It Must Be Orson Welles Week

I've mentioned previously - almost exactly a year ago, in the review of The Violent Men - that I'm not typically a big fan of Edward G. Robinson. Not as a gangster, anyway. So I was a little concerned about watching The Stranger, since it was in one of those noir collections.

Fortunately, Robinson plays Mr. Wilson, who works for the Allied War Crimes Commission.  He convinced them to release one prisoner, Konrad, in the hopes he'd lead them to his commanding officer, who was a brutally efficient C.O. at a concentration camp. The plan works as Wilson hopes, and leads to the small town of Harper, Connecticut. Where Wilson (not very good at trailing people unobserved), gets konked on the head and loses the trail. We didn't lose the trail, and learn Konrad seeks Franz Kindler, now Charles Rankin (Orson Welles), who is to be married that day to Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter of a Supreme Court justice.

Konrad and Rankin take a walk in the woods, where we learn two important things: One, Konrad found religion, and two, Rankin hasn't abandoned the cause, he's decided to play the long game. And that's the end of Konrad. Wilson stays around, trying to pick up the trail, and gradually grows suspicious of Rankin, enlisting Noah Longstreet, Mary's brother into the investigation. Rankin begins to feel the strain, and takes some risks, poisoning Mary's dog after it had found Konrad's body, generally becoming extremely domineering towards Mary. Wilson tries to get Mary to help them, to tell what she knows (she met Konrad before he found Rankin, but she's denied this), but Mary refuses, swearing loyalty to Charles even as she starts to break under the strain. Which makes Charles take ever more desperate actions.

It all ends about how you would expect, the villain doomed by his own obsessions. I would have liked some mention of Mary coming out of it OK. She seemed like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, maybe even suicidal over the idea she'd fallen in love with him so completely. I did enjoy the fact that, when it came time for there to be shooting, she got to do it. Not Wilson or Noah, her, the one Rankin had tricked the worst, who had been through hell over this indeterminate period of time. because Rankin admits to killing Konrad to her, but frames the story so that he did it out of love, that he's an innocent victim, something we'll come back to.

But let's stick with Mary. For most of the movie, she's left with the sort of traditional role, or being emotional, terrified, unable to handle the strain, unwilling to listen to all those around her. She did frustrate the hell out of me at times. Damn it lady, you married a Nazi, get it through your head already! The comes a turn late in the film, when Rankin wants her to meet him at the clock tower. Her maid has been ordered not to let her leave without Wilson knowing of it, and the lady fakes her own fainting spell to keep Mary there. Extreme, but effective. Mary's concern for Sara overrides her love for Charles, so she asks Noah to let Charles know she'll be late. He and Wilson rush there, and nearly fall victim to the trap Charles had planned. When Charles returns home and finds her well, he lets slip what he had planned, and Mary's had it. She demands he kill her, but hands him a fireplace poker, telling him not to lay his hands on her if he does it.  Help arrives before we know if Charles will go through with it, and Mary faints. None of that is great, though I appreciated the breaking point. That night though, she wakes up, slips out of the house, and makes her way to the clock, making sure she isn't followed. She climbs the ladder, up to the point Charles had sawed through the rungs. He's there, and she tells him to pull her up. She takes his hand and lets go of the ladder entirely. Outright dares him to drop her. And then she confronts him. Wilson does show up, and probably lands the final hammer blows to Rankin's confidence, but when the gun hits the ground, it's Mary who comes up with it, and comes up firing at Charles. No hesitation, he hadn't taken the opportunity to kill her, but she wasn't going to make the same mistake.

Rankin makes a speech about how of everyone in the world, only the Germans haven't learned the cost of this war. Or rather, they refuse to accept it, and wait eagerly for the next Barbarossa or Hitler to come along and lead them into it again. Which is a bit strange, since it almost advocates the necessity of exterminating the Germans, if they're simply going to start it allover again. Then again, the movie paints Kindler/Rankin as the guy who really worked out how to do the Final Solution, so he's no stranger to the idea of genocide. But that idea of distancing or ignoring the truth of matters is central to him. His lies about Konrad, and ultimately why he killed him, designed to paint him as a sympathetic figure. When Mary finds him, he tries to paint himself as something greater than Man, looking down on everyone like they were ants. When those ants find him, encircle him, he's reminded he doesn't tower above them, and he seizes on that. 'I was following orders,' he pleads, which Wilson swats aside. 'You gave the orders.' he gets right in Kindler's face and confronts him, like Mary unafraid. Kindler is only a man now, and a pitiful one, scurrying about in the rafters of this tower like a rat.

It wouldn't be a Welles directed film if there wasn't clever use of lighting. The part I noticed was how the shadows deepened around Rankin, especially when he was around Mary. He's this dark ugliness threatening to envelop and destroy her. Mary is usually brightly lit around him, and usually wearing light clothes, emphasizing her love and openness towards him. That lighting seems to dim, and her clothes are frequently darker shades when she's around others. Rankin's a shadow draped around her, convincing her to wall off her kind nature and intelligence from everyone else. It's the difference between viewing a house with heavy drapes from the outside versus the inside. Outside, everything may look dim and gloomy, uniformly unfriendly. Inside, you're able to perceive there are places of light and shadow, and boundaries between them. It's a quiet struggle you can't see from outside, where Mary appears standoffish, impatient, and blind.