FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Orson Welles - The Stranger


 "Because Welles was young and romantic, his genius seemed closer to us than the talents of the traditional American directors. We loved this film because it was so complete-psychological, social, poetic, dramatic, comic, grotesque. Kane' both demonstrates and mocks the will to power; it is a hymn to youth and a meditation on age, a study of the vanity of all human ambition and a poem about deterioration, and underneath it all a reflection on the solitude of exceptional beings, geniuses or monsters, monstrous geniuses." Francois-Truffaut wrote this about Orson Welles. That's right. But above all, The Stranger is an Edward G. Robinson film. And his most personal! The Stranger can also be considered his most private film. In Wikipedia you learn that his family fled from Romania to the USA because of the anti-Semitic riots. Robinson always remained an upright antifascist. In The Stranger he plays the UN investigator Wilson, who releases a Nazi lackey in the hope that he will lead him to the big fish. Wilson wants to catch Franz Kindler, the organizer of the Holocaust. Kindler, of course, is impersonated by Orson Welles himself. He's a terrible guy. Kindler may pass as a brisk teacher type - but behind him is a Eichmann. An architect of death. The Stranger was Welles' third directorial work in Hollywood. His visions had already been blurred before and now Welles was trying to restore his reputation. In Welles career, The Stranger is the closest thing to a real studio hit. There are wonderfully expressionistic images, one of the first Holocaust Film Noir - and one can assume that the American public in 1946 did not know much about the Holocaust. The devastation of the war is evident in the psyche of the protagonists, indeed in the American psyche - the enduring theme of Film Noir.