STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR, 1940

SARA: This time we get to talk about a movie I really, really liked!  STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR is evidently often (along with THE MALTESE FALCON and M) cited as the first film noir, which leads me to believe that the number one thing you need for an iconic noir is Peter Lorre being all popeyed. A reporter (John McGuire) with a crappy apartment is the witness to a murder, testifies at the trial, has an ethical freakout, sees a crazy person, and has a German Expressionist dream sequence.

An actual scene from STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR. (Not really).

WALLACE: This might be the greatest Fritz Lang homage I've ever seen. It's got all of the hallmarks of a Lang movie: mystery, paranoia, a phantom villain, humor, an expressionistic fantasy sequence ... this is a tight little thriller. Even better, the film's upbeat ending doesn't negate any of it's cynicism. Yeah, the final moments of the movie might suggest that the city opened its prisons and released every wrongfully accused man currently serving time. But that doesn't mean we all aren't just moments away from being sent to the gallows by a bored, apathetic jury for a crime we didn't commit.

I've sat in on a few jury trials in my time and they're every bit as terrifying (and arbitrary) as STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR paints them to be.

SARA: I loved the great representation of that middle of the night "scared to look, scared to not look" frozen thing I've had many times, like when my college roommate would occasionally stop snoring and I'd be both entirely sure she had suddenly died and entirely sure I was an idiot. I mean, on the one hand, if you go touch her foot and she's not dead, you're a weirdo, but if she is dead she's gonna be just as dead in the morning, right?  So you shouldn't investigate. But you might be in here with a dead person.

I was almost thinking that STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR, not being a "full noir" necessarily, might do something really unexpected and have the neighbor not be dead at all, the Peter Lorre character another boarder's brother come to visit, and the man on trial be totally guilty. That would also have been a satisfying movie, I think.

WALLACE: The message would have been the same, for sure. But the audience was probably rooting for the jerkhole neighbor to be dead. I actually had more empathy for Lorre's character, who was a psychopath on the third week of a murder bender.

There are still a few elements of film noir that hadn't fully gelled here. First up is the weirdly attractive cast. John McGuire and Margaret Tallichet both look like they stepped out of a Frank Capra romcom. There's not a glimmer of menace in either of their characters, who are as virtuous as Brad and Janet in THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW. That whiskey stained despair I've come to associate with film noir is mostly absent here. Our male hero should have a face like a catcher's mitt; our heroine should look like a vampire.

Also unusual is that both of the protagonists in this film are pretty smart, too.

SARA: Yeah, I was so glad to see the romantic interest being sensible and resourceful (and, you're right, weirdly wholesome.)  Is that a femme sain?  She annoyed the hell out of me early in the movie for being awfully hard on somebody who's just testifying on the facts in court, but once her fiancé gets framed for murder her response is to go bust her ass canvassing for witnesses in the neighborhood (something the cops don't seem terribly interested in doing). Of course she makes the classic movie misstep of winding up alone with the killer once she spots him, but it's a believable one and her efforts to escape are pretty good, too. (And as a public librarian in a large urban library, I have to tell you I have rarely seen such realistic mental illness ramble. I can't tell you how many times I've heard something exactly in the same tone and general pattern as what Lorre tells her, I mean, usually without the murder parts... probably.  You never know.)

Which of course brings us to Peter Lorre. Man, is he ever not good? I thought the bit with the dog was a really neat bit of writing — it made it clear that this isn't a guy who's evil or cruel. He's dangerous because he's really really crazy and frightened, but still plenty smart.

WALLACE: STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR's willingness to combine genres might be the accidental origin of film noir. This is a mystery with elements of Expressionism, a romantic adventure and a violent thriller that's still beholden to the Old Testament values of the Hays Code. It's that latter element that might be most critical part of the formula. It allowed characters to commit heinous crimes because there would always be a reckoning in the final reel. And the more objectionable the behavior, the more dire the consequences. The pessimistic nature of film noir was hardwired into the genre out of necessity.

SARA: I feel that what makes it a special movie is what it owes to Expressionism, though.  Obviously visually, which leads to the really memorable fantasy sequence, but more subtly in the focus on Ward's fears and the subjectivity of the lens they're viewed from.  (And, I suppose, in the extravagant crappiness of his living situation.  Everything is just a little bit outsized.)  It's also a movie that seems to really enjoy playing with expectations a little bit; consider the diner scene where whatsherface realizes she's sitting next to the killer and he orders raw hamburgers. Both she and the viewer think "holy shit is that guy so evil he eats his hamburgers bleeding?!" and then you see him give them to the dog.  I think maybe the reason she even follows him is partly related to that little ghoulish touch — she is us and we want to see a monster eat some raw meat.

