SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

steffaneybenson This movie was OK to me . Not my type of movie. A little slow but it does have a good context behind the whole thing and some good parts like the juicy details they speak upon one another in secret and great actors as well. This movie also had good lighting and camera angles as well.

CinePete This film may have the questionable label as the weakest in Welles' canon, but The Stranger is particularly significant in the development of post-war film noir.Posing as a teacher at a boys' school in Harper, Connecticut, a Nazi war criminal-in-hiding (Orson Welles), about to marry the daughter of good family (Loretta Young), discovers the presence of an FBI agent (Edward G. Robinson) sent by the government to track him down.The cat-and-mouse game that ensues arguably does veer into the preposterous; it is over-emoted, full of curious improbabilities and implausible coincidences. But in its own peculiar way, the film compels.Earlier in the decade, Thornton Wilder's Our Town set the prototype of small-town America, but film noir brings out an alternative view, notably in Shadow of a Doubt, Out of the Past, The Killers and the noir underbelly of It's A Wonderful Life. The cycle of films expresses the national anxiety following World War II as threatening crime intrudes into America's safe places. Loretta Young here represents the complacent American suddenly traumatized by the inconceivable. This is part of Welles' point. Harper assumes itself to have nothing to be afraid of. But in the circumstances, the small town turns perverse, full of harsh lighting effects, odd camera angles, grotesque faces, murderous events stretched to the limits of plausibility - all achieved through Welles' preference for the angular and distorted, harsh lighting and layered compositions. Harper eventually closes in on the Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler; the radius gets narrower and narrower, the world shrinks finally to the space inside the church bell tower, trapping 'the stranger' in the deadly mechanism of a medieval clock.The clock, operating randomly, with medieval figures that move and (when needed) pierce sharply with their spears, is a sign that time itself is out of joint. Appropriately, Kindler the Nazi is fatally wounded by clock figures that, as he has himself explained earlier, derive from Teutonic mythology. Thus, figures from the historical past destroy the modern abomination.The most lucrative for Welles of all his films, The Stranger had good box office. It moves quickly, and there is always an unexpected situation coming up, and we keep wondering about that clock in the church square.The use of concentration camp newsreel and the release of the film during the Nuremberg trials make it contemporary and relevant to the post-war era.

bandw Orson Welles plays Charles Rankin, a history teacher in a school for boys in small town Harper, Connecticut. Rankin is actually ex-Nazi Franz Kindler, who was in control of German concentration camps; in fact it was said that Kindler conceived the theory of genocide. I wish that this story could have been played in a lower key. While some ex-Nazis did enter the U.S. after the war (see the book "The Nazis Next Door") it is improbable that such a high level Nazi could have slipped in, untracked, to become an upstanding citizen so quickly after the war (this movie was released less than a year after the end of WWII). And how was it that he had no trace of a German accent? He was engaged to be married to a local woman who was the daughter of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice no less. I doubt that at a dinner party Kindler would have been so willing to provide the somewhat sympathetic analysis that Germans saw themselves as innocent victims of world envy and hatred, conspired against and set upon by inferior peoples and and inferior nations. It would have been more believable to me to have had Kindler be a lower level Nazi scheduled to marry a middle class American housewife who was not the daughter of a nationally-known father. Surely a person as high-profile as Kindler would have been a candidate for the Nuremberg Trials. If you accept the setup, then the movie has things to offer. As you might expect from any movie that Orson Welles is involved with would have interesting filming techniques. This movie is in the film noir style--unusual camera angles, high contrast black and white, much use of shadows, and thriller aspects building to fantastic final scenes. Unfortunately it is easy to remember Welles as the overweight pitch man for merchandise on TV, most notably Paul Masson wine, but it is good to be reminded here that the young Welles was an attractive man and a decent actor. It was an unusual choice to have Loretta Young play Kindler's fiancée, but I thought she was well cast and carried the part well. Edward G. Robinson plays the agent trying to track down Kindler's whereabouts and, as always, Edward G. Robinson plays Edward G. Robinson.There is some archival footage of concentration camp horrors. No matter how often I have seen such it is always shocking and sickening to see it. I can remember that the first time I had seen such footage was in "Judgment at Nuremberg." I can only imagine that this footage was especially hard to digest by audiences in 1946. If you are like me who did not know that paper chase was a game, you will see such a game played here.A straight story detailing how a German war criminal could wind up getting into the U.S. and settling down would be interesting.

aubrimmer I had heard some pretty negative things about this film but it was a pretty good "thriller". Welles films tend to have a theme surrounding the main male character and his dark past but they also always have those long shots that seem to draw you in to the film and the story. "The Stranger" is definitely different from his other films I have seen because it was more classic Hollywood and less original Orsen Welles but that was intentional.Orson Welles not only directs but plays the leading role in his films a lot of the time. He does a great job of showing the conflicted protagonist who can also be gentle and loving. The story was interesting and capture the viewer with its plot. This movie was a good film, not the best of Welles but definitely enjoyable.Typical to Welles style of directing, there were some really nice long shots but with the scenes capturing the snow it took on a magical feel with the result. The scenes would have dark lighting but that sis typical to noir films. I think the best shot scenes of the film were the ones showing everyday life of the town in the winter. The scenes shot with the snow just took on a different feel of the film to almost contrast the plot of this noir film.