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.

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. Thomas reveals that the notion of typecasting was a part of his extra-filmic persona, one that even Lorre upheld in radio and television appearances. She admits that her inquiry into these other types of visual and acoustic could be substantially expanded in future work.

To arrive at these conclusions, Thomas analyzes a great many of Lorre’s performances, taking into account his verbal and nonverbal acting style and what she calls his self-reflexive roles, which provide opportunities through mannerisms and other distinguishing features to refer indirectly to the role he was constructing and to other roles he had previously played. In addition to gestus, she brings up other non-naturalistic techniques adopted from his experience with Brechtian theater, for example episodic acting that interrupts and distances the viewer from the action. She also locates Lorre's self- reflexive style in a number of direct, overt references made in radio and television appearances to screen roles and public persona. While the direct references to his earlier work are convincing, the argument on indirect self-reflexivity within one performance and between different screen roles is somewhat problematic. The detailed analyses of verbal and nonverbal elements in Lorre's performances include kinesthetic elements such as physical appearance and gestures, and auditory features such as oral quality, intonation, pitch, volume, and modulation. It is hard to gauge these indicators objectively, since this strategy calls for a methodology that can distinguish between the intentional use of body and voice, and the personal style of an actor that has developed over time, with all the physical identifiers of style, including gestures, posture, facial expressions, and vocal qualities. Thomas identifies in many of Lorre's roles a kind of deliberate body language and props (a hand gesture or a mirror) that incorporate intentional self-reflexive nods to earlier films. However, it is not always convincing that the ways in which Lorre uses his hands, mirrors, and stairwells stem from self-reflective strategies, and that the ever-present cigarette in his mouth is necessarily "a signifier of filmmaking labour" (p. 131). On the other hand, autobiographical self-reflexivity in the

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. 3 H-German film’s text or storyline, as for example in Lorre's own filmDer Verlorene is a different matter. But unless readers are familiar with a good many of the films she discusses, they might not be able to evaluate the detailed evidence she provides on performances. The book argues with merit that performance is not resistant to analysis. It is credible that Lorre’s acting style changed, but it is a bold claim that some of Lorre's roles afforded him the opportunity to convey a self-reflective, distancing perspective and a context to comment on being employed in the Hollywood film industry (p. 47). Here, one dreams of a multimedia book with copyright-approved hyperlinks to film clips as supporting visual and acoustic evidence, especially where intonation and line delivery factor into the analysis.

The seven chapters of the book proceed chronologically, with a thorough introduction and conclusion, bibliography, and index. Readers might miss a reference list of films, even an abbreviated version of the compendium in Stephen Youngkin's The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre (2003). In contrast to Youngkin's biography, which Thomas reevaluates on several levels, her analysis deals with Lorre's roles, and a brief list of his work would be helpful in her treatment of stage plays, films, radio, and television appearances.

Chapter 1, "Lorre and the European Stage (1922-1931),” inquires into the genesis of Lorre’s later dualistic acting style in the naturalistic and non-naturalistic techniques of his stage work in Europe during the 1920s and in early 1930s film. Chapter 2, "M, Fritz Lang and Hans Beckert (1931)," scrutinizes Lorre's renowned role as serial killer Beckert in Fritz Lang'sM , which was crucially important in constructing Lorre's extra-filmic persona. Accounts of Lorre typically measure his subsequent performances on how well he replicated this performance, and while Lang's fame soared in the 1950s and 1960s, Lorre's later roles never reached the critical acclaim of Beckert. According to Thomas, Lorre's pluralistic acting style in M draws out the double nature of the character, a strategy that he maintained throughout his career. Lorre’s acting style differs in the two other versions ofM in French (dubbed) and in English, in which Lorre delivers the lines.

Chapter 3, "The Hollywood Leading Roles (1935-1941)," focuses on Lorre’s move to Hollywood, where he was under contract for Columbia (1934-36) and for Twentieth Century Fox (1936-40), working as a leading actor, first in A-movies, then in a series of B-movies starring as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto. Marketing strategies were developed by several studios to control his career and present a unified persona, and these strategies influenced how Lorre's screen work was perceived, whether in terms of artist or monster. The author argues against the inaccurate assumptions that Lorre's talents were misused in "typecasting," and although the notion of being typecast was an integral part of his extra-filmic persona, Lorre's subsequent concomitant association with art cinema and the artistry of Germany’s golden age only increased his market value. The extra-filmic persona provided a consistent framework to promote the actor's work, making him a "known commodity" and easier to sell (p. 73).

