Mask of Dimitrios is the original film of a writer living out their stories. I discovered this film on TCM during a Peter Lorre phase (a perfectly normal phase for a young woman in her late teens) and was automatically interested because for once, the poor actor with the bug eyes was not playing a secondary character or the villain. He is the hero of this story and his character is the writer I’ll be focusing on.
The whole thing starts when mystery writer Cornelius Leyden (Lorre) is approached while on vacation in Istanbul by a man who is both a fan and a member of the local police. You find Leyden sitting alone at a party just watching the people and not engaging. I love this. He’s supposed to be a famous author, yet he has enough anonymity to still act the way most authors would act at a party. Then a conversation starts with Colonel Haki (Polish actor Kurt Katch . . . playing a Turkish man . . . Yes. Movie casting be messed) saying how much he’d like to write a book and Lorre looks a little like he want to escape right then and there. But Haki brings up the recent death of the infamous criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos and asks Leyden if he’s like to know more of the sake of his writing.
Peter Lorre and Kurt Katch. Image property of Warner Bros.
Leyden is eager, but discovers his first shattering of reality when Haki shows him Dimitrios’s corpse which had been found exposed to the elements on a beach. “It isn’t quite what I thought it would be,” he says uncomfortably as the death wounds are shown off. Despites his squeamishness at a real death, Leyden declares that Dimitrios would be a fantastic basis for a character and decides to track down more details of the man’s life for a new novel.
You know I love research so even in a film where the fictional writer must go through European records and interview unusual characters using charm he saved up for such occasions makes me happy. Lorre even dons glasses and pulls out all of the please and thank you’s of a man needing favors from other people. I try to imagine Lorre’s Casablanca character squealing, “ Reeeeek! Help me, Rick!” while wearing glasses and it really would have detracted from the scene. The research even takes him to meet his subject’s former girlfriend, a rather worn looking young woman named Irana Preveza (Faye Emerson) who paints a manipulative yet charming hired assassin in Dimitrios. The other characters add other political crimes to the criminal’s dossier. Leyden seems rather naive in finding nothing wrong in all of these spies and thieves telling him dangerous facts.
The character fits with how an author does not always match their subject matter. While Leyden write popular detective stories full of murder and mayhem, the writer is a soft-spoken, somewhat humorous person (although he always seems to be laughing at a in-joke with himself), who wishes there were kinder people in the world. He is also a rather overly logical fellow. Upon walking into a grand house, he go instantly to introduce himself to the cats. When a gun is waved at him, he grumbles that he’s tired and wants to go to bed.
My favorite quote in the whole film is when another character is shot, Lorre says like a bewildered child, “He was my friend. He wasn’t my friend, but he was a nice man.” This sums up the character well.
Enter Sydney Greenstreet as Mr. Peters, the character that will turn a research trip in a full blown mystery. Greenstreet and Lorre made many movies together, usually where they were both villains. In this case, Mr. Peters is a rather jolly smuggler who isn’t convinced that Dimitrios is dead and wants the writer’s help in tracking him down.
Most writers, especially of genres such as fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery, are not equipped to do what we put our characters through. If I had to face some of the monsters I put in my novels I would simply pee my pants and let it eat me. That’s a part of this movie. Leyden is presented as a little out of touch with reality and by the end he has to take charge and be brave. Also, when it is all over, he has to still write the novel he set out to do. After all, if you are put in mortal danger for a project it’s a good idea to finish it.
Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet as a strange duo. Property of Warner Bros.