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| Peter Lorre, from the trailer for Mad Love |
BOILED EGGS IN THE BEDROOM.
Before directing Gremlins, Piranha and The Howling, Joe Dante comprised, with Allan Arkush, the entire publicity staff of bargain basement producer Roger Corman. “We cut the trailers,” reminisced Dante. “We wrote the copy. We did the advertising. We sold the hell out of those films." Slogans he invented for T.N.T Jackson, a piece of Filipino chopsocky, included "T.N.T Jackson - She'll Put You In Traction", "This Hit Lady's Charms Will Break Both Your Arms" and "With That Dynamite Bod, She's A Jet Black Hit Squad." Among "Seat-Selling Slants" for cinema managers, the press book advised "Blow up local power stations, and leave a note saying 'T.N.T Jackson was here'."
In 2007, Dante celebrated the uncredited expertise of movie publicists by launching Trailers From Hell a website that invited friends and colleagues to add amusing and instructive commentaries to vintage previews, many of them for Dante’s special enthusiasms, science fiction and horror films. Now available on YouTube, these three-minute snippets exhumed many rightly forgotten turkeys and a few neglected gems.
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| Rick Baker |
The decision of creature creator Rick Baker to resurrect the trailer for the 1935 Mad Love, the first American film of Peter Lorre, provides a high point in the series. Driven out of Germany by the Nazi edict against Jewish artists, Lorre moved to London for The Man Who Knew Too Much with Hitchcock,then to Hollywood, where he hoped to interest Harry Cohn at Columbia in an updated Crime and Punishment, with himself as Raskolnikov.
Forewarned by Brave New World author and sometime screenwriter Aldous Huxley, who compared movie producers to chimpanzees, “agitated and infinitely distractable,” Lorre arrived with a simplified synopsis of the book, to which Cohn, who had heard of neither the novel nor Dostoievsky, paid little attention - until Lorre mentioned that it was out of copyright. With no need to bargain with a greedy author or agent, Cohn signed Lorre to a one-film deal, gave the project to director Josef von Sternberg, and, rather than have the actor twiddling his thumbs during pre-production, loaned him to MGM for a film to be directed by fellow refugee Karl Freund.
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| Karl Freund shooting The Mummy |
At Universal, Freund’s stately version of The Mummy with Boris Karloff had won praise for the cinematographer turned director, but status-conscious Louis B. Mayer was unimpressed. MGM didn’t make horror films – unless, that is, they fell into the category of Literature.
Among thousands of books and plays in MGM’s story department was The Hands of Orlac, by French writer Maurice Renard. Inspired by developments in psychoanalysis, it followed the fate of concert pianist Steven Orlac,whose hands are mangled in a train accident. Thanks to a brilliant surgeon, Doctor Gogol, he acquires the extremities of an executed criminal - with, he comes to believe, their former owner’s homicidal urges. Reality or delusion? We’re never entirely sure.
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| Frances Drake in the Grand Guignol. |
Not counting Renard, seven writers laboured to transform this sow’s ear into a silk purse for Lorre. They spiked his dialogue with quotes from Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning, and references to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Banishing the self-pitying Orlac to the wings, they turned the spotlight onto his actress wife Yvonne, who metamorphosed into a star of Paris’s Théâtre des Horreurs, inspired by the Théâtre du Grand Guignol. (Brainchild of a retired police prosecutor-turned-pulp writer, the tiny Grand Guignol presented only plays celebrating torture and violent death. Eyes were gouged out, faces pressed to red-hot stoves. Opened in 1897, it only closed in 1962, its imagined horrors no match for the headlines.)
Gogol, obscenely obsessed by Yvonne, attends every one of her performances. Alone in a private box, half his face in shadow, he all but salivates as she is tortured on the medieval rack. She begs medical help for her husband and he falls over himself to assist, using spare parts provided by Rollo, a notorious knife murderer, recently guillotined. Gogol gambles that gratitude will mellow into love, but when he steals a kiss at a backstage end-of-run party (its centerpiece, a large cake, is decorated with a model guillotine) Yvonne can’t hide her disgust. “I have conquered science,” wails Gogol in a cry familiar to nerds everywhere. “Why can't I conquer love?"
Orlac, crazed by the alien urges of his new hands, tries to investigates their donor, and the doctor sees a way to remove his competition. He laces himself into a grotesque costume that encloses him from neck to waist and, claiming to be Rollo, informs the traumatised musician that, in return for taking his hands, Gogol restored his severed head.
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| "...But Gogol sewed them back on again..." |
Lorre’s immoderate exhibition of expressionist acting, imported from the Berlin of Jessner, Piscator, Leni and Weine, had no parallel in the Hollywood of the day. The trailer for Mad Love reflects MGM’s awe and respect. It opens with a simple quote from Charlie Chaplin . He calls Lorre “the greatest living actor.” After that, we discover Lorre draped over an armchair, book and cigarette in hand (see picture at top), a Central Casting Great Dane crouched alertly at his side. Languidly he accepts a telephone call from a glamorous starlet who compliments him on his forthcoming debut as what the trailer calls “a new, a strange, a gifted personality.”
Sadly for Lorre, audiences found his baleful presence a little too new and strange. His appearance startled even Andre Sennwald, the normally unflappable critic of the New York Times. “Perhaps you have not yet made the acquaintance of Mr. Lorre.” he wrote. “Squat, moon-faced, with gross lips, serrated teeth and enormous round eyes which seem to hang out on his cheeks like eggs when he is gripped in his characteristic mood of wistful frustration. As if these striking natural endowments were not enough, his head has been shaved clean for the occasion, and his skull becomes an additional omen of evil in the morose shadows evoked for the photo-play.”
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| Lorre's eyes like eggs |
Mad Love was in trouble from the start. Freund, unable to relinquish the camera to cinematographer Greg Toland, later to shoot Citizen Kane, meddled in the lighting, to the exasperation of the studio producer. He would remain an important artisan in Hollywood but never direct another film.
Next to Lorre’s grandstand performance, his co-stars withered. Shots of Frances Drake as Yvonne standing next to the 160cm Lorre suggest she was chosen because, unlike most MGM actresses, she didn’t tower over him. The trailer assigns Colin Clive a single puzzled close-up as Orlac, and a reference to his role in Frankenstein,the most likely reason for his casting. Clive was an alcoholic in the last stages of tuberculosis. He barely needed to act, so convincing was his despair and desperation. At his funeral two years later, Lorre was a pallbearer.
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| Peter Lorre and Frances Drake |
Back at Columbia, Lorre completed a worthy but unremarkable Crime and Punishment with von Sternberg, but by then Mad Love, released first, had done its damage. Whatever MGM’s ambitions, it was still regarded as a horror film, and Lorre banished to the ghetto that housed all B-movie players. Despite roles as the effeminate Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon and doomed intriguer Ugarte in Casablanca, not to mention a series as Japanese detective Mr. Moto, he would never become a leading man. The pattern was already established that led inexorably to him dressed in a crow costume, obese and morphine-addicted, stooging for Vincent Price in Roger Corman’s The Raven. Of the downward spiral in his fortunes, Lorre joked morosely “All that anyone needs to imitate me is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice.” For his monument, look no further than Trailers From Hell.
Rick Baker’s on Mad Love can be seen here. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mad+love+trailers+from+hell
An excellent copy of the feature can be seen here.
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