#and refusing that and being the hero is probably brainy's defining thing

[cyclone-rachel]

Pay the Asking Price

a Supergirl fanfic

chapter 1

Kara knew, regardless of who or what she found, that her life would change once she opened the pod.

Change even more than it had in the past year- because after becoming Supergirl, and learning to defend her city, she’d just stopped her first alien invasion. She’d managed to keep Myriad from killing almost everyone and neutralized Non, while J’onn had taken care of Indigo. She’d launched Fort Rozz back into space where it belonged, even risking her own life… and after almost dying, she figured she deserved a little bit of a break. She needed time to slow down, to process what she’d gone through and make sense of it all.

But after the party she and her family had thrown, of course there was something to disrupt it once more, and in this case it was another pod.

Another Kryptonian pod, to be specific, although when she did indeed open it and get a good look at the person inside, she knew its passenger was anything but Kryptonian.

“Oh my god.” She said, looking down at the unconscious Coluan.

J’onn landed a moment later, following her gaze and taking a step back once his eyes landed on what Kara was looking at.

“This… complicates things.” He said.

“Yeah, he couldn’t have landed at a worse time.” Kara agreed, looking down at his hands and trying not to imagine them squeezing around her throat. “But we still have to help him, don’t we?”

“Yes.” J’onn said. “He may be more of a threat to us alone- at least, once he wakes up, he’ll know he isn’t, and if he’s anything like Indigo he won’t kill us first.”

“He might not be anything like her, we don’t know.” Kara answered. “But I guess that can wait until he wakes up.”

J’onn nodded, and Kara lifted the alien into her arms.

“Follow me.” J’onn said, and she did, without question.

~

After casually breezing through the whole Oh hey, there’s a DEO building in the middle of the city that we never told you about talk, Kara was more than ready to see the DEO’s new guest, the man who fell to Earth.

He was still sleeping, hooked up to monitors and currently lacking a shirt after his other one- black, with three silver dots in an upside-down triangle- was taken off in favor of placing the electrodes for the monitors. Winn was already in the room by the time Kara and Alex arrived, J’onn soon following them.

“Well, at least we don’t have to figure out where he’s from.” Kara started, pacing around him. “But why would he have a Kryptonian pod?”

“Okay, you may know what kind of alien he is, but maybe elaborate for the audience at home?” Winn joked. “All I know is, as soon as he wakes up I’m not letting him get anywhere near this.”

He holds up his tablet, before pulling it close to his chest and crossing his arms over it protectively. “I just got this thing, I’m not about to risk it being hacked by some-“

“Hey, hey, we don’t even know if he is a Brainiac.” Alex said.

“That’s right, Indigo said that symbol signified the Coluans- that’s her people, Winn.” Kara answered.

“Duly noted.”

 “So he could be anyone.”

“Yeah. But, all we know right now is that he’s comatose, but his vitals are stable, and his breathing is normal. And I’m going to be running more tests on him until he wakes up.”

“Good work, Agent Danvers.” J’onn said. “Keep monitoring his condition, he still could be dangerous.”

Kara wanted to sigh- but then again, she knew he was right.

“So what do you suggest we do? Lock him up until we know for sure?”

“No.” Kara said immediately.

“You don’t have the authority to make that call.”

“Yeah, but I found him, and who knows what he’s actually like?” Kara answered. “He could be lonely and scared, just like me, and regardless of the planet he’s from he deserves to be treated like our guest for now. Okay?”

Alex and J’onn looked at her for a long while, then back to the unconscious man, before relenting when they looked at Kara again.

“Very well.”

“Alright. But, sir-“ Alex said, focusing on J’onn. “I would request that Winn help with the investigation. We need someone to analyze the pod’s telemetry, and Winn does read Kryptonian.”

“I also read Coluan!” Winn pointed out. “Although for the ship itself, Kryptonian is more relevant. But hey, maybe if he wakes up and can’t speak English, I could talk to him for you?”

“We’ll talk about that when we get there.” J’onn answered. “But if you want to prove your worth, Mr. Schott, find out something my team of highly-trained alien experts can’t.”

“Challenge accepted.”

“Let’s go.” J’onn said, Alex and Winn following him out- with Winn extending a hand toward Kara as he did.

“We’ll figure it out, Kara, I promise.” He said, as Alex and Kara walked out together, though Kara couldn’t help but take one more look at the Coluan, and hope he would wake up soon.

~

“I just invited Superman to visit our mystery guest.” Kara answered. “Fair warning, he might be…”

Kara coughed.

“Just, you know. This may surprise you.”

“Understood.” Clark said, as he followed J’onn. Alex and Kara joined them in the room, just soon enough to see the shock on Clark’s face.

“He landed on Earth last night, in a Kryptonian pod.” Kara explained. “We don’t know who he is.”

Clark could hardly stop the smile that was growing on his face, as he turned to her and answered, “I do.”

“Wait, you- you what?”

The brakes on Kara’s train of thought came to a screeching halt, as she stared at her cousin, who had pulled up a chair beside the Coluan and was currently gently brushing his hair back, whispering in his ear.

“I don’t think he can hear you.”

“Yeah, I know, but… there’s always a possibility.” He answered. “He’ll be okay. Hopefully before I leave, he’ll be awake and I can say hello to him.”

“You haven’t even told us who he is!”

“You used a quantum scan to determine his age, right?”

Kara sighed.

“First thing we did.”

“And did you X-ray vision him for foreign objects, like a cybernetic data core?”

“Clark…”

“Just making sure.”

“Fine, yes. He has a data core- no duh.”

“But will you tell me-“

“Okay!” Winn said, strolling in. “So, my handy-dandy translator just decrypted the pod’s data log. But…”

“But what?”

“Part of the data is missing.” He answered, holding up his tablet with a visual aid on it. “The data starts after he passes through some kind of disruption… but that can’t be all of it.”

“It probably isn’t.” Clark answered. “But it might’ve been destroyed while passing through the disruption, or he additionally encrypted it to keep it secret.”

“That’s… very specific.” Winn said, looking at him suspiciously. “How would you know?”

“Well, just to get things out in the open- we were friends.”

“What?” Kara asked. “You, and a-“

“A Brainiac? Yes.” Clark said. “But I didn’t know that at the time. How do I explain… you’ve been in the Fortress of Solitude, right?”

“Yes…”

“Did you see a ring there? All gold, with an L on it?”

“Yeah, but…”

“That ring comes from the future. The 30th century, to be precise- although the last time I visited, it was the 31st. Those who wear it are part of a superhero team, called the Legion of Super-Heroes- and, not to give many more spoilers, but they were inspired by you and me.”

“What?”

“I know, but I’ve seen our statues- they’re pretty impressive.”

“Oh my god, you went to the future? We have statues?”

“Yeah, when I was first starting out as Superman- you know, just casual saving lives, hadn’t even put on the tights and underwear yet- the Legion came and found me, in Smallville.” Clark answered. “They took me to their headquarters, and I trained with them. Learned from them, as they’d learned from me. It was… one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ll never forget it. Or…”

He looked down at the man again.

“Or him. Although, he’s a bit older than when I last saw him. Probably around your age, Kara.”

“So what’s his name?”

“Querl Dox.” Clark said, pronouncing it with care. “Brainiac 5- or, as his friends call him, Brainy. Which I did, because…”

“Right.” Kara answered.

“The others doubted me, at first. I didn’t exactly look like the Superman they so admired. But Brainy never stopped believing in me. We saved each other more times than I can count, and I know the whole Legion really helped me onto the path to becoming Superman, but Brainy… he’s my hero. And a good person. You can trust that he won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“Well, of course we can take your word for it.” Kara said.

“I should hope so.” Clark said. “Take care of him.”

“We will.”

“And if you have any questions, please ask.”

Winn looked down at Querl, before meeting Clark’s eyes again, nervously.

