walls" and instructs them to "use pad." As the phone conversation ends, Rankin tears the

signature sheet off the notepad, and the camera tracks him in profile out of the phone

booth.

 The erased signature is a rather heavy-handed illustration of Rankin's identity. By

this point in The Stranger, it is obvious that Charles Rankin, a history professor at a boys'

prep school in Harper, Connecticut, is in fact the escaped Nazi mastermind, Franz

Kindler. Although the townspeople consider him "above suspicion," his actions leading

up to this scene-especially his strangling of fellow-Nazi fugitive Konrad Meinike

(Constantin Shane) as well as his fierce insistence that Marx was not a German but a

Jew-have left no doubt about his identity. So, the delayed revelatory signature shot does

not seem to reveal much.

 But the signature moment was to occur right at the beginning of the film.

 Strike Two. A few quick strikes would have revealed that the former, high-ranking

SS officer and architect of the Final Solution, Franz Kindler (also Orson Welles), had

indeed transformed himself into Charles Rankin. The moment was to occur during the

opening Latin American sequence, when the Allied War Crimes Commission releases

Konrad Meinike, a Nazi bureaucrat, with the hope that he might lead them to the fugitive

Nazi mastermind. While elements of this expressionist sequence remain in the released

version of the film, some details have been lost. In search of Franz Kindler, a

schizophrenic Meinike was to travel to Argentina.1 In a moment that would have eerily

anticipated Harry Lime's acclaimed entrance in The ThirdMan (1949), Meinike was to

appear shuffling anxiously down a cobblestone path, wanting to deliver a message "from

the All Highest." He was to come in contact with the "Nazis of 1932 plotting for