Retrospektive 2018

The Face Behind the Mask

Robert Florey
USA 1941
69 min
V'18

My favorite Peter Lorre movie, and that’s saying a lot (And he’s the star too!). It’s brisk and unpredictable, always zigzagging from genre to genre. The tale starts out like Kafka’s Amerika, with a wide-eyed immigrant, our Lorre, on a liner cruising past the Statue of Liberty, on his way to unforeseeable opportunities in the West. Lorre plays the new American with a succession of acting styles that permute as rapidly as the film’s careening genres, which freely shift the storytelling cadences from coming-of-age narrative to crime film, romantic melodrama fairytale and even revenge legend, all the while defining a nation. It’s a B-movie wonder! (Guy Maddin)

With ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN

Credits
  • Peter Lorre - Roderick Raskolnikov
  • George E. Stone
  • Evelyn Keyes
  • Don Beddoe
  • John Tyrrell
  • Cy Schindell
  • Stanley Brown
  • Arthur Levinson
  • Allen Vincent based on plays by Thomas Edward O’Connel
  • Paul Jarrico
  • Franz Planer
  • Sidney Cutner
Columbia Pictures
35 mm
bw
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