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‘The Stranger,’ Made All the More So in the Person of Mastroianni
Devoted to an actor of uncommon looks, charm and range, the Marcello Mastroianni retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center includes a work that is itself rare: Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel “The Stranger.”
The movie, in which an ordinary Pied-Noir (Algerian-born Frenchman) irrationally murders an Arab in broad daylight on a Mediterranean beach, was made in 1967 with Mastroianni in the lead. It has long been without an American distributor and, owing to complicated rights issues, was never released here on DVD. It’s showing on Saturday and Tuesday in an excellent 35-millimeter print from the Istituto Luce Cinecittà.
Shot in Technicolor entirely in Algeria, with Jean-Luc Godard’s favored actress, Anna Karina, as the protagonist’s lover, Visconti’s “The Stranger” makes the senseless sensuous — even sybaritic — in its blazing light and palpable heat. The movie was eagerly anticipated but suspiciously received when it opened in New York in December 1967. Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice deemed it a cynical producer’s package intended to titillate “urban art-house, God-is-dead-and-living-in-Argentina sophisticates.”
Visconti seemed an inappropriate choice to direct Camus’s laconic classic. He was an operatic stylist and an aristocratic Marxist then best known in the United States for his neorealist and costume spectacles “Rocco and His Brothers” (1961) and “The Leopard” (1963). Mr. Sarris accused him of having “prostrated his own directorial personality before the cultural monumentality of Camus.”
Actually, Visconti had a personal connection to “The Stranger,” which he had been trying to film since the early 1960s. His first movie, “Ossessione” (“Obsession”), released in Italy in 1943, a year after “The Stranger” was published in France, was an unauthorized adaptation of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” That hard-boiled novel inspired Camus, partly because it was narrated by a murderer on death row.
“The Stranger” à la Visconti, however, is far from film noir.
Visconti originally planned to set it in independent Algeria, a transposition vetoed by Camus’s widow, Francine Camus. The time frame was pushed back to the late 1930s, intensifying the emphasis on French colonial rule. The novel necessarily focuses on its antihero’s internal world; the movie effortlessly calls attention to the situation of the Pied-Noir, living amid a sea of subjugated natives. (A longish scene, barely in the novel, puts Mastroianni’s character in a holding cell filled with Arabs.)
Steering clear of visual metaphor, Visconti focuses on atmosphere and quasi-documentary detail. (In her recent book, “Looking for ‘The Stranger,’” the cultural critic Alice Kaplan called the movie “a precious record of Camus’s lost world.”) Visconti’s attention to location and fidelity to Camus’s text accentuate the story’s peculiarities.
The first half of “The Stranger” depicts a shabby idyll. Visconti’s anticlerical, anti-bourgeois politics become overt only in the trial sequence, broadly staged in a real, seemingly stifling Algiers courtroom. The movie reaches its existential apotheosis in the confrontation between Mastroianni’s character and a priest in a dark prison cell.
Visconti’s first choice to star was Alain Delon. Icy and self-contained, he might have been a beautiful cipher; Mr. Mastroianni’s warmth and natural appeal make his inexplicable character all the stranger.
Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies currently playing in New York’s repertory theaters.
The Stranger
May 27 and 30 at the Walter Reade Theater, Manhattan; 212-875-5601, filmlinc.org.
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