The Stranger (1946)
I get that Orson Welles is an influential director and technical innovator, but I haven't warmed to his movies that much. In that regard,
The Stranger is vintage Welles for me; long-winded, pompous, and hyperbolic. And Welles himself is too grandiose for someone trying to hide in plain sight.
The intro at the harbor looks (and somewhat feels) like noir, but once the action moves to Harper, it's just a regular thriller. If this weren't a Film Noir HoF, I wouldn't have known this was noir. It seems to lack most of the things I'd expect to see in noir, like a cynical protagonist and moral ambiguity and sexual tension. Maybe my idea of the genre is wrong, though.
Like many old films,
The Stranger is rather pedantic in ascertaining that viewers will surely get who's the bad guy and how the story unfolds. There's an evil nazi mastermind, a naive wife, an adamant nazi hunter, etc. No shades of grey, no depth, only an adjective and noun to describe everyone.
The Stranger isn't a bad film, though. It delivers a simple story in a comfortably compact form. It's a lot more naive than I expected, and there's too much hand-holding for the audience, but I could think a lot worse ways to spend 90 minutes.