ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

By: Joshua Glenn
August 20, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

JOEL CAIRO

Peter Lorre’s turn as the sinister, unfailingly polite Joel Cairo, partner in crime to Syndney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon (1941), instantly became the stuff of cartoonish caricature. Literally cartoonish: The Animated Peter Lorre, which is my kind of reference book, lists hundreds of instances, from 1940s Looney Tunes shorts to The Ren & Stimpy Show, in which an exaggerated version of Lorre, often in the form of a scheming yet winsome animal, pops up. Cairo may be an unscrupulous villain… but we can’t help but root for him, just a little bit.

In Dashiell Hammett’s 1929–30 detective novel, the basis for John Huston’s directorial debut, Sam Spade’s gal Friday announces Cairo like so: “This guy is queer.” He enters Spade’s office “with short, mincing, bobbing steps” — because his pants are so tight. His features are “Levantine”; his garish handkerchief reeks of the exotic East. In the movie adaptation, too, Cairo’s accent is difficult to place — and he suggestively touches the handle of his umbrella to his lips, when describing the Maltese Falcon. However, although Hammett and Huston tried their utmost to depict Cairo as ambiguously foreign and homosexual, an abject other whom we are invited to scorn and fear, Lorre subverts these ignoble efforts. Lorre’s Cairo is foppish, yes… but it’s impossible not to admire his dedication to foppery. After Spade knocks him out, when Cairo comes to, the first words out of mouth are: “Look what you did to my shirt!” There’s something in the febrile quality of his outrage that makes Cairo… admirable.

Like Sam Spade, whose personal code overrules whatever feelings he may have for Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Cairo has a code.

Unlike most other villains, Lorre’s Cairo is seeking more than wealth or power — something that he’ll likely never find. What is it? A clue can be found in the way that Lorre enunciates the word “idiot,” twice. Returning from the police station after having been interrogated all night, Cairo doesn’t complain about the manhandling; instead, he coldly notes that he felt “distinctly like an idiot” sticking to the story that Spade had invented. And when it turns out that Gutman has stolen a decoy dingus, Cairo explodes: “You… you imbecile! You bloated idiot! You stupid fathead, you!” What Lorre’s Cairo seeks is not the Maltese Falcon, we understand in these moments, but respect and intelligent company.

Fifteen years before America became a fascist state, here at HILOBROW I wrote: “Ever get the feeling that civilization is being overrun by testosterone-addled jackasses? Me, too. You don’t have to be a Hungarian-German Jewish refugee, like Lorre was, to sympathize with what we must recognize as his characters’ (perverted, to be sure) idealism.” So what can we learn from Cairo? Take your lumps, but stick to your code.

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ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (14)

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