don't mean a thing to us, right?  ...Well, no.  It's not that simple.  Even though I try not to think about that side of things, it always matters to me.  I can't really enjoy watching Ben Kenobi in the Star Wars movies anymore, because I know that Alec Guinness hated the series and couldn't wait to get it over with.  (And conversely, as long as we're talking about epic series and mentor characters, I like Gandalf in the LOTR movies all the better because Ian McKellan was so obviously having a wonderful time.) 

Anyhow, I found out a lot about Peter Lorre willy-nilly, in the process of trying to find Crime and Punishment on DVD.  It's a mixed bag, but it was pretty much okay and didn't change a thing about the fun I have watching him.  I feel a little sorry for him, though.  On the plus side, he sounds, on the whole, like a fun person to be around.  On the minus side, he was a drunk and he did a lot of drugs.  Like every other actor in Hollywood since the movie industry began, it seems.  Oh, movie people.  Why do you have to crash and burn like that?  Why is it always actors?  (Well, I can guess why it's always actors.  I was one once, in a modest way.  Applause gives you a rush that's pleasantly like being drunk, and it works the other way round, too.  And then your performance is in a film canister, sent off to be enjoyed where you don't get to hear the laughs and the applause, so you have to find something affirming to do, so you drink.  Also, everybody else is doing it.  Those are certainly the only reasons I've ever deliberately had too much to drink: social pressure and/or feeling neglected.)  It seems he did theater with Bertolt Brecht before either of them was famous; got out of Germany just in time, like several other well-known actors; hit Hollywood in the 1930s and stayed there most of the rest of his life; was married three times; and hung out with Humphrey Bogart.  They did a lot of  drinking together, and then they'd go to a sauna next morning and try to sweat off their hangovers.  Now you too can share the mental image.  You're welcome.

Oh!  And this is a great story.  Lorre had a daughter from his third marriage, Catharine Lorre.  Supposedly he said, "She looks like me, but it looks better on her."  And when she was a young woman, she was accosted on her way home by two guys disguised as policemen, who were actually the Hillside Stranglers.  Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono did what was apparently their usual routine: they tried to coerce her into coming with them, so that they could get her alone and kill her.  They started talking with her, and she happened to let slip that her father was Peter Lorre.  And they backed off and left.  It was only later, after these two were identified as the killers, that Catharine Lorre realized whom she had met and how narrow her escape had been.  When I first heard this story, I guessed that the murderers backed out of it because they were scared of Peter Lorre like you'd be scared of a boogeyman.  You know--just this once, being typecast as a shadowy killer works in your favor by protecting your nearest and dearest.  But then I reread that anecdote and realized it happened in 1977, by which time Lorre himself had been dead for years.  Apparently, the killers just left her alone because her father had been famous, and perhaps they were even fans of his.  But I liked the anecdote better the first way.  There's a lesson there: never check the details on a good story.

YouTube has been taunting me with little morsels of all the movies I know I'll have a hard time finding in full.  It's like getting a free sample of the most wonderful old smoked Gouda at the deli, and then never being able to find it for sale anywhere.  This is one that works perfectly well on its own, though.  Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, fighting on the side of good.  I want a couple of guardian angels like these two.