According to IMDB, The Stranger was Orson Welles' least favorite film of his own. He made it in 1946, after the ill-fated Magnificant Ambersons, just to prove to the studios that he could complete a project on time and within budget. This was the only film directed by Welles to show a profit in its original release.It's a tribute to Welles' talent that one of his mediocre efforts is still more interesting than the "A" game of a lot of other filmmakers.
Set just after World War II, The Stranger follows the cat and mouse game between an investigator of the Allied War Crimes Commission named Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) and Franz Kindler (Welles). Kindler is a Nazi who has seeken refuge in Harper, a small collage town in Connecticut, under the false identity of Dr. Charles Rankin.
In The Third Man, Welles gave fugative Harry Lime a thin layer of charm and a hint of regret over his core of greedy, self-indulgent malevalence. So, it's understandable for Holly Martin and Anna Schmidt to love and defend him.
But as Kindler, mastermind of the "Final Solution", Welles mugs and chews so much scenery that one wonders why it takes so long for the people around him to figure out that something is wrong.
Orson Welles originally wanted Agnes Moorehead to play Wilson. But the studio balked at the idea of a female investagator and instead cast Robinson. Not the clichéd shoot'em up cop, Wilson is a cunning and quiet pursuer. Robinson is as restrained in the part as Welles is over the top.
Rounding out the cast is Loretta Young, who plays Kindler's new bride Mary Longstreet. Acting as an enabler for Kindler's facist nature, Longstreet could give lessons in naivety to Kay Adams from The Godfather.
Like the Lady From Shanghai (another superficial masterpiece), banal dialog is overcome by interestingly staged camera angles and lighting. This somewhat redeems the movie for lines that border on camp as when Young, screaming in alliterative hysteria, declares "Charles is not a Nazi!"
As part of his plan to elude Wilson's investigation, the ever regimented Kindler walks around with a to-do list that includes laughable tasks like "establish alibi." He even dutifully crosses each item off the itinerary as he completes it.
There are some wonderful moments in The Stranger. One such moment is the bit in a phone booth where Kindler absent-mindedly doodles a swastika while making a call.
I particularly enjoy the dinner scene that has a suspicious Wilson engaging Kindler/Rankin in polite conversation as a method of tripping him up. One of the topics they discuss is what to do with Germany in the aftermath of the war.
Even though he's pretending to be an American college professor, Kindler can't help but let his true Nazi tendencies peek through when he suggests that a post-war annihilation of the entire German population "down to the last babe in arms" is the only sure solution.
Mary is shocked that her dear sweet Charles could even suggest such a "Carthaginian peace."
To which Kindler/Rankin calmly replies, "As an historian, I must remind you that the world hasn't had much trouble from Carthage in the past 2000 years."
Wilson later realizes that he's on the right track when he remembers other details of that dinner conversation and in a "eureka" moment exclaims, "Well, who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German... because he was a Jew?"
3 comments:
Kindler may be revealing “Nazi” tendencies by advocating genocide, but the movie itself simply doesn't see that. Wilson calls Kindler (qua Rankin) “above suspicion”.
From the start if the war until some time after it ended, it was socially acceptable in America to advocate exterminating the Germans and the Japanese. (A majority did not agree, but it was none-the-less socially acceptable.)
As I say in the post, it's Rankin's comment regarding Karl Marx being a Jew that is Wilson's "eureka" moment.
However, I tend to think that Welles had Kindler, the Nazi, expousing those ideas in order to shine a light on them (however fleeting).
Indeed his comment on Marx is the Eureka Moment, which is itself problematic, because many non-Nazis (including many alienated German Jews) would have agreed. There's a Civic Lesson being presented there, but it's being delivered in a terribly unfair manner.
Even had Welles not had his experience of eight years earlier, with The War of the Worlds, I'd say that your interpretation of his intent w.r.t. Rankin's advocacy of genocide were unnatural. As it was, he'd had a hard lesson in the limitations of the audience as critical thinkers.
Rather, over the previous half-century or so, the meaning of “liberalism” had been turned utterly on its head in America. Democracy was confused with liberty, and in their defense one could advocate annihilation of whole peoples.
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