The Stranger is a 1946 American thriller film noir directed and (although uncredited) co-written by Orson Welles, starring himself along with Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young.

Then Wilson shows her graphic footage of Nazi concentration camps and explains how Kindler developed the idea of genocide.

Contemporary news items about the production add uncredited and unconfirmed cast members Neal Dodd, Nancy Evans, Fred Godoy, Joseph Granby, Ruth Lee, Lillian Molieri, Gabriel Peralta, Gerald Pierce, Robert Raison, Rebel Randall, Johnny Sands, and Josephine Victor.

Some scenes elaborated on Meinike's flight through Latin America, shadowed by an agent named Marvales and his wife, a woman in distinctive gold earrings who is murdered by savage dogs kept by the Nazis-in-exile.

She finds him in the woods, looking at the incongruous 16th-century Gothic clock in the town square, and tells him it was "brought by sailing ship from the shores of the Mediterranean" by one of her ancestors.

Rankin is familiar with the clock and her family's history, and as they walk through the cemetery he notes the many Longstreets who are buried there and their patriotic service.

[5]: 199 "Character development suffers from the loss of these scenes," wrote film historian Bret Wood, who also observes that inclusion of the Latin American pursuit would have increased the sense of foreboding before the story enters the idyllic town of Harper.

[5]: 200–201  A sense of mystery would also have been set up by an imaginative but unrealized pre-title sequence in the Welles version; instead, the titles are simply superimposed over the image of the clock.

[7]: 187 Welles planned to use the campus of his alma mater, the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, as the setting for The Stranger.

[11]: 23:20  Scenes could be filmed that provided deep views of adjacent buildings through windows or reflected in their glass, adding richness and dimension.

[11]: 12:32 The set facilitated long takes in which conversations begin indoors, move outside to actual storefronts, and continue across the town square.

At a time when a one-minute take was a rarity,[11]: 12:33  Welles presents one unbroken scene between Kindler and Meinike in the woods that is four minutes long—longer than the bravura opening of Touch of Evil (1958).

"Welles has said, since the making of The Stranger—which he completed one day before schedule and under budget—that nothing in the film was his, this despite the fact that the unmistakable Wellesian moods, shadows, acute angles, and depth-of-focus shots are pervasive.

[7]: 189 [15] "What we tend to forget today is that in the 1940s a large percentage of the population could not believe that the Nazi death camps were real," said Bret Wood.

[11]: 100:50  Welles had seen the footage in early May 1945[11]: 102:03  in San Francisco,[16]: 56  as a correspondent and discussion moderator at the United Nations Conference on International Organization.

[16]: 56–57 [18]"It is clear that the visual power of the newsreels had struck him deeply, and it is no surprise that clips from them would be included only a few months later in The Stranger," wrote film scholar Jennifer L.

[16]: 57 Three of the four post-liberation scenes included in The Stranger are from Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), a film assembled by George Stevens, James B. Donovan and Ray Kellogg and used as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials.

[2] The Stranger exists as an answer to the critics who complained that Welles could not make a 'program' picture," wrote film noir scholar Carl Macek.

Crowther called the film a "bloodless, manufactured show" in which Welles "gave no illusion of the sort of depraved and heartless creatures that the Nazi mass-murderers were.

He is just Mr. Welles, a young actor, doing a boyishly bad acting job in a role which is highly incredible—another weak feature of the film.

As a matter of fact, the writing of The Stranger, by Anthony Veiller, is the weakest thing about it—and that estimation includes another silly performance by Loretta Young as the killer's wife.

"[21] More favorable coverage was found in Variety, which called the film "a socko melodrama, spinning an intriguing web of thrills and chills.

Director Orson Welles gives the production a fast, suspenseful development, drawing every advantage from the hard-hitting script from the Victor Trivas story.

"One reason for the similarities is the recutting, supervised by Ernest Nims," wrote film historian Bret Wood.

"[5]: 19 In his audio commentary for the 2013 Blu-ray release of The Stranger, Wood calls it "an undervalued film" due to the absence of the "stylistic swagger" of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

[11]: 1:00 At the 19th Academy Awards, Victor Trivas received an Oscar nomination for Writing (Original Motion Picture Story).

The film is also available on the Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming services, and the Daily Motion and YouTube video-sharing platforms.

The debut issue (July–August 1946) of the short-lived pulp digest Movie Mystery Magazine presented a novelized condensation of the screenplay for The Stranger.

Robinson re-created his role from the film, performing with Ruth Hussey, Roland Morris, and Gerald Mohr.