The stylized visuals in this RKO mini-masterpiece are more extreme than any of the German expressionist classics said to have influenced it. A cub reporter experiences a nightmare of crazy injustice, a psychological payback for his own testimony that convicted a killer on circumstantial evidence. The pale and forlorn face of Peter Lorre haunts this very strange melodrama, pitched somewhere between horror and a new style yet to be identified: film noir. Lorre is great, but so are the leading players Margaret Tallichet, John McGuire and especially Elisha Cook Jr..

Stranger on the Third Floor
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1940 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 67 min. / Street Date February 24, 2026 / Available at MovieZyng / 21.99
Starring: Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Charles Waldron, Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Halton, Ethel Griffies, Vince Barnett, Emory Parnell, David Wayne.
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Art Director: Van Nest Polglase
Costumes: Renié
Film Editor: Harry Marker
Special Effects: Vernon L. Walker
Music Composer: Roy Webb
Story and screenplay by Frank Partos
Produced by Lee S. Marcus
Directed by Boris Ingster

Stranger on the Third Floor plays better now than ever. A big-city soda fountain romance opens up into a full-blown paranoid nightmare, fronting some of Hollywood’s strongest expressionist visuals ever. RKO’s overachieving program picture is pegged as film noir but it’s just as effective as a horror picture. Scarcely more than an hour long, it is a masterpiece in miniature.

First-time director Boris Ingster helmed only three features but continued to a long career writing and directing on TV. Frank Partos would be credited as a writer on the spooky classics  The Uninvited and  The Snake Pit. They apparently didn’t have much interference from producer Lee Marcus, who in the same year had to oversee 25 RKO productions.

All who see Stranger on the Third Floor remember it. Even Forrest J. Ackerman’s less than scholarly Famous Monsters magazine knew it was something special, as it was featured in an article on scary movies that weren’t exactly horror, but that elicited the same reaction. It was listed with other titles that meant little to young monster fans, like  The Queen of Spades. I eventually saw that old article again, in a reprint … many of those titles are now favorites.

Stranger takes place during lean times in New York. Few jobs pay a living wage. Working ‘kids’ Mike Ward and Jane (John McGuire & Margaret Tallichet) want to marry, but Mike, a newspaper reporter, doesn’t want to commit until he wins a promotion. But opportunity does not come in a desirable way. Mike is a key witness in a murder case, in which cab driver Joe Briggs (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is convicted on circumstantial evidence. Mike is uncomfortable knowing that his testimony, overstated by his newspaper, has weighed the verdict against Briggs. But he can’t be responsible for just telling the truth, can he?

Mike takes Jane up to his room to dry off from a rainstorm, which brings both the prudish landlady (Ethel Griffies) and Mike’s obnoxious neighbor Mr. Meng (Charles Halton) over to heap scorn upon them. When Meng insults Jane’s virtue Mike becomes livid, and says he’d like to kill him. The next day Mike notices that he can’t hear Meng through the paper-thin walls. He then imagines that someone has murdered the nasty old man — and experiences a harrowing nightmare in which he is accused of the crime. Everything he’s said and done works against him as circumstantial evidence.  When Mike wakes, he worries more about his neighbor Meng. Could he really be dead?  What will Mike do if he is?

Stranger on the Third Floor has long been cited as the first official film noir of the classic period. It contains the visual elements we think of as noir, but Forrest Ackerman had the right idea when he described it as functioning more like a horror movie. We identify with Mike Ward as doubt and fear close in around him, but his panic is not an existential trap as in the noir  The Dark Corner, nor does it spring from a character weakness. Mike isn’t a self-defeating loser hero like Al Roberts of  Detour. He’s just an ordinary guy with ordinary desires and no particular axe to grind. Guilt is imposed from without and amplified by doubts from within. Putting aside the fate of a condemned man because it’s convenient for his career …. guilt.  Taking a girl up to one’s room, and being shamed by the disapproving neighbors … guilt.

