Brecht’s Lorre: The Gentle Stranger

Summary

Born László Löwenstein in 1904 in Rózsahegy, a small town in the Tatra Mountains in what at the time was northern Hungary, Peter Lorre possessed qualities that allowed his Hollywood film persona to embody an uncanny strangeness: a soft, unsettling voice; an unidentifiable foreign accent; a face that expressed a range of emotions from menacing shrewdness to sudden disquiet and alarm; a supple body that executed quick transitions from stealth to shrinking cowardice. Akin to his East European neighbor in Prague whose afterlife gave rise to pedestrian notions of the “Kafkaesque,” Lorre lives on in the conventional imagination as the sinister alien. His significance for Brecht, whose own theater practice was engaged in “rendering the familiar strange,” as in estrangement or Verfremdung, was entirely different. Based on his gestic speech and physical presentation, notably as Galy Gay in the 1931 production of Mann ist Mann, Lorre became Brecht's exemplar of epic acting.

Those who had known Lorre's work in the theater believed Hollywood corrupted him. His younger brother Andrew Lorre recalled that Peter “was disappointed at being typecast by the studios as the stage was his first and lasting love, but he seemed to have resigned himself towards the end.” He often resisted studio pressures but just as often gave in, as with the eight Mr. Moto films featuring a Japanese detective that made him a Hollywood favorite with movie-goers in the late 1930s. Lotte Lenya, who had shared the Berlin stage with him in three productions—Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Pioneers in Ingolstadt), Dantons Tod (Danton's Death), Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), all in 1929—said in an interview with Edwin Newman: “It's really appalling what Hollywood did to Peter Lorre, he was such a good actor. Once in New York I asked him, ‘Peter, will they ever give you anything other than Mr. Moto Goes to China’ or whatever it was he was doing. And he said, ‘No. All I do is talk a nasal voice and make faces.’”

Typical understated Lorre, and not quite true. Lorre's signature quirks were always harnessed to his deeper understanding of his craft. Film critics had quickly recognized Lorre's gifts and his potential beyond the secondary roles he often played.