Peter Lorre: Face Maker, Constructing Stardom and Performance in Hollywood and Europe by Sarah Thomas (review)

A common lament about studio-era Hollywood is that actors' talents far exceeded the narrow and stereotypically determined repertoire of available roles. In a cogent new book, Sarah Thomas argues that complaints about typecasting often obscure the actual complexity and heterogeneity of actors' screen portrayals, and also deny the agency of Hollywood performers in negotiating their terms and patterns of employment. Thomas further suggests that the implicit juxtaposition of constrictive casting practices against actors' boundless potential reduplicates the rhetorical strategies of studio marketers, who sought to lend prestige and coherence to often-scattered and inconsistent film careers. Establishing a critical distance from industry discourse, Thomas highlights the discrepancy between actors' screen work and what she terms their "extra-filmic personas" (6), and she emphasizes the important function of trans-medial promotional outlets in the construction and management of Hollywood stardom.

Thomas' study focuses on the actor Peter Lorre, whose career path is often figured as a downward trajectory from artistic collaborations with Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang in Weimar Germany to uninspired 'B' movies in mid-century Hollywood—or, in her words, as "a tragically slow and inexorable slide towards mediocrity" (9). This lapsarian narrative, as she demonstrates, relies on a series of interlocking binaries: Europe and the United States, art and commerce, and theater and film. Thomas resolves to offer a more nuanced and unbiased portrait of Lorre's career, treating the actor equally as a "Hollywood performer" and a "European émigré working in Hollywood" (13). Her study examines Lorre's early work on the Central European stage (1922-1931); his performance in Lang's M (1931); his leading and supporting roles in Hollywood (1935-1941 and 1941-1946, respectively); his directorial effort in postwar Germany, Der Verlorene (1951); and his final American screen roles (1954-1964).

For Thomas, Lorre's career presents a case in which an actor's screen labor was eclipsed by a powerful and enduring promotional image. Lorre's "monstrously murderous" reputation (5), she contends, cannot be solely attributed to the actor's film work, which included disparate roles across a broad spectrum of genres. Rather, Lorre's persona was produced through extra-textual sources and trans-medial infrastructures that served to homogenize the actor's multifaceted and wide-ranging career. The final chapter of Thomas' book considers Lorre's appearances in alternative Hollywood-based media (e.g. radio, television), as well as caricatures of the actor's persona that proliferated in American popular culture beginning in the 1930s. Thomas' historical survey reveals that Lorre's promotional image was itself discontinuous and unstable, changing according to shifting marketing strategies and broader structural transformations in the film industry.

Throughout her study, Thomas argues that dominant critical paradigms have reproduced fixed conceptions of Lorre's career and devalued aspects of his screen work. Auteurist studies of the 1950s and 1960s retrospectively prioritized the creative agency of the director above that of the actor—a phenomenon especially discernible in the reception history of M, for which Lang gained almost exclusive recognition. Furthermore, in Thomas' view, scholars of national cinema have simplified the American careers of émigré figures and perpetuated a monolithic and static conception of Hollywood; she indicates that interpretations of Der Verlorene as an exilic work disregard the majority of Lorre's film career, overlooking both the actor's dynamic position in Hollywood and his visibility within American popular culture. Finally, Thomas contends that Dyerian theories of stardom reify the boundary between stars and other actors, thereby ignoring performers mainly recognizable for supporting roles or among niche audiences.

Whereas theories of stardom tend to view actors as "objectified commodity images" (12), Thomas writes, studies of screen acting attempt to restore agency and flexibility to film performers by concentrating on their role as creative laborers. (The tension between the two approaches interestingly recalls the mid-twentieth-century philosophical debate between Methodological Socialists and Individualists, as analyzed by Arthur Danto in "The Historical Individual.")⁴⁵ Thomas' own determination to foreground...