That's Cinema Retro London correspondent Adrian Smith (center) with the crazy lads who comprise The League of Gentlemen.
Ten years ago a
show appeared on British TV that was so strange, so grotesque, so dark, yet so
utterly hilarious that it quickly developed a cult following and a number of
popular catchphrases. It ran to three series and eventually a feature film.
This was the League of Gentlemen, a weird combination of sketch show and sitcom
which clearly took inspiration from old horror movies, detective dramas, sexploitation
comedies, to name but a few. I took the opportunity to pin down the gents in
order to unravel just what their influences were. The conversation immediately
turns to Take an Easy Ride, described
by Mark as almost being a snuff film. This leads to my first question:
Have seventies
snuff films been an influence on you?
M-
Just that one!
Is it available
commercially?
J-
No, its illegal. You risk prosecution! (Although a quick search later uncovers
copies available on Ebay and YouTube)
M-
It purports to be an information film. It’s really a rape exploitation film. It
starts like ‘Charley Says’ then it
just gets ridiculous! It’s horrible.
J-
You realise you are getting old when you talk about these things. I was doing
some work with We Are Klang (UK comedy outfit) and they started talking about ‘Two girls, 1 cup’ and I genuinely hadn’t
heard of it! Imagine that!
Neither have I! A
couple of years ago most of you did a commentary for Blood on Satan’s Claw. How did they know you were fans?
J-
I think we’d mentioned it in one of our commentaries.
R-
We tried to get the claw in a toybox for Daisy Haggard (in their new TV show Psychoville). Her Dad Piers Haggard directed
the film.
M-
Someone sent me a copy of The Frozen Dead.
It only worked once, it was such a bad copy. You know that one with the frozen
Nazis? It virtually doesn’t exist. It was a huge thing. In the horror film
books of the seventies there were these huge colour plates from this film no
one ever saw. It was terrible.
J-
Someone gave me on video a copy of It!,
which was also in those books.
M-
With the golem??
J-
Yes.
That’s just come
out on DVD now with The Shuttered Room.
I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it’s terrible. It’s got Oliver Reed in
it.
M-
I always think of Beast in the Cellar.
It’s a similar
thing except it’s in an attic.
R-
Dame Aileen Atkins told me she was in an Exorcist
rip-off I said “I Don’t Want to be Born?â€
She said “You’ve seen it’? “ Of course I have!†Joan Collins raped by a dwarf?
Brilliant! She couldn’t believe I’d seen it.
Dame
Aileen Atkins. That’s how she got the part in Cranford.
S-
That’s how she got a Dame-hood.
I love that film,
especially where the baby pushes the nanny into the lake.
M-
It’s a horrible thing, that creature.
R-
You had the devil’s child in Crooked
House (recent portmanteau horror film screened on UK TV over Christmas,
written by and starring Mark Gatiss) didn’t you?
M-
Yes, The Devil’s Hand.
You often included
references in your shows to old films, such as the episode Royston Vasey and the Monster from Hell (a reference to Hammer
horror Frankenstein and the Monster From
Hell). Was it to see if people would notice, or to make each other laugh?
M-
We just needed to think of a title.
S-
Do you remember? We actually watched that Frankenstein film, and from that we
thought we should do something with torches. So we said ‘let’s burn the shop
down’. So that storyline came from the film directly.
M-
It’s a good title though isn’t it?
Oh it’s brilliant. It
shouldn’t work but it does! You’ve also worked with people like Freddie Jones
(in the Christmas Special) who of course once played Frankenstein’s monster.
J-
We remembered him more from Children of
the Stones.
S-
And Elephant Man.
M-
We’ve always had that kind of affinity with those films, and getting to work
with various people over the years is sort of like repaying a debt.
J-
David Warner for example. On the film (The
League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse), I couldn’t believe every day there was
David Warner from every film I loved growing up.
M-
One of the strange lessons of that is that he has no affinity with fantasy. You
would think that as a viewer he must love those films. But he just did those
films because that’s what people asked him to do. He’s become a complete genre
hero.
There was such a
dearth of filmmaking in the seventies that a lot of actors had to do whatever
they could to get by.
