The Lost One: Peter Lorre's masterpiece
“Nothing that’s alive sleeps so deep that it can’t awake .. as long as its alive.”
The Lost One fell within, and later came to symbolize, a period of disillusionment in Peter Lorre's career. He returned to Germany tired of - as he called acting - "face-making", desperate to rediscover not just himself, but the land he left behind. The latter shunned attempts at decontextualization during this time - the classic realist Trümmerfilm, by sheer collective ignorance, having been eliminated in favor of nationalistically affirmative Heimatfilme that told Germans that it was okay to be so - while the former was in aching need of reinvigoration. Given said motivations, unsurprisingly tired, dark, and pessimistic is the end result.
In the film, Lorre plays Neumeister, a doctor attending to war victims in a refugee camp near the border of Poland. To his surprise, he is found by former colleague and Gestapo officer Hösch, who begs him for a hide-out and new identification, prompting a view in the past: Neumeister was once scientist Karl Rothe, a respectable working man turned murderer of his fiance after an espionage incident. Rather than pay for his crime, however, the state, at the behest of Hösch, covered the murder up, and Rothe, filled with guilt yet unable to atone for it, continued killing.
Rather than singling out individuals, Lorre - the director - points out how in a system predicated on control and surveillance, where each matter, be it of life or death, is a matter of the state, one cannot remain apolitical. Private life is inextricable from public life; neutral spaces are absent. What does a singular murder mean in a country that is producing them en masse?
Throughout the film passes from present to past not via strict monologue (as would be usual) but through conversation between Rothe and Hösch, the two as representatives of the individual and the state, the latter sometimes awake and coarsely active, sometimes slumbering. Further, past and present are linked through technique. Before the murder of his fiancee, Rothe lights a cigarette; Right after, the film transitions back to the present, where he extinguishes the match. The cigarette - usually a trademark object of Lorre - takes on meaning of eternality: eternality of his murderous tendencies: of an inability to break from himself. So, if Rothe's name change cannot dissolve his past - the cigarette remaining - one may, likewise, ask how the defeat of Nazi Germany so suddenly changed the ideologically indoctrinated minds of eight million NSDAP members?
The Lost One owes an obvious, yet only superficial, debt to Fritz Lang’s M. Both evidently deal with serial killers roaming the dusky streets of Germany, and both make use of similar techniques, but beyond, Lost One is rather Lorre’s commentary on M than a strict copy. If M, as Harun Farocki claims, prefigured fascism and served as a presentiment of Nazism, where murder and concomitant hysteria serve as impetus for controlling measurements, Lost One reconstructs life under Nazism, where murder has now been absorbed into the regular way of functioning. After all, as unfair as the kangaroo court was, Hans Becker paid for his crimes, whereas Dr. Rothe did not.
Additionally, The Lost One - if one focuses on its title, whose German variant “Der Verlorene” carries greater semantic significance here - is deeply reflexive, seeing M as the film that both made and ruined Lorre’s career by branding him with the image of the psycho, the very stench he cannot rid himself from even when taking on such noble professions as that of scientist or doctor. He forever remains the Triebtäter (sexual murderer). He forever remains lost, to a point where the ending of his character - the redemptive murder-suicide - becomes Lorre's ending too; a resignation to inevitability. He drops his cigarette one final time, and, atop train tracks, is purified under the wheels of progress.
Rather than misunderstanding Lorre, audiences understood him very well, too well perhaps, dismissing his film for coming too close to the truth, a truth which would see them having to accept responsibility, responsibility imposed on them by a middle European who never witnessed the atrocities he describes first hand. Instead, audiences preferred to curl up next to the warm escapism of Grün is die Heide, Heidi, and Sissi, ignorant monoliths against whom Lorre couldn’t hold a candle to. As autobiographer Stephen Youngkins wrote, “Like Rothe, he stood on the outside looking in, a stranger in what had become a strange land.”
Lorre left Hollywood a broken man - dissatisfied and drug-ridden - but returned in arguably worse condition. Retroactively respectable genre roles - Three Strangers, Black Angel, Mask of Dimitrios - became shoddy grotesqueries - Congo Express - that turned him from villain to joke. Der Verlorene was, then, perhaps not a defining moment - though a defining film - as much as it was a further nail in the coffin of a former prodigy.
I beheld many friends, and the friend I loved the most,
helplessly sink into the swamp
I pass by daily.
And a drowning was not over in a single morning.
Often it took
many weeks; this made it more terrible
And the memory of our long
agreeing talks about the swamp, which already
held so many
Powerless now I saw him leaning back
covered with leeches
in the shimmering
softly moving slime. Upon the sinking
face the ghastly
blissful smile.
Bertolt Brecht - The Swamp