Stranger on the Third
Floor
Director: Boris Ingster
Year: 1940
Rating: 5.5
In this book that I am reading titled Film Noir:
A Critical Guide to 1940's and 1950's Hollywood Noir by Eddie Robson, the
author claims this as the first noir. I suppose to some degree noir is in
the eye of the beholder and there is I expect a debate about which noir film
came first and which films should even be included in that category. Of course,
when these films were being made no one called them noir or thought of them
as a distinct sub-genre - that didn't come until years later. But for me
The Maltese Falcon with Bogart has always been the first. Now this guy says
this one is. I cautiously push back.
There are certainly a bunch of standard noir characteristics in this film
- a 10 minute dream sequence in which German Expressionist style runs wild
- and a lot of odd angled camera shots with shadows hanging around like corpses
in a morgue. It even has Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. But for me it is
missing the key ingredients - a femme fatale, bleakness and betrayals. Without
that we just have a B film murder mystery done in an interesting and unique
style.
A journalist (John McGuire) is the witness to a man (Elisha Cook Jr.) standing
over a murdered body and testifies to this. The man is convicted but the
journalist's girlfriend (Margaret Tallichet - wife of director William Wyler)
feels that the case isn't that foolproof. The journalist at this point takes
on the internal narration and clearly the guilt of maybe being wrong begins
to drive him nuts. Another man is murdered. Peter Lorre who is the Stranger
pops in and out but of the 103 minute running time he is only on screen for
perhaps 15 minutes of it. Elisha Cook even less. Lorre was already a big
star and the following year he and Cook would both appear in The Maltese
Falcon but RKO only had him for a few days. He is still at the top of the
billing though.
The movie isn't all that good other than the photography by Nicholas Musuraca
who went on to lens a ton of films among them The Blue Gardenia, The Hitch-Hiker,
Out of the Past, The Spiral Staircase, The Seventh Victim, The Ghost Ship,
Cat People and the Fallen Sparrow. The acting feels very B, the sets austere
and the ending rather idiotic. I kept hoping the film was heading in a much
more interesting direction but in the end it is quite conventional.
