TCM Schedule for Wednesday, August 13 -- SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: PETER LORRE

[Longhorn]

3:44am Short Film: From The Vaults: Weekend In Hollywood (2000)
BW-10 mins

4:00am Strangers When We Meet (1960)
An extramarital affair threatens the fortunes of two families.
Cast: Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Ernie Kovacs. Dir: Richard Quine. BW-117 mins, TV-PG

6:00am Hotel Berlin (1945)
During World War II's final days, people with a variety of problems converge on a Berlin hotel.
Cast: Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre, Faye Emerson. Dir: Peter Godfrey. BW-98 mins, TV-G

7:39am Short Film: One Reel Wonders: Hotel Anchovy, The (1934)
BW-18 mins

8:00am Confidential Agent (1945)
A Spanish spy and an American heiress battle fascists in England.
Cast: Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre. Dir: Herman Shumlin. BW-118 mins, TV-PG

10:00am All Through The Night (1942)
A criminal gang turns patriotic to track down a Nazi spy ring.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Jane Darwell. Dir: Vincent Sherman. BW-107 mins, TV-PG

12:00pm Arsenic And Old Lace (1944)
A young man about to be married discovers the two aunts who raised him have been poisoning lonely old men.
Cast: Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre. Dir: Frank Capra. BW-118 mins, TV-G

2:00pm My Favorite Brunette (1947)
A baby photographer mistaken for a private eye ends up framed for murder.
Cast: Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lorre. Dir: Elliott Nugent. BW-86 mins, TV-G

3:30pm Background To Danger (1943)
An American gets caught up in wartime action in Turkey.
Cast: George Brent, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet. Dir: Raoul Walsh. BW-80 mins, TV-G

5:00pm Quicksand (1950)
Petty theft leads a mechanic into a life of crime.
Cast: Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre. Dir: Irving Pichel. BW-79 mins, TV-PG

6:30pm Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1934)
A British family gets mixed up with spies and an assassination plot while vacationing in Switzerland.
Cast: Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre. Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. BW-75 mins, TV-PG

What's On Tonight: SUMMER UNDER THE STARS: PETER LORRE

8:00pm Mad Love (1935)
A mad doctor grafts the hands of a murderer on to a concert pianist's wrists.
Cast: Peter Lorre, Frances Drake, Colin Clive. Dir: Karl Freund. BW-68 mins, TV-PG

9:15pm Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
A newspaperman serves as key witness in a circumstantial murder case.
Cast: Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet. Dir: Boris Ingster. BW-64 mins, TV-14

10:30pm Maltese Falcon, The (1941)
Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade gets caught up in the murderous search for a priceless statue.
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet. Dir: John Huston. BW-101 mins, TV-PG

12:15am Mask Of Dimitrios, The (1944)
A meek novelist investigates the mysterious death of a notorious scoundrel.
Cast: Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Zachary Scott. Dir: Jean Negulesco. BW-96 mins, TV-PG

2:00am 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954)
A renegade sea captain uses a pioneering submarine to force peace on the world.
Cast: Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas. Dir: Richard Fleischer. C-127 mins, TV-G

4:15am Muscle Beach Party (1964)
The beach gang goes head-to-head with the bodybuilders of a new gym that's interfering with their strip on the sand.
Cast: Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Luciana Paluzzi. Dir: William Asher. C-95 mins, TV-PG

[Longhorn]

1. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TCM/Images/Dynamic/i34/StrangerOnTheThirdFloor

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), an obscure B movie from RKO Studios, has its place in movie history as the first film noir. More than just a possible influence on the flood of dark, urban crime dramas about to follow en masse (as a B film, its "influence" on anyone at the time is debatable), it marked, as author Robert Porfirio has written, "a distinct break in style and substance with the preceding mystery, crime, detection and horror films of the 1930s." In other words, it looked radically new. Its extraordinary look and tone are the product of stylized sets, bizarre angles and lighting, and a powerful blurring of dream and reality - qualities strongly influenced by German expressionist films of the 1920s.

