After starring in some of the greatest early noirs and proto-noirs (M, 1931;  Stranger on the Third Floor, 1940; The Maltese Falcon, 1941), Peter Lorre, back in his native Germany, produced and directed himself in Der Verlorene (US: The Lost Man), a psychological thriller set during and just after Nazi Germany. Lorre plays Dr. Karl Rothe, currently practicing medicine in a camp for displaced people, who is paid a visit by a former associate who reanimates Roche’s memories of his Nazi past. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Rothe, a respected researcher during the war, suffered a mental breakdown upon learning that his fiancée Inge (Renate Mannhardt) had leaked Rothe’s research secrets to a Nazi officer with whom she was having an affair. Inge’s betrayal impaired Roche’s sanity to such an extent that he set off on a journey of misogynistic murder. The film is bleak, lacking any forms of redemption, reminding us that nobody can escape or outlive their moral depravity, especially not Nazis or their collaborators (“Dr. Rothe was dead without dying,” he says of himself). Lorre can portray psychological frailty better than anyone — note his three noirs listed above — and delivers a creepy, fractured performance here, in one scene even rubbing rabbit blood on his face. Václav Vich’s cinematography is sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, using the Institute’s labyrinthine halls and basements as a canvas for depicting Roche’s increasingly warped perspective.