E-Mail This Article to a Friend ‘You despise me, don’t you?’ Peter Lorre at the Harvard Film Archive BY CHRIS FUJIWARA
	"Peter Lorre: A Sinister Centennial" At the Harvard Film Archive June 1 through 13.

Any movie that Peter Lorre was in is worth seeing. A deft physical actor, notorious for his irrepressible ad-libbing and trickier with cigarettes than anyone, Lorre was the epitome of scene stealing. More than that, he was an actor of great playfulness and perception, a witty and warm, if troubled, soul who never stole a scene that didn’t need stealing but who was well aware that he was usually the most interesting thing on screen. Despite his reputation as an advanced rotter, he rarely played figures of unmitigated evil; his best roles were sympathetic losers, clever scoundrels, and people who couldn’t help doing the things they did, like his child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which kicks off the Harvard Film Archive’s tribute to Lorre, a series co-presented by the Goethe-Institut Boston.

M (June 1 at 7 p.m. and June 2 at 9 p.m.) is a masterpiece, and Lorre’s tortured vocal and physical expressions during the famous scene of the murderer’s appearance before the court of criminals are shattering. Lorre was intelligent enough to avoid roles that exploited the fame of M. But many of his later characterizations take up the burdens he carried in that film, like the resignation to the fate of being human and the protest against monstrous injustice.

Zanier, shorter, and more violent than its 1956 remake, the first version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934; June 5 at 7 p.m. and June 7 at 9:30 p.m.) is lit up by intense, disconnected moments that scatter over the film like firecrackers: a father reunited with his daughter and trying not to show his emotion before her kidnappers; a policeman dying (in fulfillment of a wish he’s just uttered in jest) with his face against a girl’s mattress. Lorre, as the leader of a conspiracy to assassinate a European diplomat during the latter’s visit to London, has little to do, but he gives the film’s most striking and nuanced performance. Still round-faced and pudgy, as he was in M (he would lose weight later, in Hollywood, and keep it off for a while), he puts on the air of a malevolent baby, his childlike spontaneity and ready grin offset by two tell-tale signs of depraved maturity: a stripe of gray hair near the middle of his forehead and a scar above his right eye.

Lorre’s early Hollywood career included a stint in a short-lived series of brisk, atmospheric low-budget mystery films in which he played a Japanese detective known as Mr. Moto. The first two, Think Fast, Mr. Moto and Thank You, Mr. Moto (both 1937), will play on a double bill on June 6 at 7 p.m. Both were directed by Norman Foster (whom Orson Welles later chose to direct Journey into Fear), and both capture an ambivalence in the character that made him interesting: as played by Lorre, Moto is a dangerous man, capable of dispatching his enemies with his hands or a knife, motivated by deep, hidden loyalties rather than by a mechanical idea of justice.

Now a Warner Bros. contract player, Lorre opened a new phase of his career with The Maltese Falcon (1941; June 11 at 7 p.m. and June 13 at 9 p.m.). In John Huston’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, Lorre is superb as the obviously gay Joel Cairo, one of several globetrotting misfits who wind up in San Francisco searching for a priceless statuette. Cairo’s indignation at being slapped by Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and his outburst of frustrated rage at the failure of the plot of the "Fat Man" (Sydney Greenstreet) are quintessential Lorre.

Warners brought back Lorre and Greenstreet, with Bogart, in Casablanca (1942; June 4 at 7 p.m. and June 8 at 9 p.m.), which limits Lorre to a brief but memorable bit as the man who as the possessor of the letters of transit so crucial to the plot fawns over Bogart’s Rick. ("What right do I have to think?" he says; then, later, "You despise me, don’t you?", to which Rick replies, "If I gave you any thought I probably would.") The success of the film prompted the studio to reunite Bogart, Claude Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre, and director Michael Curtiz in another study in the contemporary mythology of France, Passage to Marseille (1944; June 4 at 9 p.m.). Bogart and Lorre (whose role is, again, small) play patriotic convicts who escape from Devil’s Island to come to the aid of their country when Germany invades France in 1940. The screenwriters do everything possible to make the film insane and ridiculous, but their efforts go unnoticed by Curtiz, who runs the thing aground trying to make it shape up as a war movie of noble passions.

