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A lot of people live in Brooklyn. Why couldn't I?
So I am tired to the point that I have to look at the calendar to remember what I did in the last few days, and then the calendar tells me that yesterday I canceled my voice lesson because of exhaustion and slept through most of the afternoon, and that's about how the last few days have been. I spent the evening on the couch with cats, reading Patricia C. Wrede and Pamela Dean's splendid Points of Departure (2015). I got up very early this morning and will probably get up earlier than I feel like tomorrow, because I want to see the double feature of Play Safe (1927) and Show People (1928) at the Somerville. I haven't talked about movies here in weeks. Read on.
There are ways in which I don't want to write about Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), because if you watch it cold, the genre it suddenly swings a hard right into is a breathtaking surprise. There are also ways in which I wish to evangelize, because it's that much of a delight. It looked like just another small-time B-picture to start with.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I picked it because its runtime was 64 minutes and its cast included Peter Lorre. We had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.
It starts like a crime thriller, or even a social message picture. John McGuire stars as Mike Ward, a hustling young reporter who gets his big break when his eyewitness testimony is the key to railroading a hard-luck petty ex-con (Elisha Cook, Jr., underworld shlimazl extraordinaire) for murder on a combination of circumstantial evidence and judicial apathy. The notoriety nets Mike a twelve-dollar raise from his paper—enough to move in with his girlfriend Jane (Margaret Tallichet, in her sole leading role), with whom he otherwise scrounges hurried dates at the lunch counter, meeting in buses, parks, and movie theaters to avoid the draconian censure of his landlady and the spiteful prying of his next-door neighbor—but the nastiness of the trial, which ends with a terrified, tearful man dragged out still pleading his innocence to a jury that practically dozed through his defense, puts a damper on Jane's mood and Mike's conscience. "What should I do," he defends himself, uneasily disclaiming responsibility for what might be a wrongful conviction, "lie? I had to tell them what I saw . . . The odds are a million to one that that boy is guilty." Her response is haunted: "It doesn't make any difference, Michael. He'll be with us the rest of our lives. I'll always hear his voice." And as she hangs up, the shadows are already thickening around them, doubt becoming visible in the angular lighting and encroaching darkness of film noir, the ambiguous cityscape of mixed motives and murky resolutions which Stranger on the Third Floor helped invent. We are in the half-world now, the cynical theater of society's anxieties and desires. It's only going to get stranger from here.
Narrating his own tail-chasing thoughts in a brooding voiceover that could have come right out of a radio drama, Mike returns to his long-loathed rooming house, where an eerie encounter with the eponymous stranger—a slight, white-scarfed figure with the huge eyes of a lemur and restless, spidery hands, glimpsed first on the front steps, then bolting from the third floor as if suddenly materialized within the building—combines with the oppressive silence from the next room, usually occupied at this hour by plaster-shredding snores, to convince him that someone has killed his neighbor. He can't stop thinking about it. He's afraid to find out. It's a leap of paranoia that quickly reveals itself to spring from something very real and unnerving. If poor bewildered Joe Briggs didn't kill Nick Narbajan and leave his throat dripping into his own cash register, then a very unsavory kind of murderer is still at large in the neighborhood. And if the stranger who disappeared like an evil impulse into the empty, echoing streets really killed snooping, sanctimonious, utterly repugnant Albert Meng (Charles Halton, hypocrisy personified in wire-rims and a comb-over so unconvincing, his hair looks like it was doodled on), then he might just have committed the crime Mike has been obscurely fantasizing about for months. The farther out of reality the cinematography pushes the low angles and the high