Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) - One of the first Classic Hollywood Noir

Here is an RKO Radio Pictures cheapo, it along with The Letter are one of Hollywood's first Noirs.

Directed by Boris Ingster (Southside 1-1000). Written by Nathanael West based on a story by Frank Partos.

 Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People, The Seventh Victim, The Fallen Sparrow, Deadline at Dawn, The Spiral Staircase, The Blue Gardenia, The Hitch-Hiker  ). Music by Roy Webb

Starring Classic Noir icons Peter Lorre as The Stranger and Elisha Cook Jr. as Joe Briggs, between them they are in just under twenty Films Noir. with leads John McGuire as Michael Ward, Margaret Tallichet as Jane, and  Charles Waldron as the District Attorney.

Margaret Tallichet as Jane

John McGuire as Michael Ward

Peter Lorre as The Stranger

Elisha Cook Jr. as Joe Briggs

I was surprised when I first watched this years ago to find out that it wasn't a Cornell Woolrich story. The gritty city tale constructed from Partos' story and Wests screenplay, is quite similar to those Woolrich tales of impending doom where a woman is basically the sleuth trying to save her man from the electric chair (The Phantom Lady, and Black Angel). 

The best things about films based on Woolrich is that they speed up the action. Woolrich has a tendency to milk what could be said in a simple sentence into a paragraph, the bad things are the films also leave a lot of details out, and completely fuck with the plots. There probably isn't one film based on Woolrich's work that is completely true to his writings. Of the ones I've read, The Phantom Lady, The Window and maybe No Man of Her Own are close.  They all could be remade (keeping around the time period they were set in is crucial), and if they actually followed the plots better they would seen like completely different films. 

So in Stranger on the Third Floor we have two lovers Michael and Jane wanting to get married. Michael is a reporter and Jane a secretary. Michael lies in a single room flop, while Jane lives with a roommate. The big obstacle is money. Between them they don't have enough for a big apartment.

 Jane and Michael

Michael gets a big break when he is a witness to a murder in Nick's All Nite Coffee Pot across the street from his apartment. He walks into Nick's, sees Joe Briggs standing at the open cash register with Nick's body draped over it. Nick's throat is slashed. Briggs runs out the back door when he sees Michael.  

Michael reports the murder to the police then, writes an exclusive story for the paper. Michael gets a raise as a result and he proposes to Jane, and all is going well until the Briggs trial. 

At the trial Michael gives his testimony. Briggs version was that he arrived at Nick's after the murder also, and right before Michael walked in. Surprised by Michael, Briggs didn't think it out, and ran away out the back door to the alley. 

Here is your typical Film Noir stupid move. It happens over and over in Noir. Think Detour. Al Roberts opens the door of Charles Haskell Jr's 1941 Lincoln Continental convertible. Haskell already dead falls out and hits his head on a rock. Al thinks the blow of hitting the rock killed him. He panics and figures that the cops won't believe the story. Now we, the noweducated on countless crime shows audience, knows, that forensics can verify what Al would have told the authorities. 

But, we also know now from numerous wrong convictions proven by DNA evidence, that some law enforcement, back in the day, weren't that thorough, were incompetent, or manufactured false evidence, deliberately framing undesirables, transients, and people of color.

So if police work was that shoddy back then, that would shed a bit of light on what we think now is whacky behavior in Noir. If you were a transient, and saw the police pulling other down and outers in, and pinning local crimes on them, and you, stumbled in on a murder scene, you'd probably want to get the hell out of Dodge too. Maybe that move isn't stupid, it might have once been an instinct for self preservation, in a Depression Nightmare America that existed if you were an unlucky denizen from the wrong side of the tracks.

Guilty

So Michael's testimony gets Briggs convicted even though Michael did not see Briggs actually commit the murder. Briggs is shocked and screams his innocence. Jane who watched the trial proceedings believes Briggs. Michael has second thoughts. 

Michael has second thoughts. A few nights later Michael discovers his neighbor with his throat cut and tells the police he saw a strange man going in and out of his neighbors apartment suspiciously and chased him down the stairway before losing him out in the street. This was just before he discovered the body. His description is of a man with bulging eyes and a white scarf. Michael mentions that the cut throat was similar to the wound that killed Nick. 

 

Later in his apartment, thinking of Briggs, Michael is not so sure anymore of his guilt. He nods out and has a nightmare where he dreams that he is accused of murder like Briggs. It's a highly stylized German expressionistic dream sequence. 

It goes Noirsville when the district attorney realizing that Michael was at both murder scenes accuses him of being the murderer.

Noirsville

Rear screen projection of Washington Square Park, Manhattan - NYC

Its an interesting low budget Noir that might be known better if it had a few well known headliners as the two lovers in the cast. Everyone performs well but only Lorre and Cook sustained their marks in Noir and beyond. 6.5-710