Strangers on a Train (1951)

Written by: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, & Whitfield Cook (screenplay) and Patricia Highsmith (novel)
Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Farley Granger, Robert Walker, and Ruth Roman
Reviewer: Brett Gallman
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“My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer.”

Reviewer's Rating: **** (Four Stars)

Hitchcock and Chandler form a dream team of sorts with this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s clever murder plot that features Farley Granger and Robert Walker in the title roles. Granger is amateur tennis star Guy Haines, who seeks a divorce from his unfaithful wife. Walker’s Bruno Anthony provides a solution when he offers to murder the wife if Haines will return the favor by murdering Bruno’s father, whom he detests (to Oedipal levels, it would seem). It's a perfect murder plot that goes deviously wrong, as Granger is another one of Hitchcock’s common men caught up in uncommon events; he’s a fine straight compliment to Walker, who plays one of cinema’s more unusual madmen. One might call Bruno Anthony charmingly impish if he weren't so demented. His cat and mouth game with Haines sometimes resembles the type of stalking one might see from a jilted, jealous lover; he begins to inject himself in Haines’s life at every turn, an oddly menacing fungus.

Paranoia seems to be a theme--at one point, Walker is seen observing Granger from a long-shot in the shadow of a Washington building, which seems to be fuelled by the politics of the age. More bleakness emerges in one of Hitchcock’s most disturbing murder sequences; the eerie silence of the one here is in sharp contrast to its shrill, shrieking counterpart in Psycho. However, the usual playfulness from Hitchcock is on display too; the master of suspense loved to string audiences along, and he does so here in an excellently conceived final reel. Perhaps only he could turn something as banal as tennis into a gripping proposition; the cross-cutting between climactic scenes (like so many volleys in a tennis match) is masterful as our two main characters race against time.

Above all, Strangers on a Train is an entertaining variation on film noir, one where our “wrong man” must keep himself from committing murder rather than getting away with one. The horror and helplessness of being ensnared in an uncontrollable web of conspiracy is Hitchcock's defining motif, and this is one of its best examples.

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