But despite the graduated and shaped performances of Loretta Young and Orson Welles, the movie, I believe, firmly belongs to Edward G. Robinson. He is wonderfully the opposite, always calm and restrained—and this uniformity is not to be taken as a negative. In the only break with that placid demeanor throughout the entire film, Wilson, in the beginning, smashes his pipe in anger, declaring Meinike to be “an obscenity on the face of the earth!” No matter how bad some of his films, Edward G. Robinson always manages to give an outstanding performance, as here. It’s an underplayed, sincere bit of acting, as for example, in a conversation with Noah in the clock tower. When Noah mentions that Rankin’s hobby is clocks, Wilson’s face lights up with an inner passion that is totally convincing. “Mine, too,” he says.
The conclusion of The Stranger? It’s not a total surprise and, given the church tower’s mechanical figures, including a king with an extended broadsword, it is not particularly difficult to foresee Franz Kindler’s fate, and literal “fall” from respectability.
In 1946, at an Alphabet City High School in Manhattan, I sat among the flotsam and jetsam of WWII. At some desks were seated unrepentant Poles and at others cringing Poles! Film awakens echos of that past time.