page_title: Peter Lorre
section_title: First years in Hollywood (1935–1940)
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Lorre / Acting career / First years in Hollywood (1935–1940)
caption_attribution_description: English: Frame from the 1941 public domain trailer for the Warner Bros. film The Maltese Falcon showing Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman and Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo. Українська: Сідні Ґрінстріт і Пітер Лорре у фільмі «Мальтійський сокіл» (1941)
context_page_description: Peter Lorre was a Hungarian-American character actor of Jewish descent. Lorre began his stage career in Vienna before moving to Germany where he worked first on the stage, then in film in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorre caused an international sensation in the German film M, directed by Fritz Lang, in which he portrayed a serial killer who preys on little girls.
  Lorre left Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. His second English-language film, following the multiple-language version of M, was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much made in Great Britain. Eventually settling in Hollywood, he later became a featured player in many Hollywood crime and mystery films. In his initial American films, Mad Love and Crime and Punishment, he continued to play murderers, but he was then cast playing Mr. Moto, the Japanese detective, in a B-picture series.
  From 1941 to 1946, he mainly worked for Warner Bros. His first film at Warner was The Maltese Falcon, the first of many films in which he appeared alongside actors Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. This was followed by Casablanca, the second of the nine films in which Lorre and Greenstreet appeared together.
context_section_description: Lorre settled in Hollywood and was soon under contract to Columbia Pictures, which had difficulty finding parts suitable for him. After some months employed effectively for research, Lorre decided that Crime and Punishment, the 1866 Russian novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, would be a suitable project with himself in the central role. Columbia's head Harry Cohn agreed to make the film adaptation on the condition that he could lend Lorre to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, possibly as a means of recouping the cost of Lorre not appearing in any of his films.
  For MGM's Mad Love (1935), set in Paris and directed by Karl Freund, Lorre's head was shaved for the role of Dr. Gogol, a demented surgeon. In the film, Gogol replaces the wrecked hands of a concert pianist with those of an executed knife throwing murderer. An actress who works at the nearby Grand Guignol theater, who happens to be the pianist's wife, is the subject of Gogol's unwelcome infatuation. "Lorre triumphs superbly in a characterization that is sheer horror", The Hollywood Reporter commented. "There is perhaps no one who can be so repulsive and so utterly wicked. No one who can smile so disarmingly and still sneer. His face is his fortune".
  Lorre followed Mad Love with the lead role in Crime and Punishment (also 1935) directed by Josef von Sternberg. "Although Peter Lorre is occasionally able to give the film a frightening pathological significance," wrote Andre Sennwald in The New York Times on the film's release, "this is scarcely Dostoievsky's [sic] drama of a tortured brain drifting into madness with a terrible secret." Columbia offered him a 5 year contract at $1,000 a week, but he declined.
  Returning from England after appearing in a second Hitchcock picture (Secret Agent, 1936), he was offered and accepted a 3-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Starring in a series of Mr. Moto movies, Lorre played John P. Marquand's character, a Japanese detective and spy. Initially positive about the films, he soon grew frustrated with them. "The role is childish," he said, and eventually tended to angrily dismiss the films entirely. He twisted his shoulder during a stunt in Mr. Moto Takes a Vacation (1939), the penultimate entry of the series. In 1939, he attended a lunch at the request of some visiting Japanese officials; Lorre wore a badge that read "Boycott Japanese goods."
  Late in 1938, Universal wanted to borrow Lorre from Fox for the role ultimately performed by Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein (1939). Lorre declined the role because he thought his menacing roles were now behind him, although he was ill at this time. He had tested successfully in 1937 for the role of Quasimodo in an aborted MGM version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, according to a Fox publicist one of two roles Lorre much wanted to play (the other was Napoleon). By now, frustrated by broken promises from Fox, Lorre had managed to end his contract.
  After a brief period as a freelance, he signed for two pictures at RKO in May 1940. In the first of these, Lorre appeared as the anonymous lead in the B-picture Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), reputedly the first film noir. The second RKO film was You'll Find Out (also 1940), a musical comedy mystery in which he co-starred with horror actors Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, as well as band leader Kay Kyser.
caption: Left to right: Sydney Greenstreet and Lorre in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the first of their nine films together
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