Avis des critiques

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.

Stylish, well paced, and touched with some terrific, craggy faces, not to mention a standout, fall-down ending, The Stranger is great as portrait of pressure and the violence it does—to bodies, hearts, and minds. Less and less Welles's unknowing wife, Loretta Young flakes off in batty, delicious pieces. Too bad a mechanical plot and some middling performances chill the film from greatness.

...The Stranger is the only one of Welles' 13 released features that I actively dislike... I find Bronislaw Kaper's hokey score atrocious, and can accept almost none of the film's characters as interesting or believable, apart from Billy House's pharmacist, whom Welles apparently invented because he was as bored with the plot he was handed as I was. (Welles' own bombastic performance as the head villain strikes me as especially bad.)

[The Stranger] remains Welles's most seriously underestimated work... Kino Lorber has issued a magnificent Blu-ray edition... The famous Welles attention to texture and detail, long missing from "The Stranger," is back with a vengeance: an autumnal landscape slowly and implacably turned into a white wasteland by a dramatically resonant snowfall; close-ups that capture the pockmarks and wrinkles creeping into Kindler's boyish face.

The Stranger isn't exhilarating in the same fashion as those earlier films, or the later Falstaff or Touch of Evil; its technical virtuosity isn't as playful, and its theme is (deceptively) more intimate and less ambitious, but these qualities are revealed as virtues. Cloaking his formal wit in surprisingly earnest despair, Welles made a film of implied perversity that retroactively asserts itself as a kissing cousin of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.

With a relentlessly stupid screenplay, a hamstrung director, and no control over casting, this is unmistakably Welles's worst completed feature, however, though it is compromised and emasculated to a crushing degree, its scattered moments of power and poetry are true treasures.

One need not bring up the myriad of current-day instances to see how this dark and lively noir universally reverberates within any given culture, but Welles's devotion to character, style, and atmosphere overrules any moment when the message seems in danger of ruining the film's peerless fluidity.

The ultimate irony may be that, though the movie proved that Welles could handle a more conventional narrative (and even show a modest profit), the Hollywood system had no interest in housing the maverick-auteur. He must have sensed it: There's renegade poetry in the director staging his stab at a mainstream career as a tale of malignant infiltration, and then proceeding to dynamite it altogether with The Lady from Shanghai.

Many Welles supporters complain that The Stranger lacks the overt stylistic flourishes of his more celebrated efforts, such as The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Othello (1952). While it is true that his trademark style is more restrained in The Stranger, it is still recognisable as a Welles film. For example, the opening sequence... features the use of German Expressionistic lighting (in particular, the use of silhouettes) that Welles used so effectively in Citizen Kane (1941).