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. ( But I'm not going back. )
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. ( But I'm not going back. )
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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