Imagine my surprise when, while flipping through Netflix’s catalogue, coming across what looked like a 1940s film noir I wasn’t familiar with. That isn’t Netflix’s usual thing, so I stuck it on my watchlist and went back to looking for more cool movies to watch at my leisure. Then, later, a little cursory research told me the movie in question, 1946’s The Stranger, was actually public domain so, you know, anyone can run it. However, I’ve seen the movie now, so how was it?
Perhaps a better question should be “What was it?” It was a film noir from actor/director Orson Welles, with Welles (along with John Huston) having an uncredited screenplay assist. Welles was always something of a triple threat when he was so inclined, so that’s some good news to start. The basic plot is about how a Nazi war criminal (played by Welles) managed to escape to America and try to hide there by integrating into society under a false name by, among other things, marrying a young woman whose father is a liberal Supreme Court Justice.
First off, Welles makes a fantastic villain, as anyone who has seen 1949’s The Third Man can tell you. The movie opens with Allied Nazi Hunter Mr. Wilson (Edward G Robinson) declaring that the biggest target on their list is a man they can’t find, for reasons later revealed to be no one had any idea what he looked like. The only real solution is to let an associate escape and follow that guy to the heinous Franz Kindler.
That plan actually works, but Wilson proves to be a bit accident-prone, so he’s out with a hit to the head (caused by the associate, Meinike ), and thus misses the meeting between Meinkie and Kindler, now living in America as one Professor Charles Rankin, a fairly popular professor at the local college with one quirk he shares with Kindler: an obsession with clocks.
I really dug the scene between Meinkie and Kindler/Rankin. Rankin starts off by being clearly unnerved by his old associate’s sudden appearance, and largely asks the man to go away as Meinkie would raise too many questions on the eve of Kindler’s wedding. Meinkie, on the other hand, urges Kindler to ask God for forgiveness as that is the only way to avoid eternal damnation and find peace as Meinkie claims to have. All this happens while many of Kindler’s students, including his fiancee’s brother, are running around the woods engaged in something called a “paper chase”. Eventually, Kindler strangles Meinkie and leaves while the students appear to symbolically chase him off.
So, yeah, this guy is bad news trying his damnedest to hide in plain sight under an assumed name as he rebuilds the old clock in the local church tower. Wilson is fairly certain he has his man, but also knows Rankin is a beloved public figure, so outing him will be difficult, especially as he needs to prove Rankin is Kindler first.
That proves easy when he, over dinner at the house of Rankin’s soon-to-be-in-laws the Longstreets, engages Rankin in conversation over the topic of the German national character, and not only does Rankin sound vaguely fascist by insisting Germans as a people are never going to be a co-operative people and only understand force, but he dismisses the more egalitarian Marx as someone who couldn’t be German because he was Jewish.
Much of the rest of the conflict comes from how Wilson tries to get Rankin’s new wife Mary (Loretta Young) to see the truth about her husband. Young and Robinson are both fine here, but Welles stands head and shoulders above them. His generally mild-mannered first appearance gradually gives way to a more sinister figure who seems to believe he can and will have to kill as many people as possible to get away with his horrible crimes.
Now, maybe the movie got a little formulaic towards the end, showing Kindler as repentantly evil, a man who will attempt to kill his wife and succeed in poisoning her dog to prevent his secrets from getting out. But regardless of what kind of ideas the movie might have been suggesting about the human condition, this is still a Hollywood movie from 1946, and that means Kindler will get what he deserves and then some in a thematically appropriate way. This wasn’t one of Welles’ best movies, but it shows the man taking a chance on film noir for the first time and making something of it.
Grade: B
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