But he certainly sustained the illusion with a remarkable grace

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) is a confection, but a curiously elegiac one. Nested within three frames of time like an especially complex mille-feuille (the pastry metaphors are impossible to avoid; there's a plot point with macarons), the story builds an extraordinary depth of remembrance around a main plot so elaborately zany, it enjoys a murder mystery, a prison break, and the trade secrets of the hotel business while still finding time for a funicular, a romance, some truly awful shag carpet, more than one chase scene, balalaikas, and the outbreak of World War II. There's a man blamed for murder right out of Hitchcock, but he did steal the pricelessly famous painting and he knows its value on the black market, too. There's more than one MacGuffin. The ideal soundbite for this film is "the Lubitsch touch with a lot more people saying 'fuck'." Wes Anderson isn't Ernst Lubitsch, of course, nor is he even Mel Brooks, but I didn't expect him even to contemplate addressing the historical shadows which fall just out of frame of the Republic of Zubrowska in 1932, the Grand Budapest Hotel itself perched like a pristine cake topper on a diagonal of mountains so painstakingly detailed, they can't be anything but models and mattes. It's all brightly colored and meticulously poised and centrally framed and sideways-tracked and scene slots neatly into scene as efficiently as the staff of the hotel in their daily procession and yet none of it is insubstantial; it is the always lost, always nostalgic past of elegance and civility and decadence and discretion and we know exactly when it came to a very sharp stop, because Zubrowska is subject to the same historical trends as its Mitteleuropean neighbors, Orsinia, Bandrika, and we remember what was happening there in the '30's, don't we. We meet the hotel for the first time in 1968, all Soviet-bloc slap-over of its Fabergé balconies and gilded elevator cages. Watching the movie flirt through genres with all its airy social slapstick and madcap anachronism is the process of—not recovering, because it's not coming back, but realizing what once was. The film knows there are some realities that no amount of retelling can make over into a great escape or a grand affair, black-and-white and fixed as newsreel footage. It knows also that some things are never gone out of the world so long as someone knows their story. We're told this point-blank, by the very structure at the start; it still manages to sneak up on the viewer somehow. And in between there is a lot of very funny dialogue, some surprising gore, and a performance I'm sorry Ralph Fiennes won't win anything for, because it is perfectly, heartfeltly artificial in a way that mostly went out with the Golden Age of Hollywood. There is nothing realistic about M. Gustave, but you recognize him instantly. There's some Powell and Pressburger in this movie, too—the historical look-back of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), the feverish projections of Black Narcissus (1947). Anton Walbrook wouldn't have played the concierge with his fastidious perfume and explosive profanity, but I have no doubt Gustave could have gotten front-row tickets to the Ballet Lermontov on the night.

(Some time after coming home, I realized that the film also reminded me of the children's opera Brundibár, which I saw at Yale in aaaagh 2006; I am still trying to parse quite why. I think it might be something about Adrian Brody's Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis in his black leather greatcoat and his moustache which he might as well have been twirling, confronting Gustave with high-school jock trash-talk and smashing a terrifically lesbian piece of degenerate art (if it's not Schiele, it's a great pastiche). He's not a stand-in—he can't be—but he recalls. There are two kinds of danger in this film: the kind that can be fooled and dodged, and history. I wasn't expecting the latter.)

That's two Wes Andersons in a row I've really, really liked. Maybe he's evolving.

This is developing into a very bad habit

It came to my attention tonight that we have now lived for fifty years in a world without Peter Lorre in it.

I find this almost incomprehensible, so here are some arguments against the irrefutable passage of time.

It is a disservice to Lorre to say that he was at his best when he was not playing horror, because some of his horrors are the best there are on film. If you have not seen M (1931) or Mad Love (1935), check out of this post right now and see what Netflix, YouTube, and the shelves of your local library will get you. The definitive moment of Hans Beckert is not the whistling or the trial, but the faces he makes in front of the mirror at home, trying on monstrosity. No matter how crazily Dr. Gogol's voice rises, his eyes never lose their mask-like distance, staring into a private heaven-hell. He blurs around the edges of the expressionist early noir Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) like an urban legend, materializing voice-first as if stealing into reality. Rewind a little and you can see him with phonetic English in the first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), a chain-smoking, impish anarchist with the eerie nonchalance of a child. If you see The Face Behind the Mask (1941) or The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) before I do, I'll try not to feel undue jealousy.

Three B-pictures gave Lorre the chance to stretch outside of his usual gallery of spooked and charming monsters: a mild-mannered novelist in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), a louche artist in The Verdict (1946), and a ne'er-do-well, fatalistic, honest-to-God romantic lead in Three Strangers (1946). I was about to warn that none of them exist on real DVD—I taped them off TCM in the days of cable and videocassettes—when to my temptation I discovered that I can get them from the Warner Archive. You might want to do that, especially if you like Sydney Greenstreet. While we're on that subject, if you haven't seen The Maltese Falcon (1941) or Casablanca (1942), look, is there an all-night cinema near you?

In the 1929 Volksbühne am Bülowplatz production of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen, 1891), Lorre played opposite Lotte Lenya. She's Ilse, a carefree dropout Bohemian; he's the anxious student Moritz, immer noch derselbe Angstmeier even after his death. Time machine, time machine, time machine.

One of my favorite scenes of Lorre's belongs to a movie I've never seen the rest of, because something like one print exists and it's in Germany: Was Frauen träumen (1933), where he's a bouncy little detective with a misplaced confidence in his mustache, trying to impress a beautiful thief with his rendition of "Ja, die Polizei" and getting his pockets picked for his troubles. I send it to people for their birthdays.

And in 1941 (although it wasn't released until 1944, because they had to wait for the play to finish its run on Broadway) he played the part in which I saw him for the first time and fell in love. Quoting my cousins and B. in 2006, when I showed them Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace: when the most sensible character onscreen is played by Peter Lorre, everybody's in trouble.

We're working from a limited definition of "sensible," admittedly: a drunken plastic surgeon with all the moral fiber of a milkshake, hopelessly in thrall to a man he accidentally gave Boris Karloff's face to, Dr. Einstein is a person to trust with your liquor cabinet only if you're tired of it and your life only if Johnny's not around. Aside from Elaine, however—whom the film might as well have kept offscreen as a MacGuffin—he's about the only person in the Brewster household with anything resembling a grasp on the normal workings of the world, which makes him in some appalling and delightful way the closest thing the film has to a voice of reason. To watch him frantically trying to persuade Mortimer to leave the house before his homicidal brother gets back is a simultaneous exercise in the uncrackable composure of Cary Grant and all the ways Peter Lorre can find to lose his, clasping his hands, clutching his hair, jettisoning English for a string of incredulous German: "Tell me, don't those plays you see all the time teach you anything?" He's so agitated and earnest that for years I felt betrayed when moments later he's assisting in the trussing-up of Mortimer, the theater critic having in fact failed to learn anything from even the dumbest murder mystery—Lorre, you should have been stronger than that! Dr. Einstein isn't, of course. Folding like a damp rag is one of his defining traits; Raymond Massey's Jonathan relies on and relishes it. It's a little too late to dissolve our partnership. Lorre went through several changes of weight over the course of his life and for Arsenic and Old Lace he's in unusually elfin mode, his slight frame and delicate face—wincing, flickering, always those huge, beseeching eyes—the perfect visual foil for Massey's craggy, cadaverous six foot several. He's younger than the character as written, too, which creates a curiously adolescent effect, one of those small, self-protective wrasses tagging along after the scariest boy in school. (Lorre was born in 1904, but Dr. Einstein got his degree from Heidelberg in 1919. Maybe he was precocious.) He's not too scared to snicker his head off when he discovers his partner's murder record challenged by the unlikeliest of contenders, though, and the audience is right there with him. He's got our sympathy and it pays off. That final little nervous twitch of a smile. He gets a happier ending than the cab driver.

(Incidentally, I never knew Arsenic and Old Lace was a Halloween movie until I saw it on DVD. My childhood copy was taped off the television and missing the first five minutes; it picked up with Aunt Abby and the Reverend Harper in the parlor, skipping the pumpkins-and-cauldrons credits and the invented scenes with the baseball game and the marriage license. I don't think it suffered. derspatchel and I made a point of watching it for Halloween this year anyway.)

I don't have time for more. We're catching a train to New York City tomorrow morning at eight, meaning I have to be awake by six at the latest; I need to shower and stop talking about actors who've been dead since my mother was in college. Just for now.

Well—bon voyage.