The Stranger (1946)

The Stranger (1946) is a tense film‑noir thriller directed by and starring Orson Welles, alongside Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. The story follows a war‑crimes investigator who tracks a high‑ranking Nazi fugitive to a seemingly idyllic Connecticut town, where the man is hiding in plain sight as a respected professor engaged to a Supreme Court justice’s daughter.

As the investigator closes in, the film becomes a slow‑burn cat‑and‑mouse game, with Welles’s charming schoolmaster revealing himself as a cold, calculating killer obsessed with clocks and terrified of exposure. With its shadowy small‑town streets, towering clock‑tower climax, and steadily mounting dread, The Stranger delivers a compact, 95‑minute dose of postwar paranoia and classic noir atmosphere.