highlight this point because it is often left unaddressed in any assessment of the film. As

mentioned earlier, most critics have assumed that The Stranger is the least Wellesian

film, characteristic of the oppressive regime of the studio system, where ultimately, as

Andrew Sinclair puts it, "his genius was put in a straightjacket" (44). That is to say, citing

the "lost" scenes as evidence, they have established that this is the one Wellesian film of

which Welles is not the auteur. That is why the film has not mattered much in the debate

over Welles's authorship.

 Yet, The Stranger is deeply concerned with questions of authorship and authority.

For, even though Welles-playing-Kindler-playing-Rankin strikes off the swastika on the

notepad, his/their authority is not obliterated. Indeed, in that conventional moment, his

signature is intentionally erased. Still, The Stranger continues to be cited as an Orson

Welles film. So, while the most striking scenes may be lost and the genius may be

missing, in this case, an ostensibly un-Wellesian film has significant implications for the

role of the auteur in the studio system. What we need in this case is a different way of

thinking about auteurism and the name of the author.

 Surfacing Evidence

 Here is a story about another missing letter. This is a simple mystery, for the

criminal is known to all. He has stolen a letter and is now using it to blackmail its author,

who is a person of prominence. This should be a fairly straightforward case to solve: if

the police retrieve the letter, the extortion ends. So they launch a series of systematic

investigations, but to no avail. Despite their best efforts, the police are unable to unearth

that letter. The crime remains unsolved, the letter unfound-perhaps because of the

simplicity of the thing itself. While the police are frantically digging away to find clues