Review: The Stranger (1946)
★★★★½
“The Stranger” is a gothic psychological thriller that patiently builds to a haunting climax in which a Nazi receives a karmic comeuppance. Welles actually disowned this movie because the studio cut footage and edited of its own accord. But the hallmark traits of Welles are all here, with its active camera movement, deep focus shots, harsh angles, shadowy visuals, and morose themes. Welles slowly unravels both his plot and characters to reveal the depths and depravities of not just the antagonist, but humanity.
Welles is as skillful behind the camera as he is in front. His directing is deceptively fluid and expressionistic. His acting is initially charming and likable but as his character Franz slowly loses more and more control of his situation, Welles brings to the forefront both a frightfully emotionless cruelty and pathetic paranoia that were previously buried. “The Stranger” sees Nazi Franz cornered into a small town in which he had hoped to escape his past crimes, then cornered in the newly-tolling clocktower he compulsively worked on and which symbolized both his desire to start over and the inevitably of his karmic justice, and finally cornered in the highest room in the clocktower.
Franz is impaled by the clock mechanism he spent the whole movie fixing, a darkly comedic illustration of how he was his own worst enemy every step of the way. Franz acts (even murders) impulsively, concocts absurd webs of lies, leaves clues wherever he goes, and tries to murder his wife in the most guilt-absolving way he could’ve imagined that of course backfired on him.
At first, the stranger referred to in the title might be taken to refer to Franz and his living in a new town. Later, the stranger in the title becomes a clear reference to how Franz has adopted the fraudulent persona of kindly Professor Rankin to gain trust in his community, workplace, and marriage. You might also take the stranger in the title to refer to Mr. Wilson, a member of the United Nations War Crimes Commission who is also a stranger in town. Wilson is willing to both release the Nazi Meinike back into society and gamble Mary’s life with a known mass murderer if it means a better chance of catching his man. Surely Wilson’s injustices don’t approach those of Franz, but he isn’t presented as entirely moral in all his actions and, to some extent, uses others as instruments for his ends.
While those readings still stand, the climax of “The Stranger” puts forth another, more psychologically complex reading of the title in which Franz is in a deep sense a stranger *to himself*. All throughout the movie, Franz, without hesitating, repeatedly chooses not to take responsibility for his actions when given the option. First, with his former partner Meinike who found peace in faith and later with his wife Mary to whom he lies to keep in the dark about his true identity. When he is cornered in the top of the clocktower Franz gets an absolutely final chance to confess his crimes.
Drenched in sweat and panically twitching, Franz grasps for words like they were mere blunt objects to be tossed around regardless of their connection to reality, even the very timely and rightly reviled Nuremberg defense. They might as well have been random symbols with no meaning. Any combination of words would do, as long as it absolved him of moral responsibility. Importantly, the primary emotion Welles conveys in this scene is that of *alienation*.
Franz is fundamentally someone alienated from their own humanity. He sees other people, even his wife, as mere pawns to be manipulated for his own ends. He views life as a series of trivial obstacles to robotically power through. He agrees with Thrasymachus that might is right and that justice is whatever is to the advantage of the stronger. He is instinctively unwilling to take responsibility for his actions and seeks moral evasion at every turn and every cost. But Welles understands that humans are irrevocably moral creatures and that to be alienated from one’s morality is to be alienated from one’s humanity.
The acting is simultaneously melodramatic and engrossing. The narrative is meticulously crafted, yet never convoluted. The cinematography and noirish lighting has a vividness and, at times, rawness that paints tragic portraits of the characters’ inner lives. All of these bold stylistic choices combine to create an atmosphere that feels dream-like or, more accurately, nightmarish.
Welles boldly shatters that dream-like feeling with the sad truth when he shows actual footage of the Nazi concentration camps, a first for any commercial film. Welles wants the viewer to see and feel how horrors previously relegated to the domain of nightmares were actually brought to life by the Nazis. Yes, this movie is a nightmare. But it’s also about a nightmare that happened in the real world. A nightmare that humans imagined, realized, maintained, and justified.
In many ways, “The Stranger” is a disturbing psychological portrait of a sociopathic mass murderer. Franz is a stranger 1) geographically, in virtue of being in a new town, 2) socially, in virtue of being a hollow fraud in his dealings, 3) psychologically, in virtue of being lost in his own falsehoods and evasions, and 4) metaphysically, in virtue of being estranged from both the humanity of himself and others. A grim tale to be sure, but one that mirrored the all-too-real grimness that was recently exposed in the world.
