Older Reviews

THE STRANGER (1946)

Nazi what he seems

Midway into THE STRANGER, pipe-smoking Nazi hunter Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) bolts awake in the middle of the night realizing that "Who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German ... because he was a Jew?” Of course, we viewers have known from the start of the movie that Professor Charles Rankin (Orson Welles), the man who made the thinly veiled anti-Semitic remark that led to Wilson's epiphany, is indeed the Nazi whom Wilson has come all the way from Germany to Connecticut to capture. We also know that thanks to Wilson’s tenacity, Kindler will never make it to the Fourth Reich he's plotting in America. This is a suspenseful, Wellsian noir with one heil of an ending!