to be restored, thus cutting out almost entirely what Welles considered the signature

sequence of the film. For the studio, as Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni explains, "a dreamlike

sequence around South America did not necessarily smell like box office-especially in

the mid-1940s" (96). Welles himself often spoke of the clashes with the studio over the

opening sequence in The Stranger. While admitting that the majority of the deleted

segment was not central to the plot, he told Barbara Leaming that Nims was "the great

supercutter, who believed that nothing should be in a movie that did not advance the

story" (312). Since the identity of the Nazi mastermind is revealed more directly later on,

these striking wild and dreamlike images did nothing to develop the plot. Hence, they

were expunged.

 But the opening sequence may have been lost even before it was even filmed.

 Strike Three. Clinton Heylin notes that according to the shooting schedule there

were days assigned for all the scenes in the shooting script. But then, he points out, the

schedule "has a series of lines drawn through the scenes deleted from the film, perhaps

suggesting their elimination at the outset" (175). In other words, The Stranger may have

been pre-edited. Welles would insist that the opening scenes were shot and deleted later,

even claiming "a deep wound" in his leg that occurred when he "stepped on a baby's

coffin" while shooting in Latin America, a wound that would "always remind[] [him] of

what was lost from the movie" (qtd. in Leaming 312). But whether the sequence was

altered during pre- or post-production is not the most significant piece of this puzzle.

Unlike the recently recovered film It's All True, another Latin American project that

Welles worked on just before The Stranger, these originals scenes, if they ever existed,

have been lost. What we have in their place is a generic Hollywood opening that, as