contrasts, the more it comes home to Mike how easily anyone who has ever expressed anger or confrontation in public might find themselves fitted for the nine-yard suit of a murderer. He didn't just grouse about his neighbor in private, he threatened the man in front of witnesses. He expressed his loathing in vicious, unmistakable terms: "He's no man. He's a worm. The kind you ought to jump on with heavy boots . . . It'd be a real pleasure to cut his throat." Briggs is going to get the chair for less vitriol than that. Woozy with two kinds of guilt, sweating like he's under the lights of the third degree, Mike buries his face in his hands and wakes in a dream sequence that hits the viewer like an unauthorized adaptation of Kafka's The Trial mashed up with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Accusing faces assault him from all sides of the darkness. A vortex of newspapers churns down into the gossip-hungry crowd of his fellow reporters, all raising the day's paper emblazoned with the single block-letter brand "MURDER." Scenes dissolve in spinning blurs and water-ripples and colorless fire and radio signals; Jane screams as skyscrapers rake toppling angles behind her, sobs in Mike's grasp as she cannot confess that she believes him. His jail cell is an immense and desolate expanse of birdcage shadows; the courtroom is a waste of fiery stained glass and barbed wire silhouettes from whose ceiling blind Justice dangles like a gallows body. The witnesses are underlit like monsters. The jury are all asleep. The stranger crawls over the endless auditorium seats like a lizard for a better view on Mike's conviction, bright-eyed with pleasure even as Mike screams and points to the real murderer no one else can see is there. When the judge lowers his gavel, he transforms in Justice's pose into a skull-faced, grinning Fury, reaper's scythe in one skeletal hand, loaded scales in the other. Briggs laughs like a welcoming devil as Mike is strapped into the chair. It's full-bore German expressionism and it's beautiful.
And then there is Peter Lorre—top-billed, onscreen for less than fifteen minutes, worth every second of it. The film's second half plays with psychological horror, questioning whether the stranger really exists or whether he's some phantasmal conjuration of Mike's frantically self-denying guilt. Meng is dead, all right, and just as Mike feared, as soon as he reports the man's death, he's suspected of it—with the extra twist that the similarities between the two crimes, from their geographic proximity to the identical manner of death to their discovery by the same man, who each time had someone he could point to as a fleeing culprit, make him a person of especial interest to the DA, who hears out his tale of "a premonition that Meng was dead" and asks candidly, "Has there ever been any insanity in your family?" The film scatters its plot among a web of doubles, all in some way refracting its protagonist. His dream was Briggs' trial, magnified from miscarriage of justice to surrealistic nightmare; now he faces the same kind of conviction, as casual and circumstantial and deadly. Meng with his sexual policing and his leering at passing girls looks like a snide reflection of frustrated Mike, saying hotly to Jane, "I hate every place where I can't take you in my arms." The convenient stranger whom nobody seems able to find looks like Mike's thing of darkness, unacknowledged and wreaking havoc.
Of course, the stranger is both real and the real killer: we are not yet quite so deeply into the hopelessness of noir as to implode the hero in that particular fashion. The last fifteen minutes of the film drop abruptly into Jane's perspective, as she trudges the streets doggedly to find the stranger and clear Mike's name; she has only the vaguest of descriptions to go on, something about protuberant eyes and thick lips and a white scarf, and it is only when she is at her most disappointed and most desolate that a long-fingered hand lays itself on the counter beside her and a soft, German-tinged voice says from offscreen, "I want a couple of hamburgers and I'd like them raw." Swallowing her fear, she follows him out into the night. Just tell the guy at the diner to call the cops! we shouted at the screen. She addresses the stranger instead: "I was going in the same direction and I thought maybe I could walk with you. It's so late . . . and so dark . . ."