J-
Except the films were better then!
M-
I was talking to someone the other day, who said that one day he’s going to
corner George Baker and talk about a scene in a grim sexploitation film where
he goes through his collection of vibrators. A long way from Wexford! It’s like when you see people
like John Pertwee turning up in Val Guest rude sex comedies.
A-
Like Au Pair Girls.
M-
Yes.
J-
Those semi-porn films always had amazing casts.
Speaking of which I
noticed you’ve got Christopher Biggins in Psychoville?
R-
We do, yes.
One of my favourite
films of his was Eskimo Nell.
S-
I’ve not seen that one.
J-
That’s one of those mucky films.
It’s a classic!
It’s a really clever film. It’s not just about sex, honest! It’s about a guy
trying to make a film, and it ends up being a porn film by mistake.
S-
Sounds good.
A- Christopher
Biggins is in it, he’s brilliant!
M-
Was he cast in Psychoville because of I:Claudius?
J-
Porridge? Or chiefly Watch This Space?
R-
We tried to fill it with references to Watch
This Space!
When is Psychoville
going to be on?
R-
No idea.
S-
We don’t know. It’s still being edited.
You’re pleased with
it?
S-
Yeah!
R-
We’re just coming to the end of editing episode 5 which is looking very good.
Do you think people
will see it as a sequel to The League of Gentlemen?
S-
I think it’s inevitable. We had a marketing meeting today. They wanted to say
‘From the team who brought you The League
of Gentlemen and we said ‘well not quite’.
Half! But aren’t
people always going to put you all together?
S-
We’re very proud of it!
M-
We owe everything to it. It would be churlish not to.
M-
Inevitably people are going to want to have a peg to hang us on.
Presumably you took
you name from the film ‘The League of Gentlemen’?
M-
Yes!
A favourite or just
a good name?
M-
I think I’d seen it quite recently and it was just a good name.
J-
It is a great film. Very seedy.
Can I ask you about
Sherlock? (It has recently been announced that Mark Gatiss is currently working
on a new series of Sherlock Holmes TV dramas for the BBC.)
M-
Yes.
Is this going to be
in competition with Guy Ritchie?
M-
It’s a coincidence. It always happens. There are always three Robin Hood films
coming out at the same time. The character is still here because he’s been the
most filmed character in all of fiction. There’ll be several more by next year!
There’s no fight involved. Unless Harry Hill does it! This Holmes will be in
the style of the 1940s Sherlock films where he fights the Nazis. We’ve tried to
bring Holmes into the present day.
Emanating in radioactive waves of hilarity from its
home at New World Stages on W. 50th
Street in Manhattan
is The Toxic Avenger, The Musical,
the not-exactly-anticipated musicalization of the 1984 cult movie. The show
opened April 6th. New York-area “Toxie†fans of the 1984 film and its
numerous sequels will not want to miss this well-oiled, high-camp machine of a
show, written by Joe DiPietro (“I Love you, You’re Perfect, Now Changeâ€) with
music and lyrics by Bon Jovi founding member David Bryan.
Expanding upon the plot of the film, the musical
casts it net a bit wider, summoning the operatic, mock-horror of Phantom of the Opera, combined with the
rock-opera structure of Phantom of The
Paradise (1974), all in the spirit of Revenge
of the Nerds.For non-inductees into the Cult of Toxie (of which
I am one), the story concerns a certain Melvin Ferd III, a Tromaville, New
Jersey nerd, who discovers documents in his local library (while he’s there
trying to flirt with his unrequited love, the blind librarian Sarah) linking
the town’s mayor to a company dumping toxic waste in a city landfill. When the
mayor learns of Melvin’s discovery, she sics her two bullying goons on him, causing
him to fall into a barrel of toxic goo. Emerging with superhero strength, one
eyeball sliding down his cheek, his brain half-exposed and his entire body
dripping with toxic green slime, “Toxie†is nonetheless ready to go after the
bad guys and wreak bloody revenge for his horrible disfigurement. He’s also
determined to win the heart of Sarah while he’s at it, since she thought his
former self a bit too weasly.
