225 - Stranger on the Third Floor

Eavesdropping at the Movies · Apr 23, 2020 · 37m

A 62-minute-long, 1940 B-movie whose director you haven't heard of and whose top-billed star has barely ten minutes of screen time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Stranger on the Third Floor is nothing remarkable, but its reputation precedes it: Here we behold, if the legends are true, the first film noir. José, a lover of noir, both likes and dislikes this line. On the one hand, it enjoyably disrupts what is already a fairly shaky narrative of noir beginning practically overnight in 1941; on the other, noir is a term that encompasses many visual styles, stories, character types…