The Stranger **** (1946, Edward G Robinson, Orson Welles, Loretta Young) – Classic Movie Review 1680

Director/star Orson Welles’s third movie after Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons is a less ambitious genre piece, but his underrated 1946 paranoia film noir thriller The Stranger is a darkly glowing little gem.

An ideally cast Edward G Robinson is on his best Double Indemnity-style form in a powerfully restrained performance as Mr Wilson, an investigator from the United Nations War Crimes Commission who sets off to find and trap an infamous Nazi criminal (Orson Welles, extremely creepy), now known as Professor Charles Rankin, who is hiding out in Connecticut, where he plans to marry an innocent young woman, Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young).

On the trail of Franz Kindler, the Holocaust mastermind who has disappeared by erasing all evidence that could identify him and changing his identity, Wilson releases the Nazi’s former comrade Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) and follows him to Harper, Connecticut, where he is killed before he can identify Kindler. The repentant Meinike has begged Kindler to confess his crimes but Kindler strangles him in case he exposes him.

Kindler has become a prep school teacher and soon marries the unsuspecting Mary, daughter of Supreme Court Justice Adam Longstreet (Philip Merivale). Wilson’s only clue to the Nazi is Kindler’s obsession for antique clocks.

Welles’s ultra-tense and eerily menacing thriller is charged with the paranoia of the immediate postwar era, a convincing small-town America claustrophobic atmosphere and, at the dark heart of the matter, the touch of evil. In the film Rankin asserts that the Germans will never give up their dream of world conquest, and this directly echoes Welles’s own publicly stated views.

Recalling especially Shadow of a Doubt (1943), this very Hitchcock-style film is nevertheless infused throughout with Welles’s own typical style, creating a world of its own, shared with the later The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil. Welles ensures that the pace is sure and steady, filling the scenes with quiet mounting suspense, and he ends with a big finish when it is topped with a satisfying, imaginatively staged, full-blooded church clock finale.

Also in the cast are Richard Long, Byron Keith, Billy House, Martha Wentworth, David Bond, Isabel O’Madigan, Johnny Sands, Pietri Sosso and Brother Theodore.

The Stranger is directed by Orson Welles, runs 94 minutes, is made by International Pictures and released by RKO Radio Pictures, is shot in black and white by Russell Metty and is designed by Albert S D’Agostino and Perry Ferguson. Three pairs of hands are credited with adapting the original story by Victor Trivas – Anthony Veiller, Victor Trivas and Decla Dunning. Trivas was Oscar nominated for Best Original Story. Sam Spiegel (aka S P Eagle) is the producer and the score is by Bronisłau Kaper.

The copyright belonged to The Haig Corporation but the film is now in the public domain because the producers failed to renew the copyright in 1973. An archival restoration was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Kino Classics in October 2013, mastered from a 35mm print at the Library of Congress.

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