The Stranger - The Film That Should Have Saved Orson Welles' Career, Part I

The noir thriller demonstrats that, had he only been able to compromise, the renaissance man could've thrived within the studio system.

In the BBC’s Arena - The Orson Welles Story, the great man explains to Alan Yentob that he made The Stranger “to prove I didn’t glow in the dark.” Anxious to lose the reputation he had acquired for extravagance, Welles signed had a contract with producers William Goetz and Sam Spiegel to make an inexpensive, low-key thriller.

On Goetz’s insistence, stipulations were built into the contract which left Welles legally bound to bring the film in on time and on schedule. As one might expect, Welles gave the producers something other than they might have expected That’s not to sat that The Strangers was late or costly: on the contrary, he saved the studio both time and money. What he did do was to give International Pictures a film far less formulaic that the one they had anticipated.

According to Welles’ aficionados, The Stranger is a film characterised by its orthodoxy. As Barbara Leaming observed, “It is a brisk, linear, straightforward production.. lacking the atmosphere and texture that is such a feature of Welles’ work.” While the tale of Nazi war criminal on the run is pretty traditional, it would be wrong to describe The Stranger as a film that lacks Wellesian flourishes. On the contrary, it’s chockfull of Orson’s favourite directorial devices.

Low camera angles, long takes, amplified sound, impenetrable shadows, more than a smidgen of symbolism - you’ll find all these and more on show in The Stranger. And it’s because of them that what might otherwise have been a straightforward drama becomes a genuinely edgy thriller. In spite of his strict contract, or perhaps because of it, Welles made a film of as much interest as many of his productions.

Alas, Orson did not display similar enthusiasm for the film. As he told James Howard, “It’s my least favourite film… There’s nothing of me in that picture.”

There is in fact a lot of Orson Welles in The Stranger. The real reason he hated the picture was because it had been made to contract…