Strangers on a Train (film)

Strangers on a Train

Poster by Bill Gold
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Produced by Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay by
Based on Strangers on a Train
1950 novel
by Patricia Highsmith
Starring
Music by Dimitri Tiomkin
Cinematography Robert Burks
Edited by William H. Ziegler
Production
company
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release dates
  • June 30, 1951 (1951-06-30)
Running time
 101 minutes
Language English
Budget $1.2 million
Box office $7 million[1]

Strangers on a Train is a 1951 American psychological crime thriller film with film noir elements, produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30th the next year. The film stars Farley Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker, and features Leo G. Carroll, Patricia Hitchcock and Laura Elliott. The film is number 32 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills.

The story concerns two strangers who meet on a train, a young tennis player and a charming psychopath. The psychopath suggests that because they each want to "get rid" of someone, they should "exchange" murders, and that way neither will be caught. The psychopath commits the first murder; and then tries to force the tennis player to complete the bargain.

Plot

Criss-crossing railroad tracks are an image used in the film

Amateur tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) wants to marry Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator, and pursue a political career. First, he must divorce his vulgar and promiscuous wife Miriam (Laura Elliott). On a train, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) recognizes Guy and knows about his marital situation from the gossip pages. Bruno introduces himself, then proposes an idea for the perfect homicide: he and Guy should "swap murders". Bruno will murder Miriam, and in exchange Guy will kill Bruno's despised father. Each would be killing a stranger. Having no identifiable motive for the crimes, neither would be suspects. Guy humors Bruno's absurd murder plot by pretending to find it amusing. Bruno interprets this as agreement to the scheme. Bruno then borrows Guy's monogrammed cigarette lighter and slips it into his own pocket.

Guy meets with Miriam. Pregnant by someone else, she now refuses to give Guy a divorce and threatens to cause a scandal. Guy relays the bad news to Anne, metaphorically commenting that he would like to "strangle" Miriam. Meanwhile, Bruno stalks Miriam through an amusement park and fatally strangles her on the "Magic Isle". Bruno then informs Guy that Miriam is dead, and expects him to follow through on murdering Bruno's father. Bruno sends Guy his house key, a map to his father's bedroom, and a pistol.

When the police question Guy about Miriam's death, he claims he was on a train at the time of the murder. The police determine his alibi is inconclusive because he could have left the train in time to commit the murder and continued his trip on another train. Guy is not arrested, but the police assign an officer to trail him to ensure he does not flee while they investigate.

To pressure Guy into fulfilling his obligation, Bruno introduces himself to Anne and meets Anne's younger sister, Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock), who physically resembles Miriam. Soon after, Bruno appears uninvited at a party at Senator Morton's house. To amuse another guest, Bruno demonstrates how to fatally strangle someone. His gaze happens to fall upon Barbara, and her resemblance to Miriam triggers a flashback. He begins strangling the woman but he blacks out before harming her. An upset Barbara tells Anne that, "His hands were on her throat, but he was strangling me." Anne confronts Guy, who confesses the truth about Bruno's crazy scheme.

Pretending to agree to Bruno's original plan, Guy sneaks into Mr. Anthony's bedroom intending to warn him of his son's murderous intent. It is Bruno who is waiting there, however. Guy tries to convince Bruno to seek psychiatric help. When Guy refuses to follow through with Bruno's plan, Bruno threatens to frame Guy for Miriam's murder.

Anne visits Bruno's mother (Marion Lorne) to tell her that her son committed a murder, but the befuddled woman discounts it. Bruno appears and informs Anne that he intends to incriminate Guy by planting the stolen cigarette lighter at the amusement park. Anne and Guy devise a plan for Guy to finish his tennis match, evade the police, and reach the amusement park to prevent Bruno from planting the lighter.

Guy eventually wins the long match at Forest Hills, then, eluding the police, heads for the amusement park. Bruno is also delayed when he accidentally drops Guy's lighter down a storm drain and has to recover it. Guy arrives at the amusement park. Bruno stays out of sight until sunset when he can plant the lighter on the "Magic Isle". A worker recognizes Bruno from the night of the murder and informs the police. Guy catches up to Bruno, and they fight on the park's carousel. Thinking Guy is trying to escape, a police officer shoots at him, but his shot misses and kills the carousel operator instead. The dead man falls onto the control panel, and the carousel spins wildly out of control and crashes. The worker who recognized Bruno tells the police that Guy is innocent, and the mortally injured Bruno is the man he saw that night. Guy tells the police that Bruno was attempting to plant Guy's lighter at the murder scene. Bruno refuses to clear Guy, but as he dies, his fingers open to reveal Guy's lighter.

U.S. version

In the American version of the movie, a final scene shows Guy reunited with Anne on a train home. A fan recognizes Guy and attempts to strike up a conversation by asking "I beg your pardon, but aren't you Guy Haines?". Guy, hardened by his traumatic experience and realising that this was exactly how he met Bruno, quickly gets up and leaves with Anne without answering.

