Stranger on the Third Floor

Michael Ward is a reporter and testified at a murder trial. He saw a man standing over a body in a diner and said so. The man is found guilty and is going to the chair. Ward talks to his fiancée; she is not so sure. He goes home and notices he cannot hear his neighbour. He knocks. No answer. He had seen a strange man on the stairs that night. He sleeps and has a nightmare: he is on trial, nobody listens, and he is taken to be executed. When he wakes his neighbour really is dead. Boris Ingster directs. John McGuire plays Ward, Margaret Tallichet his fiancée and Peter Lorre the stranger; Charles Waldron is in the cast. It is an American production, made in 1940. The film is counted among the first examples of film noir; its manner became a model for what followed. The nightmare is its best known part; the set is not realistic, the shadows are exaggerated, and the sequence is close to German expressionist cinema. Peter Lorre appears in few scenes but the character carries the film's weight. The matter it treats is the unreliability of testimony; Ward describes what he thinks he saw. The film is short; it runs a little over an hour and was made on a low budget. The narrative leaves its resolution to coincidence at the end. It was not a commercial success on release and was reassessed later. Its limit is the production; the narrative is simple, the acting uneven, and the ending easy. Who it is for: viewers curious about the origins of film noir and forties Hollywood. Who it is not for: it is old, simple, and the ending easy.