STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940, RKO)
dir. Boris Ingster; starring John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Peter Lorre
Having never heard of the film before, I was surprised to read that Stranger on the Third Floor is, apparently, generally accepted as the first film noir, as it is defined in the classic sense. However, after watching this surprisingly short film, clocking in at only 64 minutes, it’s a pretty compelling argument. The film not only possessed most of the critical elements of noir, but it serves as something of a transition from mainstream American filmmaking of the period into – but, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The movie, as with most noirs, features a plot that is neither particularly interesting nor important, so we won’t spend too much time on that yet. Better to begin with, well, the beginning: the opening shot. After the RKO boilerplate, the first shot is of the entrance to an apartment building, which the camera pauses on for only a moment before swiftly racing up to a third-story window. At this window is the silhouette of a man behind the curtain, and superimposed upon it is the title of the film.
(It is here I will freely admit my sick tendency to over-analyze, to ferret out every possible metaphor and device in the hopes of finding the one legitimate one by pure process of saturation.)
This shot already serves as an in-between place, a transition. It is at once the classic Title Card, a device long since abandoned in our day but for the pastiches and homages, and our first shadow of the film. Man is represented by darkness, before there is a single word of dialogue; darkness smoking a cigarette, no less. Furthermore, in this first shot of the city apartment building, we have already exposed the urban backdrop that serves as the setting for pure noir. The rapid climb to the third floor establishes the vertical topography of the city, cramming everything so tightly together that the only place to grow is up. The vertical shape of the city not only emphasizes the claustrophobia of urban life, but it will aid noir photography as well; this film, as do countless other noirs, will feature harsh, diagonal angles up and down long stairwells. The altitudes of the city afford the noir style extremely exaggerated shots, a device that will eventually be taken to its extreme years later in Hitchcock’s psycho-noir, Vertigo (1958).
But enough about the first three seconds of film. Despite my obsessive over-analysis, the rest of this opening is actually very un-noir. Curly-cue title scripts, pleasant major-key music, and even the smoking silhouette turns to a silhouette of a man typing, and then making a phone call. Low on intrigue, to be sure. As it continues, any real scrap of noir style is all but invisible. Our main characters are sweet, and their banter is pretty weak. Jane is no femme fatale, Mike is a reporter who always has the same thing for breakfast every day at the same diner.
Our next noir element seeps in slowly. While there are many elements of noir storytelling that get used all the time as examples of the typical style (betrayal, complex twists, etc.), one that I rarely hear people talking about is the extensive, almost universal use of backstory. Often, the most important events in a noir are ones that have happened before the film begins. As this month goes on, we will see more and more that the past is viewed as oppressive, irreversible, inescapable. No matter how pure our characters may be, there is something in their past that will catch them and find them out. In Stranger, our placid diner scene already makes reference to Mike being the star witness in a murder trial, the murder of a man named Nick, a murder his fiancée Jane wishes he had never discovered. It will be a little while until we discover the details of this backstory, but there is already a sense that we have arrived in the middle of intrigue. Things are already complicated.
Later, we see the aforementioned trial, in which a young man, Joe Briggs, is being tried for the murder of Nick, who we learn was the prior owner of Mike and Jane’s usual diner. The boy is pitiful, wide open eyes, slack jawed with terror and weakness. He is no murderer, but we watch as he is strung up by Mike’s well-meaning but circumstantial witness account. It is interesting to see that we begin in a courtroom, a place generally accepted as the end of a crime. In another form, the courtroom is where all story points and characters may be gathered together to form a complete picture, to suss out who is right and who is wrong, and to end the movie justly. This, quite simply, is not that. The courtroom is our beginning, not our conclusion. The law is not a force to tie up a complicated story; the law is what complicates a simple life. It is here in the house of law that all terrors and paranoias of the film begin.
Certainly, as we watch the scene, it is clear that this is not a court we should expect to heal and cure. The judge is not paying attention. A juror falls asleep. The public defender barely tries. If there is safety and security in the world of noir, it is not to be found in the laws of man. This begins to settle on the mind of Mike Ward as he watches Briggs, sentenced to death, get dragged away as he screams out to Mike for help. As his cries fade away, Mike’s eyes (and ours) are dragged up to the shadowy figure of blind Justice that looms above, terrifying chords sounding as we zoom in on her scales.
In the scenes that follow, shadows begin to seep into the film. Mike and Jane talk on the phone about the trauma of the trial, each shrouded in darkness. As Mike leaves his courtroom news office for the night, he passes by the empty courtroom, where Justice once again towers over everything, exaggerated shadows harshly thrown, as Briggs’ screams of innocence echo once more. This shot triggers, 16 and a half minutes in, the first appearance of the inner monologue, another classic noir device. The monologue runs as Mike walks through the city streets on his way home, running over the trial in his mind. It is here we see that the noir is not the detective story. We do not care about clues and evidence and procedure. It is about the inner life, the endless doubts and cynicisms and questions that rattle inside a man’s mind. He arrives home, head full of thoughts, to find a strange, quiet man sitting on the front steps to his boarding house.
Now. Let’s talk about Peter Lorre.
