Três Desconhecidos

This is one fine made movie. It has a greatly written script and a top-notch cast. It sounds like a cliché of course but it's a real shame that movies like these aren't being made and written anymore. At least not on such a commercially large scale and with such fine big name actors in it. Movies like this aren't made anymore simply because movies like this don't really sell, unless they are being made exceptionally good. It's not really a film-noir, although the movie certainly shows similarities to the atmosphere and the story also shows noir tendencies. The movie in the end is perhaps a bit too 'light' to consider it a real film-noir, also because it features quite an amount of subtle black comedy. The story is solidly constructed and focuses on three different characters and plot-lines that of course are all still connected to each other. The fine script was written by Hollywood legend John Huston. It features lots of deeper themes such as greed and jealousy. You really start to care about the characters and their problems. Something that isn't too common for a '40's genre movie. It's not always an easy movie to watch and follow so make sure you watch this movie with a clear head. The dialog might be a bit overlong by todays standards but its so fine written and delivered by the actors that you tend to look past this. The movie gets really carried by the three main characters, that equally share the screen time. I was especially impressed by Sydney Greenstreet, which also might due to the fact that he had the best- or at least most credible plot line. Peter Lorre also played a great role and gave a fine performance. Geraldine Fitzgerald was definitely the least of the three actors and she tended to overact a bit in some of the dramatic sequences. But overall her role was also really a solid one and it says something about the quality of the acting from Lorre and Greenstreet to say that Fitzgerald gave the lesser performance of the movie. Alan Napier also plays a small role. Oh man, it really seems to be that this guy is in about every 'old' movie that I watch lately. Napier received his most fame for playing the butler Alfred in the Adam West "Batman" series from the '60's. The editing of the movie was also surprisingly good and fast. Instead of long single camera sequences, the movie cuts back and forth between different camera positions in the same sequence rapidly. It gives the story speed and helps to keep you interest even during the more slow and dull moments of the movie. The fine little musical score was from acclaimed composer Adolph Deutsch, whose music suited this movie and its atmosphere really well. It's a fine good old fashioned quality movie, made with limited resources but with fine experts involved. 8/10

It was over 20 years ago that I first encountered this small cinematic treasure, on the now-defunct indie KHJ-TV, channel 9 in Los Angeles, but it was not at all by accident. Having been enthralled by the magic that is "Casablanca" some years before, I had been seeking out other films like it made by Warner Bros. in the late 30s, 40s and early 50s. Specifically I was after more work by that classic's storied supporting cast: Paul Henried, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, S.Z. Sakall and Joy Page, among others.

"Three Strangers" gathers two of those and weaves them into a unexpectedly amoral tale of the cost of reversing fortune. Lorre plays a fallen gentleman who fallen into a bottle and thus into some dicey company, while Greenstreet plays a solicitor who's been a tad too speculative with his trust accounts. The underregarded Geraldine Fitzgerald joins them as the mysterious woman who randomly gathers the other two off a London street to see if they'll take a chance on an ancient Chinese proverb coming true.

"Three Strangers" if anything goes "Casablanca" and that other Huston/Lorre/Greenstreet classic, "The Maltese Falcon," one better in the world-weariness department, with moral ambiguities and ambivalent characters straight out of films noir made five years later. Unlike those other two films, though, there's little likability to be found in the lead characters' roguishness --- save perhaps for Lorre, who gets redeemed by a "good" woman's love at the end.

Yet that very fact makes "Three Strangers" play out like a much more modern film (like one from the early 1970s, say), rendering it an intriguing admixture of old-style character-driven plotting and contemporary moral waywardness and antiheroism.

Alfred Hitchcock was interested in directing this, and I can see why. Because it plays out like three intertwined episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) lures two strangers, solicitor Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) and drunkard Johnny West (Peter Lorre) to her London home on Chinese New Year in 1938 because of her belief that if three strangers make the same wish to an idol of Kwan Yin, Chinese goddess of fortune and destiny, the wish will be granted.

They must not know each other's names until after the wish is made, and she has thought this out and believes that the only common wish they could make is for money. So they wish for a sweepstakes ticket to come in, and they all sign their names to it. Crystal says that part of the bargain is that if the ticket wins they will bet it all on the ensuing horserace. Well of course they agree to this, because they don't really think anything will come of it anyways. So they go their own way having thought this episode nothing more than somewhat amusing.

