With its low-key black and white cinematography, hard-boiled characters of profound weakness and an almost cheerfully subversive story, Jean Negulesco's Three Strangers is undiluted nostalgia of an urbane and cunning variety. Never so far away from rationality that it is an altogether unique yet unmistakably theatrical parable, it makes a shadowy and alluring potboiler, reaching some moments of pure magnetism in a handful of its crucial sequences.
The script by John Huston and his friend Howard Koch is masterful in structure. The film begins in the shadows and fog of the London streets as Geraldine Fitzgerald coaxes two strangers, Sydney Greenstreet's caricatured attorney Jerome K. Arbutney and Peter Lorre's charismatic and cultivated alcoholic Johnny West to her London pad on Chinese New Year at the hand of her doctrine that if three strangers make the same wish to an idol of the Chinese goddess of fortune and destiny, the wish will be fulfilled. Because money will make their dreams come true, the three gamble on a sweepstakes ticket for the Grand National horse race together and concur that they will not sell the ticket if it is selected, and will hold onto it until the race is run. Fitzgerald would use the money to attempt to win her alienated husband back, Arbutny to lay the groundwork for his appointment to the esteemed Barrister's Club, and Johnny to purchase a bar as his home.
After this single, taut, spare and graceful expository dialogue scene, the plot strands of the three strangers are unraveled, demystifying who we began to believe they were in the initial scene. Greenstreet insatiably and uproariously overplays as Arbutney, who we learn has looted a trust fund. Lorre is seamlessly graceful as the drunk who becomes enmeshed in a murder of which he's not guilty, while Fitzgerald is astonishing as a manipulative and truly unpredictable woman, a femme fatale of the highest caliber.
Undeservedly obscure and overlooked, Three Strangers is about the human desire to look to gods and idols to resolve our problems, only to be driven into worse new ones. Mostly owing to the performances and the cynical manipulation of the noir plot, the film resolves as kind of a black comedy. It is an admirable and deftly executed variation on the hopeless and acerbic atmosphere of the film noir. In noir, characters are corrupt fall guys of the universe, brimming with existential distress, just like us all. Why not find a chuckle or two in it?
The script by John Huston and his friend Howard Koch is masterful in structure. The film begins in the shadows and fog of the London streets as Geraldine Fitzgerald coaxes two strangers, Sydney Greenstreet's caricatured attorney Jerome K. Arbutney and Peter Lorre's charismatic and cultivated alcoholic Johnny West to her London pad on Chinese New Year at the hand of her doctrine that if three strangers make the same wish to an idol of the Chinese goddess of fortune and destiny, the wish will be fulfilled. Because money will make their dreams come true, the three gamble on a sweepstakes ticket for the Grand National horse race together and concur that they will not sell the ticket if it is selected, and will hold onto it until the race is run. Fitzgerald would use the money to attempt to win her alienated husband back, Arbutny to lay the groundwork for his appointment to the esteemed Barrister's Club, and Johnny to purchase a bar as his home.
After this single, taut, spare and graceful expository dialogue scene, the plot strands of the three strangers are unraveled, demystifying who we began to believe they were in the initial scene. Greenstreet insatiably and uproariously overplays as Arbutney, who we learn has looted a trust fund. Lorre is seamlessly graceful as the drunk who becomes enmeshed in a murder of which he's not guilty, while Fitzgerald is astonishing as a manipulative and truly unpredictable woman, a femme fatale of the highest caliber.
Undeservedly obscure and overlooked, Three Strangers is about the human desire to look to gods and idols to resolve our problems, only to be driven into worse new ones. Mostly owing to the performances and the cynical manipulation of the noir plot, the film resolves as kind of a black comedy. It is an admirable and deftly executed variation on the hopeless and acerbic atmosphere of the film noir. In noir, characters are corrupt fall guys of the universe, brimming with existential distress, just like us all. Why not find a chuckle or two in it?