“Yeah. We will.”

“Alright then, I’ll leave him in your capable hands.” Clark said. “When he wakes up, let me know.”

“Will do.”

~

Kara sat by his bedside, after everything.

It was late at night, and Clark had already gone back to Metropolis, was already missing her. She was already missing him, too, but he eventually stopped texting, and she put her phone away to watch Querl as he slept.

“I know what it’s like to be a stranger on this planet.” She said. “Stranger to this time period, even. So when you wake up, I’ll be here for you. So you never know what it’s like to be alone.”

Suddenly, activity spiked on the monitors, and Querl sat up, breathing heavily.

[thisisheffner]

Pet Shop Boys: 'The acoustic guitar should be banned' | Music | The Guardian

The new Pet Shop Boys album is, they say, the third in a trilogy. Hotspot follows 2013’s Electric and 2016’s Super, all collaborations with producer Stuart Price, all examples of the duo’s return to “electronic purism” after a succession of albums where, as Neil Tennant puts it, they variously “pretended to be a rock band” (Release), “made a zany one with everything and the kitchen sink on it” (Yes) and “went to LA and made an album about being old” (Elysium).

“That was your big idea, being old,” says Tennant, nodding in the direction of his fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe, who is sitting alongside him on the sofa in a record company office in the City of London. “He explained that to our manager and she was absolutely aghast. She looked completely horrified.”

It is worth noting that in recent years the Pet Shop Boys have also written scores for Eisenstein’s 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin and a ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale (2011’s The Most Incredible Thing), as well as premiering A Man From the Future – a kind of pop oratorio based on the life of Alan Turing – at the Proms. They also provided the music for a theatrical adaptation of Stephen Frears’ film My Beautiful Laundrette and a one-woman Edinburgh festival show by actor Frances Barber, based on the character of Billie Trix, the washed-up pop star she played in the Pet Shop Boys’ 2001 musical Closer To Heaven. Its revival was also noticeably more successful than the critically savaged original production. “It was a very outrageous piece for 2001, loads of drugs in it, somebody dies,” notes Tennant. “Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s company produced it and I remember him saying: ‘Well, sorry guys, I guess it was a bit too much for everybody.’”

Set against this backdrop, the Electric/Super/Hotspot trilogy does seem like a return to what you might call Pet Shop Boys basics. They began their career in 1984, working with hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando, transforming the predominant sound of the era’s gay clubs into a very British and brainy brand of pop music, shot through with a streak of social comment so subtly done that people frequently missed the point entirely. Thirty years of the duo patiently explaining that Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) was a satire of 80s excess doesn’t seem to have dimmed TV documentary directors’ enthusiasm for playing it in the background during footage of yuppies shouting into enormous mobile phones or spraying champagne; 1987’s Shopping was a withering portrait of London consumerism between the Big Bang and Black Monday, so shrewdly drawn you could imagine a City boy of the era banging the wheel of his Ferrari and bellowing along, oblivious to its real intent.

A lot has changed since 1984, though. For one thing, the Pet Shop Boys have sold 100m records. But while the vast majority of their 80s contemporaries have long been consigned to the nostalgia circuit or vanished entirely – “down the dumper,” as Tennant memorably put it while working as a journalist on Smash Hits – the Pet Shop Boys have become a kind of curious national institution. Still close enough to the heart of pop that younger stars flock to work with them – Hotspot features Olly Alexander of Years & Years, who, Tennant dryly notes, “is of a different generation to us, sings in a different style, more R&B, whereas Chris always says I sing like Julie Andrews” – and yet sufficiently highbrow that all the ballets and oratorios and scores for silent films feel like a natural fit rather than an affectation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

The duo long ago reneged on their refusal to play gigs, although, as Tennant points out, his celebrated 80s line about how he “liked proving that we can’t cut it live” was meant as a joke, on account of their inability to make their grandiose plans for shows work financially – their first US tour was both a vast success and lost half a million pounds. Now, however, they are a reliably stadium-filling, festival-headlining act – a 25-date greatest hits tour of European arenas begins in May. It’s a state of affairs they seem to enjoy, but it’s not without its hiccups. “I announced I was going to retire,” sighs Tennant, “when we played a half-empty venue in Grimsby on my birthday in 2002.”

