The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre

Chapter 4. Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey

142 ❖ The LOst One 4 Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey In a company of fools a mental giant always sounds ridiculous. —Peter Lorre in Crack-Up I made the “Moto” series purposely. I wanted to get the flavor of M out of the cinema palate of the American fan. —Peter Lorre Lorre wanted to play comedy.20th Century–Fox,which hadaccepted him— and he it—on a trial basis, met the actor halfway with a dual role in an actionmelodrama . Director Malcolm St. Clair had reportedly read the screenplay for Crack-Up (1937) and then sketched his ideas of what the characters might look like. Following his drawings, the casting department came up with Lorre for the role of Colonel Gimpy, the apparently feeble-minded, bugle-blowing mascot of an airship factory.1 “Colonel Gimpy was a character worth any actor’s while,” explained Lorre.“He’s just this side of sinister, but real, with a sense of humor and a fanatical fidelity to his code. I studied the role very carefully before accepting it, as I wanted to be sure that it was not the type to horrify audiences.” Gimpy toots his horn, makes day and night owl faces—a bit of business added by Lorre—and roams the hangar spouting his own quirky version of Softly, Softly, Catchee Monkey ❖ 143 “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Hidden in the verbiage is a poetic wit that is discrepant with Gimpy’s reputation as a nitwit: “Madness . . . is a very common malady. Can it be that they are mad themselves who call me mad? If you only knew what was going on in this head of mind. If you only knew . . .” Behind closed doors, however, Gimpy trades giddy for grave when he assumes his true identity as master spy Baron Rudolf Maximilian Taggart,a coldblooded operative who bribes world-famous pilotAce Martin (Brian Donlevy) into stealing the blueprints for a newfangled airplane propeller. In the final scenes aboard a cracked-up airship, blown off course in a raging storm over theAtlantic,Gimpy and John P.Fleming (Ralph Morgan),whose company built the plane, race paper sailboats—again, Lorre’s own idea—in the flooded cockpit. With water rising, the self-exposed spy, the disillusionedin -love airplane manufacturer, and the double-crossing pilot—each a failure in his own way—chum up for a last smoke, three on a match. Crack-Up was, by all accounts, a weak entry in the single-feature circuit. Critics complained that the director had put Lorre on too short a lead, tugging him back into conventional stereotyping. More freedom, they argued, would have earned its own reward in a greater show of versatility. Hollywood had “not got within a mile yet of Mr. Lorre’s special quality,” reproved film critic C.A. Lejeune in the London Observer. “For that matter, as long as they go on taking carbon copies of ‘M’ indefinitely, each fainter and more derivative than the last one, I can’t see that they ever will.” If Fox had not handed Lorre a blank check, it at least had asked something new of him—comedy. Discharging a debt to his screen past and at the same time unleashing his comic instincts, Lorre’s dual role bore the stamp of his best performances. First as Gimpy, then as the Baron, he demonstrated his range, disjoining good and evil and ultimately absorbing them into a human whole in death. The studio pushed production of Crack-Up—compressing its schedule to eighteen days—enabling Lorre to check out early. On October 26 he hopped the“Chief” and headed to New York to begin rehearsals for Napoleon the First. Before leaving, however, he took time to file a “Certificate of Alien Claiming Residence in United States,” the next bureaucratic step toward becoming a citizen.Darryl F.Zanuck urged the actor to postpone his appearance on Broadway until he had made several pictures under the new agreement.2 No longer the babe in the woods who trustingly swallowed the sugarcoated promises of studio chiefs, Lorre said no and insisted on a clause that would allow him to remain with the play to its finish and to accept the title role in a possible film version, even if it were acquired by a rival studio. Unless Fox bought the rights 144 ❖ The LOst One to Napoleon, his contract gave him the option of indefinitely postponing his return to...