Reeling Backward: "The Stranger" (1946)

I had never heard of "The Stranger," but it was actually Orson Welles' most commercially successful directorial effort -- the only one, really. Coming out in 1946, it played on a lot of anti-Nazi hysteria about fascists hiding out among us after World War II. Welles is the supposed mastermind of the Holocaust, Franz Kindler, while Edward G. Robinson is the dogged G-man on his trail.

It seems Kindler has passed himself off as doddering professor Charles Rankin, who works at a boy's school in the Rockwellian town of Harper, Conn. He's even set to marry lovely girl next door Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), whose father is a Supreme Court justice (Philip Merivale), don'cha know.

It's the perfect disguise ... well, actually no. The best place to hide would not be in the heart of your greatest Allied enemy's country, where hordes of investigators are searching for runaway Nazis. All those stories about Hitler secretly living in Argentina were batty, but at least the Fuhrer hypothetically chose the right sort of location.

Switch it around and ask if it makes sense: If the Axis had won the war, do you think General Eisenhower would've hidden out in Hamburg, Germany?

The story is filled with a lot of holes and illogic, but it decently boils the plot. It also features some wonderfully inky photography by Russell Metty. Welles would later be associated with the film noir genre, most notably "Touch of Evil," but it was interesting to see him doing some early dabbling in that visual style.

There are a couple of scenes where Robinson acts in virtual darkness, with just one eye or a slice of his jaw clearly visible in the light. Welles also uses a lot of extreme close-ups, especially on himself, which has the intended disconcerting effect. (It also shows that Welles, at age 31, still struggled with acne.)

Oddly, the cinematography did not receive an Oscar nomination, but the film's one nod from the Academy was in the category where it most definitely did not deserve to be lauded: the screenplay. It's a jumble of mismatched characters and plot devices, with people doing things not because it makes sense but because the story needs to get from point A to B.

The script has a somewhat  mysterious provenance, too. Victor Trivas received the Oscar nomination for Best Original Story, but Anthony Veiller is actually credited with penning the screenplay. Decla Dunning also helped adapt Trivas' story, and reportedly John Huston and Welles himself tinkered around with it, too.

Wilson, the Nazi hunter played by Robinson, has an especially tough job in catching Kindler. Despite being the wunderkind of the Third Reich, he was very secretive and no photos of him are available. He decides to free Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), a collaborator of Kindler's, from prison in the hopes he'll lead them straight to the main quarry.

This is exactly what happens, but Kindler kills Meinike before Wilson can make the connection, having been bonked over the head with a sandbag in the gym. Kindler leaves Meinike's body just a few steps into the forest surrounding the town, throwing a few shovelfuls of dirt and leaves over it.

For a supposed genius who conceived and executed the mass extermination of Jews, Kindler has a pretty weak M.O. for disposing of one dead man.

Wilson makes the connection that Rankin is Kindler because of a comment during dinner. Kindler advocates an extreme form of retribution against the defeated Germans -- basically, wipe them all out, including women and children. He also disputes that Karl Marx was a German, because he was a Jew. He also has a keen interest in fixing the town's elaborate clock tower, and Kindler was known to be a nut for the stuff.

The creepiest, and most effective part of the film is Kindler/Rankin's relationship with his wife. Mary at first defends her husband, refusing to believe the man she fell in love with could be a mass murderer. But as he comes to see her as the weak link in his alibi, Kindler soon turns his evil eye upon her.

All this leads up to an inevitable confrontation up in the clock tower where Kindler is hiding out after his cover his blown. Because, yeah, that's the last place anyone would think to look for him! But a Nazi who's stupid enough to hide out in America is probably also dumb enough to hole up in a place that everyone in town knows he frequents, and lacks any sort of escape route.

The final showdown is kind of interesting, even if the build-up to it is daffy. Notably, it's Mary who fires the fatal shots that lead to Kindler's death -- the betrayed woman exacting her revenge. The depiction is also rather violent, with Kindler getting impaled by the sword of the mechanical angel in front of the clock, which continually trades places with a winged devil. Subtle enough for you?

