- Orson Welles' The Stranger is a decent film noir that suffers considerably from having too much in common with the earlier and vastly superior Shadow of a Doubt. Sure, Uncle Charlie wasn't a literal Nazi like this film's Charles Rankin (Welles), but both are evil men who flee to idyllic small towns. Both are also prone to unguarded rants at the dinner table, although Rankin whistles Deutschlandlied rather than The Merry Widow Waltz to give himself away. In both movies, the villain's true identity is suspected only by a young woman (in this case, Loretta Young) and an investigator (in this case, Edward G. Robinson). When Rankin employs a sawed-through stair as an attempted murder weapon, this case of eerie similarity officially veers into the realm of plagiarism.
- That point made, The Stranger is not a terrible film. Edward G. Robinson and Orson Welles are two of the most engaging actors of their time, and they are almost enough to make up for the plot's many shortcomings. While Welles' direction is not at the level of Citizen Kane, the film's shadowy cinematography and convincing small-town settings are memorable, as is the final encounter in the ever-looming clocktower. Wait, wasn't there a clocktower in Foreign Correspondent? Oh, nevermind. Probably the film's biggest accomplishment, for better or worse, is its integration of real concentration camp footage as a means of convincing everyone that this particular Nazi was a really, really bad guy. If you are expecting a smooth tonal transition from such genuinely affecting material to Rankin's cartoonish scrawling of a swastika or his inadvertently comedic stabbing by an angelic statue, this may not be the film for you.
