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The Stranger [Blu-Ray]

Director : Orson Welles

Screenplay : Anthony Veiller (story by Victor Trivas; adaptation by Victor Trivas and Decla Dunning)

MPAA Rating : NR

Year of Release : 1946

Stars : Edward G. Robinson (Wilson), Loretta Young (Mary Longstreet), Orson Welles (Charles Rankin / Franz Kindler), Philip Merivale (Judge Longstreet), Richard Long (Noah Longstreet), Konstantin Shayne (Konrad Meinike), Byron Keith (Dr. Jeff Lawrence), Billy House (Mr. Potter), Martha Wentworth (Sara)

The Stranger is often referred to as Orson Welles’s least personal effort behind the camera. A solid piece of postwar genre work about a Nazi hiding in bucolic small-town America, The Stranger is not unique enough to stand out from the crowd, especially not in the manner of Welles’s greatest masterpieces. As critic James Agree wrote about it in The Nation when it was first released, “There is nothing in the picture that even appears to be ‘important’ or ‘new,’ but there is nothing pretentious or arty either ...” For some, The Stranger was a betrayal of Welles’s great filmmaking prowess; for others (Agee included), it was the work of an overpraised auteur finally settling down into some semblance of rational professionalism.

The Stranger was Welles’s third feature film after the controversial (but now coveted) Citizen Kane (1941), which media magnate William Randolph Hearst tried to repress and was an enormous flop at the box office, and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), which was taken from him by the executives at RKO after disastrous prescreenings and (in Welles’s words) “edited with a lawn mower” from 131 minutes to 88 minutes. Welles made the The Stranger as proof that he could work within the Hollywood studio system, and the result is a competent, engaging thriller that bears little of the reckless brilliance that characterized Welles, the “enfant terrible of American cinema,” as Andrew Sarris called him.

The story takes place in the fictional town of Harper, Connecticut, where Welles plays Charles Rankin, a teacher at the local boys’ prep school. In actuality, he is Franz Kindler, a Nazi war criminal who ingratiates himself into American society by marrying Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), the innocent daughter of a Supreme Court justice (Philip Merivale). Welles plays Rankin with thinly disguised malevolence, a man so thoroughly ingrained with the myth of Aryan supremacy that he lets slip at dinner that Karl Marx wasn’t a German because he was a Jew and nervously scribbles a swastika on a notepad while talking on the phone. Screenwriter Anthony Veiller (working from a story by Victor Trivas, adapted by Trivas and Decla Dunning) ensures that Rankin is the vilest of the Nazis by making him the anonymous mastermind behind Germany’s attempts at genocide. In effect, Rankin is positioned as not just a willing participant in the Holocaust, but its primary cause. He bears the full weight of historical atrocity.

Following close on Rankin’s heels is Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), a dogged member of the Allied Commission for the Punishment of War Criminals. Although Wilson manages to track Rankin down in Harper, because there are no pictures of Franz Kindler, he must use other tactics to ensure that Rankin is indeed the Nazi in hiding. This involves Mary’s younger brother, Noah (Richard Long), and eventually Mary herself, whose greatest flaw turns out to be her unwavering faith in her new husband. When she is confronted with the truth about her him, she is internally torn, which Wilson explains with the protracted Freudian terminology that was all the rage at that time.

Despite its generally impersonal nature, The Stranger does contain several notable sequences that hint at Welles’s involvement, including numerous complex crane and tracking shots that allow extensive action to unfold in a single shot. Cinematographer Russell Metty (who won an Oscar in 1961 for his work on Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus) captures the innocence of Harper in bright shades of gray, suggesting visually how its very purity provides the perfect hiding place for Welles’s insidious Nazi. However, the film ensures us that it is not all sweetness, as the townspeople come disturbingly close to turning into a lynch mob of sorts once Rankin is unmasked. The narrative poses their mob activity as good ol’ fashioned American community spirit, but the visuals paint a different picture, one in which the unmistakable, expressionist darkness of film noir invades to great effect and Rankin gets his just desserts in notably gruesome and melodramatic fashion.

Much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Stranger is most disturbing in its implications about the dangers of feeling safe in a word of surfaces, something that would have rung with particular clarity at the end of World War II. At one point, Mary tells Rankin that he doesn’t need to walk her home “because there’s nothing to fear in Harper.” Of course, as the film makes clear, there is plenty to be afraid of, most of all in a place like Harper, where the charm and ease of small-town life can hide the worst of human evil.

The Stranger Blu-Ray + DVD Combo

Aspect Ratio	1.33:1
Audio	Dolby Digital 5.1 surround Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo
Subtitles	Spanish
Supplements	Theatrical trailer Restoration demo
Distributor	HD Cinema Classics
SRP	$15.99
Release Date	February 15, 2011

VIDEO & AUDIO
I won’t go so far as to say that the visual quality of The Stranger on this Blu-Ray from HD Cinema Classics is a disappointment, especially given the raft of subpar to downright pathetic DVD transfers of this film that are floating around in so many bargain bins, but it comes pretty close. The idea of any of Welles’s films in high definition is enough to make even the most moderate of film geek lose his or her head, yet this effort clearly does not take full advantage of the new format, presenting us with a clean transfer that appears to have been overly digitized, resulting in an image that is consistently flat, soft, and lacking in the kind of fine detail, grain, and texture that makes us feel like we’re watching celluloid. The cover touts that the transfer was made from “original 35mm elements,” and a brief restoration demo on the disc shows how many scratches, bits of dirt, and watermarks were removed from the image. Yet, in the process they have scrubbed it free of detail, grain, and even some contrast, resulting in an image that is better than previous DVD releases, but is far from what it could have been. The disc offers an option of both a remixed Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtrack and a two-channel Dolby stereo soundtrack, both of which are relatively clean and pleasant, although not lossless.
SUPPLEMENTS
The disc has virtually no supplements--only a theatrical trailer and a one-minute split-screen restoration demo.

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