He is a man that defines the unsettling, unnerving Other of the noir. The way he does not quite touch his hat when he greets Mike on the stoop. The way he does not quite smile. The way he does not quite focus his eyes on anything. He cannot be pinned down. He does not even speak. Why is he there? Who is he? There can be no answers to these questions now. He scares us and we do not know why. And, as if he is the literal signifier of noir, some insubstantial angel of the shadows, once he arrives, the movie is no longer a transitional piece. It is no longer a mainstream story with hints of cynicism. We are in noir. Mike walks up the stairs to his third-story room, commenting on “what a gloomy dump” it is, wishing they’d put in a bigger lamp. He passes by his snoring, obnoxious neighbor, Meng, about whom we are soon treated to more backstory flashbacks.
When Mike sees the stranger disappear into Meng’s apartment, he hides in the shadows to watch. Soon, the door opens, and the stranger’s hand slowly creeps out. It is so stylized, neither literal and realistic nor 40’s Hollywood approximation of literal and realistic. This is something alien. His shadow is cast on the wall. All is sharp light and engulfing darkness, a world of contrast. Mike chases him down the stairs, asking him all the questions we are. There is no response. Suddenly, the stranger whirls around and glares up at him, up at us. It is malice, untempered by motive or narrative. It is no surprise that Mike stops dead in his tracks, horrified. Once out the door, the stranger has disappeared.
Mike goes back to his room, but he is infected now. Once Peter Lorre enters your story, you cannot go back to a Hollywood romance. He presses himself against the wall in a contorted pose, the stylized expressions of noir having taken over. It is hard not to see why critics of the time derided this film as derivative of German contemporaries, but it is a beautiful synthesis of the Hollywood straightman and the alien angles of expressionism.
Paranoia takes over. Meng is not snoring. Is he dead? Mike cannot investigate, they will think he has done it. Fingerprints! Motives! More memories take over, all the times he threatened Meng, how many people knew he hated Meng. He remembers a night in the diner, Meng passing through while Mike eats a late dinner with a colleague. Mike asks his coworker, “Did you ever want to kill a man?” His friend deadpans back a line that could very well be the slogan for all noirs everywhere:
“My son, there's murder in every intelligent man's heart."
So there is.
As the camera angles twist and tilt more and more, Mike’s paranoia sends him into a dream, full of oppressive close-ups, shrieks and swirls, flames, phantom voices. He is found out, he is arrested, he is convicted! His prison bench sits in a room without ceiling or walls, just a void with shadows behind and shadows below, his terror reduced to the merest suggestions and shapes of his unjust punishment. In the dreamcourt, the statue of Justice is back, a pure shadow now, silhouetted above the court. As Mike screams to the sleeping jury and the hard-hearted judge, the same sinister stranger crawls over endless rows of chairs, creeping closer and closer. The judge sentences him to death, and as Mike watches, the judge transforms into an enormous statue of Justice, her scales unbalanced, her sword become a scythe. In noir, there is no glory in justice, nor in crime. There is no solution, no escape, no sympathy. The shadows are not something to hide in, they are something to consume a sane man’s mind. Even the sweet-hearted Briggs is back in the dream, his face twisted in rage, screaming “Ok kid, go and die!”
Mike wakes, and discovers that Meng is indeed dead. After a moment of panic, he is persuaded by Jane to go to the forces of law, to tell the pure truth and trust in the objective nature of the law. Is this a noir? Of course it is. Of course he is arrested for this offering of trust. Jane trawls the city, searching for the stranger, the man the police will not hunt down now that they have a suspect, a man who might not have committed the crime, but who may as well have. Jane, in her most noir act, immerses herself in the city, but to no avail. It is purely by accident that, while drinking coffee at the diner, the stranger appears in her life, first as only a hand and, for the first time in 55 minutes, a voice appearing from off-screen. He order two raw hamburgers, his voice as soft, unfocused, and unsettling as everything else about him.
Jane follows him out, strikes up a conversation, persuades him to “walk her home.” He displays sudden bursts of speed and anger to contrast his slow, unfocused stupor. He is not just one kind of terrifying, that would make him too easy to define, to pin down. He can be all of our nightmares. When Jane brings up the murders, he whirls on her, asking if “they” sent her to take him back to “the people who lock you up… they put you in a shirt with long sleeves and they pour ice water on you.” Nick, the dead diner owner, and Meng, he says they wanted to send him back. He had to kill him. We see here that there is no great reveal, no clues that lead to a perfect solution. There is no calculated revenge to be exacted here, and no revealing monologue of meticulous planning. The killings are the result of pure madness, simple insanity. How can we convince ourselves not to be terrified of this? What artificial constructs of law or logic can we invent to protect ourselves from this idea? We are naked and alone, no one will help Jane and answer our screams. Interestingly, even as he attacks Jane, we never see the knife the stranger uses. Noir is not occupied so much with violence, but with the ever-present threat of violence. We cannot shield ourselves from even the thought of death.
In the end, the stranger is killed by a truck, unable to stop in time as he runs out in front of it while in pursuit of Jane. His death is as meaningless and random as his crimes. We get the sense that this was our only chance of ending his terror, that no purposeful plot concocted by sane men could have stopped him. Our only chance was, well, chance. This is not justice. With his dying breath, the stranger confesses to the crimes, but with his last words, dispels any hopes of this being a pat, perfect ending. He looks up with those unfocused eyes, and says,
“I’m not going back.”
And he isn’t. His specter of fear has been let out of its cage, and there is no way to see the city as a safe place again. Sure, the movie can tack on its seventy-second ending, with the happy couple going off to get married, the free Briggs giving them a free taxi ride to City Hall. But this is a lie. Noir is here. No one is safe. Peter Lorre is not going back.
Subsequent write-ups will most likely not be anywhere near this long. But we’ll see
No comments:
Post a Comment