McDevitt and Juan offer five pages of "their impressions" on this film in their book A Year of Hitchcock. Although it includes a picture of Peter Lorre, they don't mention anything he actually does in the movie. Later in the chapter, the only thing they say about Lorre is that he didn't know English and had to memorize his lines phonetically. And yes, I would say that for someone who can't speak English, he's impressive. The problem with his part in this film, however, is that he simply has nothing to do. I am a huge Peter Lorre fan, and I like to watch his films. Unfortunately, he's in a few films, like this one, where he really doesn't have much to make him stand out. Lorre "stands out," of course, just by the way he looks and his presence on the screen. But damn it, that's not enough. His character needs something to do, too. In the 1956 remake with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, Hitchcock streamlines the story and makes it easier to...
The "first" Hitchcock film. As I'm reading through the Truffaut/Hitchcock book, I'm reminded that Hitchcock saw film as a visual medium. Maybe that's an obvious idea, but his point was that later, film would sort of forget that, and scenes would develop around people just finding different places to talk. I've definitely noticed this without ever putting it into words. It's probably why I don't like shows like Law and Order, for example, but when I think of other shows I do like, I can see how some of them are more "talk shows," so to speak, than shows fully utilizing the visual to drive a story. Why does that happen? Likely because it's easier to convey information through talking (and probably because it's cheaper?). For Hitchcock, he believed that the fewer title cards needed in a silent film, the better. The challenge was to convey everything the viewer needed to know through a look, or to find other visual ways to communicate th...