The Mask of Dimitrios (1944; June 12 at 7 p.m.), an adaptation of an Eric Ambler novel, stars Lorre and Greenstreet as, respectively, a mystery writer and a blackmailer both seeking the notorious Dimitrios (Zachary Scott), whose trail of robbery, smuggling, espionage, and murder the pair follow from Istanbul to Sofia to Belgrade to Paris. A cast of refugees and eccentrics has a field day personifying the shifty, flamboyant moral atmosphere of someone’s idea of interwar Europe. The heavy-handed misterioso touches in Jean Negulesco’s direction are in keeping with the film’s shabby melancholy. Lorre’s murmuring, self-depreciating intellectual, filled with moral outrage by his contact with corruption, remains in the mind long after Negulesco’s flickering shadows have faded in the light of day.

The same director’s superior Three Strangers (1946; June 12 at 9 p.m.) links the fates of three people (Greenstreet, Lorre, and Geraldine Fitzgerald) who share a sweepstakes ticket. Lorre is charming and good-natured in the central role of a gentle, alcoholic weakling who, fallen among bad company, gets railroaded on a murder charge. Urged by a street flower vendor to buy something to make his wife happy, he has an excellent reply: "I haven’t got a wife, and if I had one, a bunch of violets wouldn’t make her happy." He may not have a wife, but he has a devoted girlfriend (Joan Lorring), whose presence offers the film an opportunity to tilt toward a tale of love and redemption — an invitation it declines. The casting of Lorre rather than a conventional leading man makes the sadness in the story more inescapable, its outcome more unpredictable.

The termination of Lorre’s Warner Bros. contract after World War II spelled trouble for the actor, who spent the late 1940s and the 1950s drifting through an odd group of medium-grade films. He also directed and starred in the extraordinary German movie Der Verlorene/The Lost One (1951; June 1 at 9 p.m. and June 2 at 7 p.m.). He plays an obsessed research scientist whose work the Nazis consider so vital that they cover up for him when he murders his betraying mistress. Lorre’s elaborate, solitary performance is a tour de force of shrugs, shambling, distracted prowling. When not involved in lighting or holding cigarettes, his hand explores furniture, objects, and his mistress’s face and neck with such brazen independence that it seems to have studied acting on its own (perhaps with the same teacher who trained the hands in Mad Love and The Beast with Five Fingers, two Lorre classics absent from this series).

John Huston’s Beat the Devil (1954; June 11 at 9 p.m. and June 13 at 7 p.m.) is a dank comedy that is also, by implication, one of the first end-of-Hollywood films. Bogart plays an adventurer who teams up with a multi-national gang of crooks in Italy to close a shady deal for an African uranium mine. As one of the crooks, a German named O’Hara, Lorre spends most of the film trailing behind his leader (a funny Robert Morley), and his ad-libbing inclinations seem held in check by Truman Capote’s elegant dialogue, but at least he has a good speech about time. Bogart gives a sour performance (he later repudiated the film as something for snobs); against expectations, the person who emerges from Beat the Devil with the most credit is Jennifer Jones, strangely cast as a romantic Englishwoman.

In his last years on Earth, Lorre emerged as Vincent Price’s sidekick in three color-and-Scope horror comedies for American-International, from which the HFA has selected Roger Corman’s amusing The Raven (1963; June 5 at 9 p.m.). Price launches the film by intoning the first stanzas of the poem of the same name, and any curiosity as to whether and how screenwriter Richard Matheson will rework Poe’s masterpiece into a feature-length narrative is squelched by the raven’s first profane utterance in Lorre’s voice. Lorre plays an ill-tempered failed magician who, changed into a bird by the evil Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), harangues the kindly Dr. Craven (Price) into restoring his human shape. The three then converge in Scarabus’s castle for a prolonged cat-and-mouse game that culminates in a duel of magic between Craven and Scarabus. Of the three stars, who are all in good form, Lorre gets the biggest share of laughs with his spirited performance — more of a scene stealer than ever, for almost the last time.