The program begins at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.
Daemen College is located at 4380 Main Street in Amherst, NY. Parking is available behind the Wick Center, as well as other locations on campus.
Peter Lorre was 26 when famed German director Fritz Lang cast him in the role of a serial child murderer who terrorizes Berlin and is finally brought to justice by the Underworld. It was a role that catapulted Lorre to fame, contracts with American movie studios, and a place in motion picture history.
But it wasn’t his first time before the movie cameras. It was his second.
Lorre’s first movie was a silent film called Die verschwundene Frau (The Missing Wife), released in 1929 through Österreichisches Filmindustrie and directed by Karl Leiter. Peter appeared in the small role of a patient visiting a dentist, and his participation in the film was a secret he took with him to the grave. He told no one – not his brothers, not Celia Lovsky, with whom he was living at the time, and not the many reporters who interviewed him over the years. It wasn’t until 1996, during the restoration of a nitrate print found in a Belgian archive that his first screen appearance was revealed.
Photos of Peter as the dental patient are included in Stephen D. Youngkin’s Lorre biography The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre. The Missing Wife is discussed in Chapter 1, “Facemaker”, while the production of M is chronicled in Chapter 2, “M is for Morphine”.
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