RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST ARTICLES FROM CINEMA RETRO'S ARCHIVES 

Bradford Dillman: A Compulsively Watchable Actor

By Herb Shadrak

In a career that has spanned 43 years, Bradford Dillman accumulated more than 500 film and TV credits. The slim, handsome and patrician Dillman may have been the busiest actor in Hollywood during the late sixties and early seventies, working non-stop for years. In 1971 alone, Dillman starred in seven full-length feature films. And this protean output doesn’t include guest appearances on six TV shows that same year.

Yale-educated Dillman first drew good notices in the early 1950s on the Broadway stage and in live TV shows, such as Climax and Kraft Television Theatre. After making theatrical history playing Edmund Tyrone in the first-ever production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1956, Dillman landed the role of blueblood psychopath Artie Straus in the crime-and-punishment thriller Compulsion (1959), for which he won a three-way Best Actor Prize at Cannes (sharing the award with co-stars Dean Stockwell and Orson Welles).

On the And You Call Yourself a Scientist! Web site, Dillman’s Artie Straus is described as “all brag and bravado, contemptuous of everything but himself, with his bridge-and-country-club parents, and his vaguely unwholesome relationship with his mother.”

In the early years of his career, Dillman starred in several major motion pictures, picking and choosing his roles carefully. He was featured in Jean Negulesco’s romance A Certain Smile (1958) with Rossano Brazzi and Joan Fontaine; Philip Dunne’s World War II drama In Love and War (1958) with Robert Wagner and Dana Wynter; and Tony Richardson’s Sanctuary (1961) with Lee Remick and Yves Montand, a rancid slice of Southern Gothic based on the novel by William Faulkner.

Yet in the early sixties, Dillman started taking any part that came along to support his growing family. From 1962 on, he guest starred in dozens of TV series -- among them Espionage, Kraft Suspense Theatre, Twelve O’Clock High, Shane, Felony Squad, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Marcus Welby, M.D., The Streets of San Francisco, Bronk, How the West Was Won and Fantasy Island.

In 1975, Dillman won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Actor in a Daytime Drama Special for his performance as Matt Clifton in Last Bride of Salem (1974), an excellent tale of modern witchcraft. The 90-minute Gothic horror movie aired on ABC Afternoon Playbreak and was so well received that it was rebroadcast during primetime.

Over the years, Dillman appeared in scores of made-for-TV movies and theatrical releases, such as Walter Grauman’s drama A Rage to Live (1965) with the late Suzanne Pleshette; John Guillermin’s war story The Bridge at Remagen (1969) with George Segal; Hy Averback’s satire Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came (1970) starring Tony Curtis; and Jud Taylor’s horror-thriller Revenge (1971), with Shelley Winters. Dillman also played a psychiatrist who goes ape for Natalie Trundy in Don Taylor’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and a scientist battling firestarting cockroaches in Jeannot Szwarc’s Bug (1975) — the final film produced by legendary horror schlockmeister William Castle.

Dillman is now 78. After retiring from acting in 1995, he took up a second career as a writer. He is excellent at his new avocation, requiring no ghostwriters to tweak his prose. Dillman’s autobiography Are You Anybody? is a series of amusing anecdotes about his Hollywood years. He has also written a harrowing adventure tale entitled That Air Forever Dark, set in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. “It’s a terrifying account of the Jet Age meeting the Stone Age – Deliverance in a jungle setting,” the actor-turned-author says.

Dillman’s latest book, published in 2005 by Fithian Press, is a comedy of errors entitled Kissing Kate. “The novel is about an amateur production of Kiss Me Kate,” Dillman relates. “An out-of-work professional actor is hired to play the male lead opposite a wealthy community icon. Ultimately, of course, they end up in bed together, where a ‘catastrophe’ occurs and all hell breaks loose. I assure you that Kissing Kate is not in the least bit autobiographical!”

Fifty-two years after appearing on stage in O’Neill’s landmark theatrical event, Dillman is now a playwright as well. His Seeds in the Wind made its debut in May 2007 at the Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura, California. The play is set in 1939 in Santa Cruz, California, during a weekend celebrating the 40th birthday of a society hostess' daughter. The interaction of the houseguests is both humorous and dramatic, and all manner of unexpected events occur, Dillman assures us.

The veteran performer spoke to Cinema Retro from his home in Santa Barbara, California.

Bradford Dillman: I had a commitment to Twentieth Century Fox to do two pictures a year and, as fate would have it, the timing of the filming of Compulsion coincided. Nothing to do with the moguls’ belief that I had talent. It was just dumb luck, pure and simple.

Compulsion (1959) with Dean Stockwell and Orson Welles

CR: Following Compulsion, you were often cast in villainous roles. In 1964, you co-starred with B-movie cult figure John Ashley (The Mad Doctor of Blood Island) in an episode of Dr. Kildare with the intriguing title Night of the Beast. What was that one about?

