The Lost One

The only directorial experience of the film noir legend: a shattering thriller about post-war Germany. Russian premiere of the restored version as part of the retrospective programme of the Festival of Singular Films.

Der Verlorene
1951, Peter Lorre

Germany
98 minutes, German with Russian subtitles

Starring: Peter Lorre, Karl John, Helmuth Rudolph, Johanna Hofer

A camp for displaced persons in West Germany in 1947. The camp’s only doctor, Neumeister, is run off his feet, and he is given a newly arrived refugee as his assistant, who calls himself Novak. The doctor is stunned: he knew Novak during the war in Hamburg in 1943, when both had different surnames, and one of them worked in a secret laboratory, and the other was a Gestapo agent and helped his friend conceal a horrific crime.

Shot from The Lost One, 1951

There is hardly another film that has foreshadowed fascism as exactly as M, and hardly another that has traced the remnants of fascism as exactly as Der Verlorene.

— Harun Farocki, film critic and director, The Double Face of Peter Lorre (1984)

It is rare that a film noir can boast such a rich, hopeless atmosphere of the end of time as The Lost One, the only directorial effort by actor Peter Lorre—one of the most colourful villains in cinema history, the star of M, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Post-war Germany is portrayed here as a purgatory, whose inhabitants can only repent for the sins of the past. As they repent, they open up the still unhealed abscesses of the brutal past in flashbacks, which almost entirely make up The Lost One.

Lorre not only plays one of his finest roles, but also stages the action with expressionist emphasis, making the play of light and shadow a reflection of the murky lives of Germans in the Nazi years. Unfortunately, Lorre’s attempt to study the trauma of evil met a hostile reaction: most German viewers in the early 1950s were trying to forget about their country’s shameful past, and the film was ignored. Lorre never directed again, and returned to Hollywood to play inveterate rascals.

The screening will begin with a brief speech by the curator in Russian. If you require interpretation into English, please request it at least three days in advance by emailing international@ges-2.org.

The film was featured in the competition of the Venice festival (1951).