development of deep focus cinematography represented "a dialectical step forward in the

evolution of film language." But in this shot, deep focus is used not for dialectical but for

dramatic effect.

 In his essay showing how the use of deep focus cinematography evolved in Classic

Hollywood from the innovative early 1940s to its full-blown use after the war, David

Bordwell has argued that while Welles's cinematographic advances in Citizen Kane were

flamboyant and controversial, the studio system quickly found a way to appropriate those

innovations in the service of storytelling.26 After 1942, Bordwell notes, "Hollywood

adopted a less picturesque deep-focus style better suited to the demands of classical

narrative and decoupage" (120).27 In other words, the seemingly radical shifts in mise-en-

scene are standardized by the studio system, such that a shot that is "so rare in 1937 ...

[becomes] quite ordinary a decade later" (93). The Stranger clearly belongs to the later

tradition in its "ordinary" use of deep focus. Interestingly, in place of cinematographer

Gregg Toland, who saw himself as an artist, in The Stranger, Welles uses Russell Metty,

whose name itself alludes to that standard craftsman of the studio system, the metteur-en-

scene.

 So, if the Wellesian signature is missing here, let us turn to the other signatory on

the credits, S. P. Eagle. S. P. Eagle was in fact the name briefly assumed by the

independent producer Sam Spiegel until 1954. Like so many other Jewish European

emigres, Spiegel came to Hollywood as a stranger. As a fugitive from Germany in 1933

where All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) had been banned, Spiegel stopped over in

Mexico before coming to America, a journey that ironically echoes Kindler's move from

Germany to America. Once in Hollywood, biographer Andrew Sinclair explains, "he