#239: Stranger on the Third Floor
Noir had to start somewhere — maybe it started with Peter Lorre?
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 7, 2020.
Initial release: August 16, 1940
Director: Boris Ingster
Film noir and horror have long shared a kinship: both are long in shadow, mystery and suspense, both were shaped by the Universal Studios canon and German Expressionism, and both come together in Stranger on the Third Floor, Boris Ingster’s classic noir flick. While it’s arguable that film noir as a genre didn’t really begin to coalesce until the 1940s, we have plenty of prototypical examples that laid the groundwork, going back to the German Expressionism of the 1920s. And it’s only appropriate that, ten years after appearing as the villain in Fritz Lang’s expressionist talkie masterpiece M, Peter Lorre would cross the Atlantic to play a similar role in a much different film. He’s arguably creepier here, though: thinner, and with that cat smile of his.
The film opens cheerily enough at a diner in Manhattan. Two lovers, Mike and Jane, meet for breakfast. Mike has an announcement: he got a big raise for breaking a major story at the paper he works at, as he was the sole witness to a murder. It’s enough to rent a place together, but before they can start shopping for drapes, the trial is that day. He gives his testimony, but the accused, who swears up and down that he didn’t do it, breaks down as he’s found guilty and hauled away. Jane had come to see the proceedings, but she’s upset by the scene and has doubts as to the man’s guilt.
Going home to his boarding room, Mike runs into an odd-looking stranger, who runs when confronted and disappears. Mike, who had been so sure of his testimony, is now having doubts of his own, and those doubts seep in as he realizes his horrible neighbor has stopped snoring...
When talking about the “first film noir,” films such as Double Indemnity or The Maltese Falcon usually are what gets the designation, but so much of film noir is an amalgamation of several ideas, themes and tropes that emerged throughout the 20s and 30s. It makes it effectively impossible to say definitively what even qualifies as film noir, because for every mainstream example we can point at, among more obscure films like this one we find far more on-the-nose examples. And that’s just in the early 40s — what about earlier? The 1930s gave us such seminal films like Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy, with all the attendant shadowy set design; it was also the era of gangster films such as those starring James Cagney, and they, too, sometimes indulged in moody lighting and a grim tone. Or let’s go back further, with such films as Robert Weine’s The Hands of Orlac and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog with its flashing city lights and rumbling trains, or of course F.W. Murnau’s Dracula-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off Nosferatu.
So I can’t help but conclude that film noir isn’t so much a genre as it’s a mood, or style; even horror isn’t as rigid a genre as we would expect, given the existence of the “thriller” genre. You could point to any one of these films and call it the first film noir. So calling this film “proto-noir” feels a bit limiting, as well as an insult to the brilliance of this film. Stranger has it all: heavy shadowing, off-kilter cameras, voice-over narrative, a sinister villain, and a dream sequence so bonkers you’d think Bruce Timm wrote it.
The middle part of the film is the strongest, as Mike agonizes over what to do with his hated neighbor — should he check on him? He thinks back to times his neighbor infuriated him in some way, and worries that if his neighbor really is dead, he might be blamed for it. Eventually he falls asleep and dreams of just that, a long, winding nightmare full of Expressionist set design and a sinister, uncaring justice system — a bold move in 1940, but no less impressive today.
And in the end, the film still gives the Hayes code what it wants. In what would be the weakest part of the film, Mike is in fact arrested under suspicion of his neighbor’s murder, leaving Jane to look for the mysterious man he saw. She does eventually come across him, but the finale is over so fast it’s blink-and-you-miss-it. eter Lorre’s role as the nameless, lurking villain is so small that it’s obvious that he got top billing solely on the basis of his fame — because he barely even exists in this film. This mirrors M in which we don’t see much of the villain until the very end, but it doesn’t feel as satisfying. With a runtime of only an hour, even ten minutes to the ending could have improved it. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic film that belongs on every noir fan’s to-watch list; heck, so much of it reminded me of Batman: the Animated Series that I would recommend it to fans of that show too.
