He thought they looked like two soft-boiled eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth are to Julia Roberts and lips to Angelina Jolie, his bulging eyes were to Peter Lorre, his unavoidable calling card and a feature quite out of proportion with the norm. He featured in Looney Tunes more than once as a caricature - just two vast eyes and a menacing whine. Many adjectives have been applied to Lorre's eyes, but none is adequate to convey their peculiar intensity, the way they veered between kindness and madness, and the manner in which he made them protrude even further when he wrinkled his forehead and wiggled his ears, which he often did. Lorre, who enjoyed disconcerting strangers by staring them down, boasted that it was impossible to look into both his eyes at once. 'When I worked with actors I liked,' he reminisced, Humphrey Bogart being the chief example, 'I taught them how to act with me: "Just pick one eye and look at it. The camera will never know the difference."'

LRB 23 March 2006 | PDF Download