IN THE HOUSE
OF PETER LORRE
I went to the house of Peter Lorre to sit for a spell
and talk. I wanted to ask him about that 'M' on his
back -- he spoke : 'Well, Hans Beckert was a serial
child-killer, the central character. Putting a brand on
the unthinkable, you could say. It was 1931; movies
would do anything they could get away with, so if the
fickle public could accept a serial killer, and identify
with him, why not? Back then, we couldn't 'show'
those deaths (yes, how times have changed), and so
it became palpable and disturbing that Beckert himself
was childlike - we made it so the audience could see
that. Remember, everything was new then. I was short,
for an actor, among all these others, and it was said
I had a wounded angel's face - that's how movie people
talked, type and character and 'emotion', though all of it
was fake. My first role, for which I really did have to
wait, was Beckert in 'M', in which I played a boy dressed
as a man in a nearly floor-length coat. A shroud, of sorts.
It was all shot on sets, in a sardonic portrait of the police
and the underworld, competing to discover the child-killer
who is disrupting the city. A blind beggar realized Beckert's
identity. Another man scrawls a white-chalk 'M' on the palm
of his hand and slaps it on Beckert's back. That leads to my
real 'moment' - when I, as Beckert of course, suddenly
notice the 'M' on my shoulder in a mirror. It might not seem
like much, but I played it from deep within - who can avoid
their own inner 'demons' their own mark on their back?
It was said that I brought dread and pathos enough to the
role that the audience was confounded. And then - in
movie reckoning - I had to be 'eliminated' to keep
society 'well'. After this film, yes, which made me,
there was no going back. Once the audience had
learned to 'watch' in safety the dissembling of
another man's character - which of course we
all shared - there was no going back. We
were then ready to look at anything.
-
Oh, but all that was so long ago.'
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