Three Strangers
Directed by Jean NegulescoOn the stroke of the Chinese New Year, Crystal Shackleford persuades two men she barely knows to join her in a private ritual before a statuette of Kwan Yin: if three strangers share a wish at the turning of the year, the goddess will grant it. The wish is a sweepstakes ticket Crystal has acquired, and the two men she draws into her parlor are Jerome K. Arbutny, a pompous, debt-laden solicitor, and Johnny West, a small-time drifter with a weakness for drink and worse company. The three agree to split any winnings, and with that compact the film's machinery of fate is set in motion.
The ticket proves to be a winner, but the money arrives at the worst possible moment for each of them. Crystal is locked in a cold war with her estranged husband Bertram Fallon, and her obsession with recovering him shades quickly into something more dangerous. Arbutny, already implicated in a client's missing funds, finds the promise of a windfall only deepening his exposure to blackmail and worse. Johnny, meanwhile, has fallen into the orbit of Icey Crane, a calculating young woman whose attachment to him is entangled with a murder he may or may not have committed. The three strands pull apart even as the winnings threaten to draw the characters back together.
Three Strangers belongs to a cluster of Warner Bros. productions of the mid-1940s that locate noir's moral corrosion not in the criminal underworld alone but in the respectable middle distances of society – the solicitor's office, the suburban drawing room, the shabby pub. The screenplay, written by John Huston and Howard Koch from Huston's original story, is interested less in detection than in the way greed and self-deception collaborate to destroy people who might, under other circumstances, have lived quietly. The film traces three separate descents without privileging one over another, an unusual structural choice that gives the work a cold, almost anthropological remove.
