I knew much less about movies in 2007 when I first saw Jean Negulesco's Three Strangers (1946), but even then I knew I had discovered something special in this small, not cheaply ironic, ambiguously supernatural noir. For starters, Peter Lorre was its romantic lead.
London, 1938, Chinese New Year's Eve. In her elegant, curio-filled apartment, a beautiful woman does not introduce the two men she picked up off the street for something rather more risky than a sexual adventure: a bid to change their mutual fortunes with the aid of the goddess whose name is rendered in the title cards as "Kwan Yin." Once a year, it is said, she will open her eyes and her heart to three strangers and grant them a wish, provided all three wish for the same thing. What could be more universally desirable than money? A prayer in the form of a ten-shilling sweepstake ticket is duly offered up at midnight, all their names signed to it to seal the deal. The votive candle whose flicker seems to lend a living expression to the serenely molded bronze blows out before anyone can see whether the bodhisattva acknowledged their wish, but the liminal moment has passed and the strangers can make themselves known. The enigmatic instigator with her hair veiled like a suppliant and something starving in her eyes is Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), estranged from her husband and hoping for leverage to reunite with him. The ponderous solicitor who scoffed at Chinese superstition but shied at being the third on a match is Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet), who supposes he might finally be invited into the prestigious barristers' club if he were rich. And the flippantly philosophical ne'er-do-well with a serious vocation of drinking is Johnny West (Lorre), daydreaming a better class of skid row: "Do you know the Long Bar at the Royal? Well, I'd buy it and move in." They agree to meet again if their ticket is drawn for the Grand National. Otherwise, as Arbutny grumbles his way down the stairs with a highly amused Johnny in tow, "This has been a most unsatisfactory evening."
Originally conceived by John Huston and eventually co-written with Howard Koch, Three Strangers had a ten-year production history almost as wayward as its protagonists, involving such pinballs as Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Balcon, and the U.S. Army Signal Corps, but it doesn't show in the trimness of the finished film, which is really three noirs for the price of one. Where a more conventional script might not have resisted the temptation to interweave the lives of its chance- or fate-met strangers, this one sticks to its guns and lets them run in parallel for the nearly two months between the New Year and the National, cross-cutting only the audience's awareness of their variously down-spiraling predicaments of greed, obsession, and spectacularly self-inflicted bad luck. Neatly, each is a different flavor of noir. So softly self-possessed in her initial, prayerful scene, Crystal rapidly proves herself a stone fatale of the Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Kathie Moffat class, willing to ruin the diplomatic career of the husband she alienated, deceive with delight the girl who has been honorably waiting for him, even try to provoke him to violence so long as she can keep him bound to her, by loathing if no longer by love. "You only want what you can't have for as long as you can't have it," David Shackleford (Alan Napier) judges her, not clinically but tiredly, as if the argument is as old as his posting to China where she first betrayed him. She whispers into his ear with passionate promise; then she stubs out her cigarette on his hand. Meanwhile, the brusquely respectable Arbutny is beginning to squirm in the coils of his secret venality, having slipped from investing to speculating with the trust fund of one of his clients, Lady Rhea Belladon (Rosalind Ivan) who is inconveniently less dotty than a pearls-and-furs widow usually looks when she claims to receive conjugal visits from her deceased husband on the astral plane. Coyly confiding one moment that "the things that pass between man and wife aren't intended for other ears," the next she's announcing calmly that she's brought her accountant to scrutinize the books kept since her husband died. Greenstreet in a flop sweat looks like he's melting into his stiff collar: with the bottom fallen out of the South African diamond mines, his scrambles to recoup both his funds and his social standing swing wildly around the compass of crime, insisting all the while that he is—it rings as satirically as Shakespeare—an honest man. Perversely and appropriately, the disreputable Johnny may be facing his bad fortune with the most level head of them all, framed to hang for a murder he wasn't even a conscious accomplice to. He lies on his bunk in the death cell, listening to a cracked record whose needle stutters and skips until lifted over the break, after which, the warder proudly claims, it "plays as good as new." An existentialist to the last, Johnny muses to himself, "Wonder whether it's the same with us who play it."
