(1946; b/w) Until the end of the war, most Americans had been unaware of the Nazi-run concentration camps in Europe. "This obscenity must be destroyed!" bellows Mr Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), an agent in the Allied War Crimes Commission, referring to Franz Kindler, the mastermind behind the camps. From Victor Trivas's story, Orson Welles directed this noir film with a grotesque finale on the church clock tower.

Accepting full responsibility, Wilson orders the release of Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne) from a Czech prison cell, hoping the Nazi criminal will lead him to Kindler somewhere in the US. Both Wilson and Meinike get off a bus in Harper, Connecticut, in the autumn; but Meinike knocks Wilson unconscious in the school gymnasium, thinking he has killed his pursuer.

Having looked in a telephone directory, he then goes to the home of Professor Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) where he encounters the teacher's bride-to-be, Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter of a former Supreme Court justice. Deciding against waiting, Meinike heads in the direction from which Mary indicts Charles would soon be arriving.

When the two men meet, Charles takes Konrad into the woods where the former subordinate tries to convince Franz (who says he's changed but lying in wait among the Americans "until the day when we strike again") to ask forgiveness from God for his grievous sins. "They freed you so you would lead them to me," Franz realizes before strangling the little man. After the wedding the next day but before going away on a honeymoon with Mary, Charles buries the dead body.

To Mr Potter's self-serve general store - "All your needs are on our shelves. Just look around and help yourselves" - Mr Wilson returns with a nasty bump on his head and several suspicions. Kindler had kept such a low profile in Germany that his identity is completely unknown to Wilson except for having a hobby with old clocks.

Invited to the home of Judge Longstreet (Philip Merivale), Wilson, posing as an antiques buyer, dines with the family, including Mary and Charles, who when asked his opinion of Germany's rehabilitation from a historian's perspective expounds at length by saying a psychologist's understanding is needed: "The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world hatred and conspired against and put upon by inferior people, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German. We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned from our own casualty list the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everywhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German. No! He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in. The German's unbroken dream world comes alive, and he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. He's ... another Barbarossa ... another Hitler."

Later in the evening, Wilson calls Washington, DC: "You were right about Rankin; he's above suspicion." But in the middle of the night, he wakes with a fresh insight, placing another call: "Who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?" Taking aside Mary's younger brother Noah (Richard Long), Wilson reveals himself to be a detective in need of some covert assistance because Mary is in danger.

In order to explain Meinike's appearance two weeks earlier and sudden disappearance, Charles makes confession to Mary that in Geneva a girl had drowned in his company, and though the death had been an accident, the brother believed it was murder; Charles admits to giving the man some money. More revelations follow; nevertheless, Mary remains loyalty to her husband. Even after Wilson shows her a film of the concentration camps with their gas chambers, Mary prevaricates, denying she ever saw the mysterious stranger on the day before her wedding.

Wilson says to Judge Longstreet that his daughter (whom the judge refers to as "sister") Mary's conscience is struggling with the truth and the horror of having married and loved "such a creature," expecting the tension to result in a nervous breakdown. Wilson begins to quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and someone else helps complete his recall of the words: "Commit a crime and the world is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole." The church clock has been repaired, and snow has begun to fall on Harper.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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