The Stranger

The Stranger is a 1967 drama film directed by Luchino Visconti, adapting Albert Camus's celebrated 1942 novel of the same name. Marcello Mastroianni stars as Meursault, a French Algerian clerk whose emotional detachment becomes evident right after he loses his mother and shows little visible grief at her funeral. Continuing his ordinary routine, he begins a relationship with Marie while getting drawn into the affairs of his neighbor Raymond, a man with a shady reputation as a pimp.

Through this connection, Meursault ends up killing a man on a sun-scorched beach in an act that seems to lack any real premeditation. The back half of the story follows his arrest, trial and death sentence, culminating in his refusal to accept a priest's offer of religious absolution before his execution. Visconti shot the film as an Italian-French-Algerian co-production, casting Mastroianni alongside Anna Karina and Bernard Blier. Suso Cecchi d'Amico and Georges Conchon worked with Visconti on adapting Camus's existentialist text, and the finished picture screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival before earning a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign language film.