The Stranger (1946)

Orson Welles, Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young · 1946 · 95 min

Orson Welles hunts a Nazi through small-town Connecticut, and the Nazi is Orson Welles. He called it the most conventional picture he ever directed, and it was the only one that turned a profit on first release — but Welles's idea of conventional still runs to a clock tower, a church bell, and one of the earliest uses of real concentration camp footage in a fiction film. Edward G. Robinson does the pursuing with quiet, exhausted patience.

Chosen print (2026-08-22): Archive.org item TheStranger720p — 4.7 GB MKV · 944×720 · 95.0 min ✓.

The provenance question the sweep raised is answered: the item was uploaded 2011-08-25, two years before the 2013 Kino restoration existed, so it cannot be a rip of it — and the eye-pass confirmed it does not look like one. The alternative — a well-worn SD print running four minutes short — stays culled.

Culled: RARBG-tagged HD rip.

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and a curation pass. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Watched end to end and confirmed on 2026-08-22 (owner eye-pass): runtime, intact titles, no watermarks or overlays, no colorization or crop, audio in sync.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1946 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1973–75 contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). Every match for the common title in those volumes is a different work — Columbia's The Stranger from Ponca City (renewed R582968), Fugitive television episodes, Simenon adaptations — while this film's proprietors filed nothing. The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.