I can't tell if the film would be stronger if Mike had to confront his doppelgänger instead of Jane. It would certainly have literalized the metaphor, possibly overly so; at least this way she gets more to do than just serve as Mike's moral compass, although as such she makes a dream-logic sense as the person to rein in his wandering shadow self. Given comparatively little to work with, Lorre gets something surprisingly poignant out of his minimal screen time. For all his supernatural buildup, the stranger turns out to be an escaped mental patient who responds violently to any threat, real or perceived, of being sent "back" (hence the deaths of Nick and Meng, who really shouldn't have reached for the phone). Instead of playing him with the expected pop-eyed hysteria, however, Lorre emphasizes the frail, lost aspects of a character who might be anywhere from prematurely exhausted youth to fadingly boyish middle age; he buys hamburger meat for a starved stray dog that followed him for two blocks and smiles with a shy mouthful of crooked teeth. His long white scarf gives him half an air of distinction, half an air of dress-up. So spectrally staring when Mike surprised him in the tenement, his big eyes look now like a tired child's; he can turn on a dime from furtive gentleness to menacing suspicion, but there's real raw fear in his voice when he speaks of "the people who lock you up . . . They put you in a shirt with long sleeves and they pour ice water on you." He's not a Hans Beckert re-run; he attacks Jane not out of compulsion, but because she has betrayed herself as someone who might get him locked up again. Her life is saved by a produce truck out of nowhere, Mike's life is saved by a dying man's confession, but the stranger might consider himself victorious all the same. His last words are the deeply satisfying, "Yes . . . But I'm not going back." It shouldn't feel like a win to the audience, a man's broken body in the gutter, especially not with two people's blood on his hands. It does. Thank you, Lorre. These are the happy endings of film noir.
The ending proper is one of those feel-good whiplashes whose only redeeming virtue lies in its kindness to a character I frankly assumed the script had written off long ago; otherwise I view it with profound suspicion, having cheated its way out of closing the film with the powerfully unsettling image of just a few seconds prior. It cannot actually erase the fever-dream intensity of the previous hour. Received equivocally at the time of its release, Stranger on the Third Floor is now considered the first true film noir, melding visual stylization with deep moral uncertainty and a world in which the lines between heroes and villains are blurred as heavily as the shadows that draw in around Mike Ward as he walks home from the courthouse, thinking for the first time that he might not want to owe his start in life to the end of another man's. I had no idea of any of that when we started watching. Another one I'll want to see on a big screen if I can. This decision sponsored by my encouraging backers at Patreon.
I should review something I didn't like so much one of these days. Sadly, I suppose I might start with Tomorrowland (2015).
There are ways in which I don't want to write about Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), because if you watch it cold, the genre it suddenly swings a hard right into is a breathtaking surprise. There are also ways in which I wish to evangelize, because it's that much of a delight. It looked like just another small-time B-picture to start with.
derspatchel and I picked it because its runtime was 64 minutes and its cast included Peter Lorre. We had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for.It starts like a crime thriller, or even a social message picture. John McGuire stars as Mike Ward, a hustling young reporter who gets his big break when his eyewitness testimony is the key to railroading a hard-luck petty ex-con (Elisha Cook, Jr., underworld shlimazl extraordinaire) for murder on a combination of circumstantial evidence and judicial apathy. The notoriety nets Mike a twelve-dollar raise from his paper—enough to move in with his girlfriend Jane (Margaret Tallichet, in her sole leading role), with whom he otherwise scrounges hurried dates at the lunch counter, meeting in buses, parks, and movie theaters to avoid the draconian censure of his landlady and the spiteful prying of his next-door neighbor—but the nastiness of the trial, which ends with a terrified, tearful man dragged out still pleading his innocence to a jury that practically dozed through his defense, puts a damper on Jane's mood and Mike's conscience. "What should I do," he defends himself, uneasily disclaiming responsibility for what might be a wrongful conviction, "lie? I had to tell them what I saw . . . The odds are a million to one that that boy is guilty." Her response is haunted: "It doesn't make any difference, Michael. He'll be with us the rest of our lives. I'll always hear his voice." And as she hangs up, the shadows are already thickening around them, doubt becoming visible in the angular lighting and encroaching darkness of film noir, the ambiguous cityscape of mixed motives and murky resolutions which Stranger on the Third Floor helped invent. We are in the half-world now, the cynical theater of society's anxieties and desires. It's only going to get stranger from here.
