The Stranger (International Pictures, RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On August 20, 2005 my husband Charles and I ended the evening by watching a Critics’ Choice DVD of the 1946 Orson Welles film The Stranger, produced by Sam Spiegel (under his “S. P. Eagle” identity, which inspired a lot of Hollywood jokesters to suggest that other producers would juggle their own names similarly and bill themselves with things like M. A. Yer or Z. A. Nuck) and billing Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Welles (in that order) in a tale of international intrigue: Inspector Wilson of the Nazi War Crimes Commission (Robinson) allows the commandant of one of the more brutal concentration camps, Konrad Meineke (a marvelous performance by Konstantin Shayne), to escape in order to lead him to the master architect of the Holocaust, Franz Kindler (Welles), who has hidden out in a small town called Harper, Connecticut, assumed the identity of history professor Charles Rankin and somehow got to marry him Mary Longstreet (Young), daughter of Supreme Court Justice Longstreet (Philip Merivale). Joseph McBride’s book on Welles quotes him as calling The Stranger “the worst of my films … I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else,” and another Welles biographer, Frank Brady, said what put out Welles was Spiegel’s insistence that Welles shoot the script (by Anthony Veiller from a story by Victor Trivas) exactly as written, and also that Robinson play the investigator instead of Welles’ intriguing choice, Agnes Moorehead (!). I’d like to think that if Welles had got to rewrite the script he would have done something about this plot’s sheer preposterousness: we’re supposed to believe that somehow Kindler managed to get out of Nazi Germany and within a year after the war had successfully integrated himself into a small New England town and got the Loretta Young character to marry him; that he’d managed to erase all documentary evidence of his existence and yet he’s such a stupid criminal that when Meineke comes to town to expose him (Meineke in the meantime having undergone a religious conversion and seen the evil of his previous concentration-camp commandant ways) he kills the man in the middle of a wood where a group of students are having a paper chase and then has to kill his wife’s dog for fear the dog will dig up the crudely dug grave in which he’s buried his victim (after which he comes home in a spotlessly clean suit and tie without any clue that he’s been exerting himself physically and gotten dirt all over his clothes).

The Stranger is one of those mediocre movies that could have been truly great — indeed, the main problem with it is that it seems even more than most movies to be made up of other movies rather than having anything to do with life. According to Brady, critics at the time compared it unfavorably to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt — which certainly has some similarities to this film, only in Hitchcock’s film the woman who’s taken in by the superficially charming murderer is his niece rather than his wife, and her naïveté is at least explicable by her youth (indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Shadow is that the Teresa Wright character’s coming-of-age story is ably juxtaposed with the thriller plot), while Welles associate Joseph Cotten was considerably better than Welles himself at projecting the character’s charm as well as his evil (and, significantly, both Shadow and Stranger contain scenes in which the villain “outs” himself in an impassioned monologue he gives at a party), but one can see parallels in other movies as well, notably Gaslight, in which a woman gradually realizes she’s married to a crook even while he’s attempting to convince her that she’s insane. Gaslight worked better because it gave us enough of the backstory of the principals’ relationship that we understood why she would so fervently cling to him, and in The Stranger it’s not Mary’s husband but the presumed “good guys,” Robinson and his bosses (with whom he’s in contact by phone), who want to drive Mary to the brink of a nervous breakdown so her cognitive dissonance over her husband’s moral position will eventually drive her to do the right thing and turn him in. Another movie of the time which worked these tropes far better than The Stranger is Hitchcock’s Notorious, in which a woman (played by Gaslight star Ingrid Bergman) deliberately marries a Nazi as part of a spy agency’s plot to nail him, and Hitchcock and Ben Hecht create a far more morally ambiguous and complex riff on the plot by having her Nazi husband (Claude Rains) be genuinely in love with her, giving added poignancy to the plot twist at the end of both films in which the Nazi attempts to kill his wife to shut her up.

