Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Directed by

Boris Ingster

Genre

film noir, psychological thriller, mystery film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 04m

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 107 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A newspaper reporter helps convict a man for murder, then begins to doubt his own testimony when another killing happens nearby. His sense of guilt and fear grows as he struggles to prove the real killer is at large.

paranoidshadowytenseclaustrophobicdisorientingfeverishsuspenseful

What happens

Stranger on the Third Floor is a 1940 American film noir directed by Boris Ingster in his directorial debut and starring Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, and Charles Waldron, and featuring Elisha Cook Jr. It was written by Frank Partos. Modern research has shown that Nathanael West wrote the final version of the screenplay, but was uncredited. Stranger on the Third Floor is often cited as the first "true" film noir of the classic period (1940–1959), though other films that fit the genre such as Rebecca and They Drive by Night were released earlier. Nonetheless, it has many of the hallmarks of film noir: an urban setting, heavy shadows, diagonal lines, voice-over narration, a dream sequence, low camera angles shooting up multi-story staircases, and an innocent protagonist desperate to clear himself after being falsely accused of a crime. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Foreign Correspondent (1940)
• Fear (1946)
• Hot Steel (1940)
• In a Lonely Place (1950)
• Shadow on the Wall (1950)
• Gaslight (1940)
• The Conversation (1974)
• Circumstantial Evidence (1945)