Narrating his own tail-chasing thoughts in a brooding voiceover that could have come right out of a radio drama, Mike returns to his long-loathed rooming house, where an eerie encounter with the eponymous stranger—a slight, white-scarfed figure with the huge eyes of a lemur and restless, spidery hands, glimpsed first on the front steps, then bolting from the third floor as if suddenly materialized within the building—combines with the oppressive silence from the next room, usually occupied at this hour by plaster-shredding snores, to convince him that someone has killed his neighbor. He can't stop thinking about it. He's afraid to find out. It's a leap of paranoia that quickly reveals itself to spring from something very real and unnerving. If poor bewildered Joe Briggs didn't kill Nick Narbajan and leave his throat dripping into his own cash register, then a very unsavory kind of murderer is still at large in the neighborhood. And if the stranger who disappeared like an evil impulse into the empty, echoing streets really killed snooping, sanctimonious, utterly repugnant Albert Meng (Charles Halton, hypocrisy personified in wire-rims and a comb-over so unconvincing, his hair looks like it was doodled on), then he might just have committed the crime Mike has been obscurely fantasizing about for months. The farther out of reality the cinematography pushes the low angles and the high contrasts, the more it comes home to Mike how easily anyone who has ever expressed anger or confrontation in public might find themselves fitted for the nine-yard suit of a murderer. He didn't just grouse about his neighbor in private, he threatened the man in front of witnesses. He expressed his loathing in vicious, unmistakable terms: "He's no man. He's a worm. The kind you ought to jump on with heavy boots . . . It'd be a real pleasure to cut his throat." Briggs is going to get the chair for less vitriol than that. Woozy with two kinds of guilt, sweating like he's under the lights of the third degree, Mike buries his face in his hands and wakes in a dream sequence that hits the viewer like an unauthorized adaptation of Kafka's The Trial mashed up with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." Accusing faces assault him from all sides of the darkness. A vortex of newspapers churns down into the gossip-hungry crowd of his fellow reporters, all raising the day's paper emblazoned with the single block-letter brand "MURDER." Scenes dissolve in spinning blurs and water-ripples and colorless fire and radio signals; Jane screams as skyscrapers rake toppling angles behind her, sobs in Mike's grasp as she cannot confess that she believes him. His jail cell is an immense and desolate expanse of birdcage shadows; the courtroom is a waste of fiery stained glass and barbed wire silhouettes from whose ceiling blind Justice dangles like a gallows body. The witnesses are underlit like monsters. The jury are all asleep. The stranger crawls over the endless auditorium seats like a lizard for a better view on Mike's conviction, bright-eyed with pleasure even as Mike screams and points to the real murderer no one else can see is there. When the judge lowers his gavel, he transforms in Justice's pose into a skull-faced, grinning Fury, reaper's scythe in one skeletal hand, loaded scales in the other. Briggs laughs like a welcoming devil as Mike is strapped into the chair. It's full-bore German expressionism and it's beautiful.
And then there is Peter Lorre—top-billed, onscreen for less than fifteen minutes, worth every second of it. The film's second half plays with psychological horror, questioning whether the stranger really exists or whether he's some phantasmal conjuration of Mike's frantically self-denying guilt. Meng is dead, all right, and just as Mike feared, as soon as he reports the man's death, he's suspected of it—with the extra twist that the similarities between the two crimes, from their geographic proximity to the identical manner of death to their discovery by the same man, who each time had someone he could point to as a fleeing culprit, make him a person of especial interest to the DA, who hears out his tale of "a premonition that Meng was dead" and asks candidly, "Has there ever been any insanity in your family?" The film scatters its plot among a web of doubles, all in some way refracting its protagonist. His dream was Briggs' trial, magnified from miscarriage of justice to surrealistic nightmare; now he faces the same kind of conviction, as casual and circumstantial and deadly. Meng with his sexual policing and his leering at passing girls looks like a snide reflection of frustrated Mike, saying hotly to Jane, "I hate every place where I can't take you in my arms." The convenient stranger whom nobody seems able to find looks like Mike's thing of darkness, unacknowledged and wreaking havoc.
