Perhaps I saw Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M at a far too impressionable age, but was Peter Lorre ever better than in this role as a child murderer?

After he came to America, Hollywood never quite figured out what to do with him—they knew he was impossibly talented, but he was always cast as something too eccentric and foreign to take seriously—and often as comic relief. Often as a homosexual, too, or am I misremembering the clues that old movies would give? Certainly he was openly intended as such in The Maltese Falcon.

Anyway, in a conversation today I mentioned M, and it made me remember Lorre’s extraordinary performance as he delivers his final monologue:

But I—I can’t help myself—I have no control over this. This evil thing inside me, the fire, the voices, the torment! It’s there all the time—driving me to wander the streets, following me silently. . . . I can’t escape, I have to obey it, I have to run endless streets—I want to escape, to get away and I’m pursued by ghosts. . . . Who knows what its like to be me? How I’m forced to act—how I must—must—don’t want to—but must—and then a voice screams—I can’t bear to hear it—I can’t go on, I can’t go on. . . .

UPDATE: I found the YouTube video of the speech: