Stranger on the Third Floor

Critics and fans agree: Stranger on the Third Floor is the little B-picture that launched one of the greatest movements in cinema history: film noir. Peter Lorre plays the eerie title role in this once-neglected gem about a reporter (John McGuire) whose testimony sentences a small-time loser (Elisha Cook Jr.) to the electric chair for murder. When the reporter himself is fingered in a second murder, he realizes both crimes are the work of a furtive stranger— but will anyone believe him? All the shadowy, shivery,angled angst of German Expressionism is here, married to the hard-boiled moral ambiguity that marks the genre. The highlight: a suspense-and-sweat-drenched dream sequence that jolted 1940 audiences into an exciting new way of looking at the movies. Although he doesn't speak his first line of dialogue until the film's final ten minutes, Peter Lorre spiritually dominates this fascinating melodrama.