As a fan of the fabulously sinister reefer-smoking Austrian actor Peter Lorre, I was delighted to find this little clip of him singing. Peter Lorre singing? Although it seems almost unthinkable, in the 1920s the diminutive Lorre was a stage actor sometimes even appearing in musicals such as Happy End, the (flop) followup to Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.
After gaining a level of cinematic notoriety for playing the serial child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, Lorre was forever typecast as the creepy character, but here he gives this little ditty about the police a decidedly jolly air.
The singing kicks off about 40 seconds in.