The way it starts out it seems like it is going to be a B courtroom drama. The heavy-handed symbolism – the cutting away to the blind statue of justice looking over the courtroom – makes it initially seem likely to be a thoroughly pedestrian exercise. But then it starts to become quite interesting. Where everything up to that point had seemed quite straight-forward, the film then starts to blur the line of certainty about the hero’s resolute belief that Elisa J. Cook is the killer. And then the flashbacks and the hero’s voiceovers start to reveal an increasing sense of pent-up violence upon his part. The film is at its most fascinating when it ventures into outright surrealism in a dream sequence where the hero is accused of murder, which comes filled with striking images such as the blind Lady Justice statue sitting at the judge’s bench; newspapers with headlines that only say the single word ‘Murder’; the jury all asleep; and some amazingly stylized shadow lighting schemes, including the giant-size shadow of an electric chair cast over the room as the hero is dragged away.

It is in the casting of Peter Lorre that the film ventures into outright psycho-thriller territory. Lorre has definitely been cast as a result of his famous part in M (1931). M was a psycho-thriller that came at the end of the great era of German Expressionism. But Stranger is a film that retreats even further back into Expressionism than M ever did – director Boris Ingster casts Lorre like he were a frightened rat scuttling about and surrounds him in shadows and stark angles whenever he is about. There is a real creepy weirdness in the scenes where Lorre follows the heroine home. Although here, just when the film has started to build quite interestingly, it abruptly stops and winds things up as though a predetermined length for a supporting feature had been reached.