The Stranger (1946)

The Stranger is an American thriller film first released in 1946, directed by Orson Welles.  The film stars Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale and Richard Long.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


Immediately after WWII, a war crimes investigator named Wilson is assigned to track down the notorious Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler.  Although he played a significant part in the holocaust, Kindler managed to keep a low profile, allowing him to flee his country unnoticed as Germany fell to the Allies.   To uncover Kindler’s present whereabouts, Wilson has another former Nazi official, Meinik, released from prison.  Sure enough, Meinik leads Wilson to the place where Kindler now lives, a small Connecticut town, Harper.  Here, Kindler has assumed a new identity, Charles Rankin - a high school teacher who has married the daughter of a Supreme Court Judge.  To unmask Kindler and bring him to justice, Wilson appeals to his wife, but she is reluctant to believe what he tells her...

After the epic scale and heavy stylisation of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Stranger feels like something of a come down for Orson Welles.  It was the poor box office showing of these earlier films that compelled Welles to make a more conventional film, one that would achieve a healthy return, thereby redeeming himself in the eyes of his profit-hungry producers in Hollywood.   The Stranger may not be Welles’ most inspired or technically laudable film, but it is a respectable film noir thriller which achieved what it was intended to do, to attract and entertain a large mainstream cinema audience.

Welles claimed that he disliked making The Stranger and admitted that there was little in the project to enthuse him.  This is surprising given that the film bears many of his stylistic motifs, notably the expressionistic use of shadows and oblique camera angles.  Uncharacteristically for Welles, the narrative is doggedly linear, avoiding flashbacks, a key Wellesian device, but this adds to the film’s realism, making this one of the director’s most naturalistic works.

One of the reasons why Welles found making this film so difficult was having to work opposite Edward G. Robinson, who was foisted on him by International Pictures producer Sam Spiegel.  Welles had originally intended that the part of the war crimes investigator would go to Agnes Moorehead, who had featured in his earlier film The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).  Spiegel was adamant that Moorehead was not a sufficient box office draw to make the film a success and so hired the far more bankable Robinson.  Although Robinson gives a great performance, he had a poor working relationship with his co-star/director and the atmosphere on the set was often poisoned with acrimony.

The main strength of The Stranger is Welles’ utterly chilling portrayal of a Nazi fugitive.  This is noteworthy because the actor tacitly avoids the stereotypical image of Nazi officials that was prevalent in cinema at the time, that of the single-minded power-crazed mad man.  Instead, Welles portrays war criminal Franz Kindler in a way that is far more convincing and sinister – as a quietly calculating man who has committed himself wholesale to Nazi ideology and who has his own sincerely held views of morality and justice.  It is a role that prefigures Welles’ most famous, that of the unscrupulous Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949).

© James Travers 2008

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