Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, Patricia Highsmith, Ben Hecht
Photography: Robert Burks
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: William H. Ziegler
Cast: Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Patricia Hitchcock, Kasey Rogers, Marion Lorne, Ruth Roman, Leo G. Carroll, Howard St. John, Jonathan Hale
In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.
Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.
In director Alfred Hitchcock’s rogue’s gallery pantheon of woman-hating psychopaths—which includes at least Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley in Shadow of a Doubt, Robert Walker as Bruno Antony here in Strangers on a Train, and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho—Walker is not to be underestimated or taken for granted. I would not put him last in any stack-ranking and might put him first. Everyone knows the story in Strangers on a Train from the Sonic Youth song “Shadow of a Doubt”: “Met a stranger on a train / ... He said / ‘You take me and I’ll be you’ / ‘You kill him and I’ll kill her.’” Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) becomes the target of convenience in Antony’s plot for the perfect murder(s). Antony wants to rid himself of his judgmental tycoon father and save his inheritance too. He offers to kill Haines’s troublesome wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers, billed as Laura Elliott), who won’t give him a divorce now that she knows he’s involved with a senator’s daughter. Miriam is also pregnant by another man. Antony says his plan is perfect because no one can connect the murderers to their victims. Haines, who has indeed just met Antony on a train, takes it as an unpleasant joke and thinks no more of it. Then Miriam turns up dead, strangled to death in a lover’s lane near an amusement park. And now Haines begins hearing from Antony about what he needs to know to murder Antony’s father.
Miriam is killed surprisingly quickly, almost as soon as the idea comes up—barely 20 minutes into the movie. It’s practically a shock to the system. Miriam and the amusement park and the two men she is on a date with are lurid and wanton and the whole scene seems made to order for murder if not orgies of violence. Once the deed is done the boom increasingly lowers on Haines, who doesn’t know how to get out of the mess and instinctively tries to hide that he knows Antony at all—which of course does not work. Antony has ways, as a D.C. party scene shows, of insinuating himself into the life of Haines and the senator’s family. Granger plays Haines like a cornered rat, sweating and licking his lips in anxiety and trying to square the various points of guilt that are hemming him in. Inevitably the movie ends up back at the amusement park, whose ambience has not improved any.
Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train, as it happens, have always been near the top of my list of favorite Hitchcocks—my top favorites until I got a look at Rear Window and Vertigo when they were rereleased in the ‘80s. I like these dark tales of psychotic serial killers, but it had been a while since I saw Strangers. It may be Hitchcock’s best picture in five years at that point, but it has its problems, establishing an admirable psychological tension but sacrificing it in the finish for a busy plot half-hidden from us and full of obvious suspense devices: Haines has to put away his opponent in a tennis match, Antony has to rescue a MacGuffin that has fallen into a storm drain, an absurdly ancient old man has to crawl beneath a runaway merry-go-found to save the day. I had trouble suspending disbelief for the runaway merry-go-round itself, which you have to see to understand how ridiculous it is. But depend on Robert Walker (and carnival versions of the song “And the Band Played On”). He saves this picture every time he’s in the frame.
Strangers on a Train is also from the period when Hitchcock was trying to get his daughter Patricia’s acting career off the ground by casting her in his shows—besides Strangers she also appears in Stage Fright, Psycho, and an episode of the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It must be said she is not that good here—does not slide seamlessly into the rest of the cast. She plays Barbara (called Babs), the younger sister of Haines’s girlfriend Anne (Ruth Roman). Like Antony she is full of a morbid interest in crime and mystery stories, but unlike Antony she is not actually psychotic. In fact, she happens to be of a type that matches Miriam, Haines’s dead wife. The movie focuses on the fact that they both wear glasses, but they have other physical similarities too. Seeing Babs sends Antony into a psychotic trance, which, among other things, provokes him to lose control of himself comically strangling a fashionable older woman at that D.C. party. Did I remember to mention that Leo G. Carroll plays the father of Anne and Babs, a U.S. senator? Is any picture with him in it bad?
The use of “And the Band Played On” is nearly perfect as a subtle element. We hear it always as carnival music, from the merry-go-round, but we come to learn that it signals danger. We are conditioned to it over the length of the movie, where it becomes most effective in the last scenes. It’s similar to the use of “The Merry Widow Waltz” in Shadow of a Doubt, which appears to send Charlie Oakley into some kind of similar murderous trance. I’m not sure how much Hitchcock studied psychopaths as such, but it feels like he gets a lot of the points right. Robert Walker implements them perfectly. He is bottomlessly creepy, with an unsettling homoerotic note. Bruno Antony is one of the greatest creations of either Walker or Hitchcock.
Strangers on a Train is also from the period when Hitchcock was trying to get his daughter Patricia’s acting career off the ground by casting her in his shows—besides Strangers she also appears in Stage Fright, Psycho, and an episode of the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It must be said she is not that good here—does not slide seamlessly into the rest of the cast. She plays Barbara (called Babs), the younger sister of Haines’s