The signateurist approach is particularly apt for analyzing Hollywood, where

names-not only of directors but of actors and characters too-were strictly regulated.

As Ray notes, in the studio system, "all slippages between proper and improper names

were to be anticipated and policed" (Andy Hardy 186). This kind of policing becomes

even more crucial in the postwar landscape, where naming names would soon result in

dangerous consequences. In fact, the Waldorf Statement, a joint declaration from all the

studio heads outlining the industry's policy of not knowingly employing any Communist,

was released just a year later. The Statement would open the way to the naming of the

Hollywood Ten. While 1946 was the most financially successful year for Hollywood, it

also signaled troubles that were just on the horizon. Ultimately, these postwar shifts

would result in enforced anonymity for several prominent writers and directors, who

would not be able to sign their own names to their projects for many years to come. As

Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten, put it: "Cashing a check made out to an

imaginary person is not a simple matter when your own name cannot appear as an

endorser" (qtd. in Dick, Radical Innocence 228).23 Welles himself seems to have

responded to these cultural changes by making the most standard film of his career. In

this context, following the detective, I would like to investigate the signatures in and of

The Stranger. The detective's method will enable us to circumvent the traditional

auteurist approach of digging deep for interior meaning. This may also be particularly

relevant in the case of Orson Welles, who, Gilbert Adair argues, "was the sole American

filmmaker to have created, as director and actor, a set of characters whose names, as well

as faces, we continue to remember" (Flickers 94-95; original emphasis). The next section

will remember the name of Orson Welles, but we will also forget it in order to rediscover