The bulk of the movie takes place on street-level New York, represented by a vivid studio street set. The wannabe bride and groom must conduct their romance on barstools at a local lunch counter. Beyond that, there’s only Mike’s cramped room, where he can’t even use a typewriter without his intolerant neighbor Mr. Meng protesting the noise. What everyone remembers, of course, is the horrific nightmare sequence, which kicks the film into full-on  Cabinet of Dr. Caligari mode. Crazy distorted visuals follow one another in fast succession as smug policemen and smirking officials railroad the boy for Meng’s murder. Mike’s cell and the courtroom dock are islands in a forest of monstrous shadows; everything seems to be happening in a malevolent limbo. Everybody is against Mike. The judge and his officers presume his guilt and the jurors sleep like dead men. With perfect irrational dream logic, even the victim Meng turns up in the courtroom to jeer at him. Mike walks the last mile alone and abandoned…

This must have been powerful stuff in 1940. The visual onslaught makes the audience feel Mike’s nightmare of persecution and helpless isolation. The delirious courtroom nightmare is not a serious statement about justice in America, but an ‘interior’ fantasy that belongs in the Land of Oz, or Dante’s Inferno. The graphic stylization is of course a dose of classic German Expressionism, served straight up.

Stranger certainly didn’t introduce expressionist visuals to American films. American talkies associate the style mainly with a few horror movies, isolated montages and effects scenes, some of them made by expatriate European directors. A primary precursor was Busby Berkeley’s weirdly sinister, epic musical number Lullaby of Broadway from  Gold Diggers of 1935.

So, is Stranger on the Third Floor really noir, or not? The answer is yes, with reservations. It passes the checklist test for a noir of the classic period. But it functions more like horror, with a psychological effect more like an Edgar Allan Poe Story. Mike Ward’s friction with Mr. Meng mirrors Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, right down to the audio cues that fuel Mike’s anger. Ward is more than a little aggressive with his emotions. His outbursts include thoughtless, rash death threats. Are they just a plot device to make his trial go badly, or are they a manifestation of an irrational fury against the despised Mr. Meng?

Many films noir present the struggle of a man to prove himself innocent of a murder he didn’t commit. A subversive few try to surprise us with the revelation that the hero is actually guilty. A couple of late noirs by Nicholas Ray and Fritz Lang take this gambit to the next level —  In a Lonely Place and  Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

Peter Lorre is given star billing but appears on screen for just a few minutes as ‘The Stranger.’  Production-wise, that’s a low-budget horror gambit: write a script that needs Karloff or Carradine only for two days but use their names for marquee bait. Lorre makes every moment count with an exaggerated take on his previous child-killer in  “M”.  The Stranger is another mess of psychological disturbances. He is tender and loving to small animals, but apparently slaughters people without the slightest sense of responsibility. A psychology student might laugh at the schematism of it all — The Stranger is like a piece of Mike Ward’s personality, split off to commit the nasty crimes Mike only thinks about. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that the nightmare sequence is its real climax, and that the mystery wraps up too quickly. Lorre appears barely long enough to … no spoilers. Here’s Peter! — and there he goes.

Able-bodied actor John McGuire makes for a likable hero, but he pretty much missed the big career opportunities. He had played a proto- ‘John Wayne’ role in John Ford’s Steamboat ‘Round the Bend, where he was even given the character name ‘Duke.’  From this movie forward, McGuire’s true-blue looks mostly got him bits as cops and soldiers. He is memorable as the unlucky cop at the beginning of the noir classic  He Walked by Night.

Cute but capable, Margaret Tallichet reminds some viewers of Frances Dee. She had ambitions as an actress and got off to a great start, only to retire when she married director William Wyler, who didn’t want her to work. Charles Halton, the humorless bank examiner in  It’s a Wonderful Life, is at his slimiest as Mr. Meng — he represents every roadblock standing in the way of young lovers. It’s a generational constant: why don’t unpleasant fossils like Meng just die, and make room for us wonderful young folk?

↓  After Lorre, the most expressive face in the movie may be that of Elisha Cook, Jr., the cosmic loser in film classics by everybody from Huston to Hawks to Stevens to Kubrick. Cabbie Joe is saved, but not because anybody stuck their neck out for him — a handsome hero’s life had to be on the line first. But the glorious trio of handshakes at the finale is not diminished — the grateful Joe doesn’t care how his freedom was regained. I’d identify Stranger as Cook’s breakout role, but he continued to play bit parts throughout his career, scattered between his more noted appearances. Both he and fellow ‘any role, any time’ veteran Douglas Fowley share a 10-second comic bit in Spielberg’s  “1941“, and were scarcely acknowledged on the set.