And yet here they are, in 2020, roughly where they were in 1984, occasional residents of Berlin (they own a flat in the city, its kitchen converted into a recording studio, complete with “a vocoder which we never use because I don’t know how to plug it in,” says Lowe), making music at least partly inspired by the city’s nightlife. They are regular visitors to its notoriously hedonistic techno mecca Berghain, although their approach to the club seems impressively genteel, as befits men in their 60s. “We go on Sunday lunchtimes,” smiles Tennant, “around 12 o’clock. We treat it as pre-lunch drinks – we go up to the Panorama Bar and have a glass of prosecco. You get the people who’ve been there all night, they’re absolutely twatted, but then there’s a fresh crowd coming in as well, and it’s a very interesting atmosphere. And it’s great to walk in from daylight on to the main dancefloor, which is completely dark, there’s just a kick drum playing four-to-the-floor, and it’s really, really exciting in an alienating way.”

If the duo’s penchant for satire seems less present on Hotspot, says Tennant, that’s because it was “siphoned off” on the 2019 EP Agenda, home to Give Stupidity a Chance and What Are We Going to Do About the Rich?, by some distance the angriest songs the Pet Shop Boys have ever recorded. “What was the reaction to them? Probably generally negative,” laughs Tennant. “I mean, if you’re doing something to wind people up and they get wound up, I suppose your job’s been done.”

In fact, a careworn song about the refugee crisis aside, the tone of Hotspot is often rather romantic. “Berlin’s quite a romantic place,” says Tennant. “People in Britain tend to think of Berlin, even now, as the wall and Bowie making ‘Heroes’. But it’s got 80 lakes in it, you can be in the countryside in 20 minutes, it’s such a beautiful place in the summer, you have pubs on the river. So that’s why I think it sounds warm and romantic.”

The duo are famously entertaining interviewees, Tennant’s background as a music journalist clear both in his theorising about “the discipline of the pop single” and an awareness of how things look in print. When talk turns to the current crop of earnest post-Ed Sheeran troubadours, he first, perhaps rashly, suggests: “I think the acoustic guitar should be banned, actually.” Then offers a headline for a feature based around that quote: “Pet Shop Boys Blast Lame Rock Rivals”.

Lowe, meanwhile, contrary to his public image – stony-faced and silent beneath an unending selection of preposterous hats – is drily funny about everything from his partner’s singing voice (“Neil is not from the gospel tradition, despite having been an altar boy”), to the Americanisation of British culture: “I can’t believe schools have started having prom dances. As if school isn’t bad enough anyway without a prom at the end of it. They never end well in films, do they? We’ve all seen Carrie.”

But nevertheless, an old-fashioned element of mystery and distance remains intact: what they do when they are not being the Pet Shop Boys remains largely unknown, their private lives off limits throughout their career. They don’t do social media, or rather they did, then reconsidered when they realised that it involved “interaction”, a word Tennant says with comic horror. “We were early adopters of Twitter,” says Lowe, “and early leavers. The only thing I liked about it was blocking people. I loved to block.”

“Chris,” smiles Tennant, “is the sort of person who, if he’d been a pop star in the 1970s, would have posted a turd to someone he didn’t like.”

