Stranger on the Third Floor (1940 Boris Ingster)

This is the nascent film noir - the film noir junior. It hasn't fully grown up yet, hasn't yet developed the sardonic humour, the rich dialogue. It hasn't learned that the woman can't be a nice dame  - she has to be a femme fatale. And yet, capturing the thoughts of this everyday Joe, his crummy apartment, his exasperation with doing the same things every day, his paranoia - these are very realistic and refreshingly modern, and the setting of a shadowy night time apartment, where doors open and close as eavesdroppers look out, where landladies are poking their nose in, where there's a murderer - it's all convincingly right for the genre which it helped invent.

John McGuire is the sad newspaperman, though Peter Lorre is top billed, Margaret Tallichet the dame. Elisha Cook Jr is the wrong man, Charles Waldron the DA. With Charles Halton, Ethel Griffies, an uncredited Robert Dudley.

The dream sequence, sensationally photographed by RKO's secret weapon Nick Musuraca, may have inspired Hitch's in Spellbound. The tilted cameras are not overdone.

The ending, in which Lorre confides in the woman, is quite unsettling.

Added notes from last viewing, 2015:

When McGuire starts looking all mad and paranoid, with angles and lighting to match - he's almost behaving like a character in a Cocteau. And then when he chases Lorre down the stairs, there's a moment when they both suddenly pause.. look at each other.. then the chase continues. I love it! 

Talking of Peter Lorre, his performance is really creepy. He'd been in Hollywood since 1935, in quite a few Mr Moto films. Good tense ending (plus crowd-pleasing happy ending) - then you realise it's only 64 minutes later!

B movie favourite Nick Musuraca lights expressionistically (I don't know when those shadow patterns from blinds started, but this most be one of the earliest examples) ; those great sets (from which everyone seems to be peeking out of doorways) are by Van Nest Polglase, who went on to Citizen Kane.

Written by Hungarian Frank Partos.

Ingster was Russian, worked with Eistenstein before relocating to the US. This was his first of only three films as director. He's best known for producing The Man From Uncle.