Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Eight Review: The Stranger

Sometimes the hardest reviews to write are for the movies I like the most, because how many ways are there to say "I liked it"? When I dislike a movie, I usually feel compelled to explain why I dislike it, and to offer suggestions on how it could have been better -- which in turn gives me more to write about. There are thousands of different reasons to dislike a movie -- or even part of a movie -- but liking a movie usually boils down to nothing more than, "The acting was good. The story was good. The whole thing was good. The End."

With a movie like Orson Welles' 1946 noir The Stranger, writing a review is doubly hard, because not only did I like it (a lot), I also can't delve too deeply into the plot without spoiling the story for people who haven't seen it. The Stranger isn't a mystery, but it often plays like one, employing a detective as one of its main characters and using various well-timed revelations to build suspense and deepen our interest. There's no twist ending, no surprising climax, but to speak too freely about what happens along the way would lessen the impact of watching those events unfold against Welles' crisp autumn backdrop.

The little I can say about the plot is evident within a few minutes of starting the film: Following the end of the Second World War, the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice unwittingly marries a Nazi who has gone into hiding as a prep school teacher in a small town in Connecticut. The woman (Loretta Young) knows nothing of her husband's former life, but quickly becomes suspicious after a goverment detective, played by Edward G. Robinson, shows up and starts asking questions. Welles himself plays the Nazi, in a role he intended to demonstrate his belief that the end of the war in Europe did not necessarily mean the end of the Nazi mindset, and that the remaining members of the Nazi party were still a very real threat, with or without a unified Germany. (This viewpoint may seem slightly paranoid now, sixty-five years after the fact, but in 1946, many of the people who lived through World War II, including Welles, had also already lived through the first war with Germany twenty years earlier, and had no reason to believe there wouldn't be a third war twenty years later.)

As I said, The Stranger is not a mystery, and the purpose of Robinson's detective is not to prove to us that Welles' characer is a Nazi, but rather to prove that fact to the rest of the town, and to his wife, so that Robinson can finally bring him to justice. The strength of the film is not so much the way the story develops but the way Welles, as the director, places the story in the context of a bucolic New England setting. Postwar movies about Nazis tend to be stark, gritty affairs, set in half-destroyed European cities or dark urban landscapes; in The Stranger, Welles' Nazi covers up dead bodies with fallen autumn leaves and spends his free time working on a beautiful old clock tower in the center of town, which somehow makes the things he says and does all the more chilling. The Stranger was one of the first (if not the first) Hollywood productions to use actual footage of Nazi concentration camps, creating a sharp contrast between Young's character's pristine world and the horrors the detective plays for her on a projection screen.

Welles, Young and Robinson all do solid work in their roles, with my only quibble being that Robinson's character is nearly identical to the one he plays in Double Indemnity. Welles' skill as a director outshines them here, especially because he takes the one part with some meat to it and plays it himself, but the cast really doesn't have a squeaky wheel, nor does it have anyone who chews the scenery out from under everyone else. The tone of The Stranger is one of understatement, which may reduce the pleasure of watching it a second or third time, but also greatly enhances the story of an evil man trying to conceal himself within a world he doesn't understand. To find fault with the lack of a Bette-Davis-sized performance is to miss the point of the film entirely.

In other words: The acting was good. The story was good. The whole thing was good. The End.

Grade: A