Of course, the stranger is both real and the real killer: we are not yet quite so deeply into the hopelessness of noir as to implode the hero in that particular fashion. The last fifteen minutes of the film drop abruptly into Jane's perspective, as she trudges the streets doggedly to find the stranger and clear Mike's name; she has only the vaguest of descriptions to go on, something about protuberant eyes and thick lips and a white scarf, and it is only when she is at her most disappointed and most desolate that a long-fingered hand lays itself on the counter beside her and a soft, German-tinged voice says from offscreen, "I want a couple of hamburgers and I'd like them raw." Swallowing her fear, she follows him out into the night. Just tell the guy at the diner to call the cops! we shouted at the screen. She addresses the stranger instead: "I was going in the same direction and I thought maybe I could walk with you. It's so late . . . and so dark . . ."
I can't tell if the film would be stronger if Mike had to confront his doppelgänger instead of Jane. It would certainly have literalized the metaphor, possibly overly so; at least this way she gets more to do than just serve as Mike's moral compass, although as such she makes a dream-logic sense as the person to rein in his wandering shadow self. Given comparatively little to work with, Lorre gets something surprisingly poignant out of his minimal screen time. For all his supernatural buildup, the stranger turns out to be an escaped mental patient who responds violently to any threat, real or perceived, of being sent "back" (hence the deaths of Nick and Meng, who really shouldn't have reached for the phone). Instead of playing him with the expected pop-eyed hysteria, however, Lorre emphasizes the frail, lost aspects of a character who might be anywhere from prematurely exhausted youth to fadingly boyish middle age; he buys hamburger meat for a starved stray dog that followed him for two blocks and smiles with a shy mouthful of crooked teeth. His long white scarf gives him half an air of distinction, half an air of dress-up. So spectrally staring when Mike surprised him in the tenement, his big eyes look now like a tired child's; he can turn on a dime from furtive gentleness to menacing suspicion, but there's real raw fear in his voice when he speaks of "the people who lock you up . . . They put you in a shirt with long sleeves and they pour ice water on you." He's not a Hans Beckert re-run; he attacks Jane not out of compulsion, but because she has betrayed herself as someone who might get him locked up again. Her life is saved by a produce truck out of nowhere, Mike's life is saved by a dying man's confession, but the stranger might consider himself victorious all the same. His last words are the deeply satisfying, "Yes . . . But I'm not going back." It shouldn't feel like a win to the audience, a man's broken body in the gutter, especially not with two people's blood on his hands. It does. Thank you, Lorre. These are the happy endings of film noir.
The ending proper is one of those feel-good whiplashes whose only redeeming virtue lies in its kindness to a character I frankly assumed the script had written off long ago; otherwise I view it with profound suspicion, having cheated its way out of closing the film with the powerfully unsettling image of just a few seconds prior. It cannot actually erase the fever-dream intensity of the previous hour. Received equivocally at the time of its release, Stranger on the Third Floor is now considered the first true film noir, melding visual stylization with deep moral uncertainty and a world in which the lines between heroes and villains are blurred as heavily as the shadows that draw in around Mike Ward as he walks home from the courthouse, thinking for the first time that he might not want to owe his start in life to the end of another man's. I had no idea of any of that when we started watching. Another one I'll want to see on a big screen if I can. This decision sponsored by my encouraging backers at Patreon.
I should review something I didn't like so much one of these days. Sadly, I suppose I might start with Tomorrowland (2015).
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(It is also the movie that proved I'm almost incapable of not feeling sympathetic towards Peter Lorre, but.)
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Maybe it's the wrong weather for it? (Actually, setting the film in summer would have been both atmospheric and made it even weirder for the stranger to go around in his white scarf and black overcoat. Oh, well. Maybe the budget didn't quite stretch that far.)
(It is also the movie that proved I'm almost incapable of not feeling sympathetic towards Peter Lorre, but.)
I imprinted on Peter Lorre at a tender age; Arsenic and Old Lace did it. I hear you.
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I still can't decide whether that was a misstep in the script or an intentional Freudian slip courtesy Mike's uncertainty.
