So, I watched a movie from the 40's

I gotta admit, I half expected some kind of divine intervention to help me figure out what I was going to do for my media diary.
Videogames was my first thought, because I haven't played anything properly since 2016. But right now my only platform would be my phone, and that's kinda boring.

My divine intervention did eventually come, in the shape of a cousin who loves Cary Grant. She made me realise that besides The Sound of Music and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, I've never really seen any movies made before Star Wars: A New Hope. So I decided to embark on a journey through movie history for my blog. I'm gonna watch as many movies made before the 70's as possible, and review them in the best way I can.

The movie for this first week was picked randomly from Netflix The Stranger, from 1946.

                                                       

I wasn't particularly excited about this movie, to be honest. My pre-watch research taught me that it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Story, but because I'd never heard anything about it, I assumed it was as far from a classic as it was from anything special.

The movie has a simple premise: Mr. Wilson (played by Edward G. Robinson) is an American War Crimes Investigator looking for Franz Kindler (Orson Welles), a Nazi responsible for the death of thousands.
To find him, Wilson allows another condemned Nazi, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) to escape prison, hoping he will lead the Americans to Kindler.
That's exactly what happens.
Meinike goes to a tiny town in Connecticut called Harper, and there he finds Franz Kindler disguised as Professor Charles Rankin, who is about to get married to Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), a woman that has no idea that she's tying the knot with a Nazi fugitive.

The first 40 minutes of the movie take some getting used to.

I might be a little biased here, since I'm not used to older movies, but the camera work in this specific movie feels terrible at first. The dialogues are mostly shot in what looks and feels like one single take, with no variations from the classic "American shot" or the medium shots.

                                          
                                                            

On the other hand, the photography and lighting of this movie were amazing. I was surprised at how well it worked with the story, and how Welles used the lighting to his favor.
This is probably just a very common first reaction to Noir movies, but I still thought it was worth pointing out.

The plot does get interesting though. 

On her wedding day, a completely unaware Mary welcomes Meinike into her fiancé's house. The guy asks for Professor Rankin, and right after that, leaves the house. Unknowingly, she becomes the only witness to Rankin and Meinike's connection.
Right after this encounter, Kindler kills Meinike, afraid that his ex comrade was being followed by American authorities, which was exactly the case. Wilson arrived in Harper on the same train as Meinike, and begins to suspect Rankin after Meinike disappears mysteriously from the city.

Wilson has dinner with Mary's family, and during that dinner Rankin unintentionally blows off his cover when he tells Wilson that "Marx was not German, he was a Jew" (one of my favorite scenes, now that I think about it).

Soon after that, Wilson asks Mary if she saw the outsider, Meinike, the day she got married. As she's about to tell him the truth, her husband stops her, nearly confirming to Wilson that Kindler killed him.

Rankin then tells his wife some made-up story about how he broke Meinike's sister's heart, and that the man was after him for money, that's why he killed him.

At this point, you assume Mary would run away from Kindler. Any reasonable person would, right? Wrong. Mary decides to stick with her homicidal husband, and promises him she will never tell anyone the truth, even though that makes her an accomplice of the crime.

                                            

Wilson was always one step ahead of Kindler.
His plan was to get Mary to believe Kindler's version from the start, just so he could use her dad to tell her the real truth: that Rankin is actually Franz Kindler, a Nazi mastermind who somehow managed to hide his identity from the world, and run away to Harper.

In a deep state of denial, she refuses to believe either her father or Wilson, because in her mind, the idea of marrying a monster is inconceivable. And by doing that, Mary has no idea she is putting her life and her family's at risk.

I don't want to spoil the ending. So this is all I'm going to reveal about the plot.

Even though I didn't really like the end of this movie, I was pleasantly surprised by Loretta's role in the film.
Given the time period it was shot, I was expecting it to be very misogynistic. I expected Loretta's character to be completely one dimensional, and driven by the male characters' decisions and actions. But she had a voice, a personality, and was actually decisive for the end of the drama.

Yes, it has a lot of clichés; but it also has a pretty interesting soundtrack. And surprisingly, the noise in the images wasn't really a problem for me, it just added to the aesthetic of the movie.

Overall, I'd say this was a great start to my historical movie journey. 

I'm excited to see where all this is gonna take me.