Three Strangers

Plot synopsis:
Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) lures two strangers, solicitor Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) and charming and erudite drunkard Johnny West (Peter Lorre) to her London flat 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. Since money will make their dreams come true, the three go in on a sweepstakes ticket for the Grand National horse race together and agree that they will not sell the ticket if it is chosen, but will hold on to it until the race is run. Shackleford would use the money to try to win her estranged husband back, Arbutny to smooth the way for his selection to the prestigious Barrister's Club, and Johnny to buy a bar and live in it.
The stories of the three strangers are revealed. Shackleford's husband David (Alan Napier) moved to Canada and fell in love with Janet Elliott (Marjorie Riordan). He returns, just after Johnny and Arbutny take their leave of Crystal, and demands a divorce, but she refuses. She sees to it that he loses a promotion. She also lies to Janet, telling her that David still loves her and that she is pregnant. The trusting woman believes her and returns to Canada.
With the help of an adoring Icey Crane (Joan Lorring), Johnny has been hiding out after his drunken participation in a botched robbery that resulted in the death of a policeman. Icey commits perjury in order to provide an alibi for the murderer and ringleader, Bertram Fallon (Robert Shayne). When a second witness is discredited, Fallon confesses to the robbery but blames the murder on West and the third man involved, Timothy Delaney, who is nicknamed Gabby (Peter Whitney). Johnny is caught and sentenced to death, but Gabby finds Fallon on his way to prison and stabs him. As he dies in the railway carriage, Fallon clears Johnny.
Arbutny has been speculating in stocks with money from the trust fund of Lady Rhea Belladon (Rosalind Ivan), an eccentric widow who believe she can talk with her dead husband. When the stock falls and his margin is called, a desperate Arbutny proposes to Lady Belladon. After consulting with her dead husband, she turns him down. Worse, she says that Lord Belladon wants to have the books checked. Arbutny is about to shoot himself when he sees in a newspaper that the sweepstakes ticket has drawn the favorite in the Grand National.
The three strangers converge on Crystal's flat. Arbutny wants to sell his share of the ticket immediately so he can replace the funds he stole before his crime can be uncovered. Johnny is willing, but Shackleford is adamant that they stick to their original agreement. Arbutny becomes enraged and accidentally kills her with her statue of Kwan Yin. Ironically, they hear on the radio that their horse wins. Johnny points out to Arbutny that the winning ticket has to be destroyed because their agreement and signatures on it would provide a motive for Crystal's murder. They leave the flat, but Arbutny is overcome by guilt, and panics and runs out into the middle of the busy street. He stops traffic and attracts a crowd, including a policeman, to whom Arbutny confesses the murder.
Johnny returns to the pub, where Icey finds him. Content with her, he sets the ticket on fire.

Tags: revenge, murder

Review:
"Three Strangers" has long been a favorite film of mine, with its fascinating reference to the statue of the goddess Kwan Yin, who, in Chinese legend, opens her eyes and grants a wish to three strangers on the Chinese New Year.
Geraldine Fitzgerald, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre are the above-mentioned strangers, each with an agenda that can be easily pursued by money.
So the wish is that their sweepstakes ticket win, and the agreement is that it then be entered into the horse race that follows.Geraldine Fitzgerald's character seems sympathetic, but she reveals herself as quite obsessive and delusional as the film progresses.
Greenstreet plays a crooked solicitor, and Lorre portrays a small time criminal - he's the most sympathetic character and, to my mind, gives the most memorable performance.The film asks the question - did the meeting of the three strangers change their lives, or did events proceed as they would have?
In The Hope Of Fortune Coming Their Way. The time is 1938 London before the World War. A woman of mystery, Geraldine Fitzgerald, invites two perfect strangers played by Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet up to her apartment.
In this case the wish is money and it's in the form of a sweepstakes ticket that Peter Lorre has purchased and who gives two thirds away to Fitzgerald and Greenstreet in the hope of fortune coming their way.After this we see a glimpse of the lives of the three people.
I'm surprised Huston did not want to direct this one himself, but Jean Negulesco got some of the best performances that members of the cast ever gave on screen, especially from the three leads.Notice no really big movie names are in this cast, no leading men screen legends.
Peter Lorre also played a great role  and gave a fine performance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
Was there some reason for this or was this a coincidence.Apart from these details, the film provided much of the fare that "The Maltese Falcon" made cinema history--John Huston's screenplay and the enigmatic performances of Greenstreet and Lorre.
He follows her very easily (apparently believing her a prostitute, but why not), and they return to her apartment, where Greenstreet is surprised to find Peter Lorre there, having a drink.
Oh...one condition - they can't allow any of the three to leave the agreement, or the chain binding their luck together will collapse.It is a pip of a movie - not only the best of the Greenstreet and Lorre films (without Humphrey Bogart), but the best performance in the carreer of Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Two of the best scenes in the film show him trying to solve his money troubles by marrying the dotty Lady Rhea Bellodon (Rosalind Ivan, in a marvelous cameo performance), and then (when this engagement collapses) his attempt to commit suicide carefully in his office.
Perhaps, as things turn out, it would have been better if he had committed suicide.Lorre's character, Johnny, is a ne'er-do-well, of good family but he's living under a pseudonym, and he works in a gang.
Usually Fitzgerald, Lorre, and Greenstreet are considered the strangers, whose weird fates are at the center of the film's twists and turns.
If anything, the film may concentrate on Fitzgerald, Greenstreet, and Lorre, but fate is universal, and all of us get affected one way or another (by nature and each other).
Geraldine Fitzgerald has been trolling the streets to bring two strangers (Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre) back to her flat.
As expected, Jean Negulesco directs handsomely but can't overcome the emotional vacuum in John Huston's script: The fates of these three strangers leave us cold..
THREE STRANGERS stake their future fortunes on the whims of Kwan Yin, an ancient Chinese goddess.The original story behind this tidy little thriller was originally conceived by John Huston as a sequel to THE MALTESE FALCON (1941).
That not proving possible, it was shaped into its present form with help from the writer Howard Koch and turned over to the noted director Jean Negulesco.The film stars Sydney Greenstreet & Peter Lorre in one of their several pairings.
Greenstreet, especially, overacts magnificently, descending into melancholia and, eventually, madness, to the delight of the viewer.Geraldine Fitzgerald is pure vixen as the third member of the trio, a woman so consumed by jealousy, and obsessed with the supposed powers of the goddess Kwan Yin, that she has ceased being influenced by natural love & affection.
Obviously meant as a "Maltese Falcon" ripoff, this is in many ways a much better film, and definitely one of Huston's best.
The hero of the story by default is the romantic alcoholic Johnny West (a tour de force by Peter Lorre in one of the few true lead roles allowed him by the vindictive Jack Warner.) Not that he's morally superior to the vicious Crystal Shackleford or the crass Arbutney, just that he's too apathetic and detached to intentionally harm anyone..
In order to fulfill a ritual on the night of the Chinese New Year, Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) invites two strangers (Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet) up to her apartment.
The ritual is that if three strangers make the same wish at the same time to an idol of a Chinese goddess, it will come true.
From here the film explores the separate stories of the three people before tying it all back together.This is an underrated little gem directed by Jean Negulesco with a script by Howard Koch and John Huston.
Any movie with Lorre and Greenstreet just has to be good on that basis alone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lorre and Greenstreet are always at their best when teamed together, and Fitzgerald holds her own with them in this tightly-written screenplay about three people who find themselves the co-possessors of a valuable sweepstakes ticket.
The Lorre and Fitzgerald parts were originally written for Bogart and Mary Astor; it's hard to imagine how they could have been much better than Peter and Geraldine..
Ace director Jean Negulesco certainly knows how to put a sheen on even difficult material.Scripters Huston and Koch appear to be following on 1941's Maltese Falcon with Lorre and Greenstreet and a statuette with perhaps mystical powers.
Then too, it's probably not surprising that the dipso character Lorre plays comes-off best since writer Huston was himself a notorious boozer.
With a screenplay by John Huston and appearances by Lorre and Greenstreet, and a figurine as a major plot device, you might expect a MALTESE FALCON retread.
The three represent different moral stances: Fitzgerald is conniving and ruthless, Greenstreet does something wrong but at least has enough decency to be conflicted about it, and Lorre is simply a carefree drunk who trusts the wrong people.
Greenstreet's and Fitzgerald's plot threads are interesting as well, and the way all they come together and resolve at the end is satisfying.
An extraordinary dark film about three strangers who share a sweepstakes ticket.
Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are well-cast as the other two ticket holders.
Peter Lorre, in particular is excellent as Johnny West, an alcoholic and small-time criminal who gets framed by one of his cronies.
But the central piece of casting that makes this film work so well is Geraldine Fitzgerald as the female lead.
Also excellent in this film is the actress Joan Lorring, then aged 20, who plays a girl who is in love with Peter Lorre, and will do anything for him.
The strange story concerns a bronze statue of the Chinese goddess Guanyin (spelled in the film Kwan Yin), the Goddess of Mercy, which Geraldine Fitzgerald has in her apartment.
Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet - the Laurel and Hardy of crime as they were once described - made nine movies together and this is one of the best.
She believes that if three strangers make the same wish to her idol, Kwan Yin, at precisely midnight on Chinese New Year, their wish will be granted.The two men turn out to be solicitor Jerome K.
Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) and the philosophical, alcoholic Johnny West (Peter Lorre).They wish for success on a sweepstakes ticket that Johnny has in his pocket.
He wanted to break away from his typecasting as the duplicitous and often creepy foreigner from roles in films such as "M", "Crime and Punishment" and "Mad Love".He was given a fairly free reign by director Jean Negulesco, allowing him to create the warm character of Johnny West who although alcoholic, is thoughtful and understanding of human weakness.
