Norma Desmond be damned. They had voices then, too.

The sepulchral whine that alternately registered mystery, mirth, and mayhem has surely become part of the culture. Do the voice-as anybody can render a recognizable facsimile-and the smile of the listener widens. The script for GODSPELL instructs the actor to use a Peter Lorre or Bela Lugosi imitation to render the line, "And so angry was the master that he condemned the man to torture until he could pay the debt in full," and the choice is inevitably Lorre. Truth is, he had just as recognizable a face and form to match. Peter Lorre was a package deal-a true Golden Age original that Hollywood didn't really know what to do with.

His career was one of defining firsts and lasts; first impressions leading to terribly long-lasting ones, that is. Born beneath Dracula's Carpathian mountains in Hungary, Laszlo Loewenstein caught the acting bug as a teen and deliberately got himself fired from the bank clerk job he promised his father he'd take-only so he could say he made good on the

intent to try-and announced to the family that he was going to pursue the dramatic arts full-time. He began as a professional clapper-planted in the audience of a Vienna theatre by management to assure a standing ovation night after night.

The first of his own many fateful career firsts came when he achieved acclaim for hauntingly playing the sexually-frustrated soldier boy belittled by his comrades in Bertolt Brecht's Berlin production of the controversial play PIONIERE IN INGOLSTADT (1929). He followed this by capturing the tormented psychology of a 14 year old boy so confused and frightened by his own sexual maturation that suicide seems the only way to deal with it in FRUHLINGS ERWACHEN (SPRING'S AWAKENING - 1929), the very play which a visiting Fritz Lang caught in dress rehearsal at the behest of Peter's actress-wife Celia.

Lang saw something that evening in young Mr. Lorre, the strange, pudgy, little actor who wore his emotions as costume and struck peculiar chords in all who saw him live a part, not just play it. Lorre didn't believe Lang when the famous director told him he wanted him to star in his first talking film. Surely he wasn't the right type for the movies.

"M" changed all that. Lorre's first film brought him the kind of off-screen recognition an actor both yearns for and fears. Subsequently, his first English language film was for Alfred Hitchcock, who saw "M"and knew he had the right man to play his hired killer gnome in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934). His first American film then, while Columbia had him waiting on the sidelines at full salary and didn't know quite how to cast him, was a loaner to MGM to do MAD LOVE (1932), a classic horror movie that further ingrained Lorre as a specialist in creepy roles.

He did MAD LOVE on condition that he star in (and co-write)CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (1934), which turned out to be much too obvious a film given the meaty source material, so Hollywood stuck to the notion he was the stuff that horror films are made of. Unhappy with the typecasting and the sparsity of work, he initially seemed enthusiastic about his quirky casting as Japanese detective Mr. Moto in the 20th Century Fox series that churned out eight likable entries in just two years, but distraction quickly turned to dissatisfaction.

John Huston rescued him for a time by sensing, as did Lang before him, that what made Peter Lorre such a dynamic actor was the discontinuity between how he said what he said and how he looked when he said it. A Lorre reading inspired levels of interpretation, double-meanings, and dark subtexts codified with a cynic's wit. Untold secrets seemed to lie just behind those obtuse oculars of his.

Troubled by morphine addiction, marriages that resembled friendships more than love affairs, interesting projects with friend Brecht that never got off the ground, a career still shrouded by association with the horrific, and a lifelong struggle with extreme weight gains and losses, this gifted, intelligent actor--whose private obsessions included the study of abnormal psychology--eventually resigned himself to becoming the Peter Lorre that the movies had fashioned for him from the very start. He was, in the end (at age 59), a very unhappy man. Perhaps apocryphal, the story goes that among the weird fan letters addressed to Mr. Lorre came this one from a female admirer: "Dear Master, I would love to be tortured by you." To which Lorre scribed back: "My dear, you have been tortured enough by going to see my pictures."