Cast

Perhaps his best-known cameo, where Hitchcock boards the train while Haines gets off, at the beginning of the film.

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance in this movie occurs 11 minutes into the film. He is seen carrying a double bass as he climbs onto a train. Young Barry Gordon, a child actor through the 50's, plays a little boy who has his ballon maliciously popped by Bruno in the amusement park murder scene.

Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him "a reel of storytelling time", since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that did not have to be spelled out.[2] Hitchcock said that he originally wanted William Holden for the Guy Haines role,[3][4] but Holden declined. "Holden would have been all wrong—too sturdy, too put off by Bruno", writes critic Roger Ebert.[5] "Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno's conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him."[5]

Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack L. Warner got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock's objections.[6] The director found her "bristling" and "lacking in sex appeal" and said that she had been "foisted upon him."[7] Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock's scorn throughout the production.[8] Granger diplomatically described it as Hitchcock's "disinterest" in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of Rope (1948). "He had to have one person in each film he could harass", Granger said.[8]

Kasey Rogers (Miriam, credited as Laura Elliott) noted that she had perfect vision at the time the movie was made, but Hitchcock insisted she wear the character's thick eyeglasses, even in long shots when regular glass lenses would have been undetectable. Rogers was effectively blind with the glasses on, and needed to be guided by the other actors.[9] In one scene, she can be seen dragging her hand along a table as she walks; this was in order for her to keep track of where she was.

Production

Pre-production

Hitchcock secured the rights to the Patricia Highsmith novel for just $7,500 since it was her first novel. As usual, Hitchcock kept his name out of the negotiations to keep the purchase price low.[10] Highsmith was quite annoyed when she later discovered who bought the rights for such a small amount.[10]

Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext (only hinted at in the novel) into the story and softened Bruno from a coarse alcoholic into a dapper, charming mama's boy — a much more Hitchcockian villain.[11] With treatment in hand, Hitchcock shopped for a screenwriter; he wanted a "name" writer to lend some prestige to the screenplay, but was turned down by eight writers, including John Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder, all of whom thought the story too tawdry and were put off by Highsmith's first-timer status.[12] Talks with Dashiell Hammett got further,[13] but here too communications ultimately broke down, and Hammett never took the assignment.[13]

Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Double Indemnity, in collaboration with Billy Wilder.[13][14] Chandler took the job despite his opinion that it was "a silly little story."[12] But Chandler was a notoriously difficult collaborator and the two men could not have had more different meeting styles: Hitchcock enjoyed long, rambling off-topic meetings where often the film would not even be mentioned for hours, while Chandler was strictly business and wanted to get out and get writing. He called the meetings "god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business."[13] Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit from his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot, "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!"[13] This would be their last collaboration. Chandler completed a first draft, then wrote a second, without hearing a single word back from Hitchcock; when finally he did get a communication from the director in late September, it was his dismissal from the project.[15]

Next, Hitchcock tried to hire Ben Hecht, but learned he was unavailable. Hecht suggested his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to write the screenplay.[15] Although Ormonde was without a formal screen credit, she did have two things in her favor: her recently published collection of short stories, Laughter From Downstairs, was attracting good notices from critics, and she was "a fair-haired beauty with long shimmering hair"[16]—always a plus with Hitchcock. With his new writer, he wanted to start from square one:

At their first conference, Hitchcock made a show of pinching his nose, then holding up Chandler's draft with his thumb and forefinger and dropping it into a wastebasket. He told the obscure writer that the famous one hadn't written a solitary line he intended to use, and they would have to start all over on page one, using Cook's treatment as a guide. The director told Ormonde to forget all about the book, then told her the story of the film himself, from beginning to end.[16]

There was not much time though — less than three weeks until location shooting was scheduled to start in the east. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock's associate producer Barbara Keon—disparagingly called "Hitchcock's factotum" by Chandler[17]—and Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife. Together the three women, working under the boss's guidance and late into most nights,[15] finished enough of the script in time to send the company east. The rest was complete by early November.[17] Three notable additions the trio had made were the runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses.[18]

There was one point of agreement between Chandler and Hitchcock, although it would come only much later, near the release of the film: they both acknowledged that since virtually none of Chandler's work remained in the final script, his name should be removed from the credits.[17] Hitchcock preferred the writing credit of Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde, but Warner Bros. wanted the cachet of the Chandler name and insisted it stay on.[17]

Even while the torturous writing stage was plodding its course, the director's excitement about the project was boundless. "Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain."[19] The more the film resolved in his mind's eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes' execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks, who would continue to work with Hitchcock, shooting every Hitchcock picture through to Marnie (1964), with the exception of Psycho.[20] "Low-keyed, mild mannered", Burks was "a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an exceptionally apt choice for what would prove to be Hitchcock's most Germanic film in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding."[21] None was more demanding than Bruno's strangulation of Miriam, shown reflected in her eyeglass lens: "It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years—and Robert Burks captured it magnificently."[22]

Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitch the best of his career: "You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Hitchcock insists on perfection. He has no patience with mediocrity on the set or at a dinner table. There can be no compromise in his work, his food or his wines."[20] Robert Burks received the film's sole Academy Award nomination for its black and white photography.[22]

Production

With cast nailed down, a script in hand, and a sympatico director of photography on board, the company was ready to commence filming. Hitchcock had a crew shoot background footage of the 1950 Davis Cup finals held 25–27 August 1950 at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York. While there, the crew had done some other location scouting.[23] Exteriors would be shot on both coasts, and interiors on soundstages at Warners.

Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the East Coast on October 17, 1950.[24] For six days, they shot at Penn Station in New York City, at the railroad station at Danbury, Connecticut—which became Guy's hometown Metcalf—and in spots around Washington, D.C.[24]

By month's end, they were back in California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee in Chatsworth, California.[8] The amusement park exteriors were shot there and at an actual Tunnel of Love at a fairground in Canoga Park, California.[8] Hitchcock had already shot the long shots for the tennis match at Forest Hills and would add closer shots with Granger and Jack Cushingham, Granger's tennis coach off-screen and Guy's tennis opponent Fred Reynolds on-screen at a tennis club in South Gate, California.[20] The rest of the shooting would take place on Warner soundstages, including many seemingly exterior and on-location shots that were actually done inside in front of rear-projection screens.

Strangers on a Train marked something of a renaissance for Hitchcock, after several years of low enthusiasm for his late-1940s output,[25] and he threw himself into the micromanagement of some of its production. Hitchcock himself designed Bruno's lobster necktie, revealed in a close-up to have strangling lobster claws,[26] and "he personally selected an orange peel, a chewing-gum wrapper, wet leaves, and a bit of crumpled paper that were used for sewer debris"[20] in the scene where Bruno inadvertently drops Guy's lighter down the storm drain.

He also showed intense interest in a seldom-considered detail of character delineation: Food.

"Preferences in food characterize people..." Hitchcock said. "I have always given it careful consideration, so that my characters never eat out of character. Bruno orders with gusto and with an interest in what he is going to eat — lamb chops, French fries, and chocolate ice cream. A very good choice for train food. And the chocolate ice cream is probably what he thought about first. Bruno is rather a child. He is also something of a hedonist. Guy, on the other hand, shows little interest in eating the lunch, apparently having given it no advance thought, in contrast to Bruno, and he merely orders what seems his routine choice, a hamburger and coffee."[27]
Hitchcock and Burks collaborated on a double printing technique to create this iconic shot still studied in film schools today.

One of the most memorable single shots in the Hitchcock canon — it "is studied by film classes", says Laura Elliott, who played Miriam[28]—is her character's strangulation by Bruno on the Isle of Love. "[I]n one of the most unexpected, most aesthetically justified moments in film,"[29] the slow, almost graceful, murder is shown as a reflection in the victim's eyeglasses, which have been jarred loose from her head and dropped to the ground. The unusual angle was a more complex proposition than it seems. First Hitchcock got the exterior shots in Canoga Park, using both actors, then later he had Elliott alone report to a soundstage where there was a large concave reflector set on the floor. The camera was on one side of the reflector, Elliott was on the other, and Hitchcock directed Elliott to turn her back to the reflector and "float backwards, all the way to the floor... like you were doing the limbo."[30] The first six takes went badly—Elliott thudded to the floor with several feet yet to go[22]—but on the seventh take, she floated smoothly all the way. Hitchcock's even-strained response: "Cut. Next shot."[30] Hitchcock then had the two elements "ingenious[ly]" double printed,[22] yielding a shot of "oddly appealing originality [with] a stark fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful.... The astheticizing of the horror somehow enables the audience to contemplate more fully its reality."[29]

Hitchcock was, above all, the master of great visual setpieces,[31] and "[p]erhaps the most memorable sequence in Strangers on a Train is the climactic fight on a berserk carousel."[20] While Guy and Bruno fight, the ride runs out of control until it tears itself to pieces, flinging wooden horses into the crowd of screaming mothers and squealing children. "The climactic carousel explosion was a marvel of miniatures and background projection, acting close-ups and other inserts, all of it seamlessly matched and blended under film editor William H. Ziegler's eye."[21]

Hitchcock took a toy carousel and photographed it blown up by a small charge of explosives. This piece of film he then enlarged and projected onto a vast screen, positioning actors around and in front of it so that the effect is one of a mob of bystanders into which plaster horses and passengers are hurled in deadly chaos. It is one of the moments in Hitchcock's work that continues to bring gasps from every audience and applause from cinema students.[32]

The explosion is triggered by the attempts of a carnival man to stop the ride after crawling under the whirling carousel deck to get to the controls in the center. Although Hitchcock admitted to undercranking the shot (artificially accelerating the action),[33] it was not a trick shot: the man actually had to crawl under the spinning ride, just inches from possible injury. "Hitchcock told me that this scene was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films", writes biographer Charlotte Chandler. "The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. 'If the man had raised his head even slightly", Hitchcock said, "it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film."[34]