Even more than mild-mannered Cornelius Leyden in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Johnny West permits Lorre to shine against type—whimsical and self-destructive, the kind of gentlemanly trash fire who's much too intelligent for the smash-and-grab turned shootout he got himself mixed up in, except he was so many sheets to the wind the night he agreed to stand lookout for a couple of new friends who were buying the drinks, he has to read the newspaper coverage of the trial in order to find out what happened. "Filthy drunk, you were," his glowering minder Gabby (Peter Whitney) scolds him, but Johnny only repeats the words with the satisfaction of a punch line, which they may well be. In a lifetime of greater and lesser fuck-ups, the magnitude of this one awes even him. As their situation deteriorates from extortionate bedsits to emergency contacts in Aberdeen, he eyes the seediness of life on the lam and the specter of the hangman as ironically as Diderot, contemplating whether his innocence will earn him a more modest gallows than two-fisted Gabby or the dapper cop-killer Fallon (Robert Shayne), comprehending with dismay that his appetite for a sandwich must mean he's sobered up. He prefers to hold the world at arm's length. "Even the piano must be astonished," he shrugs when Crystal compliments him on his playing of Brahms; he cuts a flower-seller's hopeful patter short with an unnecessarily bitter, "I haven't got a wife, and if I had one, a bunch of violets wouldn't make her happy." He has sharp edges for all his fatalistic charm. But he has wistful ones, too, and they are harder to disguise around the girl who was supposed to keep him in gin and out of trouble, the cool-headed courtroom liar Icey Crane (Joan Lorring). She loves him for the simple reason that even passing-out drunk, he treats her "like [she] was somebody." He touches her hair almost absently, as if he cannot afford to let himself notice his own feelings. I love the quiet of their scene under the tidal arches of Battersea Bridge, her candid intentions and his cynical poetry and the kind of hope that expresses itself through hopelessness:
"Talk, Johnny. I like to hear you talk . . . What were you thinking just now?"
"Nothing. I was looking at all the lights in all these houses . . . Well, you see, each light cuts a tiny little circle out of the darkness, and each circle is the center of somebody's life. People swing around these lights like planets swing around the stars."
"And we ain't got a light. Is that what you're thinking?"
Naturally I love this relationship for its own wounded sake, but I also love watching it played by an actor like Lorre, for whose characters it is something of an understatement to say that romantic happiness is not usually in the cards. It hurts but does not necessarily surprise the viewer that he's pinched at the last minute of a getaway, leaving behind the poignant talisman of the violets he bought for Icey after all. He was the only one of the three to recognize the danger of asking a goddess "to reshuffle a hand that destiny has already dealt us . . . because we hope to get higher cards. A little presumptuous on our part, isn't it?" Perhaps he's only reaping the fruits of that presumption. It might not happen to Humphrey Bogart, whom Huston had originally hoped to cast when the project was being mooted by Warners as a follow-up to The Maltese Falcon (1941); it might not happen to Robert Montgomery, David Niven, or any of the other A-stars the AFI Catalog claims were considered for the part over the years; it would happen to Peter Lorre. He exits a lot of movies screaming. Just the actual casting, then, embodies the uncertainty so vital to film noir—and perhaps sharpens the audience's desire to see this sympathetic character, ghosted by his actor's weird, macabre, marginalized persona, for once survive and succeed. It would make such a nice change, especially for Johnny who has always let his life happen to him and might finally have found something he wants to make happen instead. "If I could hate Fallon, I—I suppose I could love you."
It confused me the first time around that Three Strangers does not take place contemporarily, but I have since learned that from 1941 to 1945 the Grand National was on hold for WWII-related reasons; I suspect it may also have been narratively expedient to skip all the questions about the course of history that a wartime setting wouldn't have been able to avoid. Technically I suppose that adds it to my catalogue of historical noir, although I am more inclined to class it with Repeat Performance (1947) for general themes of determinism, free will, and Janus-hinged weirdness. The uncanny lies so barely beneath the surface of Arthur Edeson's slantwise cinematography, it takes only a change of shadows to bring it into the light. That said, I appreciate that the film does make some effort to keep its Orientalism to a minimum. "Icey," Johnny concludes ruefully, "don't ever get mixed up with a Chinese goddess," but the ethnicity of Huston et al.'s incarnation of fate is much less important than the hubris of trying to manipulate it in the first place. For all her fashionable Chinoiserie and her show of reverence for the mysteries of the East, Crystal's attitude toward Kwan Yin comes to look as narcissistic as the rest of her, the possessive appropriation of "an idol instead of a soul." As Arbutny collapses into the magical thinking he previously disdained, he raves not about the perfidy of heathen images but the Devil in the form of a woman abroad in the streets. Johnny with his quirky respect for the world beyond the material may have had the right of it at the start, when he gently rebuked Arbutny for believing in the statue of a goddess but not her divinity. Certainly he could do with a little compassion. "Some people have to go to prison to be free, you know?" I revisited this movie courtesy of TCM's Noir Alley, but it also now exists on DVD, which is what I wished for the last time I watched it. Well, that and more screen romances for Peter Lorre. This light brought to you by my happy backers at Patreon.