They do feel a little out of place in the current pop climate’s obsession with authenticity and ordinariness (“authenticity is a style,” notes Tennant, “and it’s always the same style”), its lyrical penchant for what they waspishly term “narcissistic misery”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

“We’re always looking for euphoria and excitement in music,” he says, “that sort of feeling we got the first time we heard Bobby O’s records, or Helter Skelter by the Beatles, or even She Loves You, going right back to being a child. That euphoric thing came back in with the rave scene in the 80s, but it isn’t really at the core of pop music now. Its context is social media; social media has actually created and defined the form of popular music and I think, unfortunately, that takes it down the narcissistic misery route. It doesn’t have the importance it once had, and that’s been the case for quite a while. It’s become a facet of social media. You know, everything we do, there’s people working out how to edit it down to 10 seconds, literally everything. I wonder what would happen now if you released Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Then again, says Tennant, they never did fit in. “When we started off we really did think we were going to create our own world that might reference other things, like a novelist writing a series of novels set in a particular era or something like that, where we were characters. And when we did collaborations, we judged them very carefully. So our first collaboration was with Dusty Springfield [on 1987’s What Have I Done To Deserve This?]. Our label didn’t want us to work with her, they wanted us to work with Tina Turner or someone like that. I remember the director of EMI going: ‘I can get you Streisand!’ But” – he thumps the coffee table before him for emphasis – “we wanted Dusty. Then we worked with Liza Minnelli and that was sort of politely greeted with horror, but everyone went along with it and it worked, because it’s our world.”

Of Top of the Pops, he says: “We were never the kind of performers who were going to enter into it wholeheartedly. Chris established early on that we weren’t allowed to look thrilled to be there. Whenever the camera came over to us, he’d say: ‘Don’t look triumphant!’ But we used to quite enjoy Top of the Pops, you know, being glared at by some singer because you’d said something nasty about them in the press.” He laughs. “I always liked the way that British pop stars always hated each other. When I worked on Smash Hits, I remember the editor saying: ‘We should do a piece on Paul Weller, because he’ll slag everyone off.’ The feuds! Duran Duran and Spandau, Boy George and Pete Burns arguing about who had those sort of gay dreadlocks first.”

“I don’t think bands do that now,” nods Lowe. “When we tour, we’ve got this band, young musicians, and it’s so refreshing because they’re so nice. They feel part of a musical community, they all know each other, they play on each other’s records, they’re all linked in. It wasn’t like that when we were around.”

But, of course, they are still around. Their albums – if not their singles – are inevitably Top 10 hits and sprinkled with songs that rank alongside their best. The Billie Trix cabaret show, Musik, is about to transfer to London, and there are excited rumours abounding that they are playing Glastonbury this year – “which we can’t talk about, which is annoying” – after their guest spot on the Killers’ headline set in 2019.

“Making music, there is still a magic about going into a studio and finding that sort of euphoria and excitement of something new,” says Tennant. “There’s a magic to realising there’s nothing more you can add to something, it’s finished, and then judging its value or whatever. It’s a supremely enjoyable and satisfying career, and, you know, you can’t stop doing it. I mean, if you run out of ideas, that’s when you stop.”

“I’m quite looking forward to that actually,” nods Lowe. “Running out of ideas.” He grins. “Because that’s when you go and work with Brian Eno.”

Hotspot is out today

This content was originally published here.

[secondsightcinema]

“Acting is a ridiculous profession…” —notes on Peter Lorre

This post is part of the 2014 What a Character! blogathon. To see more, click graphic (above). 

“Acting is a ridiculous profession unless it is part of your very soul.”  —Peter Lorre

Even people who have never seen Peter Lorre in a movie know his nasal, dreamy voice and instantly recognizable bug-eyed face, a caricaturist’s dream, from cartoons and voice mimicry that continue to appear as the years go by—two vividly etched on my memory are the apoplectic cartoon chihuahua Ren (of Ren and Stimpy), who got his bulging eyes and his voice from Lorre, as did The Firesign Theatre’s character Rocky Rococo.

