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Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe'

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Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe' H-German Setje-Eilers on Thomas, 'Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe' Review published on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 Sarah Thomas. Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. 213 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-85745-441-6; ISBN 978-0-85745-442-3. Reviewed by Margaret Setje-Eilers (Vanderbilt University) Published on H-German (October, 2014) Commissioned by Chad Ross “Face Maker” or Face Makers? Sarah Thomas Evaluates Peter Lorre’s Stardom and Performance How are images made? What is involved in constructing cinematic images and public media images, and what purpose do they serve? In Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Stardom and Performance Between Hollywood and Europe, Sarah Thomas embarks on a dual project, not only to explore Peter Lorre's career and analyze the process in which he created images on screen but also to examine the environment in which his public image was designed and perpetuated in Hollywood by film studios and other media such as radio, television, and caricature, as well as by Lorre himself. Recognizing discrepancies between his performances and received public image, she calls the combined media images his "extra-filmic persona," introducing the new term to replace what frequent co-star Vincent Price called his "screen persona."[1] In contrast to scholarship that tends to conflate Lorre's labor and image, Thomas distinguishes between the two and shows where they do not overlap. She considers Lorre's employment as a star and supporting actor within the larger framework of stage and film, the smaller scale on radio and television, and as an émigré actor in Hollywood with respect to transmedial and transinternational perspectives. Her objective is to reevaluate Lorre in terms of his public image and to show how limiting it is to define him as typecast or as an outsider and exile actor, without scrutinizing individual performances. Instead, she places his performative work within the context of the industry; analyzes his career in terms of labor, capital, and production; and measures his public image meticulously against his actual work on stage and in film. The book proceeds chronologically, beginning in 1920s Vienna with Lorre’s non-naturalistic roles in social psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno's experimental theater, and later in Berlin, where Lorre reinforced his experience with early stage acting in a number of plays co-directed or directed by Bertolt Brecht from 1929 to 1934, including the role of Fabian in Marieluise Fleißer’sPioniere von Ingolstadt (1929) and Galy Gay in Brecht’s playMann ist Mann (1931). Along with the truly illuminating idea of separating Lorre’s screen work from his public image and considering his performances independently from the marketing of his extra-filmic persona, Thomas analyzes his cinematic characterizations from the vantage point of his early stage roles. His early work is crucial, since, as she explains, his exposure to the techniques of Brechtian epic theater permanently influenced his career and his film-acting style. From the various signifiers of Brechtian non- identificatory theater that show up in Lorre's screen performances, she singles out gestus in Citation: H-Net Reviews. Setje-Eilers on Thomas, 'Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe'. H-German. 10-01-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/46572/setje-eilers-thomas-peter-lorre-face-maker-constructing-stardom-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German particular, that is, using the body in ways that are not unconscious, but instead calculated to convey social meaning. She argues that his screen work, including the signature role of serial murderer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang's M (1931), often incorporated a mix of naturalistic and non-naturalistic elements that Lorre had adopted on stage, that is, distancing techniques and strategies that generated spectator sympathy. Like Fritz Lang, Lorre made the decision to leave Berlin for Paris in 1934. Lorre went on to London, taking a successful lead role in the first version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), which helped to garner a contract with Columbia. He landed at Warner Bros. in the 1940s, returned to Germany briefly to direct, co-produce, and star in his own film Der Verlorene (1951), and worked for the independent production company American International Pictures (AIP) in the early 1960s. By no means limited to characters like Hans Beckert—the role that brought him the most recognition and helped forge his public image—Lorre's cinematic work was a diverse mix of leading and supporting roles. Of the seventy-nine films Lorre made from 1929 until his death in 1964 at age 59, only six roles strictly reflect his public persona, and only eight of the films belong to the horror genre. Thomas sets out to show that Lorre's reputation was created mainly through media, even through extra-textual discourses such as posters, not by typecasting as a horror monster after playing Beckert. His work did not fall victim to Hollywood casting strategies that ignored or underutilized his talents and commercialized him in supporting roles of little cultural value, merely "making faces" ("He loved to entertain, to be a face maker, as he said so often of our kind," as reported by Vincent Price).[2] While Lorre did not have top star status, his public image is still recognizable and it contains sinister elements. In teasing out explanations for these inconsistencies, Thomas makes a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship on Lorre. In addition to showing that Lorre's roles and his extra-filmic persona rarely overlap and that viewing him as a psychopathic murder does not adequately deal with the question of the origin and construction of his persona, Thomas argues against established critical views (those of Christopher McCullough, Stephen Youngkin, Gerd Gmünden) that define Lorre in terms of his origin, as an émigré actor and permanent outsider (p. 7). Lorre was born in 1904 as László Loewenstein in Rószahegy, located in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and he emigrated to the United States in 1934, but he was "Americanized" in his films of the 1950s and 1960s and did not always occupy a position on the margin. His film roles range from horror to action, adventure, and comedic and his émigré status as a supposed foreigner with a central European heritage cannot be neatly mapped onto his extra-filmic persona. Along with its comprehensive examination of Peter Lorre's career, the book’s greatest strengths include its wider implications for inquiries into public images in general and the nexus of cultural and economic issues involved in creating images. Thomas has already focused on the emergence of cinematic stars in Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification,co-edited with Kate Egan (2012). For her book on Lorre, she conducted research in three major film archives: The British Film Institute Library (London), The Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles), and The Warner Bros. Archive (UCLA, Los Angeles), where she examined documents in production, correspondence, and clippings files, as well as pressbooks for a great many of Lorre's films, particularly during the Hollywood studio era before 1948, a turning point for the film industry. Citation: H-Net Reviews. Setje-Eilers on Thomas, 'Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe'. H-German. 10-01-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/46572/setje-eilers-thomas-peter-lorre-face-maker-constructing-stardom-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German Thomas helps us recall that the Paramount Decree (1948) halted the monopoly of major film studios on distribution and exhibition in its own theaters, and the U.S. Supreme Court's decision initiated a general restructuring process in the filmmaking industry. To explain the mechanisms behind image making, she informs her readers about key events like this in film studio history with a bearing on constructing public images. Even after studio control over the machinery of extra-filmic public images was removed, she explains, Lorre's public persona continued to have brand-name recognition during the 1950s and even into the present in filmic caricatures Corpse( Bride, 2005). Hunting for reasons behind the genesis and perpetuation of Lorre's image, she concludes that his persona had multiple authors, ranging from Warner Bros., Lorre's employer for a substantial period during his career, to a complicated array of socioeconomic elements, including his work for a number of other Hollywood studios. While studio publicity had initially emphasized the difference between the "real" Lorre and his sinister roles, this view changed in 1937, when Hollywood promoters constructed a unified extra-filmic persona. For example, Twentieth Century Fox linked Lorre to horror iconography by mentioning his Hungarian background and the Carpathian Mountains. The image was not built by one single studio or even deliberately, but instead stemmed from a perceived need to convey coherence to a disparate career in film, radio, and television. Generating a consistent extra-filmic identity also allowed the employing studio (and agents) to maintain economic control of the persona. The roles Hollywood gave him were not contingent on his copying the role of Hans Beckert, since the audience was limited at its first U.S. release and its re-release in New York in 1937. The shortened version of M was released worldwide in 1959, while his extra-filmic persona came into being in 1937 after Lorre had made fifteen films, six years after M.
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