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You can tell how he means it, especially with the emphasis, but then you hear the way he's structured the ratio and, yeah, I don't know, either.
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I don't write (or even think of) your kind of incisive review, but my one-line summary of "Tomorrowland" would be "beats the heck out of 'Interstellar'." I do wish the Interstellar robots could have their own spin-off, though.
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I've seen other silents from that year, and not obscure ones—King Vidor's The Crowd, Buster Keaton's The Cameraman, Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. The trend started in 1927, but I don't think sound films would become dominant until 1929, and there are even later examples like Pandora's Box (1929), People on Sunday (1930), or Modern Times (1936), where the absence of sound is an artistic choice rather than a technological constraint. During the transition, you get hybrid films like Paul Fejos' Lonesome (1928), which is mostly silent in that three scenes were converted for sound during production (with mixed results), or Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929), which was released simultaneously in both sound and silent versions, because not all British theaters at the time were equipped for sound (I've only seen the silent, which was great). So, yes, Show People is a silent film after the advent of sound, but I don't think it was badly behind the curve. It was also really, really funny and a lot of fun to watch.
I don't write (or even think of) your kind of incisive review, but my one-line summary of "Tomorrowland" would be "beats the heck out of 'Interstellar'." I do wish the Interstellar robots could have their own spin-off, though.
I did not see Interstellar, I'm afraid; it didn't even look like something I was interested in. I'm glad the robots were cool?
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I'm wondering if this was a bit of a noir theme -- 1934's Midnight (pre-Noir, I guess), begins with a jury member who is considered by the public to be solely responsible for a murder conviction, because during the trial, he'd asked why, if the shooting had been accidental, the defendant had taken all the victim's money.
The convicted killer is a woman, and apparently retained a lot of public sympathy, because on the eve of her execution he's being hounded by reporters asking him if he feels any responsibility for her impending death (no one seems to place any blame on the rest of the jury or on the judge who passed sentence). Then his daughter shoots her boyfriend in self-defense, and we go into the type of spiralling horror (and last-minute happy ending) you describe; a somewhat suspect happy ending in this case, as a sympathetic cop/DA (can't recall which) believes the daughter's story and makes sure the case never comes to trial; so the moral of the story appears to be "don't ask questions; just trust the authorities to bend the rules in the right direction."
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I count proto-noir for the purposes of this conversation! See reply to
It makes sense as a noir theme to me: it's about the essential instability of the world, how you think there are clear distinctions between doing right and doing wrong, between us and them, and then all of a sudden the apparent boundaries collapse and you're the one on the run, or your family are the ones in danger, and the right side of the law doesn't look like any such thing anymore.
a somewhat suspect happy ending in this case, as a sympathetic cop/DA (can't recall which) believes the daughter's story and makes sure the case never comes to trial; so the moral of the story appears to be "don't ask questions; just trust the authorities to bend the rules in the right direction."
I agree that's not exactly reassuring, but it's also kind of noirish in that it's a very cynical view of the justice system. You can't hope for a fair trial, just an authority figure who's corrupt in your favor.
Should I watch Midnight? I hadn't heard of it and it sounds really interesting.
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Ah, yes, the pre-Petrified Forest days before the studio noticed he could really act.
(I'm grateful to Leslie Howard for a lot of things, but that one's just really nice.)
Return of Dr. X and Black Legion are way more interesting.
I don't know either of those; I'll look for them! Thanks.
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I felt a lot more harshly about it than you do. It was impossible for me to not see his character as yet another warmed-over M, with the added layer of his being in America this time, where the audience is supposed to hear his accent and see his face and instinctively fear him as immigrant/not-us/outsider/freak, because the filmmakers think we're bigots. (*editing out rant*)
But, for what it was (yet another gentle little murderer) it was quite good; I appreciated the fact that he's extraordinarily kind to animals and that this doesn't really clash with the fact that he may have to kill someone to stay free. One thing that never changes about Lorre's characters, because he couldn't really change his height even if he changed his voice, face, and wardrobe, is that he's eternally childlike and uses that for all it's worth. Women trust his characters even when they know they shouldn't, because he's a winsome little boy. Soft, pleading hands; hopeful little smiles; big bunny-rabbit eyes.
