Strangers on a Train 1951

Generally ignored or panned when it first showed up on movie screens, it is now considered one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces and with good reason. Seen by me many times, the last being the other night on a blu ray disc it is a complex and disturbing psychological thriller based on a book by Patricia Highsmith.

The film opens with shots of two men getting out of cabs at a train station and we only see their shoes, which tell us quite a bit about the men wearing them. One pair is plain and proper, the other shoes are brown and white brogues, dapper and stylish in a show off way. The shoes and the men wearing them meet finally on the train as it travels towards our capitol and one of them is pushy and starts a conversation with the more demure and settled one.

Bruno and Guy are soon no longer strangers on a train, and if Bruno has his way they will be partners in crime. Bruno played by an unexpected and quite brilliant Robert Walker is a tease and is soon testing and baiting the more demure Guy who is a young tennis player on his way to a brilliant career in the sport and maybe later a political future. Bruno has a way of getting information out of Guy and he is soon telling him of a plan of his for a double murder pact where he will murder Guy’s treacherous cheating wife, pregnant with another man’s baby and in exchange Guy will end Bruno’s much hated father’s life. “You do my murder, I do yours”. And perhaps in gay sexual banter, we can read it also as You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.  Both are privileged men, Bruno comes from money and lives in easy leisure and the lap of luxury, and Guy the “butch” but soft   tennis player is involved with a senator’s daughter who he plans to marry once his hated wife gives him his much sought after divorce.

Matters are soon out of hand and this is what pushes the film on its twisted track of deceit and murder. Bruno is twisted and in 50’s mode he is most likely homosexual and Hitchcock drops stereotypical period pieces of pop psychology to make Bruno’s psychosis visible including a clinging mother played with disturbing humor and eccentricity by the character actress Marion Lorne who made her mark later on in network t.v. variety shows and series. Hitch is of course adept at using disturbing moms in his films. He also uses clothes as a barometer of Bruno’s fey sensibilities, including silly ties, tie pins and garish dressing gowns.

Bruno indeed takes it upon himself, to murder Guy’s wife in a pivotal and extraordinary sequence in an amusement park. We watch as Bruno flirts, follows and plays with Miriam, Guy’s wife out for a night of fun at the park with two young male friends. Miriam is wonderfully played by Laura Elliott, whose murder, strangled by Bruno will be seen by us in her fallen eye glasses a beautiful and ghastly cinematic moment. . This is one of many great set pieces in the film, but I won’t give any more away except to mention that the orgasmic climax of the film that also takes place in the same park on a run amuck merry go-round and is one of the great moments in cinema.  The casting is up and down with a somewhat miscast Ruth Roman as Guy’s love interest. She looks like she would devour him, and seems all wrong for him, and I just couldn’t see her as his lover. Someone blonde and petite would have been a better match to use a term from tennis. The other supporting players are fine especially Leo G. Carroll who held the record for appearing in Hitchcock films (6 times)  and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia who is the comic relief in this nightmare. For a time Raymond Chandler worked on the screenplay, but Hitchcock removed both Chandler and his screenplay from the film, and instead worked with an assistant of Ben Hecht, Czenzi Ormonde who got screenplay credit along with Whitfield Cook and Raymond Chandler who the studio insisted get credit. The great Robert Burks did the cinematography (and got an Oscar nomination) and was the first of 12 Hitchcock films that he photographed. A few minor debits for me include the rather long tennis match in which we can easily make out that Granger’s double is playing and some poorly done process shots. Best film, director, actor of 1951.