According to New Jersey-native composer and
lyricist David Bryan, the show is a fulfillment of a lifelong dream ever since
he saw the 1984 movie in a midnight movie theater in Newark. “From that day on,†according to his
notes on the musical’s website, “he dreamed of writing a musical about the
first mutant superhero from his home state.â€The musical was developed at the George Street
Playhouse in New Brunswick, and positively overflows
with New Jersey
references, given the Garden State-roots of both Bryan and the show’s book
author, Joe DiPietro, who hails from Exit 166. (Bryan grew up off Exit 109). In New Jersey,
if you didn’t know – and you’ll know by the end of this show – you don’t
discuss what town you’re from, it’s what EXIT you’re from!
To its detriment, the show never rises to a comedic
level above the cartoonish, comic book genre. Ecological disaster, global
warming, political corruption, small-town hypocrisy, even rape – all subjects
are given the same, frantically silly treatment. This is no doubt by design, in
keeping with the tone of the movie. However, as a result, it never really
elicits any range of emotion – just a broad, tickled smile from the start, to a
more tired smile at finish, as the facial muscles begin failing.
But I still urge Cinema Retro’s readers to go see
it, as the performances alone are worth the price of admission. There isn’t a
weak one in the bunch – all are top-form, scary-talented Broadway pros.
Jody McCrea, the son of Joel McCrea, passed away earlier this month. He was primarily known for his roles in cult films. In this excerpt from his book, Cinema Retro columnist pays tribute to McCrea's career.Â
.
Tall, strapping, square-jawed Jody McCrea who became a favorite of teenage audiences during the Sixties for his amusing performances as “Deadhead†in the series of Beach Party (1963) movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello passed away on April 4 of this year. As the dumb surfer in the bunch, Deadhead could be counted on to say something idiotic in his slow drawl. Though McCrea was always assured a laugh based on how the role was written, it is to his credit that Deadhead came off as sweetly naïve rather than a complete moron. Jody McCrea was born on September 6, 1934 in Los Angeles. His father was western star Joel McCrea and his mother was the underrated actress Frances Dee. As a child, Jody along with his brother David worked the 2300 acres of ranch that his father bought in the San Fernando Valley. The boys toiled in the bean fields, and per his interview with TV Guide, it was Jody’s early ambition to become “the greatest bean-hoer in the State of California.â€Â While attending the New Mexico Military Institute, Jody visited his dad on the set of the movie Lone Hand. Though surrounded by show business his whole young life, it was on this set that the acting bug finally bit him. McCrea studied drama at UCLA and began taking acting lessons on the side. He made an uncredited appearance in Lucy Gallant (1955) but his official debut was playing Lt. Baker in the western The First Texan (1956) starring his father, Joel McCrea, as Sam Houston. Jody would go on to work with his dad in other westerns including Trooper Hook (1957) and Gunsight Ridge (1957). McCrea’s first significant part was playing Tim Hitchcock in the William Wellman-directed bio flick, Lafayette Escadrille (1958) starring Tab Hunter as the famous French flying legion of WWI. Television fans discovered Jody McCrea when he teamed up with his dad to star in the western series Wichita Town during the 1959-60 season. Joel McCrea played the town marshal and his son was cast as his deputy. The series unfortunately was saddled with a bad time slot following the weepy This Is Your Life so when the show’s sponsor pulled out the series was cancelled. He returned to the big screen playing supporting roles in low budget comedies and westerns including Young Guns of Texas (1963) featuring second generation actors (such as James Mitchum and Alana Ladd) in leading roles. The WWII adventure Operation Bikini (1963) was Jody McCrea’s first pairing with Frankie Avalon and movie for American International Pictures. He was cast next as Deadhead in Beach Party the same year. When that movie broke box office records for the independent company, McCrea was coaxed back to reprise the role of the dumb surfer supporting Frankie and Annette in Muscle Beach Party (1964) and Bikini Beach (1964). Due to his popularity with the teenage audience McCrea progressed to second lead in Pajama Party (1964) playing Annette Funicello’s boyfriend who prefers volleyball to romance. McCrea was finally able to shine and received good reviews for his performance. Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) also gave McCrea a chance to do some real emoting as his character now renamed Bonehead falls in love with a mermaid played by Marta Kristen of Lost in Space fame. He received positive reviews such as in the Los Angeles Times whose critic remarked, “Jody McCrea…handles the comedy as a kooky beach bum on whom the sun really shines.â€Â Regarding his popularity playing a doltish surfer, McCrea told Newsday, “It took me four pictures to figure it out—the kids liked Deadhead because they felt superior to me, to him.â€Â However, McCrea was getting disillusioned with the beach movies due to the fact he was afraid that he would be typecast. After How to Stuff a Wild Bikini (1965) wrapped, affable Jody McCrea was determined to shake his Bonehead persona. The western Stagecoach to Nowhere based on Oedipus Rex was supposed to be McCrea’s next movie but it was never produced. Instead, the tall, broad-shouldered actor was perfectly cast as a rambunctious racecar driver in The Girls from Thunder Strip (1966) and a hardened biker in The Glory Stompers (1967) co-starring Dennis Hopper and Chris Noel. The latter was co-produced by McCrea.
