The Stranger
Orson Welles
Initial release: July 2, 1946 (USA)
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| images c/o Filmgrab |
One of society's great struggles is awareness and acknowledgment of the Holocaust. A sizeable portion of the United States is unaware of the Holocaust or its extent; a concerning number downplay it or deny it outright. This is not a new problem: in the years immediately post-World War II, the full extent of the Holocaust was not well known despite the Nuremberg trials and reports from witnesses and survivors. Orson Welles aimed to change that. In 1946 he released The Stranger, one of his weaker films and yet important for what it tries to do.
The film concerns a Nazi war criminal named Franz Kindler (played by Welles himself, complete with evil moustache.) In the years following the collapse of the Third Reich, Kindler (who, in the film's universe, was at least partially responsible for masterminding the Holocaust,) has burned all evidence of his former identity as a Nazi and gone to ground somewhere in America under an assumed name. The United Nations War Crimes Commission releases a less-important war criminal in hopes that he'll lead them to bigger fish. He does exactly that, but manages to lose his tail before being murdered by Kindler in a small town in Connecticut. His tail, an agent of the Commission named Wilson (played by the supremely underrated Edward G. Robinson), gradually begins to piece together the clues as to Kindler's new identity, all the while Kindler begins to unravel spectacularly. The only one who stands in the way of the Commission is Kindler's new wife, who cannot imagine that her husband is a horrible Nazi.
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Orson Welles was one of the great auteurs of his time, having made a mark in theater, radio and film. When left to his own devices he is ambitious and forward-thinking. Unfortunately, I didn't call The Stranger one of his weaker films for nothing, but it's not really his fault: studio interference cut the film to ribbons. Welles wanted a darker tale, an examination of the Nazi psyche, to try and figure out what makes men like Kindler tick. Film editor Ernest J. Nims, who Welles called "the great supercutter," wound up deleting large parts of the film that he viewed as extraneous and didn't move the plot forward. The end result is that the film is reduced from a dark, almost nightmarish psychological thriller to a straightforward mystery film that is solved rather neatly at the end.
A few sequences from this earlier vision remain. Welles made use of long takes — almost unheard of in film at the time — to force Nims to be more choosy about what he cut, with one take lasting an incredible four minutes. Later in the film, when Wilson forces Kindler's wife (played rather ineffectually by Loretta Young, demonstrating her usual inability to not overdo a dramatic role) to watch footage of the death camps, making this film the first to use real Holocaust documentary footage, taken largely from a documentary film used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. This scene, with the footage projected onto Wilson's face, is all the more chilling for Young's character's inability to accept it.
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The Stranger is not a perfect film. Welles did the best he could, but studio interference damaged what could have been one of the earliest post-war looks into the darkest depths of Nazi ideology. Nonetheless, there's something to being the first Hollywood film to show documentary footage of the Holocaust for narrative purposes. The war ended eighty years ago, but it's important to ensure that the causes of the second world war, and its consequences, are never forgotten. In times such as these, the lessons of the past will help us decide our future.
-june❤