On its release, "The Stranger" was unfavorably compared to Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943). "One reason for the similarities is the recutting, supervised by Ernest Nims," wrote film historian Bret Wood. "By removing the Latin American sequence and many of the political elements (such as the clock/fascist analogy),"The Stranger" is transformed from a socially relevant drama to a small town murder story, with the villain more a psychopath than a political fugitive. Nims cut the film to play like a conventional thriller with little regard to Welles's subtextual purposes."