Peter Lorre Face Maker

Peter Lorre described himself as merely a 'face maker'. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang's M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre's screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre's career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.

Peter Lorre described himself as merely a 'face-maker.' His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives on the actor's career which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang's M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre's screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre's career was a complex negotiation between national and transnational identities, Hollywood filmmaking, and labor practices, the ownership of star images, and the mechanics of screen performance.

Hundreds of German-speaking film professionals took refuge in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, making a lasting contribution to American cinema. Hailing from Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine, as well as Germany, and including Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, these multicultural, multilingual writers and directors betrayed distinct cultural sensibilities in their art. Gerd Gemünden focuses on Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934), William Dieterle's The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943), Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1948), and Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (1951), engaging with issues of realism, auteurism, and genre while tracing the relationship between film and history, Hollywood politics and censorship, and exile and (re)migration.

Why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? This book explores its transformative potential historically across myriad cultures, particularly in relation to its ritual and mythmaking capacities, and its intersection with power, ideology and identity. All of these factors have a direct impact on mask-centric horror cinema: meanings, values and rituals associated with masks evolve and are updated in horror cinema to reflect new contexts, rendering the mask a persistent, meaningful and dynamic aspect of the genre’s iconography. This study debates horror cinema’s durability as a site for the potency of the mask’s broader symbolic power to be constantly re-explored, re-imagined and re-invented as an object of cross-cultural and ritual significance that existed long before the moving image culture of cinema.

This comprehensively revised, updated and significantly extended edition introduces German film history from its beginnings to the present day, covering key periods and movements including early and silent cinema, Weimar cinema, Nazi cinema, the New German Cinema, the Berlin School, the cinema of migration, and moving images in the digital era. Contributions by leading international scholars are grouped into sections that focus on genre; stars; authorship; film production, distribution and exhibition; theory and politics, including women's and queer cinema; and transnational connections. Spotlight articles within each section offer key case studies, including of individual films that illuminate larger histories (Heimat, Downfall, The Lives of Others, The Edge of Heaven and many more); stars from Ossi Oswalda and Hans Albers, to Hanna Schygulla and Nina Hoss; directors including F.W. Murnau, Walter Ruttmann, Wim Wenders and Helke Sander; and film theorists including Siegfried Kracauer and Béla Balázs. The volume provides a methodological template for the study of a national cinema in a transnational horizon.

This book chronicles the radio appearances of all prominent classic horror movie stars—Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and two dozen more, including “scream queens” like Fay Wray. It contains script excerpts from radio shows as well as material from narrated albums and music singles. Each star’s appearances are listed by show and air date, with descriptions of the subject matter.

The first full biography of this major actor draws upon more than 300 interviews, including conversations with directors Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Frank Capra, and Rouben Mamoulian, who speak candidly about Lorre, both the man and the actor.