Appreciation for the director of cinematography Nicholas Musuraca would also come only later, when critics began extolling the consummate artistry in his  Val Lewton pictures and noirs like  Out of the Past. Musuraca’s work on  Cat People established the RKO house style for thrillers of all kinds. He takes the stylized nightmare scenes all the way — each shot is a little nightmare in itself.

That radical dream sequence surely inspired Hitchcock’s ‘Dali’ episode in  Spellbound. But, unless one fetishes shadows from venetian blinds, not that many noirs succumb to full-on expressionism. Kirk Douglas pitches forward into a stark death-portrait at the end of Billy Wilder’s  Ace in the Hole, a jarring effect with an expressionist element. But it isn’t blatantly abstract or a distortion of reality. The interesting thing about Stranger’s nightmare scene, is that it is more extreme than the German originals themselves.

It didn’t pay for a small film to have artistic pretensions in 1940. Critic Bosley Crowther led a chorus of critics that dismissed Stranger on the Third Floor as incompetent and pretentious, decreeing that director Ingster’s “inspiration has been derived from a couple of heavy French and Russian films, a radio drama or two and an underdone Welsh rarebit.”  Ingster’s crime was not conforming to bland realism. “The notion seems to have been that the way to put a psychological melodrama across is to pile on the sound effects and trick up the photography.”  Sounds like a fair start to me.

Stranger on the Third Floor would make a great double bill with Preston Sturges’  Christmas in July, a classic comedy released the same year. Both feature young couples frustrated by a stagnant job situation, a lingering effect of the Depression. Neither couple has any privacy. They are dogged by self-appointed chaperones that assume they’re doing sinful things. It’s interesting how the structures of comedy and horror can be so similar. Both men try to succeed through writing. One enters a foolish contest for an advertising slogan, and the other seeks the promotion that a successful, sensational news story can give him. And both fall into a nightmare partially of their own making.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Stranger on the Third Floor could carry a sub-title reading “The Art of the RKO Studio.” Old video transfers, including the remastered DVD from 2010, convinced us that the movie had a gloss we weren’t seeing. This new reworked encoding puts the glow back into Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography. This is an on-the-lot picture that features a key RKO street set; most of the action covers a space between a rooming house and a diner, with its Edward Hopper vibe.

The nightmare images have more impact than ever — the exaggerated visuals could have inspired the weird imagery of Tex Avery. But we’re especially aware of the human dimension. Boris Ingster made sure that Tallichet and McGuire are always sympathetic. My kids thought the conclusion wonderful, having already been exposed to more than one movie with Elisha Cook Jr. as a sad sack loser.

The shots that stand out the most are those with Peter Lorre. He may not be on the screen a lot, but every time we see him, Musuraca’s camera angle and lighting are superb. Lorre exudes menace without being asked to produce eye-popping contortions for every shot.

When the brain trust at the Warner Archive gets the opportunity to include extras, they come up with some very interesting items. Peter Lorre fans wanting more will enjoy 3 full radio shows from a mystery series, where he gets to flex his vocal talents.

The two cartoons included are strange as well. Both are Warners items by Tex avery, billed as Fred Avery. Each is a stack of one-off jokes — Ceiling Zero ribs aviation movies with plenty of parachute gags. Wacky Wildlife is the familiar parade of jokes, mostly with animals that don’t behave the way we expect them to. Both cartoons are in beautiful remastered color.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Stranger on the Third Floor
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Three episodes of the radio series Mystery of the Air starring Peter Lorre: Beyond Good and Evil, Crime and Punishment and Mask of Medusa.
Two classic Tex (Fred) Avery cartoons: the test pilot and parachutist comedy Ceiling Hero; and Wacky Wildlife, one of Avery’s multi-gag animal joke cartoons.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: February 28, 2026
(7475floo)

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