6/26/1904 Peter Lorre slithers into the world

June 26, 1904.  Think how much poorer our genre would be without Peter Lorre, who was born on this date in Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia).  His first big success was starring as a serial killer in the Fritz Lang masterpiece M.  When the Nazis took over Germany in 1933 he got the hell out (as did Lang).  His first English language flick was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (the first version).  He learned most of his lines for that one phonetically.

Among the American movies in which he played criminals are Crime and Punishment, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca.  The last two also featured Sidney Greenstreet, and those two went on to make seven more movies together.

He also starred in a series of movies about John P. Marquand's Japanese spy/detective Mr. Moto, a role he came to despise.  One of my favorite performances was as the hilarious plastic surgeon Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace.

John Huston, who directed him in The Maltese Falcon, said  "He's always doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else."  A great skill for an actor.

5/21/1917 Perry Mason and Robert T. Ironside is born

May 21, 1917.  Raymond Burr was born on this date New Westminster, British Columbia, in Canada.  In the forties and fifties he played villains, mostly in noir films.  The most meorable of those parts was Jimmy Stewart's mysterious neighbor in Rear Window.

In 1956 Raymond Burr applied for the part of prosecutor Hamilton Burger in the TV version of Perry Mason.  Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the character, supposedly took one look at Burr and shouted "That's Perry Mason!"  The show ran until 1966.

A year later Burr was on NBC, starring in Ironside, as the San Francisco chief of detectives, crippled by a sniper bullet. That one ran for another eight years.

Other series followed but Burr didn't find success again until the 1980s when he made two dozen TV movies as that famous defense attorney.  Erle Stanley Gardner certainly recognized his characters when he saw them.