Three Strangers

In London, on the eve of the Chinese New Year, three people who do not know one another meet in a room. The woman has called the other two in from the street: by the belief, the wish of three strangers joined before the statue of the goddess of destiny that night will be granted. The three of them go in together on a sweepstakes ticket. Then each returns to their own life, and what is happening there is far more tangled than whether the ticket wins. John Huston wrote the screenplay; the script he wrote years earlier could only be filmed in 1946. Jean Negulesco directed. Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are in the same picture again, continuing the pairing that had run since The Maltese Falcon. The three stories move on without being tied together, and each is a noir in itself: a woman will not let go of her husband, a solicitor has spent a client's money, a man is wanted for a murder he did not commit. Luck here is not a solution.