peter lorre Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Okay, really this should be more of a top 100 list, so these seven are more "off the top of my head" than any kind of definitive selection. There are several kinds of Oscar snubs. There are talented actors, artists and filmmakers who have never been nominated, and others who have been nominated many times and never won. There are great films that received one or two nominations in minor categories (Vertigo, Singin' in the Rain) and great films that received none at all. The ones I've chosen here are the ones that, especially in retrospect, seem like the most obvious omissions.

1. Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (2001)
Watts did receive a nomination two years later for 21 Grams, though that was clearly a case of making up for this mistake. In 2001, no one gave a slyer or more canny performance, in any film, in any category. Watts not only plumbed the depths of her soul for material, but also stretched to two opposite extremes of the character's personality, making up the two parts of this great, enigmatic film. It was historically important that Halle Berry won the Oscar that year, but considering the other nominees: Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones's Diary), Sissy Spacek (In the Bedroom), Judi Dench (Iris) and Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge), Watts' snub is a real head-scratcher.

In a recent article for Cinematical, I wrote: "Too often, Asian-American actors are relegated to bit parts (the food delivery guy, gangster #3, mysterious prostitute) simply because of their race." Historically, there's another reason why Asian-American actors have not been cast in leading roles, even when the role is that of an Asian or Asian-American character: the "yellow face" factor, in which a non-Asian actor is cast as an Asian.

Playwright/actor David Henry Hwang has written a play with that title, which was inspired by the controversy that arose in the early 1990s when non-Asian actor Jonathan Pryce was cast as a Eurasian character in the original stage production of Miss Saigon. (Hwang's play opens shortly off-Broadway in New York.) Robert B. Ito wrote a biting article on the subject in Bright Lights Film Journal that gave historical context.

Philip W. Chung commented on the phenomenon last week in AsianWeek: "Often, these 'yellow face' performances [by non-Asian actors] both reinforced and embodied all the negative stereotypes -- funny accent, slanted eyes, buck teeth, and enough 'Orientalism' to send the yellow fever meter through the roof." Chung compiled a list of 25 "yellow face" film performances "that have arguably had the most impact on our cultural landscape." Last week's article counted down from #25 to #11.

Chung starts off his list with a recent example -- Christopher Walken in Balls of Fury -- and then stretches back to Richard Barthelmess in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919), which he says formed a "template for Hollywood's take on Asian men ... unrealistically noble, feminine and utterly asexual." Chung takes a fascinating skip through the decades and points out "yellow face" performances by Fisher Stevens (#20), Eddie Murphy (#18) and Peter Lorre (#13).

AsianWeek's Top 10 will be counted down this week. Who do you think should be included on the list?

"Mr [Peter] Lorre, with every physical handicap, can convince you of the goodness, the starved tenderness, of his vice-entangled souls. Those marbly pupils in the pasty spherical face are like the eye-pieces of a microscope, through which you can see laid flat on the slide the entangled mind of a man: love and lust, nobility and perversity, hatred of itself and despair, jumping out of the jelly." That's how novelist Graham Greene put it; Charlie Chaplin made it easier: "Lorre is the best actor alive." This was in 1935, and Lorre had just made his first American film. Karl Freund's Mad Love, less than 70 minute long, is now out on the recently released six-film Hollywood Legends of Horror pack; some other Halloween goodies bundled in include Tod Browning's Mark of the Vampire, and the quite unsettling Devil Doll, starring Lionel Barrymore.

Mad Love is the prize in the collection. It's a bewildering story, beginning at Paris's "Le Theatre du Horreurs": Obviously Le Theatre du Grand Guignol of Montmarte. (Since the namesake Guignol is a puppet, Jigsaw's merry adventures in Saw III are all the more in this Parisian theater's tradition of staging torture, mutilation and grisly death.) The genius surgeon Gogol (Lorre) is also the worst kind of fanboy, lurking at every show. With his huge bald head, framed with a rich fur collar, he looks like a lecherous wingless vulture. Roosting with the rest of the gorehounds at Le Theatre, he waits for the performance of the woman he loves.