BD: I was the beast. I was such a bad guy I had my thugs hold Kildare down while I raped his girlfriend in front of his very eyes. When we came to the comeuppance scene, I learned that Richard Chamberlain had obviously never been in a fistfight in his life. The stunt men couldn't teach him how to throw a punch; I couldn't teach him. So we had a gentle comeuppance. He's a nice, sensitive man who has since come out of the closet.

With Carol Lynley, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. feature film The Helicopter Spies (1968)

CR: In 1967, you were the guest villain on The Prince of Darkness Affair, a two-part episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E, later repackaged as a theatrical release – The Helicopter Spies (1968). You were great fun as Luther Sebastian, the Third Way cult leader who steals a rocket. Did you have any scenes with lovely Lola Albright?

BD: The Helicopter Spies has disappeared in the vortex of remaining brain cells. I don’t remember if I exchanged words with Lola Albright.

Basehart in Fellini's masterpiece La Strada. (Photo: Cinema Retro archives)

Cinema Retro columnist Herbert Shadrak recently spoke to Stephanie Kellerman, a friend of the Basehart family and webmaster of The Talented Richard Basehart shrine at www.richardbasehart.com

Cinema Retro: Was Richard Basehart an actor’s actor? Was his enormous talent only truly appreciated by other actors? 

Nehemiah Persoff: From Jerusalem to Hollywood – and Beyond

By Herb Shadrak

Born in Jerusalem in 1919, Nehemiah Persoff went on to become one of the busiest character actors in Hollywood. His face is familiar to millions of boomers across North America from his numerous guest appearances on just about every TV series that aired from the 1950s through the 1990s. Persoff’s name may have been unfamiliar to many of these TV viewers, but his face was instantly recognizable. Filmspot.com describes Persoff as a “short, dark and stocky-framed actor who specialized in playing ethnic-type villains, although he frequently essayed sympathetic roles as well.” (Witness his heartbreaking moments with Maria Schell in Voyage of the Damned.) Yet he excelled as gangland figures like Johnny Torrio, mentor to Al Capone in the 1959 biopic, or mobster Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik – a recurring role on The Untouchables.

Persoff’s childhood was poverty-stricken, but there was constant singing, dancing and music in his home. He was a very creative and imaginative youngster, who always visited the circus when it came to the Holy City. “There was a large field in Jerusalem where the circus used to set up,” Persoff recalls. “It was a very small one-ring circus, but I loved it. Outside the circus was an Arab with a box on a stand with peepholes in it, and he had a small monkey on a chain with a hat. This was enough to make me stand there for hours watching. One day, the Arab let me look through the peepholes. There I saw a funny man with a derby and cane. He had a funny walk. It was Charlie Chaplin! Little did I know that 20 years later I would meet that man face-to-face!”

Persoff found himself drawn to the cinema at an early age. “Two outdoor moviehouses were opened on Zion Square: one was called Eden. It had a circle of bulbs that would light up one after the other. I used to walk down there barefoot and watch the cinema from a post on the street. From that height I could see the top of the screen for free. I think the other outdoor moviehouse was called Aviv. For its grand opening they showed Ben Hur with Ramon Novarro. There were pennants hung all over… I guess that was our version of a Hollywood opening.

“I find that at age 88 my mind goes back to my early childhood more and more. Jerusalem in the late twenties was a place like no other. I cannot imagine a 10-year-old more attached to his birthplace than I was. I was keenly aware of the love that people had for each other, the feeling that we were all tied to the same cause. The pioneers came with nothing but enthusiasm and a love for life and our native land. Their attitude was ‘to hell with worldly goods, that's not what's important in our lives.’”

And yet Persoff’s father, a silversmith and painter, felt he had no career prospects in Palestine. So the young Persoff emigrated with his family to the United States in 1929, just in time for the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression. Persoff spent several years working as an electrician on the New York subway system, gradually taking an interest in acting in the 1940's.

“When I started acting, I was working in the subway and there was a rule that subway workers were not allowed to have any other job,” Persoff remembers. “So on the program of the play, I used the name Nick Perry. My reviews were great but no one knew it was me, so I got none of the glory. After that I always used ‘Nehemiah Persoff’.”

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Persoff started seriously pursuing an acting career in the New York theatre. In 1947, Persoff’s big break came along, one that would lead to steady work in films and television for the next 52 years.

