A Film Canon

 

 

The Stranger translates Welles' fascination with shadowplay - and, more specifically, with testing the elasticity between an object and its shadow - into narrative, as 'Mr. Wilson' (Edward G. Robinson), an investigator from the Nazi Crimes Commission, arrives in a small Connecticut town to shadow, and eventually apprehend, the suspected architect of the Final Solution, now posing as 'Professor Charles Rankin'. Not only does Welles suffuse the space between these two figures with images of elasticity - a dangling gym rope, a paper trail, a bell-pull - but he condenses it to the town square, which is walled by the four central topoi - Rankin's house, Wilson's hotel, the general store and the town clock - and itself elasticised via a series of elaborate tracking shots, in which the camera curves up and around a series of vertical objects, all of which reiterate the omnipresent clock. As this might suggest, Welles' ultimate ambition seems to be to render object and shadow spatially distinct but connected, or continuous, in time; temporal elasticity. Hence the magnificent editing, which cuts between Welles and Robinson in such a way as to construe them as twin movements of the same mind, providing the apotheosis of both their peculiarly cerebral screen personae. In the same way, the fairly overt fantasy-fulfilment of having a single person to blame for the Final Solution is redeemed by Rankin's simultaneous role as its shadow, which ensures that he defends it as an intelligent fundamentalist, rather than a propagandistic caricature, and confirms it as the third protagonist in a shadow-object triangle that comes closer to evoking - and aestheticising - the presence of evil than any noir to date: "The little man was walking all by himself, across a deserted city. But when he moved away...the shadow stayed there behind him...and it spread out, just like a carpet."