Tales From The Warner Archives #9: "Stranger on the Third Floor" (Ingster, 1940) and "The Outfit" (Flynn, 1973); an Elisha Cook, Jr. double feature (sort of)

The inef­fable Mr. Cook, Jr., does not spend a whole lot of his brief screen time in this excep­tion­ally enga­ging RKO B‑picture look­ing so chip­per. Rather, up until pre­cisely this point, he has been kick­ing and scream­ing and kick­ing and scream­ing and insist­ing “I did­n’t kill any­body!” and kick­ing and scream­ing some more. And then, in a lengthy German-Expressionist-inflected dream sequence, he sneers and snick­ers at the film’s hero, who’s about to get the chair for the murder that he him­self accused Cook’s char­ac­ter of, get­ting a bit of his own back with some “How YOU doin’?” sar­cast­ic insolence. Cook plays a cab­bie who’s fingered by stol­id but appar­ently insuf­fi­ciently attent­ive hero John McGuire (and the char­ac­ter­’s a report­er, too; damn sloppy journ­al­ists…) and is not-quite-cooling his heels in the death house as McGuire’s cutie girl­friend is men­aced by the real killer and title char­ac­ter, played by Peter Lorre in one of his most ser­i­ously weirdly men­acing turns. Proudly show­ing off his ser­i­ously bad teeth, indol­ently drap­ing his long gray scarf around his neck, lunging for our heroine as if in the slow-motion of a smack-induced trance, his work here is part of why this pic­ture is some­times referred to as “the first true film noir” (and that is the quoted blurb on the back of the Warner Archive box). An argu­able claim, for a lot of fairly obvi­ous reas­ons we need­n’t get into here. As enjoy­able as this pic­ture is, it is not what you’d call an incred­ibly inspired piece of work. Which is part of what makes it so enjoy­able. There is cer­tainly some bril­liance here, but also a lot of expedi­ence, and it’s the com­bin­a­tion of the two that make this a kind of sur­real exper­i­ence. Because it’s a B‑picture and it’s got to get its work done in like an hour and change, its nar­rat­ive traffics in a kind of ruth­less effi­ciency (to use the won­der­ful phrase from the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch) that cre­ates, among oth­er effects, break­neck, seem­ingly arbit­rary changes in tone, as when the her­o’s interi­or mono­logue begins, 19 minutes into the action. (Said mono­logue fea­tures the immor­tal reflec­tion, “Lotta people live in Brooklyn. Why could­n’t I?”) These shifts give the pic­ture as a whole a pecu­li­arly, and I’d say largely unin­it­en­tion­al, ali­en­ated sur­real feel. Nothing is weirder, however…and I guess this should be clas­si­fied as a spoiler…than Cook’s trans­form­a­tion at the end. The once surly and man­ic fellow—not that he did­n’t have a damn good reas­on to be—has had his name cleared, and his job as a taxi driver (!) rein­stated. Waiting out­side the diner where the new­ly­wed hero and heroine have said their good­byes to the neigh­bor­hood, he’s genu­inely eager to show the man who almost had him executed that he does­n’t hold any­thing even resem­bling a grudge. Offering the couple a ride, he prac­tic­ally screeches, “This one’s…ON THE HOUSE!” The pause there indic­ates that maybe all is not as well as he would like it to look, and that maybe he’s gonna drive them all off of a bridge after they get in. We nev­er do find out. 

Cook is some­what more con­sist­ently low-key in his even smal­ler part in John Flynn’s 1973 The Outfit, a par­tic­u­lar aspect of which was dis­cussed here. Playing the coun­ter­man at a rur­al diner over­seen by Joe Don Baker’s char­ac­ter, he expresses very Cook-ish sus­pi­cion at the two bogus “hunters” who ooze in look­ing for his boss. Baker makes quick work of the pair (not in the way you might think, though; one of the ways this is such a refresh­ing film is the resource­ful­ness shown by its crim­in­al class—part and par­cel, of course, of the Richard Stark “Parker” nov­els, one of which is the source mater­i­al for this pic­ture). This post-noir pic­ture fea­tures a really exem­plary group of glor­i­ous clas­sic pres­ences in bit and sup­port­ing roles: aside from Cook, there’s Jane Greer from Out of the Past, Marie Windsor, who did Cook very wrong in The Killing, Robert Ryan, Timothy Carey (also in The Killing, as you’ll recall),Henry frig­ging Jones, and more, and more still. (And Army Archerd as Ryan’s but­ler!) Despite this near-parade of seem­ingly ref­er­en­tial cameos, one nev­er gets the feel­ing of being winked at, as one often does in the post-Tarantino age of supporting-role stunt/homage cast­ing; all of these pros act like they belong. Because they do.

In any event, a better-than-solid anti-polici­er, hap­pily replete with scenes and dia­logue snatches very well trans­planted from the book, and one or two zingers that the film­makers appear to have come up with them­selves. One favor­ite in the lat­ter cat­egory: “Goddamn you, why’d you have to kill him?” “He owed me money.”