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The movie begins with Edward G. Robinson declaring his intentions to round himself up some war criminals, dramatically punctuating his intent by slamming his pipe against a table. Fade to a meek, nervous little man who makes his way from steamer to bus, on route to the quaint little town of Harper, Connecticut (for some sort of Nazi conspiracy, of course). Robinson tails him, pipe in hand (a visual motif that gets used far too much), through the city’s center, meeting the checkers-obsessed city-clerk Mr. Potter, and up and around to the local boy’s school.

Here is where the film first stumbles, as Robinson shadows the little man, squinting through ubiquitous pipe smoke, and gets hit by a gymnastic ring that the man hurls from an upper balcony. It somehow manages not only to strike Robinson, but to wallop him with enough force to knock him unconscious – which is ridiculous – and even loopier is the notion that the little man assumes he has killed his pursuer, and slinks his way out of the school without so much as a pulse check.

He goes from here to meet Herr Franz Kindler, who is, in fact, Orson Welles. Kindler is living in Harper as a high school professor under the name Charles Rankin, and is startled by his old Nazi friend’s reappearance. So startled is he, in fact, that he decides to choke the man to death in order to preserve his own anonymity. In a virtuoso single take which must last upwards of six minutes, Welles and his feeble counterpart converse while strolling through the forest, until finally the dark look in Welles’s eyes turns to murder.

The single, graceful tracking shot shows just how far ahead of his time Welles was; in that this type of move was being done by contemporary filmmakers like Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir, but wasn’t being championed in mainstream Hollywood apart from the “would-be genius” – Orson Welles. Camera moves this ambitious wouldn’t be fully popularized until folks like Kubrick, Scorsese, and De Palma started making them more universally acknowledged.

Orson’s flashes of directorial brilliance, however impressive, don’t alleviate the odor of mediocrity that the film exudes. Loretta Young plays Welles’s naïve wife – a woman who slowly realizes she’s married a Nazi – and goes through the heroine-in-stress motions without much success or failure. Had this been a Hitchcock movie, we would have seen the same story, but from her point of view, and the picture probably would have succeeded. Instead, we get Robinson theorizing about her psyche, sending out some genuinely terrible lines like: “her subconscious is in control now.” All the while her true suffering is left underappreciated. Mostly, though, there is too much Orson Welles. The director seems preoccupied with himself, and for some reason, with the drugstore owner Mr. Potter, whose comic relief tries to relieve us far too often. So, Young gets little of the screen time, and yet is under the most strain, which makes The Stranger’s narrative rather muddled.

The Stranger is a neat little idea, in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, where evil enters a small town in the form of a charming, good-looking, otherwise model citizen. The similarity between the two plots in this regard actually made me consider halfway through the movie what a brilliant choice Joseph Cotten would have been for the main role. Unlike Orson, Cotten could have pulled off both the intelligence and the terror, without the constant menace that Welles’s powerful jaw and furrowed brow can’t avoid. Even something more in the line of Welles’s own performance as Harry Lime in The Third Man – where his charm outweighed his wickedness – would have been more interesting than his Franz Kindler/Charles Rankin, who stomps around and manages to make even a game of checkers look sinister.

Also disappointing is the reality that Welles’s brilliance with light and shadow, rather than the plot, offers up most of the films fascination, but is wasted whenever Mrs. Young gets an emotive closeup. As though she were Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Young is shot in perpetual glowing radiance through a thick gauze of diffusion in almost every close shot she gets. She and her husband are in almost complete darkness in their bedroom, and yet Loretta has a 10K light blaring in her face!? Come on, this isn’t something Orson Welles would have done. The inconsistent lighting reeks of studio interference (as does the awful, this-is-how-you-should-be-feeling musical score), and serves to lessen a film where the darkness is supposed to outweigh the light. It would be like sticking a huge florescent in Al Pacino’s face every time he had a closeup in The Godfather Part II – something would look slightly out of place, yes?

Anyways, usually when Welles had a less than ideal story to work with, his cinematic muscle flexing made up the difference, and produced an intriguing piece of work in spite of itself. The Stranger, however, was not salvaged. Welles once said that he wanted to cast Agnes Moorehead in the Edward G. Robinson role, which actually would have introduced an interesting dynamic, but even that odd bit of role-switching couldn’t have resuscitated the flat-lined story. It sputters along without any punch, and culminates in its preposterousness with a desperately hackneyed final sequence in Harper’s clock tower, where a fatal plunge had been forecast for 90 minutes.

For a far better clock-tower finale, stick with Back to the Future. For a better Orson Welles film, look anywhere but here.

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originally posted: 06/30/05 10:22:14
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