Saturday Night Cinema: The Stranger

Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson. Go get the popcorn and the bubbly.

Tonight’s Saturday Night Cinema is a masterpiece — it’s the film noir thriller directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and Loretta Young. The brilliantly tense film was based on an Oscar-nominated screenplay written by Victor Trivas. Sam Spiegel was the film’s producer, and the film’s brilliant musical score is by Bronisław Kaper. It is believed that this is the first film released after World War II that showed footage of Nazi concentration camps. The film was made by International Pictures, and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

It was Welles most conventionally directed film and he liked it least of all of his films. Perhaps because he was a director-for-hire on this. But he was too critical. It bears Welles unique stamp. Great stuff.

The NY Times review:

The Stranger (1946)
THE SCREEN; ‘The Stranger,’ With Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young and Orson Welles, of Palace– ‘Renegades’ Is Criterion Bill At Loew’s Criterion
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: July 11, 1946

Orson Welles plainly gets much pleasure out of playing villainous roles, to judge by his choice and performance of bogey-men in the past. And now, in his new film, “The Stranger,” which he directed and in which he plays the title role, he is proving beyond any question that he loves to scare people to death. For in this custom-made melodrama, which came to the Palace yesterday, he is playing the role of the big-brain behind the Nazi torture camps. Nothing less, mind you! He’s the inventor of their monstrous mass-murder machine.

Only—this is the crux of the story—all that is behind him now, and he is living successfully incognito in a little Connecticut town, teaching school at a peaceful little college and married to the daughter of a judge. And, indeed, everything is going nicely until a G-man blows into town, tailing a former Nazi prisoner who is the unconscious finger-man. Then Mr. Welles, as the erstwhile monster, begins to feel hot breath on his neck, and his nostrils begin to flange out and his eyes to pop and roll. The first thing you know he is plotting the murder of his knowledgeful wife—and he would, indeed, kill that poor innocent if the G-man did not step in.[…]

…Mr. Welles has directed his camera for some striking effects, with lighting and interesting angles much relied on in his technique. The fellow knows how to make a camera dynamic in telling a tale. And it is true, too, that Edward G. Robinson is well restrained as the unrelenting sleuth and that Billy House does a superb job as a small-town clerk and gossiper.

THE STRANGER, screen play by Anthony Veiller, from a story by Victor Trivas and Decla Dunning; directed by Orson Welles; produced by S. P. Eagle for International Pictures and released by RKO-Radio. At the Palace.
Wilson . . . . . Edward G. Robinson
Mary Longstreet . . . . . Loretta Young
Professor Rankin . . . . . Orson Welles
Judge Longstreet . . . . . Philip Merivale
Mr. Potter . . . . . Billy House
Noah Longstreet . . . . . Richard Long
Konrad Meinike . . . . . Konstantin Shayne
Sara . . . . . Martha Wentworth
Dr. Lawrence . . . . . Byron Keith
Mr. Peabody . . . . . Pietro Sosso

 

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