Lorre was born Laszlo Loewenstein in 1904 in Hungary and died in Los Angeles not quite 60 years and 79 films (and a lot of radio and TV) later. His phenomenal screen debut came via Fritz Lang’s M(1931), playing the child molester and murderer Hans Beckert, and the 27-year-old Lorre’s singular appearance and indelible performance burned him into the minds of both moviegoers and filmmakers as a monster capable of the most unspeakable horrors. This, along with his long-term morphine addiction, appear to have been his central tragedies. His huge success in M almost made inevitable the typecasting that kept Lorre, one of the finest actors of the century, from playing more than a fraction of the multitudes he contained. His last appearance on film was in Jerry Lewis’s The Patsy, a satire of Hollywood phoniness that Lorre, with his cordial hatred of the studio bosses whose failure of imagination kept him from the roles he fought so hard for, might well have approved. In between there were great films, good films, and stinkers, and while I cannot claim to have seen anywhere near all of them, I do feel safe in saying that he always added  something worthwhile—Lorre made no film worse, and a great many were better or even succeeded because of his contribution.

Lorre was born Laszlo Loewenstein in 1904 in Hungary and died in Los Angeles not quite 60 years and 79 films (and a lot of radio and TV) later. His phenomenal screen debut came via Fritz Lang’s M(1931), playing the child molester and murderer Hans Beckert, and the 27-year-old Lorre’s singular appearance and indelible performance burned him into the minds of both moviegoers and filmmakers as a monster capable of the most unspeakable horrors. This, along with his long-term morphine addiction, appear to have been his central tragedies. His huge success in M almost made inevitable the typecasting that kept Lorre, one of the finest actors of the century, from playing more than a fraction of the multitudes he contained. His last appearance on film was in Jerry Lewis’s The Patsy, a satire of Hollywood phoniness that Lorre, with his cordial hatred of the studio bosses whose failure of imagination kept him from the roles he fought so hard for, might well have approved. In between there were great films, good films, and stinkers, and while I cannot claim to have seen anywhere near all of them, I do feel safe in saying that he always added  something worthwhile—Lorre made no film worse, and a great many were better or even succeeded because of his contribution.

Lorre’s unique onscreen personality and delicacy as an actor could convey menace, madness, homicidal rage, and both sly wit and an extravagant sense of humor, and that was just in the typecast roles. But he knew he could do so much more. And in the rare instances when he got to play outside type, like Three Strangers, where he is decidedly offbeat, a gentle, sweet-tempered drunk who gets the girl, he proved he could do just about anything.

Like Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, Lorre was a great talent who was only partially understood by most of his audience. That is, Fats Waller was such an extraordinary entertainer, such a delightful and fabulous personality, that a lot of audiences probably didn’t notice that he was one of the greatest of stride pianists and a damned good composer. Back when I was growing up in the ’60s, Armstrong was known for “What a Wonderful World” and “Hello, Dolly!” rather than his stunning trumpet and vocal work from the ’20s and ’30s. It seems difficult for people to accommodate complexity, and most of the time when they’ve decided who you are, they simply don’t see anything else—they’re blind to it.

I think Lorre was, in this, like Waller and Armstrong—a great artist who is beloved, but only for a fraction of his gift.

If you’re curious about Lorre’s life and work hie yourself to Amazon or B&N or your local bookshop and pick up a copy of Stephen D. Youngkin’s authoritative, exhaustively researched The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre (University Press of Kentucky). Lorre presents a lot of interesting items for study, but time is short. So we’ll restrict this post to looking at two areas: how his career was shaped and a few  films in which he played atypical roles that allowed him to showcase the spectrum of his talents, such as The Mask of Dimitrios, Three Strangers, and The Constant Nymph.

One of Fritz Lang’s goals in M was to present the escalating madness and violence, the sense of a society at the edge of disintegration, that he saw in the daily papers.  Mass murders were occurring with shocking frequency in cities and towns across Germany, horrific crime sprees not by gangsters but by people who seemed utterly ordinary. In Lang’s previous crime films he had depicted master criminals, evil geniuses, but in M he made Hans Beckert as ordinary as the killers of the day. Beckert is no antisocial mastermind, he’s a pathetic dweeb—that’s Lang’s and his wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou’s innovation. But casting Lorre as Beckert was essential to the film’s success. From The Nation‘s review: “[Lorre] gives us an intuition of the conflict of will and desire such as we are accustomed to only in the great classic dramas when they are played by great tragic actors. And in the last scene…his wide-eyed, inarticulate defense is made the equivalent of those passages of rhetoric at the close of Greek or Elizabethan plays in which the hero himself is forced to admit his helplessness before the forces which have undone him. The modern psychopath, through Peter Lorre’s acting, attains to the dignity of the tragic hero. It does not matter that the forces are no longer on the outside. They are perhaps the more ruthless for being inside him. The moirae may be given different names by the doctors, the judges, and the audience, but they have lost none of their ancient inevitability.”

