Everyone has a favourite movie star, especially when they are young. Like the Ancient Romans, we get to choose amongst our Gods for that deity that suits us best. I had a whole galaxy of candidates, and there were those I liked—such as John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Janet Leigh; and those I disliked—especially Kirk Douglas despite the fact that he kept turning up in, and sometimes even produced, my very favourite films, and John Derek, Fred Astaire and anyone else that Rosely thought wonderful; and those I puzzled over—like Marilyn Monroe for obvious reasons that were yet to become clear to me, Charlie Chaplin who I always suspected was Adolf Hitler in disguise and Alfred Hitchcock who kept rolling onto the television screen and being very silly when I was sure his films and TV dramas were serious.
    But, given the enormous range I had to choose from, the one that my mind settled upon as outright favourite remains a puzzle to this day. He was a weedy little man with a sinister voice who only rarely got to play good guys. But any movie at all was riveting to me if it had Peter Lorre in it, whether it be a small part, or he played a monstrous villain and a weak-willed slimy character—just as long as he was there.
 “But from that day on—what anguish! And what obsessions—encouraged by the condition of your brain, gravely injured as it was and by your naturally nervous disposition!… Your one thought was to make your hands the hands of an artist and of a virtuous, upright man, to naturalise those interlopers, those refugees, those necessary parasites as Orlac’s hands! … You tormented them so as to make them lose all recollection of their former owner, to appropriate them to yourself and fashion them in the likeness of your own dead hands! You titivated them, you tried to get them in condition! Such expenses, my dear Monsieur! All that inconvenience! All that trouble!… And your gloves! You bought them yourself, on the quiet, because you needed a size larger than before! Those gloves from which, in solitude, you scratched the size in order to replace it with your own original 7… And those repulsive blond hairs that sprouted—and went on sprouting—from those terrible hands, despite your depilatory creams and your electrolysis—from those murderers hands that had stabbed a woman, an old man and a little girl…”
… “There is something you owe me.”
“What?… “
“Your hands!”
“My hands? … they’re yours? …”
“Your hands—are mine.”
At these words the unknown man took his hands out of his pockets. Using his teeth, he removed the blue linen gloves that covered them. They were metal hands, jointed: piteous orthopaedic devices.”….
    One of the very best of the early Peter Lorre horror films was Mad Love, the one about the concert pianist who has a terrible accident—train wreck—and has the hands of a murderer grafted on by an evil surgeon. The hands have a mind of their own, attacking others and eventually the pianist himself. It was based on a fairly good but completely unbelievable book called The Hands of Orlac, by Maurice Renard, and would have been nothing without Lorre. It turns out that the hands were framed. The author seemed very confused about whether the musical skills came from the fingers or the brain, not to mention murderous intent.
    Lorre’s first English speaking film was M, in which he played a child killer hunted by all sides of a community—the screen’s greatest depiction of a human sewer rat. He did a lot of horror movies in which he was the monster, and some unforgettable villains—the effeminate Joe Cairo in The Maltese Falcon is the most famous—and it took me a long time to like Casablanca because he got bumped off early (after a pivotal cameo). He made a long series in which he played the Chinese detective Mr Motto, and a succession of dramas in which he and the gross Sidney Greenstreet alternated as hero and villain. He played significant good guys in 20000 Leagues under the Sea, The Mask of Dimitrios and Passage to Marseilles.