Friday 8pm THE STRANGER - A 1946 thriller directed and starring Orson Welles along with Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. An investigator from the War Crimes Commission travels to Connecticut to find an infamous Nazi.
Immediately following World War II, ex-Nazi Franz Kindler (Orson Welles) is living under a false identity as a teacher in a small Connecticut town, and has even married the headmaster's daughter (Loretta Young) as part of his cover. But when one of Kindler's old German associates (Konstantin Shayne) arrives unexpectedly in town, bringing in his wake a sly federal investigator (Edward G. Robinson), Kindler resorts to desperate measures to preserve his secret.
Credit Wikimedia Commons
TRIVIA
- This was the first mainstream American movie to feature footage of Nazi concentration camps following World War II.
- By this time in her career, Loretta Young, like older contemporaries Claudette Colbert and Jean Arthur, was photographed almost exclusively from the left side, or left three-quarters; never was this more evident than in this film.
- The vast New England town exterior sets, including the church with its 124-foot clock tower, were constructed in Hollywood on the back lot of the United Artists studio located on Santa Monica Blvd. In some production shots taken by LIFE Magazine, the circular metal scaffolding of a huge collapsible natural-gas storage tank can be seen behind some of the sets. The only such tank near a Hollywood studio was a block away from UA.
- Knowing Orson Welles' reputation for long exposition scenes, International Pictures gave editor Ernest J. Nims the freedom to cut any sequences from the film that he felt were unnecessary. To Welles' disgust, Nims ended up cutting almost 30 minutes of Welles' final version, including 19 minutes from the film's opening. The footage is believed lost, as even the original negatives have gone missing.
