Actor · 1904–1964

Peter Lorre

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

Arsenic and Old Lace

Frank Capra · 1944

Frank Capra’s 1944 adaptation of Joseph Kesselring’s play is a tightly wound black comedy set over one Halloween day in a Brooklyn house where two elderly sisters poison lonely bachelors, their delusional nephew buries the bodies, and their theatre-critic nephew tries to contain the chaos. Starring Cary Grant, Josephine Hull and Raymond Massey, it prioritises rhythmic precision over emotional depth, using studio-era craft to sustain a high-wire act of escalating absurdity.

13:00

M

Fritz Lang · 1931

Fritz Lang’s 1931 German thriller M follows the parallel manhunts for a child murderer by Berlin’s police and criminal underworld. Using sound innovatively — especially Edvard Grieg’s 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' as a leitmotif — and avoiding on-screen violence, it treats crime as a systemic rupture. Peter Lorre stars as Hans Beckert; Fritz Arno Wagner shot it for Nero-Film. Widely regarded as a landmark of procedural and sound cinema, it remains austere, precise, and morally unresolved.

13:00

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Alfred Hitchcock · 1934

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 British thriller follows a couple who uncover an assassination plot while on holiday in Switzerland, then race to stop it in London — all without police help. Built on tight pacing, precise editing, and Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds Cantata, it prioritises cause-and-effect over psychology, domestic stakes over geopolitical spectacle. Though leaner and less polished than Hitchcock’s later work, its structural rigour and unwavering focus make it a masterclass in economical suspense.

13:00

Casablanca

Michael Curtiz · 1942

A 1942 Warner Bros. romantic drama set in Vichy-controlled Casablanca, where American expatriate Rick Blaine must choose between rekindling a wartime romance with Ilsa Lund and helping her husband, resistance leader Victor Laszlo, escape to continue fighting the Nazis. Directed by Michael Curtiz, written by Julius and Philip Epstein, Howard Koch and Casey Robinson, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, it is a tightly constructed studio picture whose enduring power lies in its moral economy, disciplined craft and refusal to separate personal longing from political consequence.

13:00

The Maltese Falcon

John Huston · 1941

John Huston’s 1941 debut adapts Dashiell Hammett’s novel with surgical fidelity: low-key lighting, unadorned dialogue, and performances that treat deception as craft. Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade operates by self-imposed rules, not ethics, and the pursuit of a jewel-encrusted falcon reveals not desire but the architecture of betrayal. Made for $300,000 on the Warner Bros. lot, it endures not as myth but as method — a blueprint for how to build tension without spectacle, and meaning without explanation.