The Stranger - 1946

The Stranger (1946) is a film not so much about the battle of good versus evil as much as it is the inner battle the conscience wages to justify evil.  It was a movie of its time, but in this respect has just as much relevance today.

As we end this bizarre and improbable year, I’ve chosen a couple of off-beat seasonal movies instead of the usual holiday fare, to surrender to the curious and unsettling atmosphere this year, and throw even a few more shadows for good measure.  Next week, we’ll discuss The Curse of the Cat People (1944).  We get a Christmas carol, at least, in that one.

Long post ahead.  Have someone read it to you while you string popcorn for the tree.

The Stranger is not exactly a holiday film, though it does take place in what appears to be late autumn/early winter in a New England town.  I’ve always thought of it as taking place between Thanksgiving and Christmas, perhaps that torpid state just after the tryptophan wears off and before the hectic shopping begins.  In this quiet netherworld between giving thanks and being relentlessly reminded through songs, holiday cards, and popular programs with contrived Christmas themes that there should be peace on earth but there isn’t, a Nazi hunter travels to a small town to settle some unfinished business.

That, in itself, is a remarkable plot device for a nation weary of war, as we were in 1946, wanting to move on, many not wanting to be reminded of ghastly and unfathomable atrocities – and still others, not choosing to believe them.  This was the first feature film to show clips of official government footage of what became known as The Holocaust.  Film critics and fans have argued for decades whether this is Orson Welles’ worst film or one of his best, but that inclusion of this horrific documentation alone, I think, merits this film as a crowning achievement.  Welles’ celebrated creativity could be freewheeling, but he was also a man whose brashness sometimes took the form of frank courage when it came to the larger themes of life, such as: when is an atrocity not merely an inconvenience?  We discussed his radio commentary on race discrimination and a particular savage event in this previous post.

If his direction, not to say his acting, seems harnessed in this production famed for his being forced by the studio to bring it in on time and under budget, with an editor who slashed out several scenes that apparently would have revealed some character development, the movie nevertheless is appealing for what it does show in its very leanness.  There are a few scenes I would have liked to have been more developed, a back story explored here and there, but for the most part, I just enjoy watching the plodding search of the Nazi hunter for the war criminal in hiding. 

Edward G. Robinson plays the Nazi hunter, good-humored, pleasant, pensive, methodical -- a less crusty character than his insurance investigator in Double Indemnity (1944), but just as persistent.  From the opening moments of the film, we see Mr. Robinson is about to tail a Nazi official who is being allowed to leave his post-war incarceration by American authorities in Europe on the chance he may unwittingly lead them to bigger fish, a more important Nazi official who has escaped capture.  No one knows what the big shot Nazi looks like because he never allowed photographs to be taken of himself, they don’t know his new assumed name, or where he is.  All that is known about him is that he has a passion for clocks.

Konstantin Shayne plays the underling, the dupe Mr. Robinson will follow to get to his real quarry.  Shayne is nervous, pushy, and a self-proclaimed religious convert whose blind fanaticism causes him to search devotedly for the whereabouts of his superior all the way to America, where he finds him and instructs him to pray with him and find salvation.  There is no repentance, however, in this man’s religious fervor; only an obsessive-compulsive switch from one fanatical loyalty to Hitler’s regime to a new zeal for a heavenly Master who will presumably reward him with the blessings of superiority that the Third Reich reneged on. 

Close on Mr. Shayne’s heels is Edward G. Robinson, who lost him when Shayne, realizing he was being followed, lured Robinson into a school gymnasium and conked him on the head with gym equipment.  A sign, with black humor, warns us, “Anyone using apparatus in this gym does so at their own risk.”

The gym is part of a private boys’ school, and the town where Robinson has followed Shayne is the fictional Harper, Connecticut.  It is really an ingenious, deceptively simple movie set, and through inventive camera angles looking out at the common through shop windows, it feels very much like a real New England town.  It has a soul, like a character in the movie, a setting that is not a backdrop but a metaphor for American ideals and innocence. 

