The Stranger

[wannabe-director]

What do you all think of The Stranger? I just saw it recently and I think it is one of Welles best films! It is definitely one of his more conventional movies but overall it is brilliant. The perfomances were all top notch. I love the scene where Welles strangles his former Nazi henchman to death in the woods. The final scene in the watchtower is also amazing. Of course Edward G. Robinson is great, he seems to always pull of a great performance. The way he delivered his lines during the watchtower scene gave me the goosebumbs! Wonderful film!

[jaime marzol]

robinson is always great. i just saw him in HOUSE OF STRANGERS and he was fabulous playing an ialian immigrant that made good in america. his accent was incredible. also, see him as johnny rocco in KEY LARGO. KEY LARGO is the best example you will find of just robinson. the director huston didn't like to give directions. he did his directing in the casting by hiring the guy that did what he needed rather than trying to get a performance out of an actor. so johnny rocco is robinson minus direction.

notice welles didn't use a black person as a servant in THE STRANGER. another director, like walsh, who i like, but he has a penchant for using eye-rolling darkies for comedy releif. walsh always had eye rolling darkies, and lovable old coots in his movies. today, those are stumbling blocks, just one more thing you have to get through to enjoy the film. THE BIG TRAIL was ruined by the lovable old coot. HIGH SIERRA is marred by Alginon, the supersticious, eye rolling darkie. welles never fell for any of that. look at the black servant in KANE, he was handled with dignity.

[Terry]

The Stranger was the first Welles film I saw - and I thought it was #### excellent. I thought Loretta Young was too #### and a bit annoying. Richard Long is quite #### and probably grew up to be a ####. Billy House cheats at checkers, and Johnny Rocco is such a poor detective he doesn't even notice. Should have had Aggie instead, because she could #### a #### through a garden hose. Welles impaled on the sword at the end is quite ####, and didn't he lie about a stuntman falling off the tower? That was a dummy. Konstantine Shane is AWESOME.

John Huston didn't tell his actors what to do? That makes him as useless as George Lucas! What do you call a director that doesn't direct? What do you call a director who makes love to his actors - REALLY makes love to them? I'd call him a ####.

:p

[jaime marzol]

a director that doesn't need to direct is a good producer. and there is a stuntman on that clock. it's a dummy that falls, but there is a stuntman. look again. he has a black wig on and looks nothing like welles. and your comment about moorehead is hillarious.

[Terry]

Aunt Fanny wouldn't have been a spinster if I had had anything to do about it. Aggie was a spicey little New York number most of her life. Welles gave her frumpy roles because he was jealous of other men so much as looking at her. Rita Hayworth was a trade down by comparison. Aggie would have been a much better femme fatale.

But she became Endora instead.

[jaime marzol]

her screen persona keeps me from thinking anything about her except some one you want to see get strangled in the movie. and very slow. aggie, along with cotten and wise were the team that sodomised the ambersons. wise and cotten got past it, but moorhead really screwed herself by showing up to film the new ending. that allowed them to take out her best work ever i'm sure. bet you if she had a chance to do it again she would have gone into hidding so they could not find her. without her there could have been no reshoot. cotten alone would not have been enough. so aggie had to settle for sucking #### through ### garden hoses in cheap movies.

[Terry]

Everybody turned on Ambersons. Regarding Aggie - #### #### #### #### and especially ####.

Sure would be great to see what caused the panic.

Regarding the preview version - and the Carrington continuity - isn't it true that 15 minutes had already been cut from the film by this time? There seems to be no documentation for what occured in those scenes - though there may be some stills from them on that Ambersons site I linked awhile back. Those fifteen minutes are not in the Carrington screenplay. I'm thinking there were two scenes of Eugene and Isabel by the tree - one shot during the day - the next at night. The night shot has vanished.

[Roger Ryan]

I'm not sure how this thread morphed into an "Ambersons" discussion, but I agree it would be interesting to discover what was actually shot, but later cut by Welles before the 131 min. version was assembled. I'm fairly certain that Eugene and Isabel's conversation by the tree was originally longer including Tarkington's lines about Time being like smoke rising up a chimney into the sky (just like in the end of "Citizen Kane"!). As it stands now, that scene is a bit abrupt, although it would work much better coming between the first veranda scene and the dinner scene (as originally edited) than as the premature placeholder it serves now. If publicity stills can be trusted, it appears they may have been another scene featuring Bronson (Erskine Sanford) and the "greek chorus" of townsfolk taking place in a city clerk office. Of course, the footage using the camera as George traveling through the deserted Amberson mansion was eliminated, although I can't imagine it would have taken up more time than dictated by Welles' original narration (a series of dissolves would have probably been used, just like with the building shots during the "last walk home").

Just to get this thread back on "The Stranger", I would suggest that, despite studio interference, it's closer to Welles' intentions than "Lady From Shanghai" which not only suffers from haphazard cutting and poor scoring, but features an awful lot of "glamour close-ups" Welles was forced to insert that disrupt his natural visual style. "The Lady From Shanghai" is the better film ultimately, but "The Stranger" is less polluted.

[jaime marzol]

it's hard to keep the threads on track. it's hard to keep a conversation on track, and threads are basically conversations on line, so what the heck, lets talk.

also, we got on ambersons because of the moorhead link between stranger and ambersons, and because of hadji's 'thing' for deflowering endora (i can't even imagine doing such a thing, but what the heck, to each his own).

when i read the screenplay of the missing scenes in ambersons, what appears in the carringer book is in the screenplay, but there is more. like in the george, fanny, and isabel porch scene. in the screenplay there is construction in the front yard and a busy street with lots of traffic in front of the mansion. the cutting continuity doesn't have the construction site of cheap little houses, the busy street, or the constant sound of traffic and horns blowing under their conversation. imagine pairing that with the extended kitchen scene with construction in the rear of the mansion.