WALLACE: There's something almost Hitchcockian in the movie's structure. We spend the better part of the film following the intrepid reporter, who gets sidelined when the cops eventually charge him with murder. From there, his girlfriend takes the lead ... and the transition isn't condescending or jarring. That's because the movie invested in this change, establishing Tallichet as the haunted voice of reason from the very beginning. If she didn't spend the first act whining about the inequities inherit in the system, Lorre's magical appearance later in the film would have felt a little too convenient.

SARA: That's certainly true, it's just a little unfair of her to freak out at Ward just for giving an accurate testimony! It isn't a mystery per se (it just waits until the killer shows up, and it's obvious that it's gotta be Peter Lorre because, duh, Peter Lorre) but it has the feel and pacing of a mystery. Although this movie does like its female character a lot better than a Hitchcock film ever did.  

THE LETTER, 1940

SARA: Our next film is THE LETTER, a 1940 William Wyler film starring Bette Davis as a murderess on a plantation in Singapore. And it is hella disappointing. I picked it up from the library because we watched the opening scene as part of the "Daily Dose of Darkness" tidbits I've been getting in my inbox as part of the TCM course, and the opening scene works like gangbusters. No fucking around, just get to the "empty your gun at a dude" part!  The next few minutes as Davis' character explains herself to her husband and the authorities works well too, and then there's the rest of the movie to sit through.

WALLACE: One of the taglines for the film was "And I wish I could say I was sorry," which set up Davis' character as some sort of femme fatale. But she spends most of the film making lame excuses for her behavior in the opening sequence. Yeah, she's bad ... but in a way that seems more fitting for the police blotter than a film noir. I can think of a dozen other Better Davis characters that would eat this one for breakfast.

Even though, Davis is still the star of this picture. Her character isn't written any better or worse than the rest, but she's got a real magnetism. And that's coming from somebody who's never been a fan of her work.

SARA: Well I think the problem with the film might be that the movie isn't quite sure who the star of the picture is. Unlike most films noir, THE LETTER doesn't have a viewpoint character.  There's no voiceover and no specific point of view, which is an interesting contrast to DARK PASSAGE, our last movie.  So when the movie is lazily moving pieces around the board, in and out of lawyers' offices and jail cells, there's nobody talking to the audience giving us any sort of internal perspective to liven the place up. There's the Bette Davis character, who's rather hard to sympathize with, and there's a lawyer whose name I never bothered to remember who has the fakest and briefest crisis of conscience I've ever seen, and the film can't make up its mind who it's really following.  So instead it just sort of spins its wheels through the second act.  It picks up a little bit at the end but by then it's too little too late.

I did appreciate the Hays Code used specifically as a suspense mechanism; once somebody gets away with murder in a court of law the audience knows the clock is ticking down and she's gonna get it.

WALLACE: I just realized that somebody didn't get their just desserts: Davis' friendzoned lawyer friend, who took part in extortion, perjury and a host of other shady deals to get her acquitted for murder. The most he suffers for his crimes is a brief bout of the flop sweats.

Is this a good time to talk about racism? Because that's when THE LETTER gets weirdly complicated. Old Hollywood movies are like that relative we all have who thinks racism is measured entirely by how much you use the N-word. There might not be any slurs uttered in THE LETTER, but that doesn't mean it gets a pass for how it treats its Asian characters.

SARA: Oooh, yeah. Every fan of old movies cringes when a movie busts out the plinky "Asian music" in the first five minutes. "Don't be racist don't be racist don't be — GODDAMNIT!"  And no, before I get an inbox full of snotty comments about how I'm too stupid to realize that things were different back then, I know things were different back then and it is entirely possible to enjoy a film while simultaneously not thinking it's okay and that it's worth pointing it out.  I will not soon forget bringing home HOLIDAY INN in blissful ignorance of the Lincoln's Birthday number.

WALLACE: I'd love to talk more about this film, but there's not much to chew on. The first and final minutes of the movie are terrific, but the meat of the film is forgettable. Even its casual racism is half-assed. The film wants to have things both ways: We're supposed to sympathize with Gale Sondergaard as "Inscrutable Asian Dragon Lady" because her husband's murder went unpunished ... but it's really hard to sympathize with a character who doesn't speak, change facial expression, etc.

Sondergaard's character is almost a symbol for the film's major problem, now that I think about it. The characters are just too sketchy to care about.

SARA: And too faux-exotic!

Dat opening tho...