The Stranger

An investigator for a war crimes commission follows a fugitive Nazi to a small town in Connecticut. The man he is looking for teaches at the school under a new name and is about to marry the judge's daughter. Orson Welles directed and starred. Shooting ran from September to November 1945 at Samuel Goldwyn and Universal studios. The producer Sam Spiegel handed Welles the job after John Huston went into military service. To prove he could deliver on schedule and under budget, Welles accepted a contract stacked against him, and he kept his word. The film's place in history lies elsewhere. It is the first commercial film to use documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps; Welles cut in material from Nazi Concentration Camps, the 1945 record shown as evidence at Nuremberg. Against a budget of 1,034,000 dollars it took 3.22 million, making it the only Welles film to succeed commercially on first release. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 97 percent, though Bosley Crowther in the New York Times dismissed it as a bloodless, manufactured show. The success did not help. International Pictures cancelled the four-picture deal it had promised Welles as soon as the film was finished. The copyright was not renewed in 1973 and the film fell into the public domain. Who it is for: viewers who like film noir and are curious about the most conventionally told work Welles made. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to be caught off guard by the camp footage. The scene is brief but it is real.