It’s a truism that Peter was wasted as a popular entertainer because he had so much potential as a serious actor, and the best way to test this proposition is to examine his performance as Dr. Rothe in “Der Verlorene”  (“The Lost One.”) Whether or not it’s qualitatively better than his commercial film work, it’s radically different in approach and effect. Peter infused his early European and Hollywood film roles with a certain arresting intensity, pulling out all the stops to amuse and thrill his audiences, but there’s none of Peter’s characteristic sense of fun or showmanship in Rothe. He’s a slow-moving, passive screen presence, not at all what you’d expect from the actor who created Hans Beckert and Joel Cairo. Certainly Rothe was meant to be the opposite of Peter himself, a psychoanalytic case study of the sort of ethnic German who went along with the victimization of the Jews under Hitler and found himself victimized in turn. However, in its stripped-down naturalism it seems as though Peter was showing something closer to his real self through Rothe than he’d previously revealed on screen.

    Peter had wanted to direct for a long time–he’d had a directing option written into his Warners contract–and the idea of a suspense film written and directed by one of Hollywood’s premiere suspense stars was an obvious commercial decision, as was having him make the film in Germany, as the postwar boom in European art films would have made it saleable both in German-speaking Europe and the U.S. There was also an uplifting element of political correctness in a Jewish refugee from the Nazi era returning to contribute to the Allied de-Nazification effort with a film set in Nazi Germany that would both hammer in the guilt and offer interethnic reconciliation. As executed it’s plain to see why the film was a commercial failure on its release, though it offers considerably more to contemporary audiences, and for anybody who’s at all interested in Peter it’s essential viewing.    

    It was Peter’s name alone that sold this picture, which is why he undertook the very difficult task of playing the lead role as well as directing “Der V.” But to make a Peter Lorre film for a German audience, when he hadn’t performed for the German public in nearly twenty years, was problematic. He couldn’t simply carry over his American persona, which was hard enough to quantify in an American context. His solution was to reinvent himself as a German noir protagonist to fit the new realities of postwar Germany. The look that his cinematographer Vaclav Vich would give the film was a harsh, high-contrast black and white similar to that used in film noir and by the Italian neorealist filmmakers, and Peter made no attempt to soften the look when he was photographing himself. He had lost weight, and the loose skin on his face and neck, his complexion toughened and discolored by the California sun, and his watery eyes and thinning lips gave him a weathered, Bogart-like look. He really needed the sort of tactful Hollywood lighting, makeup and camera angles that made Bogart’s decaying beauty tolerable to look at. Rothe is supposed to be a sad, defeated man, but the fact that he looks so badly prematurely aged, combined with Peter’s depressive characterization of  Rothe, makes for a painful viewing experience for those who come to the film anticipating the sort of crowd-pleasing tactics and boyish energy they’d every reason to expect from Peter’s earlier film performances.

    “Der V.” dutifully follows conventions of the Hollywood noirs that Peter had appeared in over the years. There is heavy liquor and cigarette consumption, handguns are brandished and femme fatales swarm over the wary protagonist. But Peter and his collaborators, like most European noir filmmakers, lacked the essential American instinct for anomie-driven violence, and so these elements of American noir fit uncomfortably into the film’s European setting. Wenkler and Hoesch, the callous Nazis who conspire to destroy Rothe, are probably truer to life and more palatable to German audiences than the Satanic Nazis depicted in Hollywood films, but for this reason they make flaccid film noir villains. But the most problematic element in the film’s noir paradigm is Rothe himself. Hollywood relies on the assumption that any American, sufficiently stressed, can pick up a gun or a knife and become an outlaw. However, respectable middle-aged Germanic research scientists do not transform overnight into serial killers as “Der V.” requires Rothe to do. It is purely a theatrical metaphor for the collective mania that turned ordinary Germans into Nazi killers, and it just doesn’t work in the context of this film, though Peter was correct in deciding that the enormity of Nazi Germany’s crimes can best be approached in art through metaphor (as in Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre the Wrath of God,” the best film ever made about Hitler, in which Hitler is symbolically depicted as a psychotic Spanish conquistador.)

    The narrative of “Der V.” offers no realistic build-up to Rothe’s crimes; the only indication that he is about to murder one of his victims is that he develops an abnormal eye-blink. The murders happen decorously offscreen, as in “M.”  They have a gratuitous feel, as though they only  happen to satisfy audience expectations (people are supposed to die violently in Peter Lorre films) and to supply the obligatory thrill element to the plot as well as to advance the obligatory sociopolitical metaphor. The only deaths in the film that carry any dramatic conviction are Rothe’s murder of Hoesch at the end of the film and Rothe’s subsequent suicide, but even these are staged in an anticlimactic manner consistent with Rothe’s characteristic rageless passivity. Immediately after killing Hoesch Rothe searches the dead man’s pockets to see if he has any cigarettes, as if this were the real reason he killed him.   

   

     “Der V.” has some flaws commonly seen in films by beginning directors, such as an overly complicated plot and an overly serious tone that comes across as emotionally numbing rather than tragic, and its unpretentious visual elegance and understated performances are compromised by a bombastic, sub-Max Steiner musical score.  But if Peter had not yet mastered cinematic storytelling, he certainly had a grasp of its essential vocabulary. The final sequence of Rothe’s suicide is a very clever and effective bit of montage. Rothe simply stands in the foreground of the picture, presumably on the train track, and puts his hand over his eyes, while the locomotive charges up behind him and towards the camera until it fills the screen with blackness, and that is the end of Rothe and the film.

