As fascinating as it would have been to see Orson Welles take on Camus's classic work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger (1946) is not that film. A rare box-office hit for the director, it is, however, one of Welles's greatest achievements . It also remains halfway forgotten in the Citizen Kane (1941) / Magnificent Ambersons (1942) / Touch of Evil (1958) triple-threat that most firmly and popularly cemented his reputation as a Hollywood auteur. Not that those films are undeserving of their place in the canon (in fact, my colleagues and I are showing our Intro. to Media students Kane and Evil for the auteurism unit this fall), but The Stranger is certainly a small noir masterpiece that holds its own against anything Welles ever did. Along with his equally impressive and underrated follow-up The Lady from Shanghai (1947), it further demonstrates how Welles (like Hitchcock) kept one foot in the door of classical cinema and the other edging towards modernist, perhaps even especially in this more traditional postwar genre fare. Welles plays Franz Kindler, a Nazi war criminal hiding out in Harper, Connecticut, who poses as a prep school teacher and marries one of the locals (Loretta Young), only to find federal agent Edward G. Robinson snooping around his doorstep.I'm a stranger here myself
- Will Scheibel
- I teach in the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana University, where I am completing my Ph.D. in Film & Media Studies.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
From the cinematheque vaults: The Stranger
As fascinating as it would have been to see Orson Welles take on Camus's classic work of existentialist fiction, The Stranger (1946) is not that film. A rare box-office hit for the director, it is, however, one of Welles's greatest achievements . It also remains halfway forgotten in the Citizen Kane (1941) / Magnificent Ambersons (1942) / Touch of Evil (1958) triple-threat that most firmly and popularly cemented his reputation as a Hollywood auteur. Not that those films are undeserving of their place in the canon (in fact, my colleagues and I are showing our Intro. to Media students Kane and Evil for the auteurism unit this fall), but The Stranger is certainly a small noir masterpiece that holds its own against anything Welles ever did. Along with his equally impressive and underrated follow-up The Lady from Shanghai (1947), it further demonstrates how Welles (like Hitchcock) kept one foot in the door of classical cinema and the other edging towards modernist, perhaps even especially in this more traditional postwar genre fare. Welles plays Franz Kindler, a Nazi war criminal hiding out in Harper, Connecticut, who poses as a prep school teacher and marries one of the locals (Loretta Young), only to find federal agent Edward G. Robinson snooping around his doorstep.