But The Stranger has its echoes in later films as well. Welles told McBride that “the best stuff in the picture was a couple of reels taking place in South America” which were supposedly completely removed by Spiegel — actually a few minutes of this footage survives, at least in the print we were watching (the running time is variously listed as 85, 95 and 115 minutes, and ours was the 95-minute version), and while it’s virtually incoherent dramatically, it’s by far the most visually arresting part of the movie, all oblique angles and deep shadows, anticipating Welles’s use of Latin American settings for similarly dark and dire atmospherics in The Lady from Shanghai (a film whose script isn’t appreciably more coherent than this one, but which in Welles’s hands comes off as surrealism instead of mere sloppiness) and Touch of Evil. There’s also an astonishing anticipation of The Third Man — a film Welles didn’t direct but seems to come closer to his “world” than any other in which he starred but did not direct; in both The Stranger and The Third Man Welles is playing a master villain who faked his own death to avoid capture, and in both films the authorities win the cooperation of the reluctant associate of the Welles character (his wife in The Stranger, his male best friend in The Third Man — and, curiously, the relationship between the Welles and Joseph Cotten characters in Third Man seems more intense and emotionally weighty than that between Welles and Loretta Young in The Stranger) by showing films of the atrocities for which he’s responsible. Many films seem to be concocted out of bits of other movies, but few to the extent this one is — even the spectacular clock in the Harper church, which Welles’s character (described as having an obsessive hobby of buying, restoring and repairing clocks) fixes, has a series of statues that revolves inside it as it strikes the hour (one of which, a figure holding a sword straight out, impales Welles in the final scene), is straight out of Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, in which a similar (and similarly sinister) clock symbolized the effect of fate on the Emil Jannings character. — 8/21/05

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The feature film my husband Charles and I watched February 21 was The Stranger, a 1946 quasi-noir thriller directed by and starring Orson Welles, though it was at once the least personal of his projects as director and the only film Welles ever directed that actually turned a profit on its initial release. The Stranger began life as an “original” story by Victor Trivas, who worked on a film adaptation with Decla Dunning (both names that otherwise mean nothing to me), though the actual script was by Anthony Veiller, who had some pretty imposing credits under his belt even though few of his films became enduring classics. (One which at least arguably did was State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy, katharine Hepburn and Angela Lansbury and directed by Frank Capra, who had previously worked with him on some of his U.S. Army Signal Corps productions.) Welles signed to make this film for the short-lived International Pictures, then an independent studio releasing through his old stomping ground, RKO, though within two years they would merge with International to form Universal-International. The producer of the film was Sam Spiegel, though for some reason he took his credit as “S. P. Eagle” (which led to Hollywood’s jokesters offering suggestions to other movie moguls to do the same to their names and call themselves things like M. A. Yer or Z. A. Nuck). Spiegel’s contract with Welles specified that he could not make any changes to Veiller’s script and if he ran overbudget or otherwise displeased Spiegel, the producer could fire him as director while requiring him to continue as star.

The plot of The Stranger casts Welles as ex-Nazi Franz Kindler, who following Germany’s defeat in World War II assumed the name “Charles Rankin” and got a job as a professor of history at a small college in Harper, Connecticut. The film opens with what in many ways are its best scenes, a few minutes of Nazis arriving in South America to hide out after the war; Welles said these sequences took up the first 20 minutes of the film and were the scenes he was proudest of, but they were cut to the bare minimum needed for exposition. Among the refugees are Konrad Meineke (Konstantin Shayne), who during the war was a top Nazi official but after Germany’s defeat repented, became a born-again Christian and was deliberately allowed to escape from an Allied war-crimes prison in hopes he could lead the investigators to Kindler. The lead Allied investigator is Wilson (Edward G. Robinson, in a role Welles originally wanted Agnes Moorehead to play, though the late William K. Everson in The Detective in Film argued that Robinson’s casting tied this film in to Confessions of a Nazi Spy and put Robinson in the position of being a Nazi-hunter both before and after the war), and he traces Meineke to Harper. Meineke arranges for Wilson to come to a deserted gym at the college and tries to kipp him with a piece oif gymnastics apparatus, but though injured Wilson survives and maintains the hunt for Kindler. He arrives in town on the day “Rankin” is scheduled to marry Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter of U.S. Supreme court Justice Adam Longstreet (Philip Merivale), though Veiller’s script doesn’t give much insight into just why she was attracted to him.

