Arsenevich: Boris Ingster - Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

El desconocido del tercer piso

Michael Ward es un periodista que se ve involucrado como testigo clave para inculpar a su vecino, Joe Briggs, en un caso con pocas pruebas. Briggs afirma tozudamente su inocencia, lo que retrae a Michael, El periodista comienza a tener dudas, y preso de su ansiedad, sueña que vive la situación contraria: él es el acusado y Briggs el testigo clave.

Dirigida por Boris Ingster, un emigrante ruso, la obra impresiona por su mezcla de concisión y dislocación de la realidad con ayuda de procedimientos que se acercan al guiñol, pero no cae en el ridículo. La histeria de los protagonistas y la opacidad del conjunto dan una sensación de claustrofobia al espectador. Reina la ambigüedad. El inocente parece tan esquizofrénico como el culpable.

--- Noël Simsolo: “El cine negro. Pesadillas verdaderas y falsas”

Though he doesn't speak his first line of dialogue until the film's final ten minutes, Peter Lorre spiritually dominates the fascinating RKO melodrama Stranger on the Third Floor. The plotline is carried by John McGuire, playing Ward, a newspaper reporter whose courtroom testimony sends the hapless Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr). to the death house. Ward is certain that he saw Briggs leaving the scene of a murder, but as the days pass, he is tortured by guilt and doubt -- especially during the film's surrealistic knockout of a nightmare sequence. When another murder is committed, Ward finds himself as much a victim of circumstantial evidence as the unfortunate Briggs. The reporter's girlfriend (Margaret Tallichet) tries to clear Ward....and that's when she first makes the acquaintance of Lorre, who is heard ordering a pound of raw meat! Stranger on the Third Floor was a "film noir" long prior to the genesis of that cinematic movement. Long ignored or trivialized by film historians, this 7-reel quickie has in recent years graduated to classic status.

A bizarre gem about a newspaper reporter's guilt over sending an innocent man to the electric chair because of his testimony. It offers a cynical look at the entire legal system and how most people are indifferent to injustice, but comes down particularly hard on those who are part of the system: judges, cops, juries, crime reporters, prosecutors, and defense attorneys for their lack of concern in seeing that justice is carried out fairly. Even though the film begins and ends on a trite happy note, it cannot take away a powerful dream sequence that indicts society for its callous attitude. Peter Lorre shines as the real lunatic murderer, in a role that is similar to the one he played in Fritz Lang's M.