The script by Frank Partos (and, some say, an uncredited Nathanael West) centers on a reporter (John McGuire) who discovers a murder and whose testimony soon condemns an ex-con (Elisha Cook, Jr.) via a legal system shown to be corrupt. McGuire feels guilty and starts to investigate the crime further on his own, eventually finding himself the suspect in a second killing. The story is essentially about paranoia, and this theme (not to mention the Germanic influence) reaches its peak during an extended, stylized dream sequence that feels like something out of Dostoyevsky, in which McGuire imagines his own conviction and execution for a crime he did not commit. Writing in their book Kings of the Bs, Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn have called this sequence "alive with subconscious desires, seething with repressions, awash with pent-up hatred, and constructed from the nightmarish circumstances of the character's real situation. strong contrasts in lighting, angular shadow patterns, and distorted, emblematic architecture; in short, a kind of total stylization that manages to be both extremely evocative and somewhat theatrical."

As McCarthy and Flynn further point out, the movie is bold in more ways than just in its look: "It is extremely audacious in terms of what it seeks to say about American society?The trial of the ex-con is a vicious rendering of the American legal system hard at work on an impoverished victim." Indeed, forces of order like the police and judges are presented as cruel, and "the sinister role of police and prosecutors in obtaining confessions and convictions hallmarks of the hard-boiled literature that paralleled and predicted what we call film noir."

First-time Russian director Boris Ingster was a former writer and future television producer. Never again would he make anything as notable or striking. He was helped here by a team of true artists. Cameraman Nick Musuraca had already shot over 100 films and would go on to shoot Cat People (1942), Out of the Past (1947), and Clash by Night (1952), among other notable titles. The special effects by Vernon L. Walker are amazing considering the film's low budget, and Van Nest Polglase's art direction contributes mightily to the claustrophobic feel of the movie. One of the most influential production designers in American cinema, with King Kong (1933) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) to his credit, Polglase would soon begin designing the sets for Citizen Kane (1941). RKO house composer Roy Webb's score also does much to create the mood. Webb would later rework some of his themes here for Murder, My Sweet (1944).

Receiving top billing is Peter Lorre even though he has very little screen time. Seen as a fleeting figure in a long, white scarf, he has no dialogue until the end but is a memorable presence. His role recalls M (1931), an important noir precursor, though by this time he looked thinner and more graceful. For Lorre, a Warner Brothers contract and The Maltese Falcon (1941) were right around the corner.

Unsurprisingly for a B picture, critics at the time were generally loathe to see Stranger on the Third Floor's unusual look as an artistic achievement. The New York Times' Bosley Crowther dismissed it as a "pile sound effects and tricked-up photography." And reviewer P.S. Harrison, after declaring the film "too harrowing" for mass appeal, wrote, "at its conclusion, one feels as if one had gone through a nightmare." Little did Harrison know that that's not a bad description of film noir!

Producer: Lee S. Marcus
Director: Boris Ingster
Screenplay: Frank Partos
Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca
Film Editing: Harry Marker
Art Direction: Van Nest Polglase
Music: Roy Webb
Cast: Peter Lorre (The Stranger), John McGuire (Michael Ward), Margaret Tallichet (Jane), Charles Waldron (District Attorney), Elisha Cook, Jr. (Joe Briggs), Charles Halton (Albert Meng).
BW-64m.

by Jeremy Arnold

[CBHagman]

2. We love Laszlo!

"Who's Laszlo?" you ask. See here:

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/03/peter-lorre-the-ghostly-echo-of-a-gentleman/



With Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace.

[Matilda]

3. I love this man's work!

I've just ordered from Amazon the DVD of the German film "M", which hasn't been seen here for more
than a decade, and was never released on either video or DVD. I'm so looking forward to seeing it
again after so long; it was this film that made me realise what a great actor Peter Lorre was.

I notice that none of his "Mr Moto" films is listed - I'm curious, because to my knowledge, TCM here
have never screened them either. He was famous for those films, and they were enormously popular,
but I've never seen them at all. Has anyone else? They are available on DVD on Amazon, but I
hesitated this time, because I'd already spent a bit of money stocking up on a couple of Alan
Rickman films not released here on DVD, and didn't want to blow my budget.

[CBHagman]

4. I was just poking around on the U.S. TCM site...

...after posting Tuesday's schedule, and it's hard to get the search engine to cough up Mr. Moto titles. Apparently the Mr. Moto series was discussed during the recent TCM Race & Hollywood: Asian Images in Film series, and TCM sells a Mr. Moto DVD set.