Film review: The Stranger (1946)

I didn't know that there were so many Orson Welles films - I thought it was just Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil, but here's another one.  Supposedly it was taken away from him and re-cut, and is thus a "lesser Welles" but we certainly enjoyed it.  Its major strength is the three main actors, Welles himself, playing a Nazi who is hiding out as a teacher in a small Connecticut town, Edward G. Robinson as Wilson, a war crimes investigator who is on his trail, and, perhaps doing the most dramatic heavy-lifting, Loretta Young as Mary, the woman who marries the Welles character on the day Robinson arrives in town. Welles is playing Franz Kindler, a notorious architect of the death camps who is famous for two things: his anonymity (he managed never to be photographed) and his obsessive love of repairing old clocks that is to be his undoing.  Wilson tracks him down by allowing another, lesser Nazi (the last one alive whom they know knows what Kindler looks like) escape and lead him to Kindler.  However Wilson is careless and the escaped Nazi (a skinny older man called Meinike) works out he's being tailed and leads Wilson into a deserted high school gym and gives him such a crack on the head (with a rope swing) that he thinks he's killed him.  Then he meets up with Welles and tells him that he's been followed, but (in the mistake people in films always make) that he is the only one who knows where he, Welles, is.  So Welles throttles him in the woods.  (What makes the scene particularly shocking is that Meinike has "found God" and is trying to get Welles to pray with him as he does it.)  Then Welles tidies up and goes off to his wedding.  However, Wilson is of course not dead and proceeds to stalk Welles, made suspicious by the fact that he is deeply engaged in getting the long-broken town clock to work.  He attends a meal with Welles and wife and in-laws (her father is a well-respected judge) and tries to get Welles talking about the Germans.  Welles recommends total extermination of the German people, a statement that, rather implausibly, initially makes Wilson believe he can't be Kindler.  However, in the same conversation he says that Marx was not German because he was a Jew and Wilson decides that "only a Nazi would say that" (see - this film is relevant again!)  The rest of the film plays out like a Columbo episode, except on location.  A lot goes on in the village store, where the owner likes to sit by the register challenging all and sundry to checkers games.  It's also where Meinike left his suitcase for safe-keeping, and the fact that he never shows up to reclaim it leads to a search for his body in the woods.  But not before Welles has poisoned his own wife's beloved dog because it kept trying to dig up the body.  The main drama of the film, and the reason why so much rests on Loretta Young's shoulders, is watching her resist and then slowly accept that she's married a Nazi.  (She did Nazi that coming.)  Really the only sign that it was directed by Welles is the great film noir cinematography - lots of faces coming out of the shadows, that sort of thing.  The tension ratchets up nicely to a very satisfying denouement atop the tower that holds the town clock.  A lesser Welles is still a cracking good film, I'd say.  He may chew the scenery a bit, but his character is monstrous enough that you expect it, and Edward G. Robinson makes a fine, decent but with steely resolve, foil.