The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 17-23
The Stranger (1946)
Directed by Orson Welles
A mustachioed Welles plays a mastermind of Nazi atrocities who aims to evade prosecution by hiding in plain sight, assuming a false identity to teach at a quiet New England college and marry the daughter (Loretta Young) of a Supreme Court justice (“a famous liberal”); it’s his bad luck that War Crimes Commission manhunter Edward G. Robinson arrives in town on the day of the nuptials. A tour de force of visual style, The Stranger shrouds this pastoral idyll in dread and uncertainty, building to a climactic set-piece worthy of Hitchcock. Hubris was Welles’s perpetual subject—here he found it not only in one totalitarian monster, but also in the oblivious crowd in which he sought refuge. Eli Goldfarb (May 22, 9:30pm; May 24, 4:30pm at the Quad’s “Immigrant Songs”)