Youngkin says that in that final scene, “the dialogue itself…does not touch Lorre’s performance, which sealed his fate as an actor. Rawly emotional and physically racking, it is as exhausting to watch as it was to give. ‘If I play a pathological part,’ Lorre later admitted, ‘I put myself into this character until I begin to display his symptoms.’ He sweats, screams, pants, pleads, and squeals. His eyes bulge, his fingers clench, and his voice pitches toward an ecstatic frenzy.” Lang, famously autocratic on the set, shot that final scene in a marathon that began at 10 a.m. and finally ended at 1 a.m. after Lorre had actually fainted—the director finally had what he wanted, and he used the shot of Lorre’s collapse.

Such a tour de force debut is as often a curse as a blessing. Brilliant debuts not only create inflated expectations, they create a demand for more of the same. For writers, musicians, actors, painters—the more clearly defined you are in an audience’s mind, the less likely you’ll get a chance to branch out, try something new. The money guys don’t like to gamble: If you succeed as a mug, you’re probably going to play a lot of mugs (ask Cagney). And if you get pigeonholed just out of the gate, before you have a chance to get to know the industry and chart a course that’s consistent with what you want and can do, you may get swept along in the current and end up with a one-way ticket to Poverty Row… Stories like Myrna Loy’s, in which she managed to transition from playing exotic yellowface and bad-girl roles (Fu Manchu’s daughter) to playing impeccably respectable but still sexy (Nora Charles) are very rare.

In contrast to Lorre’s career-defining debut, Bogart’s career benefited from growing slowly through a series of appearances in films throughout the ’30s. He mostly (but not always) played bad guys, but even leading roles as villains in The Petrified Forest and High Sierra somehow didn’t fix him so firmly in the minds of the studio bosses that he couldn’t get a shot at playing Sam Spade. Audiences were familiar with him but not so much that they wouldn’t accept him in the part.

The Maltese Falcon may not have broken the bonds of Lorre’s typecasting, but it did rescue him from the downward spiral that typecasting creates—studios refuse to cast you outside your designated type, then grow stale on the type and refuse to cast you at all. Warner Bros. was not much interested in Lorre, but John Huston was: “Peter just seemed to me to be ideal for the part…. He had that international air about him. You never knew quite where he was from, although one did of course…. He had that clear combination of braininess and real innocence, and sophistication. You see that onscreen always. He’s always doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else. And that’s when he’s at his best.”

Huston also noted that some of Lorre’s finest touches were not apparent when they were shooting: “I’d often shoot a scene with Peter and find it quite satisfactory, nothing more…. But then I would see it on the screen in rushes and discover it to be far better than what I had perceived on the set. Some subtlety of expression was seen by the camera and recorded by the microphone that the naked eye and ear didn’t get. He’d be doing little things that the camera close on him would pick up that standing a few feet away you wouldn’t see. It was underplaying; it was a play that you would see if you were close to him, as a close-up, as a camera is close. Things would flicker there and burn up slightly, like a lamp, and then dim down, and come on again. You’re watching something as if it were in motion.”

Lorre said in 1962 that making Maltese Falcon was one of his happiest times, and that for years after, “we used to have a sort of stock company, an ensemble…It was a ball team…Each one of those people, whether it was Claude Rains or Sydney Greenstreet or Bogart, or so on, there is one quality about them in common that is quite hard to come by: You can’t teach it and that is to switch an audience from laughter to seriousness. We can do it at will, most people can’t.”