With its heavy-handed symbolism and dippy character construction, "The Stranger" is hardly one of best films in the Welles oeuvre, even if it is one of the better-looking.

Reeling Backward: "F is for Fake" (1974)

I sought out "F is for Fake," the last feature film directed by Orson Welles, because of its thematic similarity to "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a new documentary about street art that will be reviewed here this week. Both films cast doubt upon the authenticity of acclaimed works of art that are sold for great prices -- and upon their own truthfulness as documentaries.

Welles at least has the good manners to reveal at the end of his film that he has "been lying my head off."

"Fake" is less a documentary than a personal essay by Welles, a meditation on art and authorship. Ostensibly it centers on Elmyr de Hory, the world's most famous art forger, who claims to have passed off thousands of his paintings as works by the masters. Many of his paintings hang in the most famous museums in the world, hailed as masterpieces, he says.

Also portrayed is Clifford Irving, a writer who wrote a biography of Elmyr that exposed and elevated him. Irving later claimed to be writing the autobiography of tycoon Howard Hughes based on interviews with the recluse himself, which he eventually admitted was a hoax.

He served jail time for his fraud, and his story became its own 2006 movie, "The Hoax," starring Richard Gere. (Appropriately enough, Irving disassociated himself from the film, calling it inauthentic.)

Welles happily identifies himself as a fellow traveler of these con men, showing himself performing magic tricks for children as the story opens, and recounting the hoax that launched his career, the infamous radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds," which sent large parts of the country into a panic.

Early in the going, Welles solemnly pledges that everything he says for the next hour will be the unvarnished truth, or at least based on the best available facts. He then spends the last 20 minutes of the film fabricating a wild story about a beautiful woman named Oja Kodar, who supposedly posed for 22 nude portraits by Pablo Picasso on the condition that she keep the paintings when he was through.

This sets up a showdown between the great painter and Kodar's grandfather, who painted fakeries of the 22 works and passed them off as Picasso's own. Told with Welles and Kodar as the stand-ins, the two painters debate the value of "real" versus "fake" art, with the forger claiming he has not stolen from Picasso, but added to his legacy. Then he reveals that he has burned Picasso's original paintings upon which he based his forgeries.

At this point, Welles gaily jumps in and announces that the entire story is a ruse. Kodar, in fact, was Welles's companion and lover for the last quarter-century of his life, and his accomplice (and co-writer) for this film.

The movie veers wildly from puckishness to borderline pomposity, as in this moment when Welles contemplates the Chartres Cathedral:

"Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash -- the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. 'Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.' Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much. "

Much like "Exit Through the Gift Shop," the very authorship of "Fake" is somewhat questionable. A prominent figure in the film is Francois Reichenbach, an art dealer who interviewed both Irving and Elmyr for his own documentary about the swindlers, before turning the footage over to Welles, who anointed his predecessor as his cinematographer.

The editing of "Fake" is groundbreaking for its pace and the way it cuts off one thought by starting another, and its self-referential nature. Welles narrates from within a film editing bay where he's supposedly cutting the movie even as we watch it, with the frame we're seeing often jumping into the one seen through the editor's viewfinder and back again.

So even as we see interviews with Elmyr and Irving in which they appear to be in the same room addressing one another, arguing even, in fact they are not. Although we do see them together at a party at Elmyr's villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza, and Welles himself makes an appearance, drinking wine and enjoying the company of his brother hoaxers.

In one terrific moment, Elmyr -- who often burnt his paintings contemptuously moments after finishing them -- does a portrait of the man he calls the greatest forger in history, Michelangelo, who eventually went legit. Elmyr finishes by signing Welles' own name to the painting -- misspelling it in the process, perhaps intentionally.

Welles quotes Picasso: "Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." In that spirit, he argues, even forgers are not criminals but artists.

Or in the filmmaker's own words: "What we professional liars hope to serve is truth. I'm afraid the pompous word for that is art."

3.5 stars out of four