London, 1938, Chinese New Year's Eve. In her elegant, curio-filled apartment, a beautiful woman does not introduce the two men she picked up off the street for something rather more risky than a sexual adventure: a bid to change their mutual fortunes with the aid of the goddess whose name is rendered in the title cards as "Kwan Yin." Once a year, it is said, she will open her eyes and her heart to three strangers and grant them a wish, provided all three wish for the same thing. What could be more universally desirable than money? A prayer in the form of a ten-shilling sweepstake ticket is duly offered up at midnight, all their names signed to it to seal the deal. The votive candle whose flicker seems to lend a living expression to the serenely molded bronze blows out before anyone can see whether the bodhisattva acknowledged their wish, but the liminal moment has passed and the strangers can make themselves known. The enigmatic instigator with her hair veiled like a suppliant and something starving in her eyes is Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), estranged from her husband and hoping for leverage to reunite with him. The ponderous solicitor who scoffed at Chinese superstition but shied at being the third on a match is Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet), who supposes he might finally be invited into the prestigious barristers' club if he were rich. And the flippantly philosophical ne'er-do-well with a serious vocation of drinking is Johnny West (Lorre), daydreaming a better class of skid row: "Do you know the Long Bar at the Royal? Well, I'd buy it and move in." They agree to meet again if their ticket is drawn for the Grand National. Otherwise, as Arbutny grumbles his way down the stairs with a highly amused Johnny in tow, "This has been a most unsatisfactory evening."
Originally conceived by John Huston and eventually co-written with Howard Koch, Three Strangers had a ten-year production history almost as wayward as its protagonists, involving such pinballs as Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Balcon, and the U.S. Army Signal Corps, but it doesn't show in the trimness of the finished film, which is really three noirs for the price of one. Where a more conventional script might not have resisted the temptation to interweave the lives of its chance- or fate-met strangers, this one sticks to its guns and lets them run in parallel for the nearly two months between the New Year and the National, cross-cutting only the audience's awareness of their variously down-spiraling predicaments of greed, obsession, and spectacularly self-inflicted bad luck. Neatly, each is a different flavor of noir. So softly self-possessed in her initial, prayerful scene, Crystal rapidly proves herself a stone fatale of the Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Kathie Moffat class, willing to ruin the diplomatic career of the husband she alienated, deceive with delight the girl who has been honorably waiting for him, even try to provoke him to violence so long as she can keep him bound to her, by loathing if no longer by love. "You only want what you can't have for as long as you can't have it," David Shackleford (Alan Napier) judges her, not clinically but tiredly, as if the argument is as old as his posting to China where she first betrayed him. She whispers into his ear with passionate promise; then she stubs out her cigarette on his hand. Meanwhile, the brusquely respectable Arbutny is beginning to squirm in the coils of his secret venality, having slipped from investing to speculating with the trust fund of one of his clients, Lady Rhea Belladon (Rosalind Ivan) who is inconveniently less dotty than a pearls-and-furs widow usually looks when she claims to receive conjugal visits from her deceased husband on the astral plane. Coyly confiding one moment that "the things that pass between man and wife aren't intended for other ears," the next she's announcing calmly that she's brought her accountant to scrutinize the books kept since her husband died. Greenstreet in a flop sweat looks like he's melting into his stiff collar: with the bottom fallen out of the South African diamond mines, his scrambles to recoup both his funds and his social standing swing wildly around the compass of crime, insisting all the while that he is—it rings as satirically as Shakespeare—an honest man. Perversely and appropriately, the disreputable Johnny may be facing his bad fortune with the most level head of them all, framed to hang for a murder he wasn't even a conscious accomplice to. He lies on his bunk in the death cell, listening to a cracked record whose needle stutters and skips until lifted over the break, after which, the warder proudly claims, it "plays as good as new." An existentialist to the last, Johnny muses to himself, "Wonder whether it's the same with us who play it."