Kudos to Kino: the video company has released a boxed set of the acclaimed AFT feature films.
By Raymond Benson
.
Want
to go see a Broadway or West End stage play—but at the local cinema? No, it’s not a filmed stage production. It’s a play translated to the film medium,
but with complete faithfulness to the original play script. Not only that, it stars big name actors and
is directed by a top-notch director. To
complete the conceit, you get handed a playbill (program) when you enter the
theater. There might even be an
intermission—or two! And you have only four
showtimes at which you can view the picture before it disappears, and you have
to buy your ticket in advance with a subscription for a whole “season†of these
filmed plays, or staged films, or whatever you want to call them.
This
was the unique and exciting experiment called the American Film Theatre.
Back
in 1973, producer Ely Landau launched this daring and unprecedented cinema
series that played in the U.S. for two “seasons,†with a total of fourteen
titles (but only thirteen were shown), all renowned works—classic and modern—originally
produced on the stage. Landau and his
wife Edie were not Broadway producers, but they were Theatre People and had
helped launch the “Play of the Week†series on PBS television, produced Sidney
Lumet’s film version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long
Day’s Journey Into Night (1962), and were keen on inventing a way to make
Broadway (or the London stage) accessible to everyone in America—at their local
movie theater.
There
have always been stage plays adapted for film—A Streetcar Named Desire, for example, or The Miracle Worker, or Hamlet. But plays like these were “re-imagined†for
the film medium—the script was often changed or re-written with added or
deleted scenes, the action was “opened up†to include locations outside of a
single, claustrophobic stage set, and the roles were usually re-cast with
“Hollywood actors†rather than “Broadway actors.â€Â Then there were also the few stage
productions that were filmed as is, i.e., cameras were set up in front of an
actual proscenium stage while an already-rehearsed play was performed and the
cameras simply recorded the production. Waiting for Godot (1961), for example,
was done this way for television.Â
The
American Film Theatre concept tried something different. The directive was to take a great stage play,
not change a word, and in most cases,
use the actual play script as the screenplay.Â
The next step was to hire an accomplished film director to interpret the
text for the film medium but stay
faithful to the play. Sometimes the
director was the same person who helmed the original stage production. A further step was to persuade the original
casts from the Broadway or London productions of those plays to star in the
film; or, when that wasn’t possible, to cast big-name Hollywood or British
actors. Thus, the result was indeed a
filmed play—but you as an audience member wouldn’t be watching it from the
middle of the orchestra or from the side or from the first balcony; instead you
were up close and personal in a realistically-presented world (on studio sets
and/or real interior or exterior locations)—just like in “regular†movies. You had the best seat in the house, so to
speak, but there’s no proscenium arch.Â
It’s a movie. But it’s a
play. Get it?Â
Landau
didn’t have a lot of money to produce the series. Getting the rights to the plays was the easy
part. In most cases, if the playwright
was still living, he was more than happy to take a modest fee to see his play
translated faithfully to the screen.Â
Edward Albee, for example, had already gone through a Hollywood
experience with Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? During that production, he
and producer/screenwriter Ernest Lehman often clashed over the script until
Lehman finally gave in and used Albee’s original play text as the film script
almost verbatim (and yet Lehman was credited for the screenplay and received an
Oscar nomination for it!). So, when
Landau approached Albee about doing A
Delicate Balance in the American Film Theatre with promises that the actual
play would be the screenplay, and Albee would have director and cast approval,
the playwright jumped at the chance. Landau
collected the rights to the plays he wanted in this manner and started from
scratch with every production, except for two.Â
Three Sisters, from the Anton
Chekhov play and directed by Laurence Olivier, had already been produced and
released in Britain only in 1970. Philadelphia, Here I Come!, from the
Brian Friel play and directed by John Quested, was an Irish production set to
be released in 1975. Landau bought the
U.S. distribution rights for both films and presented them as two of the
entries in the AFT program. Thus, Three Sisters and Philadelphia, Here I Come! were the only pictures in the entire two
seasons that Landau and his team did not produce.
