Even for a groundbreaking auteur with an impressive and varied filmography, Orson Welles’ 1946 film-noir classic The Stranger, is a remarkable piece of early post-WWII cinema. Playing against type, Edgar G. Robinson stars as Mr. Wilson, a war crimes investigator locked in an intense cat-and-mouse pursuit of fugitive Nazi Franz Kindler (played to the nines by Welles) in a staid New England town. Welles’ injection of a malevolent presence into the setting of naïve small-town America is a masterful work that raised, if not created, the bar for subsequent spy and political thrillers.
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