Chapter 4, "The Supporting Actor (1941-1946)," looks at Lorre’s memorable roles at Warner Bros. during the 1940s, for example with Humphrey Bogart inThe Maltese Falcon (1941), where Lorre played Joel Cairo, whose not too subtlety coded homosexuality and stylized performance foreground the construction of his character. As Ugarte in Casablanca in a short appearance with Bogart again, Lorre provided the crucial letters of transit (1942). His high marketability earned him inflated credit in many films of this period. For instance, sharing only few lines, Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet were

Chapter 5, "Der Verlorene (The Lost One) (1951),” analyzes the only film Lorre directed after briefly returning to West Germany (not taking Brecht's invitation to join him in the former East). While critical discourse places the film autobiographically in the context of Lorre's supposed tragic life as an outsider, or "insider as outsider," Thomas looks for direct self-reflexive references to earlier film roles, including child murderer Beckert.[3] She insists that viewing Lorre in terms of the binary opposition between "insider" and "outsider" skirts the complexity of his status in Hollywood, where his visibility in U.S. pop culture had been increasing steadily, and his extra-filmic persona was not equivalent to his work. In a series of flashbacks, Lorre as the lead, Dr. Rothe, comes to acknowledge his sinister, murderous past and commits suicide. Besides the inopportune timing of the film's release and spectator disinterest in the notion of collective war guilt in postwar Germany (which the author does mention), American films had just begun to be released in Germany, and German audiences were unlikely to recognize the references to Lorre's films with killer roles in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chapter 6, "The Final Screen Roles (1954-1964)," examines Lorre's work in the genre of action, adventure, and horror films in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, Thomas argues, Lorre's acting style is rooted in self-parody in eighteen films, in which he is more than merely a sinister character and "face-maker." In these last ten years, Lorre appeared in "family" films and independent horror films with comic elements, and these films need to be seen in the context of Hollywood studio restructuring after 1948, a growing teenage male audience and Lorre's cult fandom, not to forget Hollywood's competition with television. Over the entire period of roughly thirty-five years in film, his roles included the sidekick, eccentric, criminal, anti-hero, and mercenary. They were not limited to the serial killer, and Lorre's accomplishments in the last ten years did not label him as an émigré actor, entrenched in lazy parody, or in frustrated face making. After the shakedown of the Paramount Decree, stars had more control over their own images, and although Lorre's film work and extra- filmic persona did not ever overlap completely during his career, the public image of Lorre constructed in Hollywood as a film monster (with roots in M) was central to his cult recognition from the 1950s on.

Chapter 7, "Alternative 'Hollywood' Media Contexts," shows how Lorre's extra-filmic persona of the horrific and gruesome was particularly well maintained on radio, to a lesser extent on television as host, guest, and performer in many admittedly lazy parodies, and in caricatures, which Thomas defines as brief or exaggerated representations of the actor created without his presence, thus in diverse public discourses that could not have possibly worked together. In this all-too-short chapter, Thomas reveals that even Lorre conflated the "real" Lorre with his persona to keep his image coherent and marketable--for example, responding to a comment of Dean Martin on television in 1949 about his evil screen roles, “What makes you think I’m acting?” (p. 168). Astoundingly, Lorre was one of the motors that perpetuated the persona. One can only hope that Thomas pursues her inquiry into aspects of generating and propelling public personae.

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

Thomas enters new territory in analyzing performance, especially in terms of vocal quality. Her close readings of Lorre's performative work expose the complex relationship between his acting strategies and the labor market in the sociohistorical context of Hollywood filmmaking from the 1930s to the 1960s. Lorre was not the tragic figure that critics have understood as typecast, the outcast émigré actor in a downward spiral afterM , his talent wasted, and his work fused with his extra-filmic persona. Although Lorre's term "face-making" may have expressed disappointment, it helped unify his extra-filmic persona and had economic implications. Thomas persuades her readers to understand that a public image may obscure important performative parts of a career, especially for biographers. We should instead try to disassemble the identification machines that might more accurately be called the face makers, the producers of Lorre's extra-filmic persona.

Notes

[1]. Stephen Youngkin,The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 109.

[2]. Ibid., 449.

[3]. Ibid., 249.

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Citation: Margaret Setje-Eilers. Review of Thomas, Sarah, Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2014. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40739

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