The
talent (directors, actors, designers, technicians) was asked to work at a
reduced rate or at scale. No one
refused. It was for a cause they all
thought was worthwhile. Lee Marvin, for
example, joked that he “lost $225,000†by starring in The Iceman Cometh (which meant he did the movie for only
$25,000—his going rate at the time was $250,000).Â
Grants
from American Express and other organizations helped fill out the rest of the
production costs. Finally, audiences
were asked to subscribe in advance to a certain number of films in a particular
season. They could buy tickets for the
entire season or a lesser selection if they desired. Only four performances per film were shown at
selective theaters around the country—simultaneously—and a new film premiered
every month. Just like theatre, only in
the cinema.Â
Being
a Theatre Person (defined as someone who has studied and worked in the theatre—I
was majoring in Drama at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1973
when the American Film Theatre premiered)—I found the series exhilarating. Most people who appreciated and knew the theatre loved it. They understood and “got†what Landau and his
team were trying to do. Unfortunately,
the rest of the public met the series with a collective shrug. Film critics complained that the films were
“too much like stage plays†(duh!).Â
True, many of the productions were a bit claustrophobic because, like
the original plays, they took place in single settings. In only a few cases were the plays “opened
up†to include scenes outdoors (such as Rhinoceros
and Lost in the Stars). What the critics didn’t understand was that
the series was created to celebrate playwrights,
and so the emphasis was on the plays. With
great acting. And wonderful
direction.Â
Speaking
of the acting, I assert that the AFT series contained some of the best performances
one can see on the silver screen—ever. It’s a shame that none of the films were
eligible for Academy Award consideration (due to the limited showings and non-traditional
distribution); otherwise we would have seen many of the AFT’s stars up for
Oscars. Only one of the films, The Man in the Glass Booth, was released
in a regular theatrical run in 1975 after the AFT seasons were finished—and
Maximilian Schell was indeed nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in
the picture.Â
AFT’s
first season consisted of eight films/plays.Â
Beginning in October 1973, one picture played each month through May
1974. The second season consisted of six
features (only five were actually shown) and ran in 1975.Â
To get in a warm weather mood with summer not approaching fast enough, here is a look at Hollywood surf movies from a different and albeit biased perspective. Gay men are always looking for gay subtext in movies and TV, and I am no exception. Am I reading more into these films? Probably—but it was sure a lot of fun doing the research.
The Sixties beach movie craze began with Gidget (1959) starring Sandra Dee and James Darren, a fictionalized look at teenager Kathy Kohner’s surfing escapades in Malibu during the mid-Fifties. It was groundbreaking as the movie contributed to the mass dissention of surfers on the beaches of Malibu and started a series of surf-theme films such as Gidget Goes Hawaiian and Ride the Wild Surf. The surf movie soon morphed into the beach-party film, whose heyday was from 1963 through 1965, where surfing was only used as a backdrop to fanciful teenage beach adventures. Beach Party from AIP starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello launched Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. Soon other studios were releasing their own Beach Party rivals such as Surf Party, The Girls on the Beach, and Beach Ball. Some of these films varied from the formula by shifting the locale to a lake (A Swingin’ Summer) or the ski slopes (Ski Party, Winter a-Go-Go, Wild Wild Winter). These movies for the most part followed a successful simple formula—start with attractive swimsuit clad teenagers twisting on the sand, add a dash of surfing (or ski) footage, mix in romantic misunderstandings, stir in popular musical performers, add aging comedians for comic relief, and whisk in villainous bikers or predatory adults.Â
Out of the surf and back in the closet: Tab Hunter was one of many male sex symbols who had to hide their sexuality during the beach movie era.
Gay subtext crept into a few of the beach-party movies giving these films camp appeal today. Discounting the obvious fact that these sand-and-surf epics were titillation for homosexual men of the time, as good looking shirtless movie hunks such as Jody McCrea, Fabian, Aron Kincaid, James Stacy, and Peter Brown frolic on the sand bare-chested in swim trunks and on the slopes in tight ski pants. Or that gay actors such as Tab Hunter, Tommy Kirk, and Paul Lynde appeared in these movies, there were other factors that probably were not obvious back in the Sixties. Either a director or screenwriter may have tried to slip in with a wink and a nudge to the homosexual community in an unassuming way that made it past the oblivious producers and censors.Â
The most obvious example is Muscle Beach Party (1964) featuring a clean-cut group of surfers versus a cult of bodybuilders headed by Don Rickles' Jack Fanny. During the Fifties and Sixties, the public automatically associated bodybuilding with homosexuality because muscle men of the time appeared as objects of desire wearing posing briefs or sometimes nothing at all in physique magazines whose readers were mostly gay men. Writing on the subject, film historian Joan Ormond commented, “Homosexuality in this era was regarded as potentially more damaging to society as the wild antics of surfers.â€Â Hence, the bodybuilders of Muscle Beach Party whom seem to enjoy the company of each other rather than any of the bikini girls on the shore are seen as the bad guys along the lines of Eric Von Zipper’s motorcycle gang of Beach Party as they are out to corrupt the youth of America.
Let’s
face it. Many Hollywood biographies are cut-and-paste jobs, recycling (if not
actually cribbing) material from other sources – yellowing issues of Variety,
The Hollywood Reporter, vintage tabloids or previously published biographies –
and retelling the same old anecdotes. Happily,
The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre is no such hack job. It is one of
the finest biographies of an actor ever written, on a par with Patricia
Bosworth’s Montgomery Clift andCharles Winecoff’sSplit Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins.
However, the time it took to research and write the Lorre tome may well be
unprecedented. Author Stephen D. Youngkin started working on The Lost One in the early 1970s and the
book was finally published in 2005, so there are many first-hand accounts by
Lorre’s friends and colleagues (most of whom have died over the years).
Despite
Lorre’s many wonderful performances and guest appearances on stage, screen,
radio and television… and his growing cultural icon status 45 years after his untimely death, his life was a sad one, and that of his late daughter
Catherine was even sadder. Lorre's melancholia was impossible to hide from the
camera in his final years, partly as a result of a growing awareness as
his health declined that he would leave his daughter in desperate straits,
and that her life would not be an easy one, mainly due to financial
hardship resulting from his almost complete lack of business acumen. (Lorre
entrusted a lifetime’s earnings to a shady money manager who robbed him blind;
and, although steadily employed, the actor was chronically underpaid for his
services; inexplicably, Lorre’s salary was far less than Sydney Greenstreet’s
in the six films in which they co-starred, even though Greenstreet was a
relative newcomer to films). And yet Lorre had many friends and admirers and
even went through a sexy period in the 1940s, attracting the attention of the
stunning (but troubled) starlet Kaaren Verne, who became his second wife in
1945. They were divorced in 1953. Lorre also never quite lost his mordant sense
of humor.
Youngkin
defines the unique talent and menacingly comic persona of the diminutive,
bug-eyed actor with the purring voice, tracing Lorre’s slowly descending career
arc, from his early stage successes in Weimar Berlin with the trailblazing
dramatist Bertolt Brecht, his starring role as the baby-faced child-killer in
the German thriller M – which catapulted Lorre to international fame (if not
fortune), his escape from Nazi Germany (Lorre was a non-practicing Jew), the
botched gall bladder operation that led to his lifelong pain and addiction to
morphine, and the ongoing typecasting as a sort of comic bogeyman that saw him
end his career in junk like American International Pictures’ Muscle Beach Party
(in a cameo as “Mr. Strangdourâ€) and in episodes of such TV series as Five
Fingers, 77 Sunset Strip and Route 66. However, Lorre appreciated any work that
came his way.