[Terry]

Not to keep steering this thread the wrong way (though that's the beauty of stream-of-consciousness) but I thought Carringer said in his essay that Ambersons had been cut by fifteen minutes before it was previewed, and that the restored screenplay was based on the continuity cut for the preview version. I haven't done my homework, but I thought that meant that fifteen minutes of Welles' rough cut was not covered by the Carringer screenplay.

Consider this photo:



Sure, Orson doing magic to entertain a sexually aroused Joseph Cotten. But seriously, this is a night shot - and while Isabel is wearing the same gown from the day tree scene, Cotten has a different tie on at least. So is this photo of a dress rehearsal? Or an alternate take? Or Welles' original version, which the studio reshot? Or is it the second half of the ladder structure, cut from the release version? The Carringer screenplay doesn't mention another tree scene.

How about this photo:



Here's the description from Ambersons.com:

This image is from a scene that came right after George's argument with Uncle Jack about Isabel and Eugene (i.e. the bathroom scene). George is furious about the situation, and tries to avoid Isabel by walking upstairs to the ballroom. Isabel follows, and George, having no place else to go, stands motionless with his back to her. She tries to wish him goodnight, not knowing that he is angry with her, while he remains still and only able to utter a few terse words.

There's no mention of this scene in the Carringer screenplay either. So I wonder if the 131 minute rough cut included them, but they hit the cutting-room floor before a cutting continuity was written, or if, as Roger suggested, they were filmed but not included in the rough cut.

I guess my big question is this: Does the restored screenplay include the complete 131 minute rough cut or not?

Food for thought, anyway.

[jaime marzol]

i never heard of a restored screenplay, what is that? you mean a screenplay rewritten to fit the film? i don't know why they would do that. back then the screenplay had no commercial value. they did that with CASSABLANCA screenplay, but they did it in the 90s because the original screenplay was a box of notes and screenplay chunks in no particular order, so they restored it to put it on the market. personally, i think they should have just reproduced the box of scrap paper and screenplay chunks.

[Terry]

My bad, Jaime - sorry. Call it the Carringer reconstructed cutting continuity if that will make the matter more clear. And again, I wonder if it refers to the 131 minute version or the first preview version, which was already 15 minutes shorter than the original rough cut.

[Terry]

I've been reading Carringer's essay on the editing - and gotten more confused the more I've read. Apparently the Pomona preview version was Welles' cut - as dictated from Brazil by whatever means of communication were open to him. It ran 110 minutes and did not include a number of scenes which RKO wound up reinserting by the time the release version was completed. The 131 minute version was the one which Welles had re-edited into the first preview version. Just looking at the cuts, it seems like Welles' Pomona version was pretty bad. While the 131 minute version has a continuity dated March 12th, the first rough cut had been assembled by Welles and Wise on February 5th. What that one included I guess we'll never know. Maybe it had the night tree scene and the scene with Georgie standing with his back to his mother. Maybe not. But from Carringer's evidence (telegrams et al) it would seem that Welles' version was the Pomona cut - and if we wish to reconstruct Welles' version we must cut the scenes that Welles wanted cut. Subsequently we lose the first porch scene, the scene of George and Isabel discussing Eugene's letter, Isabel's letter to George, George's walk with Lucy on the street, the drugstore and poolroom scenes, the second porch scene, Uncle Jack's visit to the Morgan mansion, Isabel's return, Eugene and Lucy's walk in the garden, and George's auto accident. That's what Welles personally had cut from the picture. I'll have to do an edit of Roger's version to see how Welles' Pomona cut plays. Pomona cut nothing - that's Welles' cut, period. I'm curious now as to whether it works that way. It seems strange that after all those cuts it could still run 110 minutes. I'll do more homework.

[Terry]

While I find the content (or lack thereof) of Welles' cut to be very surprising, I'm also surprised to find that George Schaefer oversaw the project the entire way - including the release version we have today. Charles Koerner had absolutely nothing to do with it. Welles' memories of the "new government" at RKO destroying Ambersons were mistaken. Koerner fired Welles and the Mercury, but Schaefer was the one responsible for Ambersons being recut.

Sorry to sidestep The Stranger, but feel free to pick it back up at any time.

[jaime marzol]

i also get confused when reading the carringer essay. the carringer book is only good for the continuity, the rest you can rip out of the book and throw away. to the best of my knowledge, the first preview version was welles'. after that got booed, welles made adjustments by telegram, and they came up with the second preview version. that one also angered the audience. robert wise was assigned to the project and came up with version #3, the version we have today.

but this order of things might be boiled down to the 3 most important mutilations. there might have been 2 or 3 other versions between these 3, or i might be completely wrong. every new journal that comes out has new info making the last journal obsolete. in a case like this there is only one place to get the latest, most difinitive answer; clinton heylin's book.

everything with welles was like this. look at the twisted history of TOUCH OF EVIL. talk about the dog chasing it's tail till it was too dizzy to make any sense. how are you AMBERSONS.

if it was me making the restoration, i would consult the screenplay and dispose of everything else. who cares what welles did to the film after it was booed, i'd like to see what he did before he was told it stunk, which we all know it didn't stink, it was the war climate in america that mitigated the circumcisions the film went through.