The Stranger

Orson Welles' Nazi-fugitive thriller The Stranger (1946) starred Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Loretta Young. Each play a sort of perfected version of their screen self: Welles as the duplicitous college professor Charles Rankin/fugitive war criminal Franz Kindler; Robinson as the tireless federal agent Mr. Wilson, doggedly on Kindler's trail; Young as the resilient but desperate damsel in distress. Like The Night Porter (1974), Liliana Cavani's sadomasochistic cult film starring Dirk Bogard and Charlotte Rampling, Welles' film begins with an examination of fugitive psychology, a process involving confession, conversion, guilt, and murder. As the movie begins, Rankin performs the ultimate film noir daily double--a marriage followed by the secret burial of a man he has killed in the woods of his small Connecticut college town. Rankin/Kindler, part-author of the final solution, must evade not only Robinson but his strongest "ally" as well, Loretta Young's subconscious. The film is full of textual gags such as the USE GYM AT OWN RISK sign in the beginning, admonitions like "in Harper there's nothing to be afraid of," and casually-spoken lines like "we'll catch up with you." 1946 was an eventful year for Welles who also used his radio show that year to work in conjunction with the NAACP to publicize the case of Isaac Woodard Jr., a returning African American soldier beaten and maimed in his South Carolina hometown while still in his Army uniform. Stylistically, The Stranger bears an unmistakable nod to Hitchcock. Robinson's character of the Nazi-hunting federal agent also brings to mind the role of "Vampire Hunter" Van Meer played by the great Sam Fuller in Larry Cohen's A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). Fuller, a notorious cigar smoker, guaranteed Cohen that he would carefully regulate the use of his on-screen and off-screen cigars so that continuity would not be disturbed during editing. The problem was that Sam Fuller did not really have an on-screen and off-screen cigar; watching the film today it is more than amusing (for Fuller fans) to watch his cigars magically change back and forth in length. The Stranger's melodramatic ending, high above the town in the giant clock tower, should not distract from this well-paced thriller.