The Stranger on the Third Floor

Discussions about criminal justice, and, particularly, the death penalty generally sort people into two categories:  Kafkas and RCMP Mounties.  Kafkas are cursed with a vivid imagination and sense that everyone could be plausibly, and, even, perhaps, justly, accused of a loathsome crime.  RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Polices) Mounties imagine themselves so stalwart, upright and virtuous that no one could ever suspect them of a traffic ticket violation let alone a heinous offense.  Kafkas are given to morose introspection; they read and think too much.  Mounties are beefy, attend Church for all the wrong reasons, and like guns.  Both camps are pretty entrenched and tend to glare at one another with hurt feelings when a debate between them ensues.  The 1940 film,  The Stranger on the Third Floor, depicts an earnest Mounty in the process of turning into a Kafka and its a dark, understated little gem.  The picture is directed by an unknown quantity, Boris Ingster, shot by the incomparable Nicholas Musuraca, and features the ultimate Kafka, tiny Peter Lorre slinking around the urban landscape, wordless until his final serenely insane speech.  Lorre always looks like he's guilty of something; his counterpart in this film, a Mounty, is a rock-jawed young journalist whose profile is a little like that of George Reeves, the Man of Steel famous for playing Superman in the latter part of the Fifties.  (I don't know the name of the actor or the leading lady -- they were minor contract players who have long since slipped into oblivion.)

The journalist witnesses the aftermath of a murder at a diner in Brooklyn.  (He's a regular at that place).  He doesn't see the actual murder just the suspect standing next to the man whose throat has been cut.  This killing turns out to be a benefit to the journalist -- he gets a scoop and by-line when he publishes the story in the paper and, then, is lionized when his confident testimony puts the bad guy on death row.  (The bad guy is the perpetually victimized and semi-hysterical Elisha Cook, Jr. -- here his baby-face convulsed by terror.)  The hero's problem is that his fiancée is a Kafka and thinks there is a reasonably doubt about the provenance of the murder. The trial, in which the Judge is paying no attention, the smarmy prosecutor and public defender gloating together over the crime, and the jurors asleep or almost asleep, is a nightmare to her and she quarrels bitterly with her boyfriend.  Aided by some melodramatic and accusing shadows, the journalist begins to doubt himself.  He recognizes that he has clashed repeatedly with a nosy, vicious neighbor and, indeed, when that neighbor is discovered with his throat slashed in the adjacent apartment, the journalist finds himself accused of that murder.  Then, Peter Lorre appears, haunting the premises of the two murders, and, of course, confesses to the girl with sinister nonchalance that he has killed both men.  After wrestling with the girl, Lorre runs out into the street and gets hit by a truck  This brings the film to an abrupt conclusion -- 30 seconds later, it's all over with Elisha Cook, Jr. revealed to be the taxi-driver who will take the happy couple to their marriage at City Hall.  In terms of plot, there's not much here but it's the details that make the film interesting.  For instance, the truckdriver immediately embarks on a lament about how he is not responsible for running over Peter Lorre -- there's a suggestion that the whole cycle of guilt and retribution is now firing up again, but in a different vein.  After the jury's verdict, we see the couple talking by telephone -- in both of their rooms, giant shadows of chairs are cast on the wall, reflecting the fact that the verdict and the criminal's execution have cast a shadow on their relationship.  About a third of the film is devoted to bravura fantasy sequence in which the hero imagines himself condemned to death by a stylized court and sleeping jurors, locked in a prison cell, and, then, dragged to his execution.  Critics debate whether this sequence signifies the inception of film noir.  (My vote is that it does not -- the fantasy sequence is too airy, involves sets that are too big and spacious, and, rather, seems more related to movie musicals of the late thirties:  the art director had worked with Fred Astaire on films like Top Hat.  Film noir is fundamentally claustrophobic and these sets, which are very large and open, look more like dance-floors. That said, the film's general sense of paranoia and doom make it a good candidate for a proto-noir whatever you think about the fantasy and dream sequences.)  Peter Lorre, of course, is great -- he was acting off the last couple days of his contract with RKO Radio Pictures and is scarcely in the picture.  But it's about him and his haunted face bridges the gap between Mounty and Kafka.  His first lines are indelible:  he orders two hamburgers raw so he can feed them to a stray dog:  "he is homeless," Lorre says about the dog, "and I am also."