The Stranger

I ordered THE STRANGER (1946), directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, Edward G Robinson and Loretta Young, from Netflix and it came in a sleeve that announced it was part of the “Film Noir Collection.” I would challenge the categorization of the film as “noir” on the basis of the simplicity of the moral struggle it portrays, and the too easy sense of justice it claims.

It is not as if Welles couldn’t do better. In TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), another film in which he both starred and directed, the moral status of all the characters is ambiguous at best. Here, though, Welles, as Franz Kindler, is almost cartoonish in his evil, the bête noir of Edward G Robinson’s Mr Wilson (and all good God Fearing patriotic types, I suppose). The rigidly upright Wilson rivals Dudley Do Right in his All American (or Canadian) goodness.

Welles portrays not only a Nazi, but the Nazi that masterminded the death camps. As such, Welles is indeed portraying an evil character—but he does so in an over the top, even campy, way. The arrogance of Kindler outstrips his intelligence, and he doesn’t come across as a real adversary for Wilson because of his blind self-assurance in his brilliance.

Mr Wilson (does he not have a first name, and such a bland last one, because he is representing all of virtuous American manhood?) is a war crimes investigator that chases Welles to Harper, Connecticut, where Kindler is in hiding as Charles Rankin, a teacher at a boy’s school named after the town. Wilson takes responsibility for releasing another Nazi so that he can follow that escapee to Kindler. The escapee flies unerringly home to his master, never thinking that he has been set up (more Nazi arrogance). Wilson acknowledges that this gambit is morally dicey, but in his towering indignation at what the Nazis have done, he proclaims “blast the repercussions, I will risk the bottom pits of hell” to get his man. We are made to believe that Rankin/Kindler somehow has the capacity to resurrect the entire Third Reich from his classroom in bucolic Connecticut, and will do so unless the avuncular, pipe- smoking Wilson can’t get his man.

Wilson’s monomania about catching Welles could be an occasion to explore how we become monsters in fighting monsters, but it is not. He brings Kindler to justice in ways that are completely cricket, Marquis of Queensbury, the good-guys-fight-fair-and-win-because-God-is-on-their-side kind of way. Wilson makes it seem like catching Kindler will somehow exonerate America for things like its sinful inaction about the Final Solution early in the war, fire-bombing Dresden, even for turning away boatloads of Jews looking for asylum before America joined the conflict.

In a strange twist Rankin, who marries Mary Longstreet (Young), the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice, gives an impassioned speech to Wilson at a dinner party wherein he proclaims that the Germans are waiting not for another Messiah but another Hitler (which is exactly what Kindler is doing), and that the Germans should be wiped from the face of the earth. He proclaims that all Germans would rather worship Warrior Gods than the Judeo-Christian one (obviously the one they worship in Harper, a Norman Rockwell town if there ever was one, an American town for Americans, that is if you are an American who fears God and is heterosexual and white) and responds with a resounding yes to Mary when she says that surely he is not suggesting a “Carthaginian Solution” to the problem. It’s a bold move, this, Rankin espousing a doctrine running completely counter to his own, but of course the evil must have an Achilles heel, a tragic flaw, and Rankin does. When he tells Wilson that Marx was a Jew and not a German, Wilson knows he has found his man.

And there is more heavy handed stereotyping, not from Kindler, but from Welles the director. Kindler/Rankin is obsessed with clocks, and works tirelessly on the clock in the tower of the town church. I guess that German need for precision and order will out every time. When he finally fixes it, there is a little track that circles the tower, with an armor-less knight or angel with a sword chasing a gargoyle or devil into eternity (representing Wilson and Kindler, America and the Nazis, us versus them, you fill in the easy blanks, the way any propaganda movie will for you).

I couldn’t help but think of all the resonances the word Stranger has when watching the movie, from the way we tell little kids about “stranger danger” to Billy Joel’s song wherein he warns about “the stranger in yourself.” Even INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS pivots on the idea that you might know your neighbors so poorly you don’t notice they are really from another galaxy. It’s a fear as old as time itself, the fear of the evil one in disguise, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the evil one in glorious raiment, while goodness is garbed in the humblest of costumes. Wilson could be the proverbial frog prince. But just because it is a primal fear doesn’t mean it should be portrayed in a trivial, juvenile way.

The most interesting twist on this stranger theme is the one whereby Longstreet marries Rankin only to find out that he is not the man she thought he was. And it is way more than the fact that he has bad table manners and leaves the cap off the toothpaste, or that he gives up the pretense of romance to drink beer and watch wrestling on TV. Indeed, he starts off by poisoning her dog, and works his way up from there. The Nazi Wilson releases finds Kindler, and the good old boss kills him to avoid discovery. When it becomes clear that he must tell Mary what he has done, he makes up the most outlandish tale, and she buys it. She doesn’t believe Wilson or even her dear old Dad when they tell her who she has married, and what he has done.

It is as if the loss of her innocence is really the culprit here, and if she had not let romance, a man, and sex into her life, if she had just stayed home with dear old Dad, none of this would have ever happened. She lies for Rankin, won’t face the horror of it all, won’t allow the unthinkable to come to consciousness any more than the German people will, in Rankin’s words, allow the truth or their horrible error to become conscious to themselves. Another ham-handed irony there, when Robinson says that Mary’s unconscious will eventually force the truth to the surface, like the body working a splinter out of the flesh, in that it was a Viennese Jew came up with a lot of this theorizing about the unconscious. Until Mary discovers Rankin plans even on killing her, she stands by her man.

One of the most implausible things about the movie is the romance between Young and Welles. She looks young enough to be his daughter, and he is a humorless, charmless and pretentious bore. And the whole town seems smitten with him, what with his school master’s English and patches on the sleeves of his jackets (although it is Robinson who smokes the intellectual’s pipe).

How could there be any doubt about the outcome? Rankin possesses the requisite grandiosity and arrogance to think he can hide in plain sight, but Wilson finds him out. Still, Wilson decides to let things play out, instead of merely killing the monster, until Welles tries to kill Mary in the clock tower. He fails, and tries to hide. Then, in the most over the top scene in the movie, Rankin/Kindler ends up impaled by the angel with the sword.

THE STRANGER was the only movie Wells was credited with directing that made a profit. Perhaps, in his attempt to be commercial, he felt simplistic moralizing sold better than complexity and contradiction. He was apparently right.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Another Film Noir: Scarlet Street

Fritz Lang’s 1945 masterpiece SCARLET STREET, with Edward G Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea, is disturbing to say the least. The film plays with appearance and reality almost in the same way that the characters do, conning each other into one thing or another, becoming one character or another as they all greedily, and without compunction go for the brass ring, the main chance, the big enchilada.

I wondered as the opening credits rolled if this was even going to be a noir movie. Maybe I had gotten mixed up when I was browsing Netflix and gotten hooked into some romance? The music over those credits seemed breezy and romantic, and I couldn’t see where we were going to get noir at all. The only detective in this piece turns out to be the deceased spouse of Robinson’s battle-axe of a wife Adele, and he was a dissolute bum who is more concerned with chasing down bribes than he is with chasing down criminals.

Robinson, playing the part of Christopher Cross, the same Edward G Robinson of the parts Rico in PUBLIC ENEMY and Rocco in KEY LARGO, plays an unassuming, diffident little wallflower who wouldn’t say sh*t if his mouth was full. He is too soft-boiled to be the protagonist of the typical crime drama.

In the opening scene, the guys from work are having a little party, and Robinson, a cashier who has performed faithfully for 25 years, is given the clichéd watch that you always get when you have been a wage slave for decades. He stands in the rain at the bus stop with a co-worker, both tipsy, and they seem like lonely guys, even though they are both married.

Robinson started out as a boarder in Adele’s place, and she acted sweetly at first, but she turned shrewish upon taking the wedding vows, just one of the people who gull Robinson throughout the story. She has insurance money from the sainted and dead husband (easier to be one when you are dead, as we will see later) but won’t spend any of it even for a radio, which she continually nags at Robinson to purchase for her.

Robinson dabbles at painting, turning mundane reality into beautiful fantasy even though he “could never master perspective.” Adele thinks his painting silly, and even accuses him of wanting to paint naked women. He protests that he has never seen a naked woman, and you feel sorry for him until you remember what Adele probably looks like in the buff (and how she behaves, clothed or not).

As Robinson walks through a depression era Greenwich Village, he sees a woman being accosted (Bennet being slapped around by Duryea), and rushes to the rescue, the sight of a woman in distress inspiring him to overcome his milquetoast nature for once. He whacks the fellow with his umbrella, and takes the poor girl home after going for a cop who goes after the fleeing attacker in vain.

This damsel in distress motif is extended into a sweet scene where Cross takes Kitty home and they have a soda in the basement establishment below her apartment, which she shares with a girlfriend. Kitty appears to be a sweet girl, and here we have the film trope of the “cute-meet” whereby the couple that will end up together first spark each other’s interests, before being blocked from being together in the second reel, and then finally united in the third.
But Kitty is far from what she seems to be. And Chris is not entirely honest either, telling her that he is a successful painter, or at least not disabusing her of that notion when she gets it into her head. He, who has seen his boss drive off with a young girl who is not his wife, and doesn’t consider that perhaps money has something to do with the pairing of a silver-haired oldster with a girl young enough to be his daughter, is playing the romantic role, and she, out of pity or for laughs, plays along.

Lang here is saying something important about human nature, I think. As human beings, we are self-conscious creatures, and we are aware of how we are supposed to act, and how we seem to others. So we create social personas, or masks, and use those masks to navigate our social world. And sometimes that mask is worn so long that we forget that it is a mask.

The movie merrily hums along in a romantic direction until the next scene, where we learn that the “attacker” was really Kitty’s boyfriend, who was just slapping her around because she wouldn’t give him any more money to gamble with. The two of them are as id-driven and libidinous as you could possibly be in a 1945 movie. Her apartment is filthy, and she lies around all day in her bedclothes, and throws cigarette butts into a sink overflowing with dirty dishes. “Johnny” practically lives there. He’s a hoodlum, a ne’er do well, and a grifter, but she doesn’t mind because, as she says to her girlfriend, she is in love. In a movie of the new millennium, I am sure there would have been violent sex, and it is intimated even here.

Neither Kitty nor Johnny is much for work, so they come up with a scheme for Kitty to induce Chris to get her an apartment she will “pay” for by modeling. Johnny gets hold of Chris’s paintings, which Chris has never been confident enough to sell, and Kitty starts to impersonate Chris, who doesn’t care, because now he imagines they will be together. The paintings begin to see like mad.

And then, of all things, Adele’s ex husband reappears. He supposedly drowned when he tried to save a woman suicide from doing so, but really he had been attempting suicide himself, because he had gotten caught taking bribes from speakeasies to allow them to stay open. He is mistaken for dead, and he doesn’t mind. He is a great big lout, a greasy, smelly, bear of a man, and a lush. He asks Chris to pay him off so he won’t tell Adele he is back.

And for the first time Chris really, and cleverly, is as duplicitous as those around him. He tells the ex that he can come by the house when Adele is out and get the insurance money she got from the insurance company upon his death, but of course she is home, she sees him, and now Chris, still deluded into thinking Kitty loves him, thinks he can finally be with Kitty. It is the ending of the perfect romantic comedy, lovers meet, lovers spark, lovers can’t be together, lovers can be together (when Chris’s marriage is dissolved).

But when Chris goes to see Kitty, he undergoes the same shocking reversal we did when we discovered Kitty’s attacker was really her lover (a not too complimentary view on what keeps men and women together, violence and sex, or violence followed by sex). She tells him he is old and ugly and she hates him. And when he finally must face that fact that perhaps he is, and that his romantic notion of love is ridiculous, he kills her.

Johnny gets blamed for the murder, but he is so obviously a hoodlum that no one believes him. It doesn’t help that he steals Kitty’s jewelry when he sees she is dead (“she didn’t need it anymore”). And no one believes that Chris was really the painter. Chris greatly enjoys Johnny’s death in the chair, until he thinks how Kitty and he will be lovers together in eternity, laughing at him. Chris is broke, fired for stealing from the boss to pay for Kitty’s apartment. He wanders the depressing Depression era streets, shattered, starving and crazed, and finally tries to hang himself, only to get saved by another boarder in the shanty of a rooming house he is living in. His mind gone, he tries over and over to confess, but no one will listen to him. He is in hell, but one of his own devising, not one for those who have sinned against other men, but for those who can’t come to terms with life without the social mask.

The twist in this particular noir film is that passion, combined with the inability to reconcile a romantic view of life with the harsh reality of life as really lived, is what destroys Cross. He never wanted to be a crook, a criminal; he never set himself against society. He just, as he says to his friend, wanted to know just once what it would be like to be loved by a beautiful young girl. It seems like a small crime to commit, his deluding of the self, but it leads to the killing of Kitty, and his inability to let go of the dream finally drives him mad.

© 2014 Mike Welch