The obsession of the protagonist (Charles Rankin/Franz Kindler) for the clocks is one of the two brilliant, even if evident, symbols openly spread by the director (Orson Welles) in a film that, although often undervalued by both the critics and the public, as well as by its own director, has undoubtedly hold on very well and is still perfectly enjoyable even after many years since its release in 1946, representing an excellent example of American film noir, a genre derived from the bitter awareness, arrived also in the Tinseltown with WWII, that evil is amongst us and to exorcise it are not enough the movies of Frank Capra, who anyhow directed It's a Wonderful Life in the same year.
The repair of the turret clock, the ultimately Sisyphean and symbolic attempt of Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler to avoid the crystallisation of time, and hence of his crimes, goes hand in hand with the second symbol scattered along the movie, the checkers game, which should have probably been more evocative as a chess game (which timing though would have though clashed with the required and appropriate pace of the film), suggesting the transversal cat (detective Wilson excellently played by Edward G. Robinson) and mouse (Orson Welles's Franz Kindler) game where eventually the mouse, after sacrificing, either physically (Red the dog and the repented and remorseful Nazi Konrad Meinike, nervously played by Konstantin Shayne) or morally (Mary the bride, an unassuming Loretta Young, the character probably more difficult to play), all his pawns and other pieces, is given check mate in the final duel between the two kings of this dark tale, Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson.
Three years before the Mephistophelian Harry Lime of Carol Reed's The Third Man, Orson Welles crafts here a character that never hides from the audience his cruelty, wickedness and double-dealings, thus directly directing the attention from the binary film characters (only Mary's evolves during the movie) to the confrontation between Evil (Franz Kindler), trying to hide in the small-town America and criminally self-acquitting through the marriage with a Supreme Court judge's daughter, and Good (Mr. Wilson, cleverly deprived of a first name in the movie), relentlessly chasing it.
Directed after the commercial and reputational disaster of masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) and the tensions and difficulties that plagued in 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger was regarded by Orson Welles as one of his less personal movies. However, the script shortcuts are almost always made up for by the very good pace and filmic structure as well as by the sophisticated cinematography that meaningfully utilises the juxtaposition of lights and shadows, a tribute to the German expressionist cinema's use of shadows and their projections.
The final result is a movie at the forefront of films noir, still one of the genres for which the American movie industry deserves to be thanked.
The repair of the turret clock, the ultimately Sisyphean and symbolic attempt of Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler to avoid the crystallisation of time, and hence of his crimes, goes hand in hand with the second symbol scattered along the movie, the checkers game, which should have probably been more evocative as a chess game (which timing though would have though clashed with the required and appropriate pace of the film), suggesting the transversal cat (detective Wilson excellently played by Edward G. Robinson) and mouse (Orson Welles's Franz Kindler) game where eventually the mouse, after sacrificing, either physically (Red the dog and the repented and remorseful Nazi Konrad Meinike, nervously played by Konstantin Shayne) or morally (Mary the bride, an unassuming Loretta Young, the character probably more difficult to play), all his pawns and other pieces, is given check mate in the final duel between the two kings of this dark tale, Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson.
Three years before the Mephistophelian Harry Lime of Carol Reed's The Third Man, Orson Welles crafts here a character that never hides from the audience his cruelty, wickedness and double-dealings, thus directly directing the attention from the binary film characters (only Mary's evolves during the movie) to the confrontation between Evil (Franz Kindler), trying to hide in the small-town America and criminally self-acquitting through the marriage with a Supreme Court judge's daughter, and Good (Mr. Wilson, cleverly deprived of a first name in the movie), relentlessly chasing it.
Directed after the commercial and reputational disaster of masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) and the tensions and difficulties that plagued in 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger was regarded by Orson Welles as one of his less personal movies. However, the script shortcuts are almost always made up for by the very good pace and filmic structure as well as by the sophisticated cinematography that meaningfully utilises the juxtaposition of lights and shadows, a tribute to the German expressionist cinema's use of shadows and their projections.
The final result is a movie at the forefront of films noir, still one of the genres for which the American movie industry deserves to be thanked.