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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 17, 2024 20:26:19 GMT
"It was I you intended to kill, wasn't it? Is it because the right side of my face isn't pretty enough?"
I can't get it out of my head, darn it.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 17, 2024 20:27:54 GMT
Dream wedding turned into a nightmare from hell.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 17, 2024 20:29:36 GMT
"Lift me up."
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Post by BunnyWhit on Mar 17, 2024 20:31:34 GMT
"But when you kill me.....don't put your hands on me!"
Brilliant writing.
The tension is so beautifully maintained. Several names listed for a writing credit on IMDb -- adaptation and uncredited work -- but the voice here is 100% Anthony Veiller, if you ask me.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 17, 2024 20:31:39 GMT
Wilson to the rescue.
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Post by galacticgirrrl on Mar 17, 2024 20:32:07 GMT
Dream wedding turned into a nightmare from hell.
I don't think the left side or the right side of my face would look so glamorous after all that has gone on. C'est merveilleux.
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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 17, 2024 20:33:09 GMT
How great is it that Young shot him. Just great. And with her good side facing the camera (darn it, I can't stop).
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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 17, 2024 20:37:49 GMT
Great choice, Topbilled, really fun one to share this way.
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Post by BunnyWhit on Mar 17, 2024 20:38:04 GMT
What a fine film. I always feel energized after watching a picture that is so artfully constructed. Thank you for choosing it for us, Topbilled!
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Post by Andrea Doria on Mar 17, 2024 20:38:38 GMT
Orson Welles was so fantastic in this! Many times he's a little too Master Thespian for me, but he was perfect in this. He and Loretta both did "nervous," so well I was almost hyperventilating in sympathy.
Thanks all for being here! Great movie!
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Post by topbilled on Mar 17, 2024 20:39:04 GMT
I am a bit confused about why she calls her father by his first name. Perhaps he was really her stepfather, or that the explanation of her using the judge's first name was in one of the scenes that were cut (since there was an additional 11 minutes trimmed from the later portion of the film).
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Post by galacticgirrrl on Mar 17, 2024 20:44:46 GMT
Fabulous fun again, if not too inappropriate to say given the subject at hand. Thanks to TB and one and all.
I am no doubt going to toss and turn tonight wondering about the sweet perfection of the music to my ear and why Welles didn't rate it and the film much higher.
And why did Loretta get to pull the trigger? A good Catholic girl might have deferred to another.
The magic of the movies.
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Post by topbilled on Mar 17, 2024 23:12:18 GMT
She married a Nazi
While viewing THE STRANGER it does seem fairly obvious that Orson Welles is using a postwar situation to reflect ideas about small-town decency and small-town secrecy. He was a liberal whose goal was not to support conservative ideals, but I think he did see in the story a chance to address some of America’s greatest hypocrisies and hidden evils…to make things ‘right.’ The action occurs in a make believe place called Harper.
Harper, Connecticut is as fictional as Bedford Falls, New York was in Frank Capra’s IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, but it still stands for something real and meaningful. It’s a place where a war criminal can hide, using an alias, and seemingly fool the general population. It is also a place where two other men have followed him.
One of these men is Mr. Wilson, a special investigator (Edward G. Robinson). He uses his own cover when arriving in Harper, not initially revealing the truth behind his visit.
The second man is a former Nazi collaborator named Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) who aims to reconnect with someone known as Professor Charles Rankin (Welles). We quickly learn Rankin is in actuality Franz Kindler who was part of Hitler’s Germany. He’s a dangerous killer who maintained anonymity after the fall of his country at the end of the war. Rankin/Kindler is determined to keep up the pretense of his new life, until the time is right to declare his political persuasion openly.
Meinike’s arrival happens on the same day that Wilson’s arrival takes place. Meinike wastes no time tracking down his old pal. He has a brief ill-fated reunion with Rankin/Kindler. Interestingly, Meinike is now a reformed Nazi, who does not believe the old Reich can be resurrected; but Rankin/Kindler does. When Meinike starts spouting what Rankin/Kindler considers religious gibberish, he is suddenly silenced.
A strangulation scene is staged in a wooded area, while some of the good professor’s boys (including future brother-in-law Richard Long) play an innocent game. The boys’ activities are juxtaposed with the two older men having intense physical contact in the bushes. In Hitchcock films, murders and sex are often symbolically linked. Is that what’s happening here? Meinike’s death is both holy and unholy, yet perverse.
The way this act of violence is intercut with the parade of adolescent boys in the woods underscores the idea that unnatural activities are occurring in this sleepy hamlet. Later, a dog’s determination to dig up Meinike’s body and the killing of the dog re-emphasizes such unnaturalness.
As we consider some of what transpires in the film, we must realize that five different people are listed as having contributed to the writing of the screenplay for THE STRANGER– including John Huston and Welles himself. As the director, Welles would have had the most influence over the shaping of the material and what ended up on screen. Though any of these contributors could have added extra layers or subtext to the narrative.
The film’s next major event is a wedding. Meinike’s murder happens before Rankin/Kindler is set to marry the beautiful daughter (Loretta Young) of a local magistrate (Philip Merivale). Because of the killing scene, we know Rankin/Kindler will not be a traditional husband for Mary.
This is a story about a man entering into a sham marriage with a woman to camouflage his covert activities. Any man hiding his true nature from his wife would certainly be a stranger to her. If this is a correct reading of the subtext, Welles is telling a story that carefully subverts the production code.
