225 - Stranger on the Third Floor

A 62-minute-long, 1940 B-movie whose director you haven't heard of and whose top-billed star has barely ten minutes of screen time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Stranger on the Third Floor is nothing remarkable, but its reputation precedes it: Here we behold, if the legends are true, the first film noir. José, a lover of noir, both likes and dislikes this line. On the one hand, it enjoyably disrupts what is already a fairly shaky narrative of noir beginning practically overnight in 1941; on the other, noir is a term that encompasses many visual styles, stories, character types, associated genres and influences, and artistic movements like this develop gradually, not immediately. But this taxonomic discussion says nothing of Stranger on the Third Floor's quality. And for a good fifteen minutes or so, that quality is not promising, but the film explodes into life upon the protagonist's descent into a hallucinatory nightmare brought on by guilt and fear. It's José's first time seeing the film, and immediately he proclaims its dream sequence as one of cinema's greatest. And throughout the film, before, during and after this central visual treat, there is conveyed a vivid sense of the difficulties of life in Depression-era America, alongside a severe critique of the absurdity of a justice system that can be relied upon to offer nothing of the sort. All of which is to say nothing of Peter Lorre, who imbues his titular stranger with both understandable threat and surprising empathy. So, Stranger on the Third Floor, The First Film Noir, is rather more than an historical curio. It embodies stylistic and thematic developments that were taking place in American cinema of its era, though the question of what counts as first is best left to those who think it's even deserving of an answer, let alone possible to establish one. It's a film that is on its own terms deserving of your attention, and in between its B-movie cheapness and clunkiness, offers something truly great. Recorded on 22nd April 2020.