“My friend (actor) Lou Gilbert told me that if I wanted to audition for the Actors Studio, he would arrange it. I jumped at the chance. Elia Kazan was one of the busiest directors around, and to study with him and be in his pool of actors was every actor's dream. I was in summer stock playing the lead role in George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple. I knew that Kazan was with the Group Theatre along with writer Clifford Odets. I thought of doing something from an Odets play but then reasoned that perhaps a more classic approach might work better for me, so I did a monologue from Shaw. Two weeks later, I received an invitation to come to the first meeting of the Actors Studio. I took my seat on a bench and slowly looked around. There were John Garfield, Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Montgomery Clift, Kim Hunter and Maureen Stapleton, among others. Kazan began to speak and told us his aim was to create a group of actors who work as he does, who speak his language, and that the people assembled in this room were the cream of the talent available. This was heady stuff for a nearly starving young actor. I studied with Lee Strasberg. He was brilliant and helped me find myself as an actor… I owe him much. Among other scenes, I did a Noel Coward piece with Kim Stanley.”

After the Actors Studio, Persoff never looked back. His film credits include Kazan’s On the Waterfront, The Harder They Fall (Humphrey Bogart’s last film), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Never Steal Anything Small (with James Cagney), René Clément’s This Angry Age (shot in Thailand), Green Mansions (with Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins), The Hook (with Kirk Douglas), A Global Affair (with Bob Hope), Ray Danton’s frightfest Psychic Killer, Barbra Streisand’s Yentl and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

Persoff also guest starred on about 400 TV shows, including The Twilight Zone (playing a Nazi U-Boat captain in the classic episode "Judgment Night"!), Route 66, Ben Casey, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Mr. Novak, Burke’s Law, Honey West, Dan August, The High Chaparal, The Big Valley, The Legend of Jesse James, The Wild Wild West, Gilligan’s Island, Hawaii Five-O, Tarzan, It Takes a Thief, Land of the Giants and The Time Tunnel.

In the mid-1980s, Persoff began to pursue painting. Now retired from acting, he devotes full time to this avocation he has always loved.

Cinema Retro spoke to Persoff from his home in Cambria, California.

In part two of Herb Shadrak's tribute to actor Richard Basehart, his Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea  co-star David Hedison reflects on working with Basehart on the popular Irwin Allen TV series.

By Herb Shadrak

Veteran actor David Hedison is best known for three roles: the ill-fated scientist Andre Delambre who switches heads with The Fly (1958), CIA agent Felix Leiter in two James Bond films – Live and Let Die (1973) and Licence to Kill (1989) [in which he loses his leg to a shark] – and Captain Lee Crane, who, along with Admiral Harriman Nelson (Richard Basehart), commanded the high-tech submarine Seaview on the hit TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968), which the Boston Globe’s  TV critic said was “like Star Trek with fish.” In this exclusive interview for Cinema Retro, Hedison recalls his admiration for Basehart and the highlights of working with him on the fondly remembered science-fiction action-adventure series.

Cinema Retro: Why did you want to work with Richard Basehart? 

David Hedison: I had admired his film work for years. He was always so natural on camera and he had passion. You believed in his very human characters.

CR: Which of his film performances particularly impressed you?

DH: La Strada was heartbreaking. Moby Dick. Fourteen Hours. Time Limit. Richard had fabulous range and was always worth watching in anything he did.

CR: What transpired during your very first encounter with Richard Basehart? 

DH: I had asked him to invite me up to his house. I wanted to meet him off the set, only the two of us and talk. I had some ideas for the series. Richard graciously agreed. I went up there. We talked. We hit it off, he had a lot of the same ideas I had and a similar working style. Richard didn’t take to everyone, but he liked me; my enthusiasm, I guess. I did want to work with him. He taught me so much during those four years.

CR: Was Basehart aware of your admiration for his work?

DH: Not at first, but we found we could work together easily enough and then we did.

CR: What did you learn from Richard Basehart in terms of acting technique? 

DH: Richard had great concentration. At first, noise, a wrong line, any background distraction would throw me off. Nothing shook Richard. He was always camera-ready, knew his line reading. I wanted to be able to do that and after a while, I got better at tuning out the distractions. He made me work harder, like tennis with a much better partner. Richard pushed me to be as good as he was and some days I almost was.

By Herbert Shadrak

Richard Basehart may have been the greatest American actor ever. Certainly he was too accomplished a performer ever to be “just another movie star” – his unconventional good looks and astonishing versatility allowed him to convincingly portray murderers, heels and suicidal neurotics in a career that spanned 45 years, but he was equally effective at playing gentle souls, men of action (such as the intrepid U.S. intelligence agent in Decision Before Dawn), cowboys and the heroic Admiral Harriman Nelson in the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea science fiction series on ABC.

“Even today, Richard Basehart remains one of the great, unrecognized talents of post-war American films,” writes Mark Gross in Films in Review. “Possibly this is because he is neither conventionally handsome nor easily identifiable as a character type. Instead, he seems to become lost in his performances, belied by a surface calmness, with a subtlety underlined by a sense of abandon in his quest for realism.”