(And if Lorre-portrayed stranglers existed in the real world, none of them could ever succeed at murdering their victims, because he'd be so easy for a victim to pick up and drop-kick. No one would take him seriously. In movie-world, for that matter, no one quite takes him seriously either, and THAT IS THEIR MISTAKE.)
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I agree that it's another instance of Lorre as go-to actor for sympathetic madmen, and I suspect that if I think about it, I'll be able to put together more than one link between Lang's film and this one, but the fact that he kills in panicky self-defense keeps the stranger out of M territory for me. He's so quickly sketched that it's hard to be sure, but we're never given any evidence that he's normally violent—that he was locked up for murdering people with knives, for example. Also, the sympathy we're asked to feel for Hans Beckert is based entirely on his awareness of himself as a monster, while the stranger, whatever his problems, quite reasonably does not want to be institutionalized in the 1940's. I mean, we're not talking Victorian Bedlam, but it wouldn't be my first choice for a vacation.
(Speaking of M, however, in case you haven't seen these: Fritz Lang directs Peter Lorre.)
Women trust his characters even when they know they shouldn't, because he's a winsome little boy. Soft, pleading hands; hopeful little smiles; big bunny-rabbit eyes.
I don't think Jane trusts the stranger, interestingly: he's not what she expects from a serial killer, and she does feel sorry for him, but as soon as she recognizes him from Mike's vaguest of descriptions, she knows he's her quarry and dangerous to her. The mistake she makes is thinking that she can somehow decoy him into accompanying her ("How do I know I can trust you?"—"They wouldn't send a woman, would they?"—"No, they wouldn't send a woman") without giving herself away, a plan which fails as soon as he realizes she hasn't built in a way to alert the police without also tipping off the stranger. Plenty of movies contain the moment where the heroine realizes she's not safe—that she's alone with the killer, that the person she trusted is the last person she should have let lock the door behind them—but I'm trying to figure out now whether Stranger on the Third Floor is one of the earliest mysteries I've seen where the heroine deliberately places herself in danger, makes herself bait. I don't want to discount decades of girl detectives and reporters, many of whom are more effective than Jane's amateur investigations. (SERIOUSLY LADY BEFORE PURSUING A MURDER SUSPECT TELL SOMEONE WHERE YOU'RE GOING.) Just something about the image of Jane following the stranger down the darkened, deserted street feels like a very deliberate reversal of the horror trope, predator switching off with prey, and I can't tell how conscious it really was. It's one of the elements that sustain the nightmare feel of the story, the ambiguity about everyone's motives.
Incidentally, you write about Lorre really well.
with the added layer of his being in America this time, where the audience is supposed to hear his accent and see his face and instinctively fear him as immigrant/not-us/outsider/freak, because the filmmakers think we're bigots.
I agree that we're meant to clock him as other. Doylistically, if you cast Lorre in an American film, he's always going to sound like he comes from somewhere else. I'm not convinced it's a matter of wanting to trip up the audience with its own bigotry, though, so much as an early exercise in collapsing false distinctions, especially the comforting ones. Lorre is the outsider, the nameless stranger whose entire characterization is his not-one-of-us-ness, but look how easily his crimes might have been committed by that nice clean-cut all-American John McGuire, harboring a murderous hate in his heart that's alien even to Elisha Cook, Jr.'s socially suspect cabbie. Ultimately Mike isn't a serial killer, but the film pushes surprisingly hard at the idea before backing off, which is probably the main reason the ending feels like it just fell out of another film. The kind of violent loathing Mike harbored for Mr. Meng doesn't just melt away with a kiss and a free ride.
[I hate LJ-comment limits. I'll come back.]
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Heh, no.
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Thank you for a splendid review.