Both Wilson and “Rankin” befriend Mr. Potter (Billy House), the town clerk, who challenges all comers to games of checkers at 25 cents per game. Potter beats Wilson easily but can’t beat “Rankin.” Supposedly Franz Kindler is the true architect of the Holocaust (there’s a brief seque3nce ini which Wilson, trying to convince Mary that the man she’s married is a monster, shows her some of the infamous true-life footage of teh concentration camps being liberated after the war, thereby including the film-within-a-film that was one of Welles’s trademarks), and in a party scene “Rankin” starts babbling about how the German people will never overcome their lust for world domination. He starts talking about “the fiery sword of Siegfried” and mentions Wagner, and at the end of his spiel he makes the argument that the only way to end the German threat to the world is to annihilate them, thereby establishing that he’s a man who thinks in terms of genocide. When one of the other guests mentioned Karl Marx as a counter-example of a German who believed in workers’ rights and human equality, “Rankin” snaps back, “But Marx wasn’t a German. He was a Jew.” Early in the film “Rankin” strangles Meineke because he realizes that if Meineke found him, so can others, and he wants to stop the trail before it leads Wilson to him (though it already has). Meineke’s body is discovered by Mary’s dog, whom “Rankin” poisons, and also by a bunch of students doing a “paper chase” through the woods surrounding the college. One of them invites “Rankin” to join the chase, saying, “You could stand to lose a few pounds” – an almost unbearably ironic line given what Orson Welles ended up looking like eventually.

Gradually it dawns on Mary just what kind of man she’s married – though it takes Wilson and his film screening to turn her around completely – and there’s an ending sequence in which “Rankin” hatches a plot to kill Mary by inviting her up to visit him in the local church’s bell tower. It seems that the bell tower has a clock and “Rankin,” an inveterate devotée of clocks and their mechanisms, has devoted himself to repairing the old medieval German clock installed in the church steeple. But he’s really sawed through the rungs of the ladder so anyone climbing up it will break the rungs and fall to their death. Mary’s life is spared when her old nursemaid and still servant Sara (Marjorie Wentworth) has a sudden heart attack and Mary has to wait with her for the doctor (Byron Keith) to arrive. Her brother Noah (Richard Long) goes to the bell tower in her place, only “Rankin” is horrified by this and pleads with Noah not to go. Mary realizes that the trap was meant for her – in an earlier scene she even tells “Rankin” that she’s O.K. with him killing her as long as he doesn’t use his hands – and in a truly baroque finish “Rankin” is stabbed to death by a spear held by one of the ornate statues that are part of the clock.

According to Frank Brady, who published the first biography of Orson Welles published after his death in 1985, critics reviewing The Stranger on its initial release complained about its similarities to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and the resemblance is there, not only in the basic situation of a young, naïve woman slowly realizing that the man she’s fallen in love with is a psychopathic killer but the specific scene in which the psychopath “outs” himself by making a shocking speech at a dinner party. But this time around the film also seemed to be reminiscent of a lot of other movies, including Gaslight (whose writers dared to explain why the woman is attracted to the man in ways that eluded the writers of The Stranger), Rebecca and the mother of all those stories in which a naïve young woman is involved with a brooding older man, Jane Eyre (n which Welles had starred just three years before The Stranger). Charles saw a parallel with Val Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, specifically in the symbolism of the clock tower as analogous to the ship’s masthead in Zombie, though I remember when I first saw The Stranger the film the clock tower and its ornate statues reminded me of was The Blue Angel.

I’m not sure what I’ve said about The Stranger when I’ve seen it before, but this time around it seemed like a good movie that could have been great. It’s a pity Welles didn’t get to cast Agnes Moorehead as the Nazi-hunter – it could have given her a rare sympathetic role and also added an extra edge to the intrigue that a woman was hunting down Kindler. It also needed a more sensitive female lead than Loretta Young – like (dare I say it?) Barbara Stanwyck, or (as difficult as it would have been to accept her as an all-American character) Ingrid Bergman, who brought far more pathos and subtlety to the equivalent character in Gaslight. Some of the original reviewers lamented that since Welles was both star and director, there was no one on board to tell him when he was overacting and try to calm him down. – 2/22/23