The Stranger

Welles, on probation with the studios, delivering their tempo without surrendering his shadows. He plays the fugitive himself; Edward G. Robinson is the patient federal man circling in. It was among the first fiction films to place actual concentration-camp footage before a mass audience — a director insisting, in 1946, that the genre look at what it had been circling. The clock-tower ending is pulp; the dinner-table scenes are not.