Lorre in his brilliant, star-making performance as the child murderer in "M"
The
book also reveals that Lorre tried to reignite his stage career in the early
1950s in A Night at Madame Tussaud’s, a Grand Guignol story in which he
co-starred with the demanding Miriam Hopkins. Unfortunately, the two actors
detested each other on sight and the play (Lorre’s umpteenth attempt to break
out of the mold Hollywood producers had set him in) folded for this silly
reason.
Being
of a certain age, I remember Lorre popping up on TV many times during my
childhood. He appeared in several films geared to a juvenile audience and I saw
most of them when they were first released: Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Five Weeks in a Balloon, The Comedy
of Terrors and “The Black Cat†segment of Tales of Terror. I have vivid
memories of seeing late-period Lorre in The Raven at the Centre Theatre and The
Patsyat the Capitol Theatre in
Ottawa (both twenties-era movie palaces were torn down years ago). I recall
Lorre being interviewed on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV program
called Tabloid. This would have
beeninthe late fifties. Lorre was quizzed by the show’s handsome,
jock-like host Gil Christie. I can’t remember much except that Lorre
chain-smoked and was very fat. As a child, I found him to be quite ugly and
scary. I am puzzled by the strange and unsettling impact Lorre had on me as a
youngster whenever I saw him on the silver screen or on black & white
television, and how inexplicably sad I felt when I heard that he had died. I
was 12 when Lorre passed away in March 1964. He was only 59 but looked much
older.
Lorre’s
portrayal of Le Chiffre in the “Casino Royaleâ€
episode ofClimax!in
1954 puts him in the cinematic history books as the very first James
Bond screen villain – a full eight years before Joseph Wiseman achieved
worldwide fame as Dr. Julius No. The late Barry Nelson (the first 007) recalled that Lorre as Le
Chiffre had trouble remembering his lines, and ad-libbed a lot. This propensity
for improvisation became an unshakable habit with Lorre in his later years,
often to the consternation of his fellow performers.
In death, Lorre finally lucks
out with this splendid biography. The
Lost One(now
in its third printing) won a Rondo Award for Best Book of 2005. It was also
nominated for CineFest's international Willy Haas-Preis 2007 (which is given
every two years). “This was a real feather in my cap,†Youngkin enthuses. “I
think there were five or six titles nominated, two in English. It's given for a
contribution to German film heritage. Considering that only about 15% of the
bio focused on German film and only Der Verlorene (Lorre’s sole directing
credit) in depth, I was surprised and pleased to garner this recognition.†(Der Verlorene
is the tale of a murderous psychopath in war-torn Germany who is better able to
conceal his crimes in the chaos of battle and aerial bombardment.)
Cinema Retro caught up with
Youngkin at his hacienda in Arizona.
Cinema
Retro: What was it about Lorre that made him such a unique presence on the
Berlin stage in the 1920s? Did Lorre’s persona influence Bertolt Brecht’s
writing style and the subjects he explored in his plays?
Stephen
D. Youngkin: Lorre was unique in how he looked and in what he said (and how he
said it), all qualities he translated to the stage (and later, film).
Contemporaries described him as distinctive, off-beat, unforgettable and
magnetic, characteristics that subsumed his rather odd looks. One theatre
impresario even said he looked like a tadpole. Fortunately for Lorre, a new
force in the Berlin theatre was looking for just that: “strange faces, strange
types.â€Â Bertolt Brecht didn’t want
matinee idol good looks; rather he was drawn to faces off the street. Â
Any
Brecht plays in which Lorre appeared (or was scheduled to appear) were written
before the two men got together. However, after the playwright came to America
in 1941, he tailored as many as eight film stories to the actor’s capabilities,
as he saw them.Â
It
is very likely, however, that Lorre’s acting influenced Brecht’s theories on
the subject. When Brecht saw something he liked, he studied it. In other words,
theory followed practice. With Lorre, the clashing of characteristics gave the
playwright the “jumps and interruptions†he felt necessary to hinder normal
meaning and underline other possibilities for human behavior. The Brecht
business gets a bit thick. Suffice to say that the double-sidedness of Lorre’s
performances helped coalesce Brecht’s developing theories about a new style of
acting.Â
CR:
What facets of Lorre’s acting talent were forever concealed from the American
viewing public due to his lifelong typecasting?