After the newlywed couple returns home, there’s an important dinner scene. At the table Mary tells Mr. Wilson the investigator (Robinson) that she doesn’t want the town clock to work, even after her recent honeymoon. Is this a nod to the strangely dysfunctional dynamic between her and Rankin/Kindler and their brand of intimacy? The broken clock may be a metaphor for his impotency with her.
In the end, their union will be exposed for the fraud it is. By the time the story does reach that point, we have had countless scenes of Wilson going around Harper, probing and asking questions. In one very memorable scene, convinced he has finally found his man, he shows Mary and her father some films from Rankin/Kindler’s secret life.
Not surprisingly, Mary is in shock. She tries to defend her husband but as Wilson points out, she is at war with her subconscious about the truth and is heading for a breakdown. Ultimately, Mary reaches a moral epiphany, but she reasons that her reputation and her love have been ruined. She is not wrong. Of course, she believes this to an extreme…to where she feels that it is now her turn to die and to take Kindler with her in death– borrowing imagery from the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld.
A viewer might find a lot of what happens in THE STRANGER confusing or hard to pin down. However, the same viewer may possess different ways of understanding and connecting the events and situations depicted on screen to Freud; and if that fails, to logic. Whether various components in THE STRANGER have been intentionally added or even subconsciously placed there by the screenwriters and the director is almost irrelevant. The film is a window into a troubled soul, where an alternate reality may now be fully grasped.
A lot of men returned from war overseas to towns like Harper. They had to go back to how things were before. But could they go forward if specific acts they had committed in the war were exposed? Their whole identity, the fabric of America, was now tangled up with abnormal violence. How could they reconcile an idyllic old-fashioned past with the horrors of what happened, if the Wilsons of the world were saying life was built on lies?
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Post by Fading Fast on Mar 18, 2024 9:54:30 GMT
The Stranger from 1946 with Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young
Hollywood, in the second half of the 1940s, had a rich stock of war tales from which to develop plots with the "there is a Nazi hiding amongst us" storyline being one of the perennial favorites.
In The Stranger, Edward G. Robinson plays a tired but persistent post-war Nazi hunter looking for the fictional "architect of the Holocaust," Franz Kindler. Kidler escaped capture at the end of the war and has, since, effaced all evidence of his Nazi past.
Robinson's search leads him to a pleasant Connecticut town where Kindler, played by Orson Welles (who also directed), has assumed a new name, is teaching at the local prep school and is about to marry the daughter, played by Loretta Young, of a Supreme Court justice.
With that setup, the rest of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game between Robinson and Welles as Robinson tries, first, to discover if Welles is Kidler and, then, when he satisfies himself that he is, to go about the hard job of proving it.
Stuck in the middle of this is poor Loretta Young who thinks she married a nice quirky teacher with an odd hobby of repairing glockenspiel clocks - scratch a veiled Nazi and his German shows. Young spends the movie making a slowly harrowing discovery.
While the plot gets a bit convoluted with way too many holes, the story's concept of a former Nazi hiding amongst "us" is that good and Welles, Robinson and Young are that talented, that they easily shepherd the story over its bumpy parts.
It helps, too, that the dialogue, while obvious, is powerful as shown in the below dinner table speech where Welles, feigning academic detachment, tries to articulate the "German" viewpoint.
Welles: The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred, conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German.
We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned from our own casualty list the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everywhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German.
No! He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in.
The German's dream world comes alive when he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. No, he's... another Barbarossa... another Hitler.
If that doesn't send a chill up your spine, then nothing will.
It is at this same dinner that Welles and his new wife have this baleful exchange:
Young to her husband Welles: I can't imagine you're advocating a Carthaginian peace.
Welles responded: Well, as a historian, I must remind you that the world hasn't had much trouble from Carthage in the past 2000 years.
It's not subtle, but even today, the words are disturbing, especially when later, as happens in The Stranger, a brief but haunting film clip of the concentration camps is shown.
Welles' directing so effectively juxtaposes the charming and "safe" Connecticut town, where families don't lock their doors at night, with the menace of Nazi Germany that it had to make audiences in 1946 go home feeling just a bit less secure wherever they lived.
Equally disturbing is Welles' portrayal of "the architect of the Holocaust" being able to amiably fit into this quiet American town. History has shown that many former Nazi monsters did bury their past identities and live unassuming lives after the war.
While Welles' acting isn't subtle, he has that all-important ability to own the screen, so much so, you can't take your eyes off him as you wait for his next word. It's not the theatrical talent of a Robinson, but you can't deny that Welles' presence on screen demands attention.
The Stranger has a too-obvious plot, but that doesn't matter much as the performances of the leads, the harrowing philosophical exchanges and the mood created by the menacing Nazi presence in this pleasant town make The Stranger an engagingly disturbing movie.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Mar 18, 2024 10:49:16 GMT
Thank you Topbilled and Fading Fast for two very interesting reviews. There was so much to this movie, it makes me wish they had gone an extra half hour to answer some of the questions.
Why did Mary call her father by his first name? Why did it take her so long to face the fact that her husband was an evil man? Yes she was in love with him, but she hadn't known him long and I would have thought she would believe her father over her husband, particularly as the evidence mounted up. Why did they spend a day searching the woods before looking in the clock tower? What was Mary carrying up that ladder in the end? Who would go up a ladder like that with one hand? Why did she ask her husband to pull her up when he could have just taken the box so she would have two hands? I know, I know, that ending was wildly dramatic and I loved it, but I just kept yelling "No!" at Mary for the last ten minutes.
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