James Naremore puts it, "barely deviates from industry habits" (125). The final authority

seems to have ended up in the hands of the great supercutter.

 Welles had in fact signed an extremely restrictive contract, giving Ernest Nims the

license to edit any part of the film "in the interest of telling its tale as simply and swiftly

as possible" (Leaming 311). Following the much-publicized struggle with RKO over The

Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Welles had developed the reputation for being an

unbankable director. Therefore, on September 20, 1945, he signed what would have

seemed to be quite an unpleasant deal with International Pictures to direct a film that was

then titled "Date with Destiny," based on Victor Trivas's story called "The Trap." Heylin

regards the contract as "Hollywood's ultimate revenge on the Boy Wonder of 1939"

(170). The terms of the agreement required Welles to surrender control over the finished

product, he argues, "depriving him of many little strokes he'd planned to apply to his

thematic canvas" (190). "Just four days after inscribing his moniker on the dotted line,"

Heylin tells us, "he delivered a 164-page final shooting script which bore telltale

thumbprints on every page" (174). But it seems that as the shooting proceeded, a number

of these thumbprints began getting erased. For the final product reflects all the elements

of Classic Hollywood filmmaking: a linear plot, continuity editing, and a neat (if

predictable) resolution of conflict at the end. Indeed, cuts to the opening sequence were

apparently only the first in a series of edits3 that transformed the film into what is

unanimously regarded as a standard studio product.

 So, in the case of The Stranger, the auteur appears to have struck out.