Even more than mild-mannered Cornelius Leyden in The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Johnny West permits Lorre to shine against type—whimsical and self-destructive, the kind of gentlemanly trash fire who's much too intelligent for the smash-and-grab turned shootout he got himself mixed up in, except he was so many sheets to the wind the night he agreed to stand lookout for a couple of new friends who were buying the drinks, he has to read the newspaper coverage of the trial in order to find out what happened. "Filthy drunk, you were," his glowering minder Gabby (Peter Whitney) scolds him, but Johnny only repeats the words with the satisfaction of a punch line, which they may well be. In a lifetime of greater and lesser fuck-ups, the magnitude of this one awes even him. As their situation deteriorates from extortionate bedsits to emergency contacts in Aberdeen, he eyes the seediness of life on the lam and the specter of the hangman as ironically as Diderot, contemplating whether his innocence will earn him a more modest gallows than two-fisted Gabby or the dapper cop-killer Fallon (Robert Shayne), comprehending with dismay that his appetite for a sandwich must mean he's sobered up. He prefers to hold the world at arm's length. "Even the piano must be astonished," he shrugs when Crystal compliments him on his playing of Brahms; he cuts a flower-seller's hopeful patter short with an unnecessarily bitter, "I haven't got a wife, and if I had one, a bunch of violets wouldn't make her happy." He has sharp edges for all his fatalistic charm. But he has wistful ones, too, and they are harder to disguise around the girl who was supposed to keep him in gin and out of trouble, the cool-headed courtroom liar Icey Crane (Joan Lorring). She loves him for the simple reason that even passing-out drunk, he treats her "like [she] was somebody." He touches her hair almost absently, as if he cannot afford to let himself notice his own feelings. I love the quiet of their scene under the tidal arches of Battersea Bridge, her candid intentions and his cynical poetry and the kind of hope that expresses itself through hopelessness:
"Talk, Johnny. I like to hear you talk . . . What were you thinking just now?"
"Nothing. I was looking at all the lights in all these houses . . . Well, you see, each light cuts a tiny little circle out of the darkness, and each circle is the center of somebody's life. People swing around these lights like planets swing around the stars."
"And we ain't got a light. Is that what you're thinking?"
Naturally I love this relationship for its own wounded sake, but I also love watching it played by an actor like Lorre, for whose characters it is something of an understatement to say that romantic happiness is not usually in the cards. It hurts but does not necessarily surprise the viewer that he's pinched at the last minute of a getaway, leaving behind the poignant talisman of the violets he bought for Icey after all. He was the only one of the three to recognize the danger of asking a goddess "to reshuffle a hand that destiny has already dealt us . . . because we hope to get higher cards. A little presumptuous on our part, isn't it?" Perhaps he's only reaping the fruits of that presumption. It might not happen to Humphrey Bogart, whom Huston had originally hoped to cast when the project was being mooted by Warners as a follow-up to The Maltese Falcon (1941); it might not happen to Robert Montgomery, David Niven, or any of the other A-stars the AFI Catalog claims were considered for the part over the years; it would happen to Peter Lorre. He exits a lot of movies screaming. Just the actual casting, then, embodies the uncertainty so vital to film noir—and perhaps sharpens the audience's desire to see this sympathetic character, ghosted by his actor's weird, macabre, marginalized persona, for once survive and succeed. It would make such a nice change, especially for Johnny who has always let his life happen to him and might finally have found something he wants to make happen instead. "If I could hate Fallon, I—I suppose I could love you."
It confused me the first time around that Three Strangers does not take place contemporarily, but I have since learned that from 1941 to 1945 the Grand National was on hold for WWII-related reasons; I suspect it may also have been narratively expedient to skip all the questions about the course of history that a wartime setting wouldn't have been able to avoid. Technically I suppose that adds it to my catalogue of historical noir, although I am more inclined to class it with Repeat Performance (1947) for general themes of determinism, free will, and Janus-hinged weirdness. The uncanny lies so barely beneath the surface of Arthur Edeson's slantwise cinematography, it takes only a change of shadows to bring it into the light. That said, I appreciate that the film does make some effort to keep its Orientalism to a minimum. "Icey," Johnny concludes ruefully, "don't ever get mixed up with a Chinese goddess," but the ethnicity of Huston et al.'s incarnation of fate is much less important than the hubris of trying to manipulate it in the first place. For all her fashionable Chinoiserie and her show of reverence for the mysteries of the East, Crystal's attitude toward Kwan Yin comes to look as narcissistic as the rest of her, the possessive appropriation of "an idol instead of a soul." As Arbutny collapses into the magical thinking he previously disdained, he raves not about the perfidy of heathen images but the Devil in the form of a woman abroad in the streets. Johnny with his quirky respect for the world beyond the material may have had the right of it at the start, when he gently rebuked Arbutny for believing in the statue of a goddess but not her divinity. Certainly he could do with a little compassion. "Some people have to go to prison to be free, you know?" I revisited this movie courtesy of TCM's Noir Alley, but it also now exists on DVD, which is what I wished for the last time I watched it. Well, that and more screen romances for Peter Lorre. This light brought to you by my happy backers at Patreon.
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