The final scene of the so-called American version of the film has Barbara and Anne Morton waiting for Guy to call on the telephone. Hitchcock wanted the phone in the foreground to dominate the shot, emphasizing the importance of the call, but the limited depth-of-field of contemporary motion picture lenses made it difficult to get both phone and women in focus. So Hitchcock had an oversized phone constructed and placed in the foreground.[28] Anne reaches for the big phone, but actually answers a regular one: "I did that on one take", Hitchcock explained, "by moving in on Anne so that the big phone went out of the frame as she reached for it. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up."[28]

Principal photography wrapped just before Christmas, and Hitchcock and Alma left for a vacation in Santa Cruz,[26] then in late March 1951, on to St. Moritz, for a 25th anniversary European excursion.[35]

Music

Composer Dimitri Tiomkin was Jack Warner's choice to score Strangers on a Train. While he had previous Hitchcock experience on Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and would go on to score two more consecutive Hitchcock films, the director and composer "simply never developed much of a kinship"[21] and "the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin's best".[21]

Nevertheless, the score does pick up on the ubiquitous theme of doubles — often contrasting doubles — right from the opening title sequence: "The first shot — two sets of male shoes, loud versus conservative, moving toward a train — carries a gruff bass motif set against Gershwin-like riffs, a two-part medley called "Strangers" and "Walking" that is never heard again."[36] The powerful music accurately underscores the visuals of that title sequence — the massive granite edifice of New York's Pennsylvania Station, standing in for Washington's Union Station—because it was scored for an unusually large orchestra, including alto, tenor and baritone saxes, three clarinets, four horns, three pianos and a novachord.[37]

Tiomkin's contrasting musical themes continued throughout the film, delineating two characters with substantial differences: "For 'Guy's Theme', Tiomkin created a hesitant, passive idea, made-to-order music for Farley Granger's performance."[38] Bruno, who tells Guy on the train that he admires people "who do things", gets a more vigorous musical treatment from Tiomkin: "Harmonic complexity defines the motifs associated with Bruno: rumbling bass, shocking clusters, and glassy string harmonics. These disturbing sounds, heard to superb effect in cues such as 'The Meeting,' 'Senator's Office,' and 'Jefferson Memorial,' are not just about Bruno, but about how he is perceived by those whose lives he crosses—first Guy, then everyone in Guy's entourage."[38]

But perhaps the most memorable music in Strangers is the calliope music,[21] heard first at the fairground and again, later, when Bruno is strangling Mrs. Cunningham at Senator Morton's soirée, and experiences his unfortunate flashback and subsequent fainting spell. It was Hitchcock, not Tiomkin, whose idea brought the four evocative numbers[21] — "The Band Played On", "Carolina in the Morning", "Oh, You Beautiful Doll", and "Baby Face" — to the soundtrack:

In one of Hitchcock's most explicit operatic gestures, the characters at the fateful carnival sing the score, giving it full dimension as part of the drama. In a conventional movie, the tune would play in the background as a clever ironic backdrop. But Hitchcock takes music to another level. Miriam and the two boyfriends in her odd ménage à trois bring "The Band Played On" to life by singing it on the merry-go-round, lustily and loudly... Grinning balefully on the horse behind them, Bruno then sings it himself, making it his motto. The band plays on through Bruno's stalking of his victim and during the murder itself, blaring from the front of the screen, then receding into the darkness as an eerie obbligato when the doomed Miriam enters the Tunnel of Love.[39]

"The Band Played On" makes its final reprise during Guy's and Bruno's fight on the merry-go-round, even itself shifting to a faster tempo and higher pitch when the policeman's bullet hits the ride operator, and sends the carousel into its frenzied hyper-drive.

Critic Jack Sullivan had kinder words for Tiomkin's score for Strangers than did biographer Spoto: "[S]o seamlessly and inevitably does it fit the picture's design that it seems like an element of Hitchcock's storyboards", he writes.[40] It is a score that "goes largely uncelebrated."[40]

Promotion and release

With a release scheduled for early summer, the studio press agents swung into high gear early in 1951. Hitchcock, promotionally photographed many times over the years strangling various actresses and other women — some one-handed, others two — found himself in front of a camera with his fingers around the neck of a bust of daughter Patricia;[26] the photo found its way into newspapers nationwide.[41] He was also photographed adding the letter "L" to Strangers on the official studio poster for the film.[26]

One studio press release gave rise to a myth that still lingers on today.[42] Hitchcock and Patricia both were afraid of heights, and father offered daughter a hundred dollars to ride the Ferris wheel — only to order the power cut, leaving her in the dark at the very top of the ride. The press release embellished the tale, claiming he left her "dangling in total darkness for an hour,"[35] only then allowing his "trembling daughter" to be lowered and released.[35] Although that account continues to be published in books to this day, "it just wasn't true", according to Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell.[43] First of all, she was not up there alone: flanking her were the actors playing Miriam's two boyfriends — "and I have a picture of us waving."[43] "This was good stuff for press agents paid to stir up thrills and it has been repeated in other books to bolster the idea of Hitchcock's sadism,"[35] but "we were [only] up there two or three minutes at the outside.... My father wasn't ever sadistic. The only sadistic part was I never got the hundred dollars."[43]

Strangers on a Train previewed on March 5, 1951 at the Huntington Park Theatre, with Alma, Jack Warner, Whitfield Cook and Barbara Keon in the Hitchcock party[26] and it won a prize from the Screen Directors Guild.[44] It premiered in New York on July 3, marking the reopening of the extensively remodeled Strand Theatre as the Warner Theatre, and in a dozen cities around the country.[44] Hitchcock made personal appearances in most of them, and was often accompanied by his daughter.

Some audience feedback arriving at Jack Warner's office condemned the film for its sordid story, while just as many others were favorable.[44] Of greater interest to Warner was the box office take, and the "receipts soon told the true story: Strangers on a Train was a success, and Hitchcock was pronounced at the top of his form as master of the dark, melodramatic suspense thriller."[44]

Themes and motifs

The film includes a number of puns and visual metaphors that demonstrate a running motif of crisscross, double-crossing, and crossing one's double. Talking about the structure of the film, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever."[3]

The two characters, Guy and Bruno, can be viewed as doppelgängers. As with Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train is one of many Hitchcock films to explore the doppelgänger theme. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis."[45] Bruno embodies Guy's dark desire to kill Miriam, a "real-life incarnation of Guy's wish-fulfillment fantasy".[45]

Doubles

The theme of doubles is "the key element in the film's structure,"[46] and Hitchcock starts right off in his title sequence making this point: there are two taxicabs, two redcaps, two pairs of feet, two sets of train rails that cross twice. Once on the train, Bruno orders a pair of double drinks — "The only kind of doubles I play", he says charmingly. In Hitchcock's cameo he carries a double bass.

There are two respectable and influential fathers, two women with eyeglasses, and two women at a party who delight in thinking up ways of committing the perfect crime. There are two sets of two detectives in two cities, two little boys at the two trips to the fairground, two old men at the carousel, two boyfriends accompanying the woman about to be murdered, and two Hitchcocks in the film.[46]

Hitchcock carries the theme into his editing, crosscutting between Guy and Bruno with words and gestures: one asks the time and the other, miles away, looks at his watch; one says in anger "I could strangle her!" and the other, far distant, makes a choking gesture.[46]

All this doubling has no precedent in the novel; it was quite deliberately added by Hitchcock, "dictated in rapid and inspired profusion to Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon during the last days of script preparation."[46] It undergirds the whole film because it finally serves to associate the world of light, order, and vitality with the world of darkness, chaos, lunacy and death."[47]

Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are opposites. The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they immediately establish the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes."[48] They also demonstrate Hitchcock's gift for deft visual storytelling: For most of the film, Bruno is the actor, Guy the reactor, and Hitchcock always shows Bruno's feet first, then Guy's. And since it is Guy's foot that taps Bruno's under the table, we know Bruno has not engineered the meeting.[49]

Roger Ebert wrote that "it is this sense of two flawed characters — one evil, one weak, with an unstated sexual tension — that makes the movie intriguing and halfway plausible, and explains how Bruno could come so close to carrying out his plan."[5]

Darkness–Light continuum

It is those flaws that set up the real themes of Strangers. It was not enough for Hitchcock to construct merely a world of doubles — even contrasting doubles — in a strict polar-opposite structure; for Hitchcock, the good-and-evil, darkness-and-light poles "didn't have to be mutually exclusive."[5] Blurring the lines puts both Guy and Bruno on a good-evil continuum, and the infinite shades of gray in between, became Hitchcock's canvas for telling the story and painting his characters.

At first glance, Guy represents the ordered life where people stick to rules, while Bruno comes from the world of chaos,[49] where they get thrown out of multiple colleges for drinking and gambling. Yet "[b]oth men, like so many of Hitchcock's protagonists, are insecure and uncertain of their identity. Guy is suspended between tennis and politics, between his tramp wife and his senator's daughter, and Bruno is seeking desperately to establish an identity through violent, outré actions and flamboyance (shoes, lobster-patterned tie, name proclaimed to the world on his tiepin)."[50]

Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. "Me, I never do anything important." Yet as Bruno describes his "theories" over lunch, "Guy responds to Bruno — we see it in his face, at once amused and tense. To the man committed to a career in politics, Bruno represents a tempting overthrow of all responsibility."[49] And at this point the blurring of good and evil accelerates: Guy fails to repudiate Bruno's suggestive statement about murdering Miriam ("What's a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.") with any force or conviction. "When Bruno openly suggests he would like to kill his wife, he merely grins and says 'That's a morbid thought,' but we sense the tension that underlies it."[49] It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. "He is leaving in Bruno's keeping his link with Anne, his possibility of climbing into the ordered existence to which he aspires.... Guy, then, in a sense connives at the murder of his wife, and the enigmatic link between him and Bruno becomes clear.[51] Guy is not a clear-cut hero, Bruno not an all-black villain: the continuum has been established.

