The Stranger: 1946 Film-Noir Orson Welles, E.G. Robinson

The Stranger: 1946 Film-Noir Orson Welles, E.G. Robinson

Rejissyor: Orson Welles. Welles plays a Nazi named Franz Kindler who, after the end of the Second World War, has escaped to the United States and lays low in a small Connecticut town under the name Charles Rankin. Edward G. Robinson costars as Wilson, an agent of the Allied War Crimes Commission hot on Rankin’s trail. The former Nazi has tried to blend in; he teaches at the local school for boys and weds Mary (Loretta Young), the daughter of the town judge. Welles plays Rankin as suspiciously elegant, lending to the idea that anyone anywhere could be the enemy—that incognito Nazis could penetrate even the most inconsequential parts of postwar America. The idea was to destroy the illusion of safety for the average American citizen Producer Sam Spiegel, who at the time was a rookie in Hollywood, pushed for Veiller’s script for The Stranger , based on a story by Victor Trivas, to be financed by International Pictures and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures (the script would eventually be doctored by John Huston). Welles was hired as both director and the film’s villain, but he had only modest input on the script. Made for little more than $1 million, it garnered upwards of $3 million at the box-office in its initial release. Behind the scenes, Hollywood lore tells us Welles shot a long sequence in which a Nazi named Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) searches for Kindler—some twenty minutes longer than the one that appears in the film, and possibly resembling the dizzying searching-down-a-lead sequences in Welles’ later Mr. Arkadin (1955). But the fate of the longer scene involving Meinike in The Stranger is yet another unfortunate tale from Welles’ storied history in Hollywood, as these twenty minutes of footage were cut by Spiegel and destroyed. Spiegel believed them to off-center given the plot’s centralized location in New England. Welles claimed the sequence was, in his opinion, the most interesting in the film, possibly since it was conceived and written by Welles himself. But then, any ac

https://archive.org/details/the-stranger-1946_202404 · Internet Archive: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/