utgard14 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. So they all make a wish that a lottery ticket will be a winner and they can split the winnings. 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. It's very fascinating with terrific performances from the three leads. Peter Lorre is especially fantastic. He gets most of the best lines. Any movie with Lorre and Greenstreet just has to be good on that basis alone. Definitely a great movie you should seek out.

jzappa 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?

Hitchcoc Put together Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet and you've got me. Lorre is at his "I don't give a damn about anything" best. Greenstreet is the windbag know-it-all who dismisses everything that doesn't benefit him, but becomes the apotheosis of neediness when he starts to fail. Now you have a pact set up by a group of ne'er-do-wells, centering around a ticket for the Grand National. At the beginning they laugh about the pact because they realize the chances of winning are nil. Now we get to know them and their human failings: a drunk, an embezzler, and a self-possessed woman who set the whole thing up. Their exploits are woven together when the ticket is drawn. They each handle it in their own way and the conclusion is quite satisfying.

Prof-Hieronymos-Grost 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. Crystal Shackleford is a woman obsessed by the goddess, an obsession that has grown particularly after the break-up of her marriage, she sets in motion a plan to grab two random strangers off the street. They turn out to be Jerome K. 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. The three strangers agree that their wish will be that a Sweeps Stake ticket in their possession should be the winning ticket. So in front of the mysterious statue on the stroke of midnight they place ticket inside the statue. Will their wish be granted? 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. Still though the weight of the cast can't but help make you smile and stay interested.