The Stranger (1946). Orson Welles is a god; therefore, we should bow down to whatever he says. The evil studio bosses corrupted his film, and, therefore, as he says, it is his worst, and we, as critics and viewers, can figure out why and how.
I’ve got a weird and subversive idea. Pizzt? You want to hear it? Why don’t we just watch the picture?
To get right down to the nitty-gritty, the movie has a great idea: After WWII, Nazis were fleeing everywhere. A leading Nazi shows up in an all-American Connecticut town posing as a history teacher in a private boys school. He marries a prominent judge’s daughter, and then things begin to unravel.
The beginning and end of the film, and some of Welles’ acting, bring to mind one word with two meanings: “overwrought.” It means deeply agitated especially from some emotion. It also means overdone, as in too emotional. The opening sequence is like film-noir on speed. The last scene is the second meaning, an overdone, melodramatic ending to a film that deserved better. The Nazi teacher impaled by a clock-tower figurine rotating around the clock on the hour? Give me a break.
The body of the film is better paced. We know early on that Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) is actually the Nazi mastermind Franz Kindler, and then a slow cat-and-mouse game begins between the war crimes investigator (Edward G. Robinson) and the war criminal. Caught in the middle is Rankin’s new wife, Mary (Loretta Young). Robinson is superb: calm, determined, forth right. Loretta Young has the great advantage of not being particularly good looking. Thus it becomes more believable that she and Rankin got married. Loretta Young has a tremendous amount of acting to do in an era when there were not a lot of resources to help her, and she acquits herself adequately. In contrast, Welles seems a little too enamoured with Welles, and photographs himself in some extreme close ups and with some overwrought facial expressions.
The cinematography is brilliant. The light and shadow in the opening sequence is so extreme that it takes film noir photography about as far as it can go and still tell a story, and the entire sequence captures the hot bed of post-WWII intrigue appropriately. Russell Metty continues the wonderful camera work when we move to Connecticut: all is white and light, and you can see everything that is going on (or so it seems). Slightly detracting from the superb cinematography are the several shots of Loretta Young bathed in a stereotypical Hollywood gauze/glow.
In contrast, the music score by Bronislav Kaper is heavy handed, telling us how to feel in a movie where it is obvious how we will be feeling.
Today, the biggest drawback watching this commendable film is that the Nazi threat is specific and not readily generalizable. Welles, apparently and wisely, was worried about Nazis in America. He had written and filmed 20-30 minutes of Rankin’s transition time in Argentina, which was unceremoniously cut by the producer. This makes for a better movie, but obscures Welles’ original intent of showing how Nazis could arrive in the US undetected. Welles’ collaborator, John Huston, was busy on Key Largo, which was finally approved with the Nazis coming in through Florida being replace by “organized crime.” The Stranger also showed the first post-WWII film footage of concentration or extermination camps. But from a modern perspective, it is unfortunate that director Welles could not have generalized to fascism of all sorts, for then it would have had obvious application today.
To conclude, I’d like to return to Welles’ dismissal of this picture, and suggest how wrong it is. Welles said, “It is the worst of my films. There is nothing of me in that picture.” This sounds like a man who is angry. The studio dictated who the war crimes investigator would be. Angry. The studio then cut 20-30 minutes of the very footage that Welles had written and filmed. Angry. The studio, from Welles’ perspective, had turned his social warning about Nazi infiltration into a one-off suspense film. Welles may have been right to be angry, but he is wrong on the other accounts. Just because The Stranger has little of him in it does not mean that it is of necessity bad. In fact, less of Welles could be good for a picture. And, as many a critic has pointed out, the film is still obviously Welles—splashes of brilliance side by side with, yes, overwrought stuff.
Jim Bell