    Latter-day Germans have taken pride in “Der V.,” including it in critical discussions of their postwar cinema, releasing a festschrift version of Peter and his collaborators’ novelization of their screenplay, and keeping the film in circulation in  home video editions. In contrast, most Americans don’t even know it exists. When it was finally given a U.S. theatrical release in the 1980s, critic Vincent Canby dismissed it as “a curiosity.” The habit of trivializing Peter is so ingrained in us. Nevertheless “Der V.” is essential to understanding Peter’s American career because that’s what the film is really about.

    What did Peter have to say to the German people in 1951? Other than sharing some prewar history and the same language, what did they have in common? Peter came from the main ethnic group that Germans had collectively persecuted and slaughtered during the Hitler regime; however, as a Hollywood star he had enjoyed luxuries and privileges most Nazi-era Germans, even in the upper echelons of the Third Reich, would have envied. This couldn’t have been lost on the Germans of 1951,  preoccupied as they were with doing what Germans do best in hard times, surviving, salvaging and rebuilding.  They didn’t need one more reminder of their dishonor and defeat, especially such a sanitized, fictionalized one as “Der V.” There is not a single swastika or SS uniform to be seen in “Der V.,” probably an artifact of Allied censorship but which adds to its atmosphere of unreality, as does the fact that Dr. Rothe, both in his wartime apartment and postwar displaced persons camp, apparently has no problem obtaining brandy, cigarettes, coffee and elegant tailored menswear. As Peter historian Nancy Agli points out, Dr. Rothe experiences life more like a movie star than an epidemiologist. Delectable women fawn on him wherever he goes. A crowd of patients waiting for vaccinations seems more like fans in line for an autograph. There’s always someone ready to take Rothe’s coat, light his cigarette, or offer him refreshments. He chain-smokes in his laboratory in a way that must surely contaminate his specimens; his bunsen burner seems to be there mainly as a cigarette lighter. An adoring peasant girl offers him a cup of goat milk, a lab assistant offers a rabbit for a blood sample, again like fans holding out autograph books. A drunken stranger recognizes him and makes annoying comments about his eyes. Is this Dr. Rothe of Hamburg or Peter Lorre of Holmby Hills?

    But Rothe/Lorre is a wary, disillusioned star. Note that he never makes the first move with a woman, not even his fiancee; females in Rothe’s world are always the aggressors, wanting his attention, his caresses, his patronage, while he reacts with a sort of weary irritation. It’s significant that in the ecology of this film Rothe does not seem aware of his desire to kill in the moments before he attacks, or to have any motivation to harm these women, until they push him over the edge by deliberately arousing him sexually. Rothe’s first murder takes place after his fiancee Inge tries to win him back after leaking his secret research to the Allies and cheating on him with Hoesch. She kneels before him like a cat asking to be petted; he caresses her face and necklace while she reacts by closing her eyes with pleasure. Rothe’s eyes flutter alarmingly and he abruptly stands up, his dark jacket filling the screen just as the black locomotive does in the film’s final shot. We then see Rothe sitting on the floor, sadly toying with Inge’s necklace, no longer on her neck. When I told a German-speaking friend that I assumed from this that Rothe had raped Inge while murdering her, she insisted that’s not what happened. Even so, in the novelized version of “Der V.” Rothe’s first-person narration of his fatal assault on Inge sounds like an echo of Dr. Gogol strangling Yvonne at the end of “Mad Love,” which is plainly a lust murder  (“I’m not hurting her. Only stroking her neck. So tenderly. You… you… why are you afraid? You haven’t done anything…I heard what you said… Hold still… I’m not hurting you… no… nothing… you… Inge… this neck…”) Maybe it’s just my prurient American attitude towards sex and violence. American critics commonly assume that Hans Beckert rapes the children he murders, though I’ve never identified any point at which the film itself comes out and says that this is what happens (and couldn’t possibly without making the audience sick.)   

    Peter portrays Rothe as a man fighting a losing battle with emasculation, nominally powerful but in practice a pawn of stronger men. His scientific genius is callously exploited by the Nazis who employ him and the Allied agents who steal his work, in the process using his woman to humiliate him sexually as well as professionally. Throughout the film Rothe experiences the attentions of women as baffling, threatening, annoying, smothering, manipulative, anything but loving and nurturing. The two overlords in his life, Wenkler and Hoesch, treat him with outright contempt. His fortunes are unstable, dependent on situational politics. He is pampered one moment, treated with cruel disdain the next. His  privileges and in fact his survival are dependent on doing what he’s told and acting the role he’s given, whether it’s Rothe the Nazi biowarfare researcher or Neumeister the DP camp doctor. He is subject to unwanted familiarity and unsolicited sexual offers while starved of real affection. No wonder he compulsively reaches for nicotine and brandy to get through each unnerving moment. Though Peter probably didn’t consciously describe his own life situation in “Der V.,” it was the only frame of reference he knew, having been a movie star most of his adult life. No wonder his audiences felt alienated from his attempts at describing the world they lived in.

    There was another, more delicate issue. A man who’d lost friends and family in the Holocaust couldn’t be reasonably expected to emphasize with Germans who had died in the firebombing of Hamburg, but to make one of the most lethal attacks on a civilian population in the war a pivotal incident in “Der V.” must have seemed tactless, though in a way Germans couldn’t have openly expressed. Hamburg suffered devastation comparable to Hiroshima minus the radiation poisoning, but you would never know this from “Der V.” All we see in the aftermath of the bombing of Dr. Rothe’s neighborhood is some improbably cool rubble and the names of some of the dead on a wall. Though when Rothe adds his own name to the list of the dead, realizing that this is his chance to abandon the past and reinvent himself, that is one point in the film where we can all meet Peter and understand what he’s talking about.

100. (c)Anne Sharp. All rights reserved.
     

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