Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) - film review

Reporter Michael Ward is the key witness in a murder trial.  At first, he has no qualms about testifying against the man who is accused of murdering a popular café owner.  But when the man is convicted and sentenced to death, Ward has second thoughts.  As he returns alone to his cramped lodgings, he is assailed by guilty thoughts.  He falls asleep and in a horrific nightmare he imagines himself tried and condemned for killing his next door neighbour.  When he awakes, he discovers that his neighbour is dead, his throat cut just like the café owner’s.  Ward recalls seeing a strange man earlier that evening, a man in a white scarf loitering in the apartment block.  Could this man be the murderer, or did he - Michael Ward – perform the two killings, in a moment of mental aberration...?

Although ill-received when it was first released and then soon forgotten, this unusual B-movie has come to be regarded as one of the earliest examples of film noir.  It has many – but by no means all - of the stylistic and thematic motifs of the classic film noir, yet stylistically it is closer to German expressionist cinema of the late 1920s than to what most audiences would recognise as a typical American film noir.  This is most apparent in the stunningly realised dream sequence, which calls to mind a similar sequence from Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922).

Stranger on the Third Floor was directed by Latvian émigré Boris Ingster, who made just two other films and who is perhaps best known as the producer of the classic TV spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1967-68).  The striking art direction was by Van Nest Polgase, whose next commission would be Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.  Cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca would subsequently work on some of the greatest film noirs – The Spiral Staircase (1945) and Out of the Past (1942), as well as the memorable expressionist thriller Cat People (1942).

The film’s soulless urban setting and the plot involving an innocent man caught up in a deadly web of intrigue are recognisable film noir ingredients, but more striking are the other noir elements – the harsh lighting, extreme use of shadows, oblique camera angles, flashbacks and voiceover narration.   This heavy stylisation can appear clunky and a tad theatrical, but it does have the effect of conveying the intense psychological crisis in which the hero finds himself as a destructive guilt complex takes him over.  

Where Stranger on the Third Floor is strongest is the way in which it introduces and sustains the ambiguity over the identity of the killer.  For most of the time we are left wondering whether the seemingly genial reporter Ward is the killer – a psychopath who for some reason cannot recall his murderous acts.  Most of the performances are mannered and theatrical, the one notable exception being that of Peter Lorre.  In a role that reminds us of his character in Fritz Lang’s M, Lorre manages to be both frightening and sympathetic as the mysterious stranger in the white scarf, skilfully portraying a man who is both villain and victim, but with a crooked smile that will freeze the blood of the most fearless spectator.  

Whilst it may lack subtlety, the film manages to deliver an effective indictment of the American legal system and society’s casual indifference to injustice.  No one seems to care if an innocent man is wrongly convicted and sent to the electric chair except the man whose evidence condemns him.   The whole burden of guilt falls on the witness; the others – judge, jury, lawyers – are merely the cogs in an unfeeling legal machine whose sole purpose is to dispassionately deliver and execute textbook justice.    Equally disturbing is the way in which people with mental disorders are treated.  Peter Lorre’s character may be the stuff of nightmares but it is hard not to be moved by his pleas not to be "sent back there".   The State apparently has just two solutions for dealing with his kind: bang them up or fry them.

© James Travers 2008

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