By Monica Nolan:

Eddie Muller on the Castro stage said "This is my church," and the theatre was full of true believers. Overheard comment at the end of the show: "People were clapping for actors I'd never heard of." What, you've never heard of Elisha Cook, Jr.? Vince Barnett? Surely the speaker recognized Peter Lorre, who behind some bizarre buck teeth (left over from Mr. Moto?) was so ineffably Peter Lorre that we were doing imitations of him all the way home. Who else could make an escaped lunatic serial killer so sublimely creepy and sympathetic? As Eddie said, "You're my kind of crazy," although he was referring to an audience that eschews streaming netflix to pack the house for obscure movies upwards of 60 years old.

Plot summaries:
High Wall: Amnesiac vet plus dead wife equals the loony bin. But sodium pentathol cures all ills.

Stranger on the Third Floor: Elisha Cook, Jr. guilty? Not where Peter Lorre lurks. My German expressionist dream says so.

Great onstage anecdotes about Peter Lorre's on-set consumption of raw onions, and William Wyler's visit to an obscure cinema club in the Sunset in 1971, in order to see Stranger on the Third Floor (his wife starred as an ingenue). Their daughter was there, and you could see the resemblance to her mom. I was shocked because I've been to parties with her (she's on the board of the silent film fest) and I'd never realized how close I was to Hollywood royalty.