Meeting Two Strangers on a Train

A cab pulls up to a big urban train station. A man gets out, but all we see are his snazzy two-toned spectator brogues. Another cab arrives; another man emerges. We spot some his luggage, including a pair of tennis racquets, but also his sensible dark dress shoes. Both pairs of feet stride through the station.. We next discover them beneath the table of a club car, where one man’s foot accidentally nudges the other’s shoe.

 This, of course, is the very enticing opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train. This film, made midway through a directing career that began in the 1920s and ended with Family Plot in 1976, is considered one of Hitchcock’s most effective in ramping up suspense by way of skillful screen artistry. The original plot, involving two young men who seek to evade the long arm of the law by committing murders on one another’s behalf (“cross-cross”) was concocted by Patricia Highsmith, for whom this was a first novel, five years before she gave the world the talented but lethal Mr. Ripley. Still, Hitchcock and company made some key changes to Highsmith’s story. For one thing, the Guy Haines character is far more culpable in the novel than he is in Hitchcock’s version, wherein (possibly to get past the censors) he can’t ultimately be tempted to follow the murderous path of Bruno (an eerie Robert Walker).  Hitchcock also deleted a key detective character, and added a famous merry-go-round scene that is one of his all-time most climactic. 

 Critics often discuss Hitchcock’s use of symbolic doubling in this film.  It focuses on the similarities (as well as differences) between two young men who accidentally meet in a train car: each of them is burdened by a relative who would perhaps be better off dead. We can’t miss the fact that Walker’s character—wealthy and superficially charming but deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life—responds to Granger’s attractiveness and is determined to bind the two of them together via the committing of two perfect crimes. There’s also the key parallel between two young women who wear thick spectacles: one is violently assaulted and the other soon finds herself in deeply symbolic danger.

 Barbara, the second of these bespectacled young women, is played by Patricia Hitchcock, the Master’s only child. She’s a distinctive character, much  different from her elegant sister (Ruth Roman) who is Guy Haines’ beloved.  Small and definitely rather Hitchcock-like in her appearance, Barbara is introduced as someone who is much fascinated by criminal behavior. The implication is that she shares Hitchcock’s own obvious delight in the macabre . . . until dangerous doings seem to be heading her way.

 Though Pat Hitchcock is fascinating (and Ruth Roman is, frankly, not), the crux of the film involves the interaction of the two male leads. As the preppy tennis player, Farley Granger is appealingly handsome and gentlemanly, which makes him slow to recognize the evil lurking in his fellow passenger. But it is Robert Walker who is unforgettable. We see his Bruno Anthony first as a fancy dresser and a glib talker, someone who can get under the skin of a complete stranger and bend him to his will. With an enigmatic smile on his face, he can pursue a young woman through an amusement park tunnel of love, and then commit a murder that is reflected in her glasses. This moment is perhaps the film’s grim high point: there are other shocks and scares to be had, but somehow the ending just doesn’t live up to what has come before.

 

Strangers on a Carousel: Fun and Games with Hitchcock

It’s unlikely that Alfred Hitchcock will be remembered as a comedy writer. His subject matter (which usually focuses on extreme jeopardy) isn’t exactly light-hearted. But as Edward White’s new The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock makes clear, Hitchcock was deft at using comedy both to make social points and to heighten our sense of impending disaster by forcing us to laugh uneasily at the grotesque within our world. There’s that inevitable banana peel in his best work: the leading character is always about to slip on it, and the results can be hideous or hilarious. Gaiety or gore?: that is the question.

 These are the thoughts that run through my mind about one of the master’s best films: 1951’s Strangers on a Train. As usual, Hitchcock based it on the prose work of a talented suspense writer. In this case, the writer was Patricia Highsmith, who 50 years later would be hailed by movie audiences for having created the slippery character of Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley and its sequels. (She also wrote the source material for the lesbian drama, Carol. )  Hitchcock and his screenwriters (who included Raymond Chandler) stayed loyal to Highsmith’s basic premise, that—in the course of an accidental meeting—two men discuss a “criss-cross” exchange of murders. Yet the filmmakers gave some significant twists to Highsmith’s original story. Notably, the architect Guy Haines is turned by Hitchcock and company into a noted tennis player, one who tries to laugh off, and then to avoid, the implications of the murderous “bargain” that is insisted upon by the story’s charming psychopath, Bruno Anthony.

  None of this may sound funny, but the finished film is laced with Hitchcockian wit. It begins right at the beginning, when the main characters are introduced as two pairs of men’s dress shoes: one sober black and one flashily two-toned, both heading across a train platform. Ultimately, when one pair “accidentally” kicks the other under the table in a dining car, we are introduced to the shoes’ owners, and drama takes over. Much of the film’s macabre comedy involves Bruno (a spectacularly creepy Robert Walker), who has murder on his mind and won’t take no for an answer. (Part of the joke was that Walker was known in his day for playing heroes and good guys.) Bruno, a wealthy idler itching to bump off his own father, lives in a mansion where he sports garish kimonos and enjoys the loyal support of his hilariously dotty mother (a fluttery Marion Lorne). As Bruno skulks through the film, intimidating the weak but well-intentioned Guy (Farley Granger, who helped commit a murder in Rope), fans of the film will remember him particularly as a spectator in a tennis match scene. While all the rest of the tennis fans watch from the bleachers, their heads swiveling as the ball moves back and forth across the net, Bruno sits immobile in their midst, fixedly staring at Guy. Nervous giggles, anyone?

 There’s also the fact that the script is full of supporting characters who find the idea of murder amusing. These include a dowager at a party who’s tickled by the whole subject of strangulation and also the filmmaker’s own daughter, the late Patricia Hitchcock, who as the sister of Guy’s beloved enjoys airing her own colorful theories about crime and punishment. Her role is not gratuitous: her thick glasses link her visually to Bruno’s victim, slain amid the fun and games of an amusement park. No surprise that the film ends on a carousel: hilarity and mayhem come together in one jauntily revolving package.