Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

where Mark lives (see fig. 41) or when we see images of Mike falling asleep in his chair
and dreaming of being accused of the murder of his neighbour, Albert Meng (Charles
Halton). In his dream, he is strapped into the electric chair and, at the moment of his
execution, Meng appears, cruelly laughing, as in Murnau’s film, while he watches Ward’s
execution. All these stylistic, narrative and visual noir elements are not only realised by
strong performances from the main characters, but by the director and the art director (Van
Nest Polglase) through the highly artificial mise-en-scène of a studio setting and the
baroque photography of Nicholas Musuraca.
The narrative patterns of certain noir films, most notably Stranger on the Third
Floor, find their antecedents in the German films of the twenties. The angst-ridden,
convoluted narratives, the framing devices and mise-en-abyme in the films already
mentioned, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Waxworks, are plausible examples for the
flashback narration so common in forties noir (Detour; Out of the Past; Criss Cross).
Some of the titles of the German films just referred to also offer good examples of the
Figure 21. M
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