Light and dark onscreen

Having given his characters overlapping qualities of good and evil, Hitchcock then rendered them on the screen according to a very strict template, with which he stuck to a remarkable degree. Ebert wrote:

Hitchcock was a classical technician in terms of controlling his visuals, and his use of screen space underlined the tension in ways the audience isn't always aware of. He always used the convention that the left side of the screen is for evil and/or weaker characters, while the right is for characters who are either good or temporarily dominant.[52]

Nowhere is this more evident than the scene where Guy arrives home at his D.C. apartment to find Bruno lurking across the street; Bruno killed Miriam that evening in Metcalf, and has her glasses to give to Guy almost as a "receipt" that he has executed his part of their "deal". "On one side of the street, [are] stately respectable houses; towering in the background, on the right of the screen, the floodlit dome of the U.S. Capitol, the life to which Guy aspires, the world of light and order."[53] Bruno tells Guy what he has done and gives him the glasses. "You're a free man now", he says, just as a police car drives up, looking for the husband of a certain recent murder victim. Guy nervously steps into the shadows with Bruno, literally behind the bars of an iron fence; "You've got me acting like I'm a criminal", he says. "The scene gives a beautifully exact symbolic expression to Guy's relationship with Bruno and what he stands for."[53]

Hitchcock continues the interplay of light and dark throughout the film: Guy's bright, light tennis attire, versus "the gothic gloominess of [Bruno's] Arlington mansion";[46] the crosscutting between his game in the sunshine at Forest Hills while Bruno's arm stretches into the dark and debris of the storm drain trying to fish out the cigarette lighter;[54] even a single image where "Walker is photographed in one visually stunning shot as a malignant stain on the purity of the white-marble Jefferson Memorial, as a blot on the order of things."[55]

Political subtext

Although its first rumblings came in 1947 with the trial and conviction of the "Hollywood Ten", the so-called Red Scare was gathering steam in 1950, with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the trial of Alger Hiss. These events were the background to their work, while Hitchcock, Cook, Ormonde and Keon were preparing the script for Strangers, and film scholar Robert L. Carrington has written of a political subtext to the film.[11] Treatment writer Cook used Guy to make the film "a parable quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America."[11]

That hysteria was targeting homosexuals along with Communists as enemies of the state.... The U.S. Senate was busy investigating the suspicion that 'moral perverts' in the government were also undermining national security — going so far as to commission a study, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.[19]

Carrington has argued that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic climate.[19] "To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype, an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed", wrote Carrington; he is "a man of indeterminate sexual identity found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised."[19]

Hitchcock, who had drawn gay characters so sharply yet subtly in Rope in 1948, "drafted the left-leaning Cook... expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters."[11]

Differences from the novel

Even before sewing up the rights for the novel, Hitchcock's mind was whirling with ideas about how to adapt it for the screen. He narrowed the geographic scope to the Northeast corridor, between Washington, D.C. and New York — the novel ranged through the southwest and Florida, among other locales.[19] The scripting team added the tennis match — and the crosscutting with Bruno's storm drain travails in Metcalf — added the cigarette lighter, the Tunnel of Love, Miriam's eyeglasses; in fact, the amusement park is only a brief setting in the novel.[19]

Hitchcock's biggest changes were in his two lead characters:

The character called Bruno Anthony in the film is called Charles Anthony Bruno in the book.[56] "Highsmith's Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic... but in [Whitfield Cook's] hands, the film's Bruno became a dandy, a mama's boy who speaks French, and who professes ignorance of women."[11] In the book, Bruno dies in a boating accident[56] far removed from a merry-go-round.

In the novel, Guy Haines is not a tennis player, but rather a promising architect, and he does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno's father.[56] In the movie, "Guy became a decent guy who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain..." writes Patrick McGilligan, "to head off the censors."[11] In the novel, Guy is pursued and entrapped by a tenacious detective.[15]

The merry-go-round scene is not in the book, but is taken from the climax of Edmund Crispin's 1946 novel The Moving Toyshop.[57] All the major elements of the scene — the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to disable it — are present in Crispin's account,[58] though he received no screen credit for it.