The Maltese Falcon also brought together the 37-year-old Lorre, a screen veteran, with 61-year-old stage actor Sydney Greenstreet in his first movie. Joel Cairo and Caspar Gutman don’t have a very substantial relationship, but there was an inevitability to the meeting and subsequent pairing of the two. They complemented each other so perfectly—Greenstreet’s girth and Lorre’s slight physique; Greenstreet’s rich, low purr and Lorre’s thinner nasal whine… Lorre drove Greenstreet around the bend on the set, having none of Greenstreet’s serious, detail-oriented professionalism. But when the cameras rolled it always turned out that Lorre had been yanking Greenstreet’s chain (he could never resist) and that Lorre knew the script backward and upside down.

I’m particularly fond of The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), adapted from Eric Ambler’s novel. As directed by Jean Negulesco, it is a tricky little noir thriller that starts in Istanbul and ends in Paris with several stops along the way (at least one in one of the multiple flashbacks). I like Lorre as Leyden, the Dutch mystery writer who becomes obsessed with the story of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a criminal whose ruthlessness and sheer nerve makes him seem a natural subject for Leyden’s next book. Greenstreet appears out of nowhere, looking to confirm Dimitrios’s death, and cultivates Leyden’s friendship by searching his room and pulling a gun on him. As Peterson (Greenstreet) often observes, “How little kindness there is in the world today…” It’s true the film occasionally loses its momentum in long dialogue scenes, but since all of them involve Lorre I’m happy, and as the film goes on Lorre and Greenstreet spend more and more time together, things just get better and better. Lorre functions as the audience, listening to the pieces of Dimitrios’s exploits and the wreckage left in his wake. Youngkin finds him wooden in this; I find him natural and reassuring—I would tell him anything.

And then there’s Three Strangers (1945), from a story by John Huston, also directed by Negulesco. Lorre saw it as an opportunity to play a romantic lead, and for once the studio let him have his way. He plays Johnny West, a petty thief and drunk with a gentle soul. The other two strangers, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Greenstreet, have stories of their own, all anchored by shared ownership of a sweepstakes ticket and an oath to a Chinese statue that is supposed to bring them what they desire. Fitzgerald is a respectable-looking horror, desperate and deceitful, manipulative and utterly solipsistic, and Greenstreet is a respectable-looking embezzler, as bad a lot as Fitzgerald. Only Lorre, the criminal and drunk, has any honor or decency. A nice girl falls for Johnny and moves heaven and earth to save him from the doom that seems to have been made just for him.

One more, though Lorre’s part mostly ended up on the cutting-room floor: The Constant Nymph(1943). This is one of my favorite movies these days. It has a hyper-romanticism that reminds me of my beloved Frank Borzage. The whole cast is fine, from stars Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, and Alexis Smith down to supporting cast including Dame May Whitty, Charles Coburn, and Lorre. Lorre’s Fritz doesn’t have much screen time but as always he finds exactly the right tone for the piece. You always enjoy his presence but he doesn’t suck all the air out of the room, chew scenery, or otherwise hog bandwidth.

Films like this demonstrate what Lorre could do when he was allowed out of his dungeon. Don’t get me wrong—the madmen and fiends he gave us are among the most memorable we will ever see, and that’s fine. But I can’t shake a sense of melancholy for him, imagining his frustration and sense of waste. Lorre left us an interesting catalogue of work, but I always wonder what we missed, what we might be talking about right now in a parallel universe where Lorre had been able to maneuver more easily in the studios. Perhaps he would have made disastrous choices… who knows?

It’s a mystery.

Note:

Quotations are from The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin. Buy a copy; it’s really good.

Also, The Films of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin, James Bigwood, and Ramond Cabana Jr., is a good resource, as is, to a lesser degree, Masters of Menace: Greenstreet and Lorre, by Ted Sennett

from Second Sight Cinema | http://ift.tt/2y6qf02 via http://ift.tt/1om9FS6