Here follows my Top Five Lorre Films, with due respect afforded his work in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), the underrated THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941), the classic CASABLANCA (1942), the only film he ever directed--the strange DER VERLORENE (1951), and the sharply offbeat BEAT THE DEVIL (1954):

M (1931): This was the one. Lorre embodies child murderer HansBeckert, and the world recoiled at their first look into the face of a pasty white pedophile. Unable to foist the disturbing image off on the supernatural imaginings of film director Fritz Lang, the moviegoing public met a real-life monster and watched as the police laboriously pieced together his demented crimes. Lang's film is a masterpiece, slowed today only slightly by the methodical investigation of the law, but coming to a terrific climax as the criminal world turns in on itself and tries and convicts the imp responsible for so monstrous a perversion. Lorre's fleshy face, bulging eyes, and tiny bulk physicalize an evil unspeakably real and his screaming for mercy because "I can't help myself!" even manages to evoke complex sympathy. His first film had as good as branded the actor an expert at deviants as did the chalky "M" planted on his character's overcoat.

MAD LOVE (1935): One of MGM's rare entries in the horror field so dominated by Universal Pictures, this genre classic was directed with great gothic gusto by legendary cameraman Karl Freund. Lorre's very round bald-head only accentuates the smooth white bulges of his eyeballs as he essays the role of mad surgeon Dr. Gogol, whose obsession with an actress in the local Grand Guignol incites morbid fixations on her wax replica and results in his grafting the hands of a murderer onto her pianist husband following an accident. Lorre achieves career-high sheer lunacy during the sequence where he claims to be the murderer who has had his head sewn on another body and has come to reclaim his hands, and the film achieves architecturally-designed frames of surreal beauty before reaching its unrestrained finish.

SECRET AGENT (1936): Lorre steals the show in his supporting role as the "hairless Mexican" in Alfred Hitchcock's immensely entertaining British thriller starring John Gielgud as Somerset Maugham's Richard Ashenden. The cast is first-rate--even if the mystery isn't--and Hitchcock's blackhumor laces through much of the film. Lorre is the shifty-eyed professional killer whose peculiarities in speech and demeanor are a constant source of twisted amusement, such as when he honestly reports after being caught in the church rafters whilst the bells are ringing that "I am still blind in this ear."

THE MALTESE FALCON (1941): Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade is a cold and sober dick, thus first-time director John Huston must rely on editing to give the early portion of his film spark. No need once the gardenia-scented card presages the entrance of Joel Cairo. Lorre's fastidious fem inoculates the film with energy, brings it to life. Next time you see it, watch how Lorre has uncanny control of and acts with every muscle of his face--independently: his eyebrows raise, his entire scalp shifts down,his ears flare back. Cairo is a great character role--quite the obvious Hollywood homosexual--and just listen to how Sam berates him with a barking order of domination: "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it!"

Too bad the Fatman takes over in the film's last third, though Cairo's spitting outburst that segues into a fit of whimpering aurally provides the climax for the Falcon's betrayal.

THE RAVEN (1963): By the time Peter Lorre was doing films for Roger Corman at American International Pictures in the early 60s, he was a bloated bogeyman whose trademark facial resign turned to sagging indifference. He was, too, a man who all his life loved to play practical jokes and enjoyed telling bawdy stories and cracking up the cast and crew. He'd also become fearless about playing with a script and would never give the same reading twice. As the squawking, egocentric, amateur sorcerer Dr. Bedlo, Lorre plays the horror-comedy to the hilt, wildly mugging, gesticulating, and shouting at son Jack Nicholson to "shut your mouth!" Karloff wasn't sure what to make of it all, but co-star Vincent Price knew what Peter wasup to and played right along. Lorre improvised left and right, and the results are hilarious, from his extemporized comment to Price that the family crypt must be a "hard place to keep clean, huh?" to his priceless mumblings while searching for a cloak to wear on the trip up to Karloff's castle. It may not qualify as a glamorous end to another near-great career, but it's an undeniably lively reel from one of the film world's irreplaceables.