In Raymond Chandler's second draft script — which Hitchcock ceremoniously dropped into the wastebasket while daintily holding his nose — the final shot is Guy Haines, institutionalized, bound in a straitjacket.[17]

Critical reaction

Upon its release in 1951, Strangers on a Train received mixed reviews. Variety praised it, writing: "Performance-wise, the cast comes through strongly. Granger is excellent as the harassed young man innocently involved in murder. Roman's role as a nice, understanding girl is a switch for her, and she makes it warmly effective. Walker's role has extreme color, and he projects it deftly."[59]

Conversely, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times criticized the film: "Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support. ... Perhaps there will be those in the audience who will likewise be terrified by the villain's darkly menacing warnings and by Mr. Hitchcock's sleekly melodramatic tricks. ... But, for all that, his basic premise of fear fired by menace is so thin and so utterly unconvincing that the story just does not stand."[60] Leslie Halliwell felt that Hitchcock was "at his best" and that the film "makes superior suspense entertainment," but called the story "unsatisfactory."[61]

More recent criticism is generally, though not universally, more positive. The film holds a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert has called Strangers on a Train a "first-rate thriller" that he considers to be among the top five of Hitchcock's films.[4]

David Keyes, writing at cinemaphile.org in 2002, saw the film as a seminal entry in its genre: "Aside from its very evident approach as a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick, the movie is one of the original shells for identity-inspired mystery thrillers, in which natural human behavior is the driving force behind the true macabre rather than supernatural elements. Even classic endeavors like Fargo and A Simple Plan seem directly fueled by this concept..."[62]

Almar Haflidason was effusive about Strangers on a Train in 2001 at the BBC website: "Hitchcock's favourite device of an ordinary man caught in an ever-tightening web of fear plunges Guy into one of the director's most fiendishly effective movies. Ordinary Washington locations become sinister hunting grounds that mirror perfectly the creeping terror that slowly consumes Guy, as the lethally smooth Bruno relentlessly pursues him to a frenzied climax. Fast, exciting, and woven with wicked style, this is one of Hitchcock's most efficient and ruthlessly delicious thrillers."[63]

Patricia Highsmith's opinion of the film varied over time. She initially praised it, writing: "I am pleased in general. Especially with Bruno, who held the movie together as he did the book." Later in life, while still praising Robert Walker's performance as Bruno, she criticized the casting of Ruth Roman as Anne, Hitchcock's decision to turn Guy from an architect into a tennis player, and the fact that Guy does not murder Bruno's father as he does in the novel.[64][65]

Accolades

Award Category Subject Result
Academy Award Best Cinematography Robert Burks Nominated
Directors Guild of America Award Outstanding Directing – Feature Film Alfred Hitchcock Nominated
National Board of Review Award Best Film[66] Nominated

American Film Institute listed the film as #32 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills.

Alternative versions

An early preview edit of the film, sometimes labeled the "British" version although it was never released in Britain or anywhere else, includes some scenes either not in, or else different from, the film as released. According to biographer Charlotte Chandler (Lyn Erhard), Hitchcock himself did not like either the "British" or the "American" version:

Hitchcock told [Chandler] that the picture should have ended with Guy at the amusement park after he has been cleared of murdering his wife. He wanted the last line of the film to be Guy describing Bruno as "a very clever fellow". This ending, however, was not acceptable to Warner Bros.[28]

In 1997, Warner released the film onto DVD as a double sided disc, with the "British" version on one side, and the "Hollywood" version on the reverse. Between the two versions of the film, the "British" version most prominently omits the final scene on the train. A two-disc DVD edition was released in 2004 containing both versions of the film, this time with the "British" version entitled "Preview Version" and the "American" version entitled "Final Release Version." The film was later made available on Blu-ray in 2012 with the same contents as the 2004 DVD edition.[67]

Legacy

Strangers on a Train was adapted for the radio program Lux Radio Theatre on two occasions: on December 3, 1951, with Ruth Roman, Frank Lovejoy, and Ray Milland, and on April 12, 1954, with Virginia Mayo, Dana Andrews, and Robert Cummings.[44] In 2015, it was announced that director David Fincher and writer Gillian Flynn are working on a remake for Hitchcock's film, retitled as Strangers, which is said to be a "modern take" on the story.[68]

A truncated version of the film's script was used for a 1958 episode of the Warner Bros. television series 77 Sunset Strip entitled "One False Step". The famous reflected view murder sequence was also used in this episode.

Legendary comedian Mel Brooks, a friend of Hitchcock, and director of High Anxiety, a Hitchcock-homage comedy, named Strangers on a Train his favorite Hitchcock movie.

The film has also been the inspiration for other film and television projects with similar themes of criss-cross murder, often treated comically. They include:

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Strangers on a Train (1951)". The Numbers.
  2. ↑ Ebert, Roger (2006). The Great Movies II New York: Broadway Press. ISBN 978-0-7679-1986-9. p. 428
  3. 1 2 Truffaut, François (1967). Hitcock By Truffaut. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-60429-5
  4. 1 2 Strangers on a Train (1951) review by Roger Ebert
  5. 1 2 3 4 Ebert, Great II, p. 428
  6. ↑ Spoto, Donald (1983). The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-31462-X (paperback edition). p. 345 All footnotes use page numbers from the first paperback edition, March 1984
  7. ↑ McGilligan, Patrick (2004). Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-098827-2. p. 450
  8. 1 2 3 4 Spoto, p. 346
  9. ↑ Strangers on a Train: The Victim's P.O.V. (2004), DVD documentary
  10. 1 2 Spoto, p. 341
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 McGilligan, p. 442
  12. 1 2 McGilligan, p. 444
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 Spoto, p. 342
  14. ↑ Krohn, Bill. "I Confess – Historical Note". Senses of Cinema.
  15. 1 2 3 4 Spoto, p. 344
  16. 1 2 McGilligan, p. 447
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 McGilligan, p. 449
  18. ↑ Chandler, Charlotte (2006). It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, A Personal Biography. New York: Applause Books. ISBN 978-1-55783-692-2. p. 192
  19. 1 2 3 4 5 6 McGilligan, p. 443
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 Spoto, p. 347
  21. 1 2 3 4 5 6 McGilligan, p. 450
  22. 1 2 3 4 McGilligan, p. 452
  23. ↑ Spoto, p. 343
  24. 1 2 Spoto, p. 345
  25. ↑ Spoto, pp. 339-340
  26. 1 2 3 4 5 Spoto, p. 353
  27. ↑ Chandler, pp. 201-202
  28. 1 2 3 4 Chandler, p. 197
  29. 1 2 Spoto, p. 352
  30. 1 2 Chandler, p. 198
  31. ↑ Ebert, Great II, p. 429
  32. ↑ Spoto, p. 348
  33. ↑ Chandler, p. 66
  34. ↑ Chandler, p. 194
  35. 1 2 3 4 McGilligan, p. 453
  36. ↑ Sullivan, Jack (2006). Hitchcock's Music. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13618-0. p. 157
  37. ↑ Sullivan, p. 156
  38. 1 2 Sullivan, p. 157
  39. ↑ Sullivan, p. 159
  40. 1 2 Sullivan, p. 162
  41. ↑ Chandler, p. 203
  42. ↑ Warner Bros. press release #HO9-1251, Nov. 30, 1950
  43. 1 2 3 Chandler, p. 202.
  44. 1 2 3 4 5 Spoto, p. 354
  45. 1 2 Dellolio, Peter (2004). "Hitchcock and Kafka: Expressionist Themes in Strangers on a Train". Midwest Quarterly (45.3): 240–255.
  46. 1 2 3 4 5 Spoto, p. 349
  47. ↑ Spoto, p. 350
  48. ↑ Wood, Robin, (1965), Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland A. Poague, editors, (2004). A Hitchcock Reader. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-5556-4. p. 172
  49. 1 2 3 4 Wood, p. 172
  50. ↑ Wood, pp. 172-173
  51. ↑ Wood, p. 173
  52. ↑ Ebert, Great II, p. 430
  53. 1 2 Wood, p. 175
  54. ↑ Wood, p. 180
  55. ↑ Spoto, pp. 349-350
  56. 1 2 3 Highsmith, Patricia (2001). Strangers on a Train. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. (2001) ISBN 978-0-393-32198-2
  57. ↑ Swanson, Peter (2012-02-17). "Armchair Audience: The Moving Toyshop (1946)". Retrieved 2013-05-25.
  58. ↑ Crispin, Edmund (2007) [1946]. The Moving Toyshop. Vintage. pp. 195–200. ISBN 9780099506225.
  59. ↑ Variety, 1951. Review: 'Strangers on a Train'
  60. ↑ Crowther, Bosley, (1951). "The Screen In Review", The New York Times, July 4, 1951
  61. ↑ Halliwell, Leslie, with John Walker, ed. (1994). Halliwell's Film Guide. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-273241-2. p. 1139
  62. ↑ Keyes, David (2002). "Strangers on a Train". Cinemaphile.org. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
  63. ↑ Haflidason, Almar (2001-06-25). "Strangers on a Train (1951)". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
  64. ↑ Schenkar, Joan. The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. St. Martin's Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-312-30375-4 - page 318-319
  65. ↑ Interview with Patricia Highsmith by Gerald Peary
  66. ↑ "Strangers on a Train > Awards". Allmovie. Retrieved January 8, 2010.
  67. ↑ Kauffman, Jeffrey (October 6, 2012). "Strangers on a Train Blu-ray Review". Blu-ray.com. Retrieved October 8, 2012.
  68. ↑ Ford, Rebecca (2015-01-13). "David Fincher, Ben Affleck, Gillian Flynn Reuniting for 'Strangers on a Train' Remake". Hollywood Reporter.
  69. ↑ Maslin, Janet (1987). "Throw Momma." The New York Times, December 11, 1987
  70. ↑ Chang, Justin (2011) "Horrible Bosses." Variety, July 5, 2011
  71. ↑ Mannath, Malini (5 October 2011). "Muran". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 4 January 2012.
  72. ↑ Allen, Conception (2010-11-12). "On the set with 'Castle'". Blastmagazine.com. Retrieved 2013-05-21.
  73. ↑ Donna Bowman (October 13, 2010). "Modern Family: 'Strangers on a Treadmill'". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 2010-10-14.

Further reading

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