Orson Welles' one attempt at directing for hire, 1946's The Stranger, is generally considered among his weakest efforts. But while it may not be Citizen Kane, or even Touch of Evil, The Stranger (TCM, Jan. 26, 4 p.m.) is still Welles. Nazi hunter Edward G. Robinson tracks down a concentration camp mastermind to a small town in Connecticut, where he discovers the unrepentant fascist posing as the newly married history professor Charles Rankin. Rankin is one of Welles' juiciest roles, the placid mask of politesse slowly slipping off to reveal the hideous face of Nazism, comfortably ensconced in small-town America.

The Stranger contrasts the comforting routines of collegiate life with the murderous drives that had so recently destroyed Europe. Hence Rankin's intense discomfort as he tries to avoid his students' cavorting in the woods in order to adequately hide the body of the man he has just killed. As a Popular Front artist, Welles was concerned by the potential rise of fascism at home, and The Stranger is his vision of totalitarianism lurking unnoticed on Main Street, USA. One of Hollywood's all-time great character actors, Robinson turns in one of his strongest performances here as the indefatigable investigator, good-natured until his inner tiger emerges.

Another postwar tale of Nazi hunting in the new world, also released in 1946, is Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (TCM, Jan. 26, 6 p.m.), which is less concerned than The Stranger with the meaning of Nazism and prefers to use it as a brilliant excuse for an exciting adventure tale and love story. Cary Grant is at his suave best as the spymaster who puts Ingrid Bergman in danger to crack a Nazi ring in Brazil, and the couple share what remains one of the silver screen's most passionate (and longest) kisses. Hitchcock invests everyday objects with enormous significance (a telephone, a glass of milk, a cellar key), injecting a frisson of current-events topicality to his love triangle. Claude Rains is peculiarly compelling as the soft-hearted Nazi who marries Bergman; Hitchcock reserves the villain's designation for his mother, played by Leopoldine Konstantin and described by film critic Kim Newman as "the sort of creature Mrs. Bates might have been if left alive."

Before he became a shock-jock filmmaker, Lars von Trier was a low-key formalist, making films that felt like careful adaptations of obscure, gnarled modernist novels. Von Trier's best early work is The Element of Crime (IFC, Jan. 31, 1 a.m.), a thriller overlaid with a portentous sense of dread. Fisher is a grizzled ex-cop returned from Egypt to investigate a series of child murders. Armed with a copy of his mentor's handbook, also entitled The Element of Crime, Fisher stumbles through a hallucinatory European landscape where all sense of normalcy quickly vanishes. The Element of Crime is unforgettable in ways that more recent, self-consciously "important" von Trier films can only dream about.