The Asheville Film Society will screen The Stranger on Tuesday, Sept. 19, at 7:30 p.m. at The Grail Moviehouse, hosted by Xpress movie critic Scott Douglas.
The Stranger
Movie Information
In Brief: Orson Welles' most financially successful (and therefore least admired) film, The Stranger is a fairly straightforward suspense thriller — but it's a suspense thriller that only Welles could make. Its hero is a Nazi hunter (Edward G. Robinson) who's obsessed to the point of being a little unbalanced. Its villain is an unregenerate Nazi (Welles) hiding in a picture-book American town, complete with a church topped with an improbable and out-of-place clock with life-size clockwork figures. It may not be high art, but it makes for a terrific movie. In its own way, The Stranger is similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) on one side and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) on the other. All this (and a grotesquely Baroque climax that must have warmed Welles’ heart) is simply unforgettable, and makes for a movie that I find hard not to love. This excerpt was taken from a review by Ken Hanke originally published on March 25, 2014.
| Score: | |
| Genre: | Suspense Thriller |
| Director: | Orson Welles |
| Starring: | Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles, Philip Merivale, Richard Long |
| Rated: | NR |
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