SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

After discovering a dead man with his throat slit, reporter Mike Ward (John McGuire) proves to be the key witness in the murder trial, putting away the accused to face the death penalty. His fiancée Jane (Margaret Tillachet) harbours doubts about the man's guilt, causing Ward to question himself and what he really saw. Returning to his apartment, he has a brief encounter with a strange man (Peter Lorre) who he sees lurking around the building, and after finding his neighbour murdered in the same way, he cowers into a paranoid and disillusioned state. When Ward is arrested on suspicion of the murder, Jane wanders the streets searching for this strange man with bulging eyes, thick lips, and a white scarf.Although it wasn't released until after similar films of the genre, Stranger on the Third Floor is considered to be the first 'true' film noir. The classic tale of an innocent man out to prove his innocence is given a slight spin with a short central section depicting Ward's descent into panic. This is punctured with a quite strange dream sequence that is filmed quite nicely given the obvious budget limitations. These limitations tend to damage the film's potential impact, with McGuire's quite outlandish performance making it disappointing that director Boris Ingster couldn't afford a better lead. With very literal narration, he flails around as if locked in an operatic Russian silent, feeling it important to inform the audience "I'm tired," after yawning and stretching.The extremely dull first two-thirds of the film spend most of the time tip-toeing around the strongest plot thread, which is Jane's search for Peter Lorre's creepy stranger. Lorre saves the film, having been a veteran of German Expressionism, is perfectly suited to the film's overwrought, dramatic style. His soft voice and small stature make him barely imposing, but subtly unnerving. Running at just over an hour, Stranger was never intended to be challenging, but a simple thriller, and that's exactly what it is. But it's also frightfully pedestrian, offering none of the sleaze or sweat I usually love from B-grade noirs. It certainly had a key role to play in the development of one of the most successful genres in American cinema history, but this, combined with Lorre's memorable but sadly brief appearance, are the only reasons why this film is fleetingly remembered.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

If you want an in your face Film-Noir expressionistic look with a style yet realized, this embryonic exhilarating movie is it. For students it can unleash an against the grain production that is not prototypical and has some other great flourishes that make this a grand experience.This tight little thriller is cynical ("there are too many people in the world") and strange. It takes on suppressed courting rituals (the rather risqué romantic interlude in the apartment) notice the gleam in his eye as he peels off her stockings in their "warm and cuddly" retreat from the rain. There is so much to look at in the dream sequences and flashbacks with the audacious use of distortion and shadows and bizarre character posturing, that this short film is packed with enticement and extremes that are as loopy and lamenting as anything in film.There are the yet to be Film-Noir standards and icons such as guilt, paranoia, geeks, false accusations, hallucinations, slimy dwellings with close quarters and staircases, diners, rain-soaked streets, trench-coats, mental illness and brutal violent acts. It's all here formulated with a minuscule budget and is a cloistered mini-masterpiece of movie potentials and artistic exuberance.

Film noir has deep roots in Weimar Germany, and I don't mean the tricks with light and shadow, those being tricks. The engine was always control over the narrative and disoriented mind. It goes back to Lang, Sternberg, Pabst, selective films by primarily those three. I have written extensively on all three. But as far as the Hollywood model is concerned, the traditional iconography we identify as noir, it probably starts here. The Maltese Falcon and a score of other films would come out the next year.The score is that a murder has taken place, a young man arrested and awaiting trial, and our newspaper reporter is the key witness. He is quite adamant in the court that he's reporting truth, truth as he saw it. But of course he didn't see the actual murder take place. Nevertheless, the young man gets the chair.Now dramatically the entire thing is shoddy and wholly scripted from the outside, every character openly announcing love or doubt. But we lucked out that this was a b-movie filmed on the cheap, and so had to be quick and inventive, in place of a lot of words having to rely on a few strokes of the camera in just over 60 minutes.Our reporter is eaten inside by doubt that he helped convict the wrong man, and ordinarily we'd be taken on a plot where the tangled web is reasoned back into its rightful order. Instead we have amazing cinema, the widely discussed hallucination and centered in the house. Now most reviewers have rested their comments on the expressive sets and feverish air of the nightmare, as the man hallucinates himself in the situation of the convicted who is innocent but no one will believe him. It is the one scene that immediately calls for attention. But the nightmare has started well before he's fast asleep and is a little more intricately woven. The internal monologue of doubt and self-recrimination starts down in the street and goes up the lodging place, with the man pacing up and down the halls, no longer the confident person we first met, going through possible scenarios and his level involvement, and the stream of consciousness reflects shattered reality, coalescing from one unfinished thought into the one after next. It's the one thing perfectly written in this, whether intentionally or not.So the limits of a safe, recognizable world torn away, the eye no longer allowed to rest within a sensible geography, every little thing suddenly becomes a clue that triggers a story to fit in it. He sees a mysterious stranger on the third floor, the door opposite his.Then of course the nightmare on the third floor, the court, pointed fingers accusing, the huge cavernous cell with shadows of bars slanting on him.The third layer and more frightening is that he wakes up to discover that reality was just as dreamed. The uncanny effect produced by doubling the other two layers into now a straight-forward 'wrong man' plot, is it allows us to recast anxiety as spillover from both nightmare and monologue. This is very clever tinkering and especially at the b- level, every last bit of the film may be the mind in disarray and muttering to itself.Of course the story was all true as we suspected, both men innocent, and a 'crazy person' responsible. Everything is set straight. The twist is that it's the woman who acts as the private eye, doing the grassroots detective work on the streets. The court is spared a second trial, fateful causality taking care of loose ends. The denouement of a happy life ahead of everyone is like straight from a dream, which is fitting since the premise was that reality was just as dreamed.Subsequent filmmakers would supply a more ambiguously layered eye, but this was great for the time, an impressive start.

I loved this movies based on the character of Peter Lorre. Peter Lorre was such a creep and George Lucas used the same character to make a villain in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So this journalist is a key witness to a murder a trial and he is not quite sure of what he saw and explains this to the jury. There isn't much evidence to pin the murder on the suspect, but the journalist's testimony seals the suspect's fate. Having confidence in the Justice System, the journalist thinks nothing of it. In a nightmare he understands that the system may have failed and that his shotty testimony may have landed this kid in jail for a murder he did not commit. After having this dream, he notices a strange quiet in his usually noisy neighbor's apartment. When he goes to investigate the strange phenomena he notices a strange figure lurking around. After reporting the murder of his neighbor, he falls under suspect for having committed it. Past exclamations claiming that he was going to kill his neighbor over his neighbor's annoying habits puts the journalist in the spotlight and in the same position as the kid he testified against earlier. The journalist's fiancé investigates on his behalf and finds a man who fit the journalist's description of the lurking figure. Turns out that a psychotic patient was killing people indiscriminately and confusing the police with seemingly unconnected murders. The psychotic patient eventually confesses and the journalist is free to go.