Stroll — to walk in a leisurely or idle manner.
Skulk — keep out of sight, typically with a sinister or cowardly motive.
It has been many years since the Circle theater existed on Pennsylvania Avenue just north of George Washington University. This theater, and its companion the Inner Circle, were the two best houses in the Washington, D.C., area to see classic movies at inexpensive prices.
They showed only old movies in double features and when most theaters were charging $3-4 a ticket, they were $1 on weekdays and $1.50 on weekends. They did something else you don’t see anymore. As soon as one movie ended, the next one started, and so on from early morning to very late at night.
They changed movies every 2-3 days. Back in the days before VCRs, DVD players and hundreds of cable channels, theaters lioke this were the only place to see old movies. I saw so many great old films there from about 1969-74. Classic silent films like “Nosferatu” and “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,” original old horror films like “Dracula” and “Freaks.”
I saw “Casablanca” there more than once, and I saw wonderful dark comedies from the ’60s like “The Loved One” and “Lord Love a Duck.”
I also saw Fritz Lang’s incredible film “M,” a 1931 classic starring Peter Lorre as a man who murders children. Lorre would later have featured roles in two true classics — “The Maltese Falcon” and “Casablanca,” but it was “M” that really showed what he could do.
Lorre died a long time ago, but he was immortalized in singer Al Stewart’s “The Year of the Cat,” with a line about a character than says he “strolls through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime.”
I figured it was a general reference to characters Lorre played in his movies with Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet, but I ran afoul of the smartest person in the world, who said it was his character in “M.”
Now it had been a long time since I had seen “M” — roughly 50 years — but I could have sworn Hans Beckert (Lorre’s character) didn’t do anything resembling walking in a leisurely or idle manner. Still, when you’re dealing with people who are at least a few levels above you intellectually, it’s best to be sure.
As it goes, I have a good number of DVDs from the Criterion Collection, and one of them is “M.”
I wasn’t really in the mood for such a downer of a movie, but I felt I owed it to my intellectual better to see which of us was right.
So I watched it from the beginning, and guess what.
Nothing remotely resembling strolling. Beckert is disturbed and furtive from the first time we see him, and while the SPITW will argue that my description of him as skulking isn’t accurate, it’s more accurate than strolling.
Sadly, writing this piece shows more than anything else what a moron I am. When you argue with the SPITW, you can never win. It’s like wrestling with a pig — you get dirty and the pig enjoys it.