A young man falsely accused of murder claims the secret to the crime lies with a stranger whom no one else has seen and who could very well be the figment of a nightmare hallucination or the result of a cruel joke. Peter Lorre plays the mysterious and possibly unreal stranger who lurks in the shadows of this little-known film, directed with remarkable visual flair by former Eisenstein colleague Boris Ingster and released one year before Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (typically named as the first film noir).

Noir goes to the art museum in this thriller with a highbrow setting. The spirit of De Chirico haunts this wonderfully suspenseful and wholly unexpected film about an art detective gripped by the recurrent dream of a train wreck that seems to grow more and more real. As so often in noir, wartime trauma is evoked, this time as a possible solution for the protagonist’s apparently shaky sanity. Director Irving Reis was a pioneering early sound designer who worked with Orson Welles on The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, among other projects.