Three Strangers is directed by Jean Negulesco and written by John Huston and Howard Koch.
It stars Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Geraldine Fitzgerald.
Plot finds Crystal (Fitzgerald) luring Johnny (Lorre) and Arbutny (Greenstreet) to her apartment to make a wish in front of a Chinese idol known as Kwan Yin. It's believed that Kwan Yin will bring a wish true if requested by three strangers at midnight.
Geraldine Fitzgerald (Crystal Shackleford) lures two strangers to her apartment in order to test a myth that her idol of Chinese Goddess Kwan Yin will grant a wish to three strangers on the night of the Chinese new year, providing that the wish is the same for each individual.
They then part ways and the film follows their individual stories until they are re-united at the end of the film as the Grand National horse race begins and they hold the ticket with the favourite runner.Peter Lorre (Johnny West) and Sydney Greenstreet (Jerome K Arbutny) are the two strangers that entertain Fitzgerald's superstition with most screen time being afforded to Lorre and his story.
Fitzgerald is determined and unrelenting in her pursuits, Greenstreet is socially aspiring and creepy, while Lorre is an alcoholic that is caught up in an unfortunate mess.The cast are good as are the support cast although we are thrown a few dodgy accents in the Peter Lorre story as portrayed by kind girl Joan Lorring (Icey), murderer Robert Shayne (Bertram Fallon) and homosexual (?) muscleman Peter Whitney Gabby.
Perhaps these three strangers in this story, whose lives have really nothing to do with each other, would never have met except for a very ancient idol: the Chinese goddess, Kwan Yin. And perhaps their separate stories might have been different except for what happened that night.
The acting was adequate, but ultimately couldn't overcome the problem for me with the characters in general.Mostly, it was a film full of unlikeable people - with the exception of Peter Lorre's character.
Arbutny, (Sydney Greenstreet) and Johnny West, (Peter Lorre) to her apartment in order to celebrate a Chinese New Year.
Crystal has a statue in her apartment named the goddess Kwan Yin which will open her eyes and grant wishes to the three strangers which involves a sweepstakes ticket.
In the film, Sydney Greenstreet, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Peter Lorre play three strangers who go to an apartment where they come in front of a Chinese goddess who is said to grant a wish if three people make the same wish at midnight.
What happens to Greenstreet's character at the end was a great twist to the film and his breakdown is masterfully done.
Legend has it that if three complete strangers meet up on the eve of Chinese new year and make the same wish in the presence of the Goddess Kwan Yin, their wish will come true.
Arbutny, (Sidney Greenstreet) a rotund solicitor with serious financial issues and the possibility of being caught for insider trading, the second man is the dimunitive Johnny West (Peter Lorre), a petty criminal and drunkard on the run and suspected of being an accomplice in the murder of a policeman.
Written by John Huston apparently as a possible sequel to The Maltese Falcon, as this fell through, Howard Koch made some changes to the script to get the film made.
The film starts with great promise, a mysterious state with supernatural powers, Lorre and Greenstreet reunited again, but it soon breaks down into odd episodic glimpses of the lives of each of the strangers, that are segued by a shimmering effect that would give you the idea it was all a dream or perhaps a flashback, it is at times a confusing muddled mess that ignores its original premise in favour of some light melodrama, a shame as in the hands of Negulesco I would have expected a more coherent film.
Geraldine Fitzgerald recruits two strangers -- Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet -- from the foggy streets of Victorian London and asks them to her flat.
She shows the men a Chinese goddess of fortune and at a certain time of the the year, if 3 strangers all wish on it then it will come true.
The real story is the stories of each of the 3 strangers lives outside that wish they made upon the Chinese goddess of fortune.
Here, perennial co-stars, Lorre & Greenstreet share the spotlight with Geraldine Fitzgerald as the eponymous three strangers in search of a change in their personal fortunes and frankly a believable plot.
The writing errs however by this time making the "little god" that is the idol too much the hub of the film, almost making it into a character in itself with its so-called presence and fortune-changing quality affecting the desperate aspirations of the three flawed strangers.
Ridiculous writing and even with Geraldine Fitzgerald, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstart starring, basically nothing can really help this film.Fitzgerald draws the other two guys and they wish before some Chinese idol to have a sweepstakes ticket.
The problem with them and this film is that they have far too many personal problems between them.Joan Lorring comes off after playing Bessie in her Oscar nominated "The Corn is Green," the year before to portray Lorre's girlfriend.
Greenstreet has his moments such as his crack-up scene, but he too goes over-the-top in quite a campy performance.Fitzgerald here really steals the show as a woman who tells the ultimate lie to her husband's mistress so that she can get him back.
However, if you can suppress that urge, then you might just find the whole thing quite enjoyable.The film begins with Geraldine Fitzgerald finding two strangers (Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre) and convincing them to come to her apartment (it's not THAT kind of film--relax).