The Stranger made the most money of any Welles film, and it also happens to be his least favorite of this own works. Knowing him, this should hardly surprise us. A man who was so willfully committed to art against the odds would be bound to have mixed feelings about success, since it would imply that his work had not been sufficiently challenging. This film has the look, pacing, story, and even actors of a film noir, made during the apex of that genre. Of all of his films, The Stranger conforms most to genre convention.
It tells the story of a small town in Connecticut with a secret: one of the teachers at the elite college prep school is in fact Franz Kindler (played by Welles), a Nazi intellectual who had escaped Germany after its fall. He is newly married to Mary Longstreet (played by Loretta Young), the daughter of a Supreme Court justice. Kindler is tracked down by Nazi-hunter Wilson, played in a typically spirited performance by the great Edward G Robinson.
On a political level, it's easy to see why Welles was attracted to this project. He was and remained a full-throated anti-fascist and many of his films speak to that anti-fascism. Here that concern is literal and on the surface, probably too much. Kindler comes across as some kind of evil genius, a way of framing the Nazis that gives them a far more powerful image than they deserve. It's also striking that Kindler and the fascist threat is coming from outside, rather than inside. I can imagine the very WASPy town the film is set in was full of the type of people who had embraced the Klan in the 1920s, as well as the fascist-friendly elements of the opposition to FDR in the 1930s. The whole framing of Kindler as a benign-looking man who is actually indoctrinating the youth in extremist ideology takes the Red Scare framing of communists to such an extent that this may be the only legitimate "Brown Scare" film.
With all of that said, there are still some very effective elements. The Stranger came out only a year after the end of World War II, and incorporates film footage from the liberation of the camps, evidently the first time this was done in a Hollywood film. The Holocaust was a raw wound at this moment, but one the wider culture did little to reckon with. Edward G Robinson's life experiences and identity give his portrayal of Wilson a power and passion that overcomes the limitations of the script. Robinson had emigrated from a Jewish community in Romania as a ten year old after his brothers were targeted in a pogrom. He was an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany well before Pearl Harbor, something that later caused him to suffer during the Red Scare. When Wilson confronts Kindler and his "just following orders" excuses, Robinson's righteous fury practically blasts through the screen.
Living as we do now in an era where overt fascism is making a comeback, this scene electrified me. However, narratives like The Stranger's present the values of small-town America as an antidote to fascist ideology, when in fact they have been just as likely to be their incubator. In that respect, The Stranger is an optimistic film, seeing the victory against the Nazis in the war as establishing a new anti-fascist future. The hardest thing to endure in the current political situation for me has been the knowledge that fascism never died, and that its defeat this time around looks far from inevitable.
I re-read the parts of Welles' interviews with Peter Bogdanovich compiled in The is Orson Welles related to The Stranger, and while he does not have a lot of affinity for the film, he is very much proud of its politics. Evidently he had contemplated dropping out of showbiz for politics full time, and supporting more radical causes like one world governmnet. His issue with the film really stemmed from it being a lone case of him being a studio gun for hire. Other people wrote and produced the film, and they had cut several scenes he had written and filmed for the beginning. In the aftermath he decided from now on to take acting jobs he was not enthusiastic about so that he could have the money to do the directing work he really wanted to do.
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