1952," who would assume he had been sent by the Ftuhrer and therefore guide him to a

morgue attendant specializing in fake passports.2 Besides issuing counterfeit travel

documents, the attendant would "take a paper from [Meinike] with Franz Kindler's name

on it and draw a series of diagonal lines through the letters F, Z, D, L, E, R until it

spelled] Rankin" (Heylin 178).

 But in the released version of The Stranger, only snippets of this expository

episode have survived. After being allowed to escape, and unaware of being followed by

a female agent who is presumably working for the Allied War Crimes Commission, we

see Meinike sneaking into a morgue in a vaguely Latin American country. Although the

expressionist mood still prevails-heightened by the low-angle photography during the

chiaroscuro exchange between Meinike and the photographer-the sequence is abridged

to report only the most essential dramatic details that will lead to the escaped convict's

journey to the United States in search of the transformed Nazi war criminal. While being

photographed for his fake passport, Meinike demands to know the whereabouts of Franz

Kindler. After some hesitation, the morgue attendant hands him a postcard of Harper,

Connecticut. There is no mention of Rankin's name, since Meinike claims he knows

Kindler's current identity. The scene cuts to the picture postcard of a bucolic old town

with a Gothic clock tower at its center; then a fade out suggests the change in location as

the town itself springs to life.

 The long Latin American segment, which the director saw as an opportunity to

explore "a whole series of very wild, dreamlike events" (qtd. in Welles and Bogdanovich

186), was apparently edited by producer Sam Spiegel in collaboration with editor Ernest

Nims. Up to thirty minutes of footage was reportedly deleted from the introduction, never