the binary opposition between interiority and exteriority, turning the world of small town

America upside down-or we might say, inside out. Hitchcock's Charles, then, becomes

the kind of criminal Poe's Dupin would find intriguing.

 Welles's Charles, on the other hand, seems not to be such a character. Truffaut

once said that Wellesian characters were always "exceptional beings." They were, he

believed, "geniuses or monsters, monstrous geniuses." Charles Rankin seems to exhibit

no such depth. Welles plays him fairly unambiguously. That Rankin is in fact the Nazi

fugitive Franz Kindler is never in much doubt. One of his first acts in the film is the

murder of old comrade Meinike, who claims he has been sent by the All Highest. This

scene with Meinike becomes the key, albeit a very obvious one, to figuring out Rankin's

identity. While the boys at his prep school are out trailing a paper-chase, Rankin drags

Meinike into the woods and murders him with his bare hands. In a rare long take, Welles

shows Rankin quickly burying the dead body in a shallow grave. That is all it takes. The

mystery is simple, and it is simply revealed.

 Indeed, the film is not about our detection of Rankin's guilt but of his wife Mary's

eventual discovery of his (to us, obvious) genocidal crimes. First, he is not a conflicted

figure. Unlike the Charles in ,\s/,/ai/ of a Doubt, Palmer argues, Charles Rankin is

unmistakably guilty and Mary is truly innocent (10). Nor is he a very complex character.

Unlike other "monstrous geniuses" in the Welles oeuvre, such as Charles Foster Kane or

Hank Quinlan, "the 'otherness' of the unheimlich Kindler is not identified with either

relentless power or hypnotic sexuality" (10). Nor still is he the ambivalent noir hero.

Borde and Chaumeton have argued that one of the central features of postwar noir is its

moral ambivalence: "In it, 'vice' is seductive; it is nevertheless experienced as 'vicious,'