Der Verlorene (1951)
Directed by Peter Lorre

Film Review

After an absence of 18 years, the actor Peter Lorre returned to his native Germany, intending to begin a career as a film director.  Since leaving his country in 1933, he had become an international star, appearing in around fifty films, including many Hollywood classics such as Casablanca (1942) and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).  For his 1951 directorial debut, Lorre could hardly have chosen a more relevant subject - a film that probes deeply into the German psyche and looks for some explanation for the madness that overtook his fellow countrymen in the previous decade.   Unfortunately, this was just about the least attractive subject for a contemporary German cinema audience; few German people wanted to be reminded of the Nazi nightmare they had just lived through.  The film, Der Verlorene, was a commercial disaster for Lorre and put a definitive end to his filmmaking ambitions.  He returned to Hollywood to resume his acting career, and his film was soon forgotten.   It resurfaced in the mid-1980s when it became available for release for the first time in the United States, twenty years after Lorre's death.

Der Verlorene is a disturbing yet strangely compelling film which, with its harsh lighting and stark use of shadows and silhouettes, clearly owes much to the expressionist films of the late 1920s, early 1930s.   Lorre stars in the film, playing a character which immediately calls to mind the child killer he portrayed so brilliantly in Fritz Lang's M (1930), the role that brought him instant celebrity.  The intensely brooding mood of the film, the use of the extended flashback and the moral ambiguity of its characters all show the influence of American film noir, which itself stemmed from the German expressionist tradition.  Lorre not only stars in the film, turning in another fine performance, but he also shows immense skill and originality in his direction.  His confined, minimalist approach has a darkness and existential bleakness that is strangely reminiscent of the films that Swedish director Ingmar Bergman would make later in the same decade.  On the strength of this film alone it is evident that Peter Lorre had the talent to become one of the leading post-war filmmakers in Germany.

Perhaps more than any German film made at the time or since, Der Verlorene comes closest to unravelling the mystery of the Nazi enigma, shedding light on how it was that ordinary human beings were driven to play an active part in one of the most heinous regimes in human history.   Dr Rothe, the Jekyll and Hyde character played with chilling conviction by Lorre, is a metaphor for the German people.  A deeply rooted respect for order and authority, coupled with a profound need for national identity, allowed fascism to thrive, whilst man's baser qualities - a lust for power and destruction - were the means by which the Nazi vision was to be realised.  Rothe is an ordinary, civilised man, until the day he persuades himself that it his duty to kill another human being.  After that he is, literally, a changed man.

What the film shows is that there is no such thing as an absolute morality.  One's view of what is right and wrong is determined by the prevailing circumstances.  The inner conflict that drives Lorre's character to the brink of insanity arises from this moral confusion.  He feels instinctively that he has done wrong by killing his fiancée, but the world around him persuades him otherwise, and he finds himself in a moral no man's land.  When one's moral compass is so badly broken, notions such as good and evil cease to have any meaning, and killing becomes as easy as breathing...

Film Synopsis

In the immediate aftermath of WWII, Dr Karl Neumeister works in a refugee camp, immunising displaced people in the ruins of a defeated Germany.   Introverted and dedicated to his work, he is perturbed when a man named Nowak is assigned to work alongside him.  It is not their first meeting.  During the war, Neumeister - then named Dr Rothe - was engaged on important research into immunology.   Nowak was his assistant, and a Gestapo agent.   When it was discovered that details of the research had found their way to London, Nowak informed Rothe that his fiancée was to blame and ordered him to put an end to the relationship.  Rothe duly obeyed - by strangling his beloved.  To protect Rothe, the German police arranged for the death to look like suicide, but Rothe found he had acquired a taste for killing...