Strangers on a Train: Hitchcock at His Best

Hitchcock's favorite movie that he ever made was Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Most people regard Vertigo (1958) as his best film, or perhaps North by Northwest (1959) or Rear Window (1954). Some have a soft spot for Psycho (1960) or The Birds (1963), two of the most thrilling films of all time. Indeed, with the exception of Shadow and The Birds, all these films are in the top 30 movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database, far above Strangers on a Train (1951), which is seated at 98.

The film, starring Farley Granger and Robert Walker, receives my vote for the best Hitchcock film of all time. A gripping film noir about an innocent who gets caught up in a world of danger and psychotic obsession, it is surprisingly adult for the conservative era from which it comes, destroying the "Production Code excuse" I give to many films from the early fifties. I can imagine the film was even more disturbing to the audiences of 1951 than it is to viewers today, with its graphic murder and direct approach to marital infedelity. And I'm pretty sure I heard Leo G. Carroll say the word "orgy" as a reference to a sexual act.

Strangers starts with feet. In seperate shots, we see two paris of feet (with shoes on, and legs attached) arrive at a train station and board the same train. We follow one of the pairs onto the train as its owner chooses a seat. When he crosses his legs, he bumps his feet into a very familiar pair of feet. The camera zooms out as one of them apologizes, and we see the owners: Guy Haines (Granger) and Bruno Anthony (Walker).

Haines is a tennis player with a relative amount of fame, and Bruno recognizes him. At first Bruno's conversation is friendly, but it soon turns intrusive, inquiring about Guy's on-the-rocks marriage and his courtship of the lovely Ann Morton (Ruth Roman). Guy grows uncomfortable, but Bruno won't leave him alone. Then he brings up murder. Bruno has spent many hours thinking of the best way to kill a person, and he even has a target: his father. The problem, Bruno explains, is motive. But Bruno has a plan for this too. "Say two guys meet on a train for the first time, just like us," Bruno says,"We could do each other's murders. I do your wife, you do my father, and neither one of us can get caught, because we're perfect strangers."

Guy brushes it off as a joke, and returns to his estranged wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers), who is pregnant by another man and has been asking for a divorce. She has now decided, however, that she doesn't want the divorce, if only to see to it that Guy and Ann can't be together. On the phone afterword Guy admits to Ann that he feels like strangling Miriam.Meanwhile, Bruno decides to fulfill his half of the bargain, and takes the train to Guy's hometown. The plot thickens.

Bruno proves to be quite psychotic indeed, as you may have guessed, and fulfills the common Hitchock motif of obsession with women. A momma's boy through and through, he pays special attention to women, particularly Ann's little sister, Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock, the director's daughter). Barabara, with her glasses and short hair, bears a resemblence to Miriam, with whose murder Bruno has become obsessed.

When he sees Barabara, Bruno does not feel guilty; rather, he relives the murder, but not gleefully. He thinks the thoughts of the obsessed and gives the look of a true psychotic. In an interesting device, the murder itself is both framed in the reflection of Miriam's fallen glasses, and replayed (in Bruno's mind) in Barbara's glasses.

While Granger is somewhat stiff as Guy, Walker (who died sortly after this film was released) is remarkable as Bruno. He has the look of madness under control down pat. When surprising Guy in public places and asking him to finish the deal (i.e. kill his father), you can see the madness boiling beneath the surface of Bruno's cool face, but at the same time can understand why someone could mistake him for a friendly guy. Bruno allows himself and his madness to be underestimated by Guy throughout the movie, only to turn the tables and show Guy and the audience that he is more clever and dangerous than we thought.

The climax of the movie contains its weakest moments. Though it has an appropriate setting and impressive ending, some of the action is either illogical or ruins the tone of the scene. I can't say too much without ruining the end, but the police do shoot an innocent bystander with ten minutes left in the movie and don't mention it once for the rest of the film. In fact, the detective who shot expresses no remorse at all, nor does he even mention it happening. But, with some visual and audio devices that measure up to anything Hitchcock did after this - note the glasses motif and the merry-go-round music - and some wonderfully stylized film noir settings, Strangers on a Train is a slightly underrated classic.