Der Verlorene part 1

Looking thin and drawn, the 47-year-old Lorre initially emerges, almost unnoticed, from a railroad crossing, after a locomotive passes (as it will three times throughout the film, like fate on rails). Dr. Rothe is an urbane and confident physician making the rounds in a refugee camp, ministering to his patients until a ghost from his past unpacks repressed crimes and tormented memories, destabilising his ordinary reality with film noir doubt. As darkly revelatory flashbacks expose to what murderous depths this detached research scientist fell (while enabled and protected by the intelligence service). Der Verlorene/The Lost One (1951 West Germany 98 mins) Prod Co: Arnold Pressburger Filmproduktion Prod: Heinz Abel, Arnold Pressburger Dir: Peter Lorre Scr: Peter Lorre, Axel Eggebrecht, Benno Vigny Phot: Vaclav Vich Art Dir: Franz Schroedter Ed: Carl Otto Bartning Mus: Willy Schmidt-Gentner Cast: Peter Lorre, Karl John, Helmut Rudolph, Renate Mannhardt, Johanna Hofer, Gisela Trowe, Lotte Rausch, Eva Ingeborg Scholz -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- He filled the room though he was very thin and fragile. I had never met a man with this radiation, this aura. - Actress Gisela Trowe on Peter Lorre This 10 part presentation is shown without subtitles as it was originally meant for the screen in Germany. More than half a century seems time enough to be able to look in historys rear-view mirror back to traumatised postwar Germany and Peter Lorres sole writing and directing credit. Lorres Der Verlorene is a brooding and fearless but little seen attempt to reconnect to his native soil (after his 18-year exile in Paris, London and Hollywood), but equally designed to jolt his homeland into an appreciation of the psychological brutalisation that had made the war possible. At the same time, Lorre sought to stimulate a depressed film industry still struggling to rise from the ashes of Nazi control. The film offered little consolation for postwar privations and psycho-social depression, the narrative now remains striking in its restraint, insidiously leading the audience to see the story as a metaphor of damaged national identity and gnawing collective guilt. Scripted with uncredited assistance from director Helmut Käutner, the plot was first nurtured as a variation on Guy de Maupassants story The Horla, but then took on the specifics of a crime story reported in Hamburg newspapers about a certain Dr. Karl Rothe who killed his former assistant and then stepped in front of a locomotive (Lorre even keeps the same name for his protagonist). Der Verlorene became a kind of orphan film, rejected at home and withheld from US release until 1984, twenty years after Lorres death. By keeping the film out of America, Lorre apparently sought to avoid unwelcome attention from the McCarthyist witch-hunt raging at the time, and which had driven his best friend Bertolt Brecht out of his wartime refuge in the United States after a single contentious, cigar-smoking appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Unlike of films of the Nazi era,with their giant red banners draped across town halls and black swastikas prominently displayed, Lorre uses no obvious decorative devices, hewing to an unusual abstraction. Here we see not a single outward sign of the Thousand Year Reich on screen, with not one mention of Der Führer or the Gestapo, and even the cratered rubble of blasted-out buildings figures only toward the films conclusion. Fascism made the social structure run backwards, pitching accomplished professional Rothe into the control of his loutish former underling Hösch and a condescending intelligence agent Winkler, both steeped in cynicism and corruption, mirroring the predicament faced by the German population at large (and indeed by Lorre himself). Initially respectful, after a few drinks Hösch turns loud and brutish, a stand-in for every arrogant Nazi who ever barked across the silver screen, and triggers Rothes downward spiral with humiliating revelations that his fiancée Inge has a track record with other men, including Hösch himself.