SDY:
First, I think you would have seen a much greater show of versatility in both
drama and comedy, aptitudes that Lorre felt Hollywood largely neglected. Also, it’s possible that his “split†style of
acting would have taken different forms, not just the naïve and sophisticated
equation, but more of what audiences saw in the stage play Fruehlings Erwachen
(Spring’s Awakening, 1929), where the actor seemed to be cut off from his own
feelings. This was spectacularly visualized in the scene where a headless Lorre
sits in a cemetery holding his own head under his arm.Â
Lorre in his unforgettable 1929 stage appearance in Spring Awakening.
CR:
Despite his frustrations at being typecast as a smiling villain in Hollywood,
Lorre turned down Brecht’s overtures to return with him to Berlin after the
Second World War to help the controversial playwright set up a theatre company.
Why did Lorre string Brecht along? Was Lorre ashamed of having been seduced by
the Hollywood lifestyle? Was his increasingly poor health a factor in his
decision not to work with Brecht in the late 1940s and 1950s?
SDY:
Lorre certainly didn’t consciously “string Brecht along.†However much the
playwright’s film stories failed to fit Hollywood norms, Lorre tried to give
them a push. The problem is that the actor had little clout at the front
office. Turning his back on Hollywood
and returning to East Germany was another matter. The short answer to this
question is that Lorre was weak. Brecht was well aware of Lorre’s commitment
issues and cut him far more slack than he would have given anyone else, partly
because of shared history, also because he saw his friend as a great actor and
one that he needed to rebuild his theatre in Germany.
I
don’t know to what extent Lorre was ashamed of being seduced by Hollywood, but
he was painfully aware of it. And most certainly, the weight of failing Brecht
(and thereby himself) grew heavier with the passing years. Those are the short
answers to hard questions that don’t entirely take into account the many issues
at play here. Lorre left Warner Bros. in 1946 with the idea of taking charge of
his career. Unfortunately, his
self-management enterprise—Lorre, Inc.—was an overwhelming failure. He still
needed to prove to himself that he could rise from the Hollywood morass (what
Brecht described as a swamp). If he couldn’t take that first independent step
in America, then Europe might do. Brecht
had mapped out a plan for Lorre that included using his American movie career
to help subsidize his theater work at the Berliner Ensemble.Â
While
Lorre was mulling this over, he went to England to earn some badly needed
money, and then drifted on to Germany, where the idea of Der Verlorene (The
Lost One) fell into his lap. Always the fatalist, he followed up on the idea of
directing, starring in and co-authoring his own film. In a poem, titled “To the
Actor P.L.,†Brecht invited Lorre (poor or rich, sick or healthy) to join him
in East Berlin. Lorre, convinced he was charting his own course, didn’t answer
the call. Some of his friends also suggested that the actor was too addicted to
the Hollywood lifestyle and the easy access to drugs to seriously consider
exchanging whatever was left of his celebrity for the sparseness of the Communist
Soviet block. There is some truth to this.Â
Lorre’s drug use was certainly on the upswing during the making of Der
Verlorene. The accumulative effects of chemical addiction and assorted other
health issues were beginning to catch up with him. By this time, he was not up
to the physical demands of the stage. Â
Just
when you tally all the negatives, however, Lorre muddies the picture with a
letter to writer Elisabeth Hauptmann in which he, in a veiled way, expresses
his regrets (“I don’t want to be a nobody forever.â€) and timidly asks if Brecht
might find a place for him. No doubt this somewhat pathetic attempt to turn the
clock back was conditioned by the failure of Der Verlorene, his drug use and
depression.Â