Critics reviews

Visconti re-creates the textures of the physical world with uncommon precision, which in turn highlights the distant, disaffected nature of Meursault’s inner life. To a filmmaker for whom surface and atmosphere had always provided insights into psychology, this is a telling tension: For Visconti, the tragedy of Meursault is the fact that we can never really know or understand him.

Whatever is keeping The Stranger out of American hands, it isn't lack of quality. I wouldn't rank it with Visconti's greatest films, but the first half in particular gets under your skin, and stays there... Visconti builds beautifully to the story's abruptly violent climax, through the cackling of the women, the empty beach, and the sun drilling a hole in Meursault's head.

Shot in Technicolor entirely in Algeria, with Jean-Luc Godard's favored actress, Anna Karina, as the protagonist's lover, Visconti's "The Stranger" makes the senseless sensuous — even sybaritic — in its blazing light and palpable heat... Steering clear of visual metaphor, Visconti focuses on atmosphere and quasi-documentary detail. Visconti's attention to location and fidelity to Camus's text accentuate the story's peculiarities.

By the film's end Meursault's landscape reduces to a dark prison cell where he's just a face crying out in the darkness. We want to explain how he arrived here, that the murder expressed a primal grief, because the opposite, that it expressed nothing, is too horrific... But Visconti gives us no joy, no acceptance, just a haunting close-up of Mastroianni's face, entombed in the stillness, his impassivity shattered forever.

It's more an inevitable failure than an interesting failure. As a producer's package, the combination of Albert Camus, Luchino Visconti, and Marcello Mastroianni seems like a logical ploy for the culture vultures. Ever since the project was announced, the cocktail-party line of the literati was that Mastroianni was miscast as the emotionally detached hero. I disagree. It is not Mastroianni who is miscast, but Camus. The Stranger should never have been made into a movie.