Palaest recommended

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

gridoon2018 "Stranger On The Third Floor" is an unknown gem. The stunning nightmare sequence alone is enough to lift it far above a routine mystery programmer (even more impressive when you consider that this was Boris Ingster's directorial debut!). The little-known leads, John McGuire and the very beautiful Margaret Tallichet, do very good jobs, and Peter Lorre is supremely creepy, even if he only speaks in the final 5 minutes of the film (the first time he speaks is another ingenious scene - we don't see him, but we recognize his voice). Of course the film could have been even darker - if (SPOILER!) McGuire really had killed those two people and Lorre was the personification of his conscience or something - but that would have been a different movie, or perhaps an episode of "The Twilight Zone". *** out of 4.

vincentlynch-moonoi I title my review "Pass/Fail", because in some ways the film passes some tests of what makes a good film, and in other ways it fails some tests of what makes a good film.Let's begin with the biggest "fail" -- the acting. Now that might surprise you when you consider the fame of the two lead actors -- John McGuire and Margaret Tallichet. Okay, I'm being sarcastic. McGuire went from being a lead in "B" pictures to bit parts...and in this film you can see why. Tallichet's biggest successes in Hollywood were being screen-tested for the role of Scarlett O'Hara and becoming the wife of director William Wyler. Neither McGuire or Tallichet have significant Hollywood resumes, and here their acting is -- at best -- awkward, and certainly amateurish. That's not to say they are totally unpleasant on screen; at least they try hard.And then we come to Peter Lorre. I have come to appreciate Lorre's early screen appearances. There was something very unique about him. But here, he has almost no actual dialog until the end of the film. He is pretty much relegated to being seen, in order to become the leading suspect. Lorre was not exactly new to Hollywood at this point, but his most famous roles were yet to come. I wondered if his teeth were that bad, or if they were doctored up here to make him look more menacing.Probably the best acting here is from Elisha Cook Jr. -- the little creep -- who is probably wrongly convicted of murder...thus the basis of the plot. Cook wasn't a very diverse actor, but he was damned good at what he did. This was his sixth film, and like Lorre, his best work was coming up, not long after this film. BTW, at the very end of the film you get to see him with a huge smile on his face! A rarity! So, what's the "pass" part. Films that are somewhat unique get bonus points from me. And, this film is pretty unique. First, it may have been the first American noir film made (though not released first). But there is plenty of interesting imagery here that you rarely see in old films, and are well worth noting.I must admit wondering if this was a throw-away pic for RKO Pictures. After all, they assigned directorial responsibilities to that finest of directors -- Boris Ingster. Okay, my sarcasm is showing through, again.All things considered, I'm glad to have watched this film, but will never do so again. Pass.Fail, but mostly fail...yet still somewhat intriguing.

Zoooma This film is widely considered to be the very first American noir film. It's a B movie to be sure, with B list actors outside of star Peter Lorre. While he gets top billing, he's not the lead and barely has that much screen time. That is unfortunate because he is excellent in his performance. The plot is so thin and so simple yet the demure-in-stature 64-minute film packs so much into it. This was the director's debut and he only made two more films after this; he was not exactly a well-regarded part of the Hollywood machine... but he had vision, that's for sure -- there's a dream sequence that is very Hitchcockian, with use of shadows that's simply outstanding, separating this from all standard movie fare at the time. If you're a fan of film noir, this gem is not to be missed.--A Kat Pirate Screener

chaos-rampant 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.