Johnny is mixed up in a robbery that turned to murder even though he was just the look-out and drunk and did not really know what was going on.

Arbutny has embezzled money from a client's estate and the investment goes south, with him having insufficient funds to avoid disgrace and jail.

Crystal wants her husband back, but he is in love with somebody else and is adamant about wanting a divorce. She seems obsessed with winning more than she is in love.

Now I can see how Arbutny's problem would be solved by money. But as for Johnny and Crystal - no amount of money could get them what they want. And it's a strange film where Peter Lorre plays the most well adjusted character, somewhat resigned to whatever fate he gets as destiny.

Then the paths of these three people converge again and the whole thing ends quite ironically. If you are looking for Greenstreet and Lorre together, they really are not for the vast majority of the film, but it still plays to their strengths and I'd recommend it.

A very literate script by John Huston and Howard Koch makes this one worth seeing. Only after the initial intriguing premise is set in motion do we discover to our amusement that all the characters we've become interested in are fairly despicable, particularly Geraldine Fitzgerald as a sociopath and nymphomaniac. With the unusually well observed character details provided by the script and the use of many supporting and bit actors one hasn't seen in lots of other pictures, THREE STRANGERS really has something of the atmosphere of London in 1938 rather than of London-via-Hollywood.

And make no mistake: Despite good direction by Jean Negulesco, John Huston's cynicism, pessimism and misogyny are evident everywhere, and that alone makes this unusual in a '40s picture. Like MALTESE FALCON it is a black comedy about greed, but it has no big stars, no glamor, and only the sliest, cruelest humor. Add the perfectly judged performances of everyone in this film, and it adds up to a neglected near-classic, one that seemed to predict the funnier and more elegant KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS.

As the real star of the film, Peter Lorre is wonderfully wry and quite lovable as one of life's eternal losers. Sydney Greenstreet often played nasty men deliciously but here he takes his character's weakness and pettiness much further than usual, and his scenes of escalating madness are very effective. Geraldine Fitzgerald's portrait of an amoral seductress is different than what she usually played at Warners, and should be considered some kind of '40s milestone in the depiction of depraved women alongside Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN and Agnes Moorehead in DARK PASSAGE. She's aided by some very form-fitting Milo Anderson gowns, one of which, a pleated satin negligee, was recycled in black for Patricia Neal in THE FOUNTAINHEAD a few years later. It looks great in both incarnations. In smaller parts Peter Whitney makes an impression as a soft-hearted (and homosexual?) crony of Lorre's, and Rosalind Ivan is memorable as a dotty widow who is much shrewder than she appears. Finally, the casting of Fitzgerald, Marjorie Riordan and Joan Lorring (who looks like a young Irene Selznick) is curious: all three young women have prominent noses, darkly painted lips and very dark, shoulder-length hair which is styled similarly. And as each character descends in economic scale, her looks are heavier and plainer. Another comment on how fickle fortune can be? Anne Sharp's comment below that the characters are meant to illustrate the dark forces that enabled WWII is interesting and valuable.

By the way, the print shown on TCM is rather dim, sketchy and full of harsh contrasts so it's hard to judge what the film was actually meant to look like. Whoever now owns the Warner Bros. library should strike a pristine version of this one.

Three Strangers is not a typical Hollywood film. Dark and philosophical, it introduces the viewer to three people, strangers to one another, and then follows their sad, desperate lives. While one reviewer on this site says it's a shame they don't make movies like this anymore, the fact is, they almost never made movies like this back then. This is far less neat and more philosophical than your typical 40s flick, a movie about strange twists of fate and the ways in which people fail to take responsibility for their actions.

The cast is excellent, with Peter Lorre particularly impressive in one of the best performances of his career as an alcoholic who thinks too much and does too little. I was also quite taken by Joan Lorring's touchingly vulnerable performance as a girl in with the wrong crowd.

Admittedly the ending ties things up in a neat little bow, yet for the most part this movie is far closer in spirit to the indie movies of the 1990s than to the film noirs of the 1940s it could be mistaken for.