Stranger on the Third Floor is a 1940 American film noir directed by Boris Ingster and starring Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, and Charles Waldron, and featuring Elisha Cook Jr.

Nonetheless, it has many of the hallmarks of film noir: an urban setting, heavy shadows, diagonal lines, voice-over narration, a dream sequence, low camera angles shooting up multi-story staircases, and an innocent protagonist desperate to clear himself after being falsely accused of a crime.

"[7] Robert Portfino called it "a distinct break in style and substance with the preceding mystery, crime, detection and horror films of the 1930s.

"[7] In their book Kings of the Bs, Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn wrote that Stranger on the Third Floor "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...[T]he sinister role of police and prosecutors in obtaining confessions and convictions [are] hallmarks of the hard-boiled literature that paralleled and predicted what we call film noir.

"[7] Van Nest Polglase, who has been called "one of the most influential production designers in American cinema", was the film's art director.

[8] In addition, the work of special effects artist Vernon L. Walker was excellent despite the constraints of a B movie budget, and the score of Roy Webb, who was RKO's house composer at the time, contributes significantly to the film's mood.

"[9] The staff writer at Variety also believed the film was derivative, and wrote "The familiar artifice of placing the scribe in parallel plight, with the newspaperman arrested for two slayings and only clearing himself because of his sweetheart's persistent search for the real slayer, is used...Boris Ingster's direction is too studied and when original, lacks the flare to hold attention.

The director, Boris Ingster, is better with shadows than with actors – venetian blinds carve up the characters with more fateful force than Paul Schrader's similar gambit in American Gigolo, and there's a dream sequence that has to be seen to be disbelieved.