The Stranger

Marcello Mastroianni stars as Meursault, Camus’s archetype of alienation, a man who commits a senseless crime simply because the sun shines. While Visconti’s vision is entirely faithful to Camus’s story, it also supplies a sense of detail and context absent from the book, meticulously re-creating 1930s Algiers with a keen awareness of the fraught relations between the French colonists and the colonized Arabs. “In Mastroianni . . . Visconti has a superb Meursault. Though the actor is much too glamorous for the part, he manages to shrink himself into the disaffected, slightly dazed, but intelligent nonentity Camus had in mind” (John Simon).