After six years knocking about Broadway, Ohio-born Basehart's breakthrough came in 1945 in The Hasty Heart, in which he was cast as a proud, dying Scottish soldier. Basehart won the 1945 New York Drama Critics Award for his realistic performance and was named the most promising newcomer of the season. Hollywood came calling, and Basehart was soon signed to a movie contract. Thus began a globe-trotting screen career that lasted until his death in 1984.

Basehart followed his cinematic debut in Repeat Performance – a 1947 “déjà-vu” thriller featuring Joan Leslie - with a supporting role in Cry Wolf (1947), an old dark house thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck, Errol Flynn and Geraldine Brooks. Basehart played Stanwyck’s younger husband, who mysteriously vanishes. 

As his Hollywood career took off, Basehart made every effort to avoid being typecast, although in his early noirs he seemed to favor parts in which he was of a villainous or conflicted nature. In preparing for his roles, Basehart spent hours by himself trying to shape the character. He would sit on the end of the couch in his living room and be so engrossed in the roles that he was completely oblivious to what was going on around him.

By Herbert Shadrak

In 1970, the charismatic actor Christopher Jones (then starring in David Lean’s epic Ryan’s Daughter) turned his back on movie stardom to lead a life of almost total anonymity. Today, Jones is a working artist who specializes in paintings with a classical antiquity theme and in portraits of Hollywood legends such as James Dean – to whom Jones once bore a striking resemblance.

Having studied at the Actors Studio and perfected his craft on episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Naked City, the extraordinarily handsome, Tennessee-born actor moved steadily up the Hollywood ladder through the late sixties. He starred in The Legend of Jesse James – a TV western that lasted through the 1965-66 season – and three B-pictures: the love story Chubasco (in which he appeared with then-wife Susan Strasberg); the sex romp Three in the Attic; and the cult movie satire Wild in the Streets, in which Jones plays Max Frost, the youngest-ever President of the United States, consigning over-30s to psychedelic concentration camps.

Jones photographed in 2008 by Greg Bryan.

Jones then traveled to Europe to star in three ‘A’ pictures – the rarely seen romance Brief Season; the spy thriller The Looking Glass War; and Ryan’s Daughter, in which he delivers a haunting performance as a shell-shocked English major posted to Ireland during the Troubles in 1915. And then, on the cusp of superstardom, Jones disappeared from movie screens. He didn’t make another film for 26 years. In 1996, Jones turned up in a cameo as a cool gangster wearing Ray-Bans in the black comedy Trigger Happy (also released as Mad Dog Time). Jones agreed to appear in the film as a favor to his old friend and Wild in the Streets co-star, actor-director Larry Bishop.

“It was no big deal, just something to do,” according to Jones, who – although he was quite memorable in his three-minute scene as a stylish hit man – hasn’t appeared in a film since. Not that he could have even if he’d wanted to, while slowly recovering from a serious health challenge. In November 1997, Jones suffered an almost fatal attack of perforated ulcers – similar to what killed his idol Rudolph Valentino.

So what is Jones, who is now 67, up to almost 40 years after his vanishing act?

“Chris is doing great,” says his business manager Sherry Dodd. “He is not going to have an operation (elective surgery to correct slight complications caused by the ulcer – Ed.). His vitality is up and he's feeling fine. He spends a lot of time with his children at his beach house. When he's in Hollywood, he stays with me in our place near the Sunset Strip and we are the closest of friends. He reads scripts when he's here and he says they are of interest, but he still contends he has no desire to return to acting. Directing maybe, if the right project comes along that he believes in. Chris is still an artist at heart, whether it's doing portraits or the Hollywood Legends series. We will be selling on eBay again soon or if we decide to do a new website. Chris is constantly getting requests for interviews and now he will only do them for money.”

Christopher Jones will always remain a fascinating footnote in Hollywood history… the actor who effortlessly achieved success in the film industry at a young age, whose Max Frost is the emblematic counterculture hero of the sixties – and then who opted for obscurity instead, choosing to give up showbiz and make his living as an artist. The reasons for his avoiding the limelight are the cause of endless speculation, much of it rather gloomy and sordid, but it could very well be that the man simply valued his privacy over stardom. It happens.

(Chris Jones invites comments from his fans. Write to him at ChrisJonesInc@aol.com)

By Herbert Shadrak

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 and Charles Winecoff’s Split 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. Strangdour”) 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 Patsy at 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 been in the 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 Royale” episode of Climax! 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.”  Bertolt Brecht didn’t want matinee idol good looks; rather he was drawn to faces off the street.  

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.  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.  

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.”) 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.