he added, "the one of my films of which I am least the author" (74). Welles's desire to

disassociate himself from the film seems to anticipate the Allen Smithee phenomenon.

Allen Smithee, of course, is the pseudonym used by directors who wish to disown films

when they feel that creative control has been wrested from them by the Hollywood

machine, which values profit not art. This practice didn't begin until two decades after

Welles had signed his name to a restrictive contract for The Stranger that, as Heylin

points out, "tied him tighter than a Victorian corset" (169). Considering the production

struggles over his first Hollywood venture since the public showdown with RKO over the

mid-shooting cancellation of It's All True, one can imagine that Welles might well have

disowned the film, and asked that his name be struck from its credits, if that convention

had been available at the time.19 But, we might ask, as Peter Conrad does in a recent

reassessment of the stories the self-proclaimed genius told about his life, "how could

Welles-who as usual directed it, acted in it, and wrote a good deal of the script-leave

himself out?" (223).

 Here's another way to think about Welles's supposed absence. Welles would often

claim that he stayed on the picture to show that he could work within the studio system,

that he could "say 'action' and 'cut' just like all the other fellas" (qtd. in Megahey 189).

In other words, this may not be a case of suppressed authorship after all. For Welles

sometimes asserted as well that with The Stranger he had intended to make a picture

worthy of the institutional mode of filmmaking, almost to debunk the myth of the

romantic genius and show that he "didn't glow in the dark" (qtd. in Heylin 171). While I

do not want to privilege one strand of directorial commentary over another, especially

when talking about someone as mercurial and self-contradictory as Orson Welles, I