It was impossible for me to not see his character as yet another warmed-over M
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.
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.
no subject
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.]