Tuesdays with Lorre

[Note the highly misleading poster art. Hope never wears anything like he is pictured here, and Dorothy Lamour certainly never appears in a bathing suit. And I seriously have no friggin' idea what those other ladies are supposed to represent.] Bob Hope was, save for W. C. Fields, the greatest solo film comic of…

Following his cameo appearance in Irwin Allen’s craptastic The Story of Mankind (1957)—one of dozens of that movie’s ‘star’ turns—Peter Lorre became part of Allen’s stock company. We already examined Lorre’s negligible role in The Big Circus. This was followed a somewhat more substantial part in the movie Voyage to the Bottom of the…

Boy, on paper this should be fabulous. Just the fact that it co-stars Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre in their respective primes, in a film that features the two together onscreen for much of its length, should at the very least guarantee that it’s entertaining. Sadly, this isn’t the case. There’s a reason this…

Universal Spoiler Alert: Didn’t think too much of this film, so warning, spoilers throughout. Having already provided me with a DVD-R of the Peter Lorre vehicle Mask of Dimitrios, long-time FoJ Roger H., then kindly volunteered to burn me a copy of another Lorre flick, The Big Circus. Sadly, while Mask of Dimitrios is…

Well, I’ve been spoiled, so I was due for a comeuppance sooner or later. Lately I’ve been feasting on movies made during Peter Lorre’s best period, when he was a contract player at Warner Brothers. He didn’t star in many of these films; indeed, some of his roles were depressingly scant. Still, he was…

John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon is one the most perfectly cast films in movie history. To some extent or other, it permanently defined the image and career of each of its major players. This was especially true for the nearly 300 pound stage veteran Sidney Greenstreet, who in the picture made his…

Confidential Agent arrived rather late in the game for a war propaganda films (which is not meant at all negatively, by the way). It hit theaters in November of 1945, roughly six months after V-E Day. Perhaps because of this, or maybe just because it’s adapted from a Graham Green novel, the film is…

I’m hyper-sensitive to spoilers. In other words, things that other people—even professional critics—don’t think of as spoilers, I do. An obvious example is when people (or reviewers) mention a film has a “terrific twist ending.” Apparently most think as long as you don’t reveal the actual twist, it’s not a spoiler. Yet how can…

This was easily the most satisfying film I’ve watched so far in my Unseen Lorre Fest. Passage to Marseille was probably a better film (and certainly portions of it were markedly superior). Still, Lorre has a pretty juicy part in this one, is allowed to ham things up and thankfully receives a pretty decent…