The Stranger (1946) – Superb Noir Mystery
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Genre – Mystery , Noir
Time: 1 Hour 30 minutes
Platform: Your Tube – Free
Director: Orson Welles
Cast: Orson Welles. Loretta Young. Edward G Robinson.
Horror movies usually have a standard formula. Someone – usually the heroine or a female character – lets in a person or an object. Soon strange things start happening around her. Deaths follow and she cant understand why. An older man , who usually has all the answers, explains the reasons why and she doesn’t believe the older man – till she sees for herself what she has done. That formula is usually used for blood spattered gory movies.
The Stranger however follows the same formula but there are no para normal phenomena, or blood spattered gory visuals. Its something much more old fashioned – the “Nazi criminals among us” type of film. Long before another genre of films with “Nazi War Criminals” became popular, The Stranger is one film where the emphasis is on the suspense and mystery rather than the gory aspects of any crime or mass murders.
War Crimes Commission officer Wilson (Edward G Robinson) wants to free a war criminal Konrad Meineke as he is sure that Meineke will travel somewhere and lead him to bigger fish. Meineke travels to America on a false passport and contacts an underground operative asking for the identity of one Franz Kindler. Meineke travels to a small town Porter , Connecticut where Kindler is living under an assumed identity Charles Rankin (Orson Welles), a teacher in a local high school.
Meineke first goes to Kindler’s home address and meets his soon to be wife Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young) but rushes out when she pushes him for answers. Wilson had also followed Meineke, who then tries to kill him in a gym, but only knocks him unconscious. Meineke meets Kindler who is incensed at such behavior. Meineke, a religious nut, asks Kindler to repent for all his crimes. Kindler takes him into the nearby woods and kills him. He returns back and marries Mary. Wilson recovers, asks around for Meineke and then checks into a local hotel. He is almost ready to give up when he stumbles on a vital clue – Rankin is about to repair the clock of the church tower.
Meanwhile Mary soon notices Charles’ strange behavior ; he locks her favorite dog in the basement and gets upset at the most trivial matters. Wilson starts accumulating more and more information which points to the fact that Rankin and Kindler are one and the same.
Kindler is also worried that Mary is asking too many questions.
The film is one of those ‘small’ films that punch far above their weight. Welles was already seen as the ‘L’Enfant terrible‘ of Hollywood and no one wanted to touch him or his projects, thus leading him to work mostly with independent production houses. This works entire in the film’s favor as the emphasis is on delivering a mystery story set in small town America. And it works beautifully.
It is also amazing that within a year of the end of WW2 , films were already showing former Nazis and Neo Nazis at work , inside America. Lest people think this is a fiction, check out Operation Paperclip ; this was a secret American Government program to get Nazi scientists to the US , and make them work for the US ; simultaneously the USSR was also doing the same – carting off scientists and technology. (The ‘father’ of Apollo 11 , the craft that landed men on the moon was Werner von Braun – who was also the ‘father’ of the Nazi German V2 rockets that were used against London, Antwerp and other Allied cities during WW2)
In an unusual role reversal, worthy of Welles as the director, Wilson is played by Edward.G. Robinson who was a past master , and typecast, as crooks, criminals , underworld dons and generally nasty characters. Robinson brings the same talent to portray the righteous and focused Wilson whose single minded quest is to collar Kindler. It’s a pleasure watching this magnificent actor go through his paces.
We cannot say who is better here – Welles the director or Welles the actor. Kindler is a character who is cornered and whose identity is now under assault , leading to his increasingly desperate acts to steer the clues away from him.
As befitting mystery and crime films of those times, this one easily qualifies for the ‘Noir’ title based on some superb black and white cinematography with lots of shadows and light in the suspense scenes while mostly it is in ‘light’ in other scenes.
They certainly don’t make them like that any more.
Script – 4 out of 5
Story – 4 out of 5
Direction – 5 out of 5
Photography – 5 out of 5
Total – 4.5 out of 5
Outstanding review, Rammesh. It prompted me to place the Blu-ray version on my Amazon wish-list.
Three great actors! Some fascinating insights into the film, after reading more on it:
From Wiki:
“When we’re filming inside the drug store, we get a sense of depth that is extremely rare in a Hollywood movie,” said film historian Bret Wood:
In the shot where Wilson plays checkers with Potter, you can look behind Potter and see a mirror behind him, and through the mirror see Potter and Wilson again, and then see the window behind the camera, and see through that window to cars, buildings and natural sunlight. It’s truly radical. If it were deep focus the way Gregg Toland had shot Citizen Kane, maybe it would have been noticed or written about in the last 70-odd years.”
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Within the film is a second film, another Wellesian touch, consisting of snatches of documentary footage showing Nazi atrocities. The Stranger was the first commercial film to use documentary footage from the Nazi concentration camps.
“What we tend to forget today is that in the 1940s a large percentage of the population could not believe that the Nazi death camps were real,”….Welles had seen the footage in early May 1945 in San Francisco as a correspondent and discussion moderator at the United Nations Conference on International Organization.
Welles: “No, you must not miss the newsreels. They make a point this week no man can miss: The war has strewn the world with corpses, none of them very nice to look at. The thought of death is never pretty but the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay. This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.
“It is clear that the visual power of the newsreels had struck him deeply, and it is no surprise that clips from them would be included only a few months later in The Stranger,”
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Hi Robin
This film was a real surprise. yes – at that time no one knew the full extent of the horrors of the camps. I was surprised that they showed the actual clips. The local Germans denied that they knew anything about them ; after all when they had a high standard of living with servants provided from slave labor why would they rock the boat. The Western Allies were shocked to find that the war had not affected the smaller town where every household had servants and so on.
KVR