way, it is Welles the auteur who becomes the ultimate stranger in this picture. Like a

dutiful auctor, Welles estranges himself from his signature in order to make a film that

would be all too familiar. Let us assume that is in fact the point and therefore look not for

depth but perhaps its inverse, the surface. In so doing, we would be following that other

O.W., Oscar Wilde, who once said: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by

appearances. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible" (qtd. in Sontag,

Against Interpretation 3).

 To judge by appearances is to point out that The Stranger, first and foremost, was

an imitation of Alfred Hitchcock's .\lit /,,ii of a Doubt (1943), which is a story about the

strange familiarity of evil. Interestingly, Welles has claimed that this was the only

American film directed by Hitchcock that he admired. In the Hitchcock version, Charles

Oackley, a strangler of wealthy East coast widows, hides in an idyllic Northern California

town of Santa Rosa. There, his sister Emma and her daughter (and his namesake) Charlie

are thrilled to welcome him into their home and community, because they believe he can,

as R. Barton Palmer argues, "save them from their suffocating ordinariness" (5). But

what Uncle Charlie introduces to the small town is an outside world not only of exciting

entertainment but also of crime and deception. .\l/hwiJ\ of a Doubt presents an ironic

portrait of wartime America. As Palmer notes, "the Capracominess of the film's Santa

Rosa makes room not only for a full gallery of oddball grotesques, but implies (as Emma

and young Charlie both testify) sexual immaturity and failure" (6). That is, the film

exposes the illusion that crime exists out there, disrupting the porous boundaries between

the underworld of crime and the moral world of upstanding small town America. To put

it differently, Hitchcock, whose fascination for Poe has been well documented, ruptures