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Oh, God, yes, that would be a time sink. You have to start with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), because it's no use trying to explain German expressionism without that film; I think you also need Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924), because it applies all that evocative stylization and shadow to a non-supernatural story; definitely von Sternberg's Underworld (1927), because it is a gangster film shot like a fever dream. (I apologize preemptively for the review; it was seven years ago and I was going through a run-on prose period. I adored the film, however, and still want a copy with the soundtrack by the Alloy Orchestra.) M (1931), of course, come on. After that I have to think, because I know I've seen any number of pre-Codes that played like proto-noir, but I don't know which ones I'd select for cinematography as well as plot. On that note, I'd want to include John Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940), too, because it's the film where Gregg Toland premiered many of the techniques he would later use to such influential effect in Citizen Kane (1941), like deep focus and a lot of dramatic, low-key lighting. And that takes us up to the year of Stranger on the Third Floor.
. . . It's a time sink.
Thank you for a splendid review.
You're very welcome. Thank you for reading.
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With a side order of "whether you're UFA or Warner Brothers, starkly lit sets are a creative way around low budgets."
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Fritz Lang, we were just talking about you!
(You and Me (1938) goes in that fictitious festival line-up. Thank you for reminding me. It's a charming underworld film with great stylization and three musical numbers by Kurt Weill; it's almost certainly not bleak enough for true noir, but it's cynical enough for Die Dreigroschenoper. If you want to talk about expatriate German influence, anyway, the only thing it was missing was Brecht.)
Boris Ingster, director of Stranger on the Third Floor, had worked with Eisenstein in the Soviet Union; came to Hollywood with him in the early 1930's and stayed in the U.S. after Eisenstein went back. Now I really want to see some Eisenstein, to find out if there was any direct influence.
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I recommend it! You might even be able to find it on DVD, unlike most of the stuff I talk about!
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(Particular Sovay line that I liked that has nothing to do with the drama: a comb-over so unconvincing, his hair looks like it was doodled on)
His dream was Briggs' trial, magnified from miscarriage of justice to surrealistic nightmare --yeah; definitely got that sense.
Lorre emphasizes the frail, lost aspects of a character who might be anywhere from prematurely exhausted youth to fadingly boyish middle age; he buys hamburger meat for a starved stray dog that followed him for two blocks and smiles with a shy mouthful of crooked teeth. --This and what comes after make him seem a *very* intriguing guilty party.
I'd like to see this one day. Thanks as always for a gripping review.
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It goes much farther with its skepticism of the hero and sympathy for the villain than I thought a Code-era film would, even if it reverts to a bizarre normative happiness at the very end. Film noir has that license, but it doesn't always utilize it as immediately and starkly. I'm amazed at the degree to which Stranger on the Third Floor was underestimated when it came out. Critics thought it was derivative and overdone. Bosley Crowther was particularly scathing:
Frankly, the only way to suggest the confusion and pretentiousness of this film is to state what it's all about. A young newspaper reporter presents some circumstantial evidence to a court which condemns a boy to death. Then the reporter begins to have doubts; his conscience talks to him. That night his next-door neighbor is murdered and he has a wild dream, all full of whirling spirals and hollow voices, that the deed is pinned on him. Sure enough, it is—on the basis of circumstantial evidence. And the poor fellow, by now a nervous wreck, is only saved because his best girl goes racing madly through the streets and digs up a maniac who confesses to both crimes.
Does that sound pretty? Well, believe us, nothing has been done by Mr. Ingster to lessen the shock.
I really hope he never got over film noir becoming the defining genre of the 1940's. What he describes is neither the weirdest plot nor the strangest visuals the decade had in store.
(Particular Sovay line that I liked that has nothing to do with the drama: a comb-over so unconvincing, his hair looks like it was doodled on)
Heh. Thank you!
When I got to the dream scene, I was thinking, this is some movie, but when I got to the part with Lorre and the stray dog--what an adventuresome film, really doing so much.
You're welcome! I hope you get to see it.