IN the boyishly macabre “The Stranger,” which Orson Welles has just beaten out, a dream of a New England village where even the buses seem clean is hit in a quiet way by one nightmarish crime after another. A man looking around a spic-and-span gymnasium is conked on the head by a flying ring; a dog nosing through the woods is given a murderous slug of poison for getting too close to his master’s secret; a boy goes fishing and is told his sister has married the Nazi who invented many of the concentration-camp torture devices; some schoolboys on a paper-chase in the woods just miss running into their favorite prof choking a lifelong pal to death. Oddly enough, the most horrible events—like that in which the villain dangles his wife from the rafters of a church steeple—go off with dispatch and don’t seem terrifying at all, whereas the lazy, cozy, inconsequential scenes—fishing on the lake, checkers at the drugstore, dinner in a secure New England home—hop with excitement; every move the actors make is significant; the scenes are entrancing enactions of everyday activity in an American town.
The story has to do with the location and the all but interminably delayed capture of a fiendish Nazi (Welles) by a detective (Edward G. Robinson) who is working for the Allied War Crimes Commission and who exposes himself to danger with a suicidal detachment and a sense of indestructibility that don’t admit of villains hurting heros. Most of the detecting takes place in Harper, Connecticut, where the Nazi is hiding out until the next war as a self-effacing history professor at a plush boys’ school. The story goes on forever, with a labored piling up of one bulky event after another. You get the sense of a carpenter at work rather than a writer. But this is as nothing compared to the pervading feeling that the situations of terror and horror are contrivances on a level with Hallowe’en pranks and that the patient and reserved people of Harper would never be involved in such Amazing Story melodrama. This is characteristic of Welles’s preoccupation with events (the more sensational the better), his adolescent delight in scaring you, in bowling you over with some knockout notion or other, his use of people as nothing but pawns to carry his fact-laden plots to fruition. The characters are made to fit the event rather than the other way around. Like his plots, his people are conglomerations of showy, unimportant detail rather than the result of curiosity and subtle perception.
But as incurious as Welles is about what makes people tick, he has no such blind spot about the medium, whatever it happens to be at the moment—theatre, movies or radio—and he has turned out a tense and vivid film, the most cinematic to come from Hollywood this year. He has a sense as well as an enthusiasm for movie-making, and particularly in this film, despite the pulp-story plot and the infinitesimal amount of character analysis, he shows remarkable savvy about how to make a movie go. He has given up much of the stagey technique of “Citizen Kane,” “The Magnificent Ambersons,” “Journey into Fear,” and now even hackneyed moments—like the ending—are not unexciting because they are set up in a striking, authentic naturalism and shot at an angle that gives you the hardest impact of the action.
“The Stranger” is beautiful for lighting and textures, and affords an experience of late fall Connecticut landscape that is on the breathtaking side. The most successful and original directing is reserved for casual conversations: here minor actions are made so engrossing and contact between persons so combustible that they seem constantly about to explode. It is as though Welles realized how much his movie was a matter of melodramatic events, and so concentrated on these trivial conversations to give you the greatest possible sense of people thinking, being emotionally affected by one another, and especially of being touchy and distant with each other.
A good deal of the movie’s unreality is due to the soggy effect Loretta Young produces as the bride who learns a day or so after her honeymoon that she’s married a fanatical Nazi rather than a history professor. She has moments —as in her worried recounting of a bad dream—when she seems in contact with this world, but otherwise she is her usual movie self, a woman whose nerves are shot and who always seems in a totally unnecessary deep study. The greatest force for realism is Robinson as the detective; the most absorbing scenes the conversations he has with the operator (Billy House) of the trick drugstore. Welles deserves a medal for using Robinson in a less sterotyped fashion than has been the case before, and another for showing a reserved, almost sullen schoolboy (Richard Long) who is the only boy I’ve seen outside of a Val Lewton film who doesn’t turn my thoughts to murder.
Recent movies I have particularly disliked are “Night and Day,” “The Kid from Brooklyn,” “Young Widow,” “The Man I Love,” “Without Reservations,” “Two Guys from Milwaukee” and “The Notorious Gentleman.”
September 16, 1946