The Team That Could Do No Wrong
Greenstreet-Lorre Together For A Last Time in The Verdict (1946)
A masterpiece if your thing is Sydney
Greenstreet and Peter Lorre framed in gaslight. I'd
watch them read table menus for the ninety minutes involved, which at
times seems extent of action in The Verdict, a leisure stride fans
would want no other way. Greenstreet/Lorre were about byplay and contrast
of style/appearance, a triumph of character men bending a star system to their unique measure. Greenstreet in an Inverness
cape looks like three guys walking astride, his voice an instrument that plays
pure pleasure. Lorre too, of course, who was always best when bent, even if slightly. Their teamings were like Burbank doing Karloff/Lugosi on bigger budget
terms, the pair fortunate they weren't typed to horror subjects and so able
to reach mainstream patronage. "Mystery" could be creepy, but not horrific,
with always a rational explanation for what happens. That was firm foundation
of thrillers WB did with Greenstreet/Lorre.
You could turn off sound and derive scares off
fog-bound setting, The Verdict not unlike Fox's The Lodger for tension the
equal of chillers done elsewhere. New-to-directing-features Don Siegel
was given The Verdict for Warner initiation. He said in a fine memoir that the
script was weak and the picture dull, both of which you could reasonably argue,
but Siegel was assessing The Verdict from '46 perspective, not in rose-hue
terms on which we now approach it. Production was against backdrop of a
violent studio strike that required Siegel to literally fight his way into
daily work, a struggle to duck chicanery by J.L. and
underlings always after something for nothing from creative staff. A Siegel
Film, published in 1996, gives vivid recall to harsh reality of studio life
during what we call a Golden Era. Read this book and understand why Siegel was
unsentimental about The Verdict and other shows we treasure. He had to live
through making them.
I enjoyed "The Verdict", in large part for how the two stars mess with your expectations. Greenstreet is a brilliant police inspector, his career ruined by the execution of an innocent man. Lorre, playing younger than usual, is an artist who reveres him as a father figure. Lorre's character is almost a romantic juvenile, struggling to emulate his hardened idol while turning boyish with a pretty suspect.
ReplyDeleteThe plot centers on a locked-room murder, but the real mystery is whether Greenstreet and Lorre are really playing against type, or whether one or both is going to suddenly unmask. A decade earlier they might have tweaked a few things and made them Warner's edgy answer to Rathbone and Bruce.
I liked this a lot better than "Mask of Dimitrios", where out-of-his-depth writer Lorre traces an international criminal and falls in with Greenstreet, a one-time accomplice of the man. The story felt watery, perhaps the victim of Production Code edicts.
That rational explanation business ruins the otherwise superb Lorre film THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS. Thanks again. I will be taking a look at this one.
ReplyDeleteCount me as a HUGE fan of the Greenstreet-Lorre pairings. I especially like those films – like The Verdict, Three Strangers and Mask of Demetrious – where they are the stars, and not subordinate to a more traditional star player. What I love about them is that the are such an anomaly to the studio system; as you say, outside of horror films, character men rarely carry the day. It’s one of the things I like the most about Warners in the Forties (like Paramount in the Thirties) – they were willing to go quirky and see how it played.
ReplyDeleteI miss actors like Greenstreet and Lorre. We are impoverished by our vanilla, interchangeable “stars” of today….