Most of the action takes place around the common, which is bordered by shops, including a small general store, administration buildings and dorms that are part of the school, and a church with a tall clock tower that is the town’s most impressive feature.  Though the clock tells accurate time, the works include automatons that are supposed to mechanically emerge from the tower when the clock strikes on the hour, medieval figures with swords, but that feature has been broken for many years and so the figures are still and the clock is silent. 

The use of automatons in the clock works seems incongruous for a New England town, particularly in what appears to be a Congregational-style church.  It seems too European, and I don’t personally know of any such clocks in New England, but I’d love to know if there are any. European architectural influences are more commonly to be found in New England’s Gothic Catholic churches, but the steeples are generally not turned into cuckoo clocks.

Still, if its incongruous, it’s another in a string of oddball aspects to wonder about in this place of scattered and decaying fall leaves, a cold breeze shaking bare branches, and wisps of snow flurries as a harbinger of a storm that seems always on its way but hasn’t quite arrived.

Since Edward G. Robinson has lain unconscious on the gym floor, he has missed some of the plot exposition we’ve observed.  By the time he wakes up and makes his way over to the general store for a bottle of aspirin, he’s lost the guy he was tailing.  He doesn’t know that man has just been murdered – strangled to death by the big shot Nazi official for whom Robinson was really searching, the man he hoped Konstantin Shayne would lead him to.  His trail has gone cold.

But we know that the big shot Nazi is here in this little town, employed as a professor in the boys’ academy, and is about to marry the daughter of the town’s most prestigious person – a Supreme Court justice – to give him further cover.  The daughter is played by Loretta Young.  The big shot Nazi hiding in the plain sight under an assumed name is played by Orson Welles.

The three stars are a triangle in this movie; not a romantic triangle but one of friction, a battle of ideals and loyalties, with a curious co-dependence. 

The minor characters form, as often happens in an Orson Welles film, an ensemble company and this may reflect on Welles’ years in theatre and on radio, notably his Mercury Theater players, which as a unit came to Hollywood before they shot off like an Air Force squadron whose planes, with astounding precision, leave the formation and go off on trajectories apart from each other.  One member of that troupe was Agnes Moorehead, whom Welles had considered casting in the Edward G. Robinson role in The Stranger, but apparently the studio did not want a woman for the part.  Unfortunate, particularly as it would have been interesting to see a dedicated, cerebral woman driven to doing her job as a guardian of democracy trying to make the starry-eyed Loretta Young face some hard facts about her new husband.  Someone who might have treated Loretta Young less delicately than the gentlemanly Robinson.

The supporting cast here are not quite the deep bench that Welles’ had behind him in the Mercury Players, but it’s to his credit that he trusts them enough to give them a lot of freedom.  Billy House plays the owner of the general store, as well as the town clerk, Mr. Potter.  He’s a jovial checkers shark who engages anybody in a game for money, and never appears to leave his chair if he can help it.  He steals scenes while both Robinson and Welles, amused or startled perhaps, seem to be unable to do anything about it.

The young doctor in town is played by Byron Keith in his very first movie.   Richard Long plays Loretta Young’s brother, who attends the boys’ academy, and it is only his second film.  He is quite good and very likeable as a quiet young man who enjoys fishing and the outdoors, and seems to make it a code of honor to mind his own business with a refreshing refusal to be judgmental.  But there is a wariness, and sense of being ill at ease with his family situation.  His professor at school is now his brother-in-law.  It takes Edward G. Robinson to point out to Richard Long that Richard does not really like his brother-in-law.  Though Long uncomfortably denies this, he will later help Robinson to trap Welles.

Martha Wentworth plays the housekeeper, and though she did uncredited bit roles, or cartoon voices, and later would appear in television, she did not have a strong career in movies – yet she takes a pivotal scene and really goes to town with it.  Miss Wentworth pops in and out in the early parts of the movie barely noticeable, one might say like a good servant.  But near the end of the film, Edward G. Robinson enlists her help.   Loretta Young is in danger of being murdered by Orson Welles to keep her quiet when she begins to crack in the face of too many of her husband’s dirty secrets and suspicious behavior.  Martha Wentworth must stall Loretta and keep her from meeting Welles at the church clock tower.  Miss Young is impatient to leave, but Wentworth keeps up relentless prattle to distract her.  Loretta gets as far as the door, and Martha bursts into tears (the housekeeper must have had a past life on the stage) and picks a fight with Loretta, accusing her of not wanting her around anymore and which forces Loretta to stay and comfort her. 

