The Stranger

While it’s not nearly the most baroque film of his oeuvre, Orson Welles’ The Stranger is chock full of Wellesian style: clever uses of deep focus, crane shots, mirrors, and glossy expressionism, all contributing to a tragic, high-drama, occasionally surreal suspense thriller set in the small town of Harper, Connecticut. American war crimes investigator Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) arrives in Harper posing as an antiques dealer and looking for a senior Nazi war criminal whom he suspects is living under a false identity. After Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) ends up dead and buried in the woods around Harper, Wilson homes in on Professor Charles Rankin (Orson Welles), a passionate clock enthusiast who is about to marry local girl Mary Longstreet (the excellent Loretta Young). After befriending the couple and confiding in Mary’s distrustful brother Noah (Richard Long), Wilson plots to incriminate Rankin, but it won’t end without terror and tragedy. As so often happens in small town noirs, much of the action converges on the local church where the treacherous bell tower becomes the backdrop for murder attempts and gruesome accidents, the film’s climax demonstrating that evil will die with the passage of time. Released just months after Germany’s surrender, The Stranger is notably the only noir containing actual documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps.