The Orson Welles movie of 1946, and today’s morning name. The theatrical poster:
(#1)
From Wikipedia:
The Stranger is a 1946 American film noir starring Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, and Orson Welles. It is Welles’s third completed feature film as director and his first film noir, about a war crimes investigator tracking a high-ranking Nazi fugitive to a Connecticut town. It is the first Hollywood film to present documentary footage of the Holocaust.
… [the set-up:] Mr. Wilson [(Edward G. Robinson)] is an agent of the United Nations War Crimes Commission who is hunting for Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler [(Orson Welles)], a war criminal who has erased all evidence which might identify him. He has left no clue to his identity except “a hobby that almost amounts to a mania — clocks.”
Wilson releases Kindler’s former associate Meinike, hoping the man will lead him to Kindler. Wilson follows Meinike to a small town in Connecticut, but loses him before he meets with Kindler. Kindler has assumed a new identity as “Charles Rankin,” and has become a teacher at a local prep school. He is about to marry Mary Longstreet [(Loretta Young)], daughter of Supreme Court Justice Adam Longstreet, and is involved in repairing the town’s 400-year-old Habrecht-style clock mechanism with religious automata [mechanical figures] that crowns the belfry of a church in the town square.
And then on from there.
Welles as Kindler, close to the film’s conclusion — at the clock face, with one of the mechanical figures:
(#2)
A critical and financial success, it was edited to take it far from Welles’s original conception, so of course Welles disliked it. Now generally considered to be a dark masterpiece.
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