Then when Loretta, with dogged persistence, heads for the door again, Martha, a middle-aged woman of no apparent athletic prowess, throws herself on the floor and fakes a heart attack.  It’s a tour de force performance.  These are the kinds of actors Welles populates his films with, and that he gives them free reign to shine is pretty great.

Playing Loretta’s father, the Supreme Court justice, is Philip Merivale, the only one of the supporting cast who really had a long and distinguished acting career, mostly in theatre.  Unlike the newbies, this would be is second to last movie, as he died the year this film was released, 1946, at 60 years old of a heart ailment.  His other theatrical claim to fame is he was married to the magnificent Gladys Cooper.

Though Director Welles may have been canny in shining the spotlight on the supporting players, there are gaps in the motivations for this offbeat lot which really affects what is, after all, a very psychological film.  There are questions that are not answered and they probably should be, because why introduce a thought that the audience will cling to, and not show them the answers?  With his experience in theatre, Welles surely knew the old maxim that if you have a telephone on your set, it had better ring or someone had better talk on it during the course of the play.  If it is left untouched, there only for set dressing, the audience is going to be riveted on that silent phone and pay little attention to the rest of your play.

Doors must be walked in and out of.  Furniture must be sat upon.  The telephone must be used.

Some questions I had:  Why does Loretta Young always call her father by his first name, Adam, and not Father or Dad, or Papa?  Her brother, Richard Long, doesn’t do that.  Why does her father always call Loretta “Sister,” instead of her name, or “Daughter”?  Maybe there was an explanatory scene that got cut.

We have no back story on Loretta, how she met Orson Welles and how he wooed her.  We might assume that she might have been given an excellent university education, or at least a finishing school, yet she appears to have no profession.  She is arranging curtains in the house she will share with Orson Welles on the very day of her wedding.  Was it her husband’s home?  Was the house a wedding gift from her father? 

Most importantly of all, why does she allow her husband to assume so much authority over her, even to making decisions about where her dog is going to sleep (he eventually kills the animal)?  For a Yankee daughter of a Supreme Court justice, we might expect her to have more backbone and independence, if not more sense.  Even the devotion for her husband that a bride in love would feel is not quite a reasonable explanation for her appeasing him – there is too much tension between them, she has caught him in suspicious behavior and lies.  But instead of stopping and thinking to herself, what is this sort of man I married, she adamantly buries her apprehension in stubborn support for him.  Loretta is something of a metaphor for people who do not want to know the truth because it challenges their own self image and everything they want to believe.

Another question left unanswered is why Orson Welles chose this very small town to settle in.  We know he has a mania for clocks and the clock tower in this town is very unusual, so perhaps he’d heard of it and that was the attraction.  He does make the interesting comment to Konstantin Shayne, a brag really, that he is about to marry the daughter of “a famous Liberal.”  The glee of “owning” Liberals by resentful fascists is nothing new.

Robinson’s only clue that Welles could be the Nazi he’s searching for is when Welles, during a dinner party where political discussion strays to questions of German philosophy, Richard Long quotes Karl Marx as an example, but Welles, nonchalantly and unthinkingly dismisses that example by replying that Karl Marx wasn’t a German; he was a Jew, so he doesn’t count.

Later that night, Robinson wakes from a sound sleep with the startling realization: only an anti-semitic person would think a German Jew was not a real German.  He puts this germ of an idea together with the fact Orson Welles is repairing the old clock in his spare time, and decides that this could be his man.  A few more incidents solidify the suspicion.  Then it becomes a matter of getting enough evidence.  He now enlists Orson Welles’ new in-laws.

When Edward G. Robinson, quietly sitting in a rowboat with Richard Long, trying to broach the subject of Orson Welles being a famous hunted Nazi, finally alludes to his sister being in danger and announces, “I know you’re man enough for what I’m going to ask you to do for me,” it’s almost as if Robinson is transforming into a father figure to Long.  He will spend the rest of the movie sharing his Nazi hunter’s work with young Richard, guiding him on what to do, and making expectations of him.  Richard seems a self-sufficient young man, and perhaps that is because his father, a man who though sometimes goes fishing with him, is nevertheless an emotionally remote intellectual, undoubtedly consumed by his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. 

Orson Welles, joining the family as his new brother-in-law, might give him comradery with an older, wiser male, but he, too, is an emotionally remote intellectual.  He’s also a Nazi. 

But the scene where Robinson talks to Richard Long in the rowboat is awkwardly cut off.  He is about to tell him all about Orson Welles’ nefarious past, but then the scene fades and resumes again when they are getting out of the boat, Robinson already having told Long the news.  This is wasting what could be a terrific dramatic moment, dropping the bomb on Richard, but we never get to see it. 

Likewise, we do not get to see Robinson explain the vile news about his son-in-law to Philip Merivale.  We are only given a scene where Merivale has already been told, and together, they show Loretta Young the film of the Nazi atrocities.  Perhaps there was a decision by Welles and the producer to save the dramatic moment for Loretta Young to be the one to have the bomb dropped on her and register her shock.

Her reaction, though certainly sickened by what she is seeing, is to remain frozen in denial that her husband could be such a villain.  For the rest of the film, Loretta will either be psychologically devastated by that thought, which for self-preservation she keeps suppressing—or her husband is going to kill her to save himself.

Orson Welles’ role in the movie is not an easy one.  Most actors love to play villains, but perhaps because of Hollywood’s stereotypical treatment of Nazis during the war years, the audience may be inclined to see these characters as one dimensional.  Welles must win his audience over to the idea that unlike the character played by Konstantin Shayne, prone to cartoonish fanaticism, evil can be calculating and charming, and a villain’s greatest need can be to simply justify his evil.

Loretta Young, feeling defensive, must justify her love for her husband by denying his is a Nazi.  As the movie runs to its climax, it becomes a chase not only for clues to build a case against Welles, but to save Loretta’s life.  Welles grows rattled when he realizes he is under suspicion.  Everybody but Robinson is a nervous wreck.

A final showdown in the clock tower – where Welles has triumphantly fixed the mechanism and the automata now move and rotate on the hour – Loretta finally accepts the awful truth and faces down her husband.  The three of them, Welles, Young, and Robinson, the triangle, fight over a pistol.  Welles’ fearfully gives the customary defense of a Nazi, “I followed orders…I only did my duty.”

While there is some satisfaction in seeing Loretta Young not only stand up to her husband but take some responsibility for stopping his ability to spread more evil – she grabs the pistol and shoots him – there is the inevitable Hollywood solution to have him die in a dramatic fall after he is impaled on the sword of one of the medieval mechanical figures. 

Though it is not as dramatic, it would be a more civic-minded move for Hollywood to show such monsters brought to justice through the courts.  Our laws are our sword and our shield in this country.  Fascism was destroyed in post-war Germany not just because the Allied armies were victorious, but because they forced the conquered citizenry to walk through the concentration camps, to accept the horror that they abetted, and to accept responsibility, to acknowledge that neighboring countries reviled them for allowing themselves to be duped and to be complicit.  Democratic law was instituted and they were expected to conform.  Germany crawled out from the shadow of those terrible years through education and courageous soul-searching.  

We don’t know if the citizens of Harper, gazing at the lurid picture of the professor lying in a heap on the steps of their church, will feel shock or disgust to have made this creature welcome in their town.  We look down from the clock tower’s height to see the townspeople below clustered like the Whos down in Whoville on a cold and snowy winter’s night. The movie ends with a quip from Edward G. Robinson, waiting to be rescued from the tower, calmly lighting his pipe, his signature prop through the movie. 

It may not be a Christmas movie, really, but there is a smattering of redemption that we don’t usually see in film noir.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.