Just before starting as contract player at Warners (and all his best remembered Hollywood films), Peter Lorre was ‘jobbing’ at various studios, M-G-M, Republic, and here Columbia on this modest Horror programmer. As an enthusiastic naïf, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, his plans are literally burned to hell when a fire at his residential hotel leaves him with a face so ghastly no one will employ him in spite of his abilities with anything mechanical. Stopped from suicide by passing bum George E. Stone (excellent*), he finds a use for his talents in robbery, stealthily moving in & out of shops, vaults, warehouses, anything. Lorre’s once strict moral code crumbling in the face of rejection by decent society, only the underworld having any use for him. One exception: Evelyn Keyes, a blind costume jewelry maker who can’t see the hideous face or how Lorre gets around unnoticed by hiding himself (and his tortured soul) under a latex mask. But then the possibility of recovery with new plastic surgery techniques raise hopes and he tries to go ‘straight’ with disastrous results. The rest surprisingly bleak. Director Robert Florey must have talked a good game, his films never quite matching his ambitions after making his name on the experimental LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413, A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA/’28. His films don’t ‘swing.* But he holds this to just over an hour and gets a boost from cinematographer Franz Planer, still fairly new in town, but soon a regular for greats like Wyler, Zinnemann and Ophüls.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *More horror for Florey & Lorre over at Warners in THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS/’46. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-beast-with-five-fingers-1946.html
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Stone very much part of the criminal gang, yet not only does he receive no punishment, he’s rewarded! The Hollywood Production Code ‘raped in its sleep,’ as James Agee would soon put it.
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