When
Lorre wasn't in front of the camera, he was often cooking up pranks on the set.
Among his favorites was taking an eyedropper dipped in water and using it to
put out Curtiz's cigarette whenever he'd leave one in an ashtray unattended -
anything to fluster the director. He once got the obsessive Claude Rains to
believe that he hadn't studied properly for a nonexistent scene that Lorre made
up. And Paul Henreid tells how Lorre managed to persuade the studio's sound
guys to wire the room in which Curtiz was known to have his afternoon trysts
with young actresses, as if taking a page from Captain Renault's lecherous
playbook, thus projecting the amorous sound track, as it were, over the set
speakers (his booming voice, heard throughout the corridors: "Oh yes, yes -oh
God, yes"). Although they do not appear in any scenes together, one of
Lorre's favorite partners in crime, Sidney Greenstreet, with whom he was paired
in more than half a dozen films at Warners, was generally at the ready to
assist in these schemes. In Hollywood Unseen, a recently published photo album,
there's a magnificent shot, snapped a year or two before Casablanca, of
Greenstreet dressed as Santa Claus and Lorre behind him wielding a baseball
bat, bulging eyes trained on his would-be target's head, looking determined to decapitate
Father Christmas.
?
It
seems somehow fitting that Greenstreet, The Maltese Falcon's "Fat
Man," was born in a town called Sandwich, in southeast England, in 1879. A
former touring member of Ben Greet's Shakespearean Repertory Company, he
enjoyed interrmittent success on the English and American stage before, at the
age of sixty-two, he crossed the Atlantic and shimmied his way into the studio
interiors at Warner Bros. Starting with The Maltese Falcon, he acted in a
staggering twenty-four films in eight years. "It has always been a
convention of the film industry," writes David Thomson, "to 'introduce'
potent new players. But few introductions have been as dramatic as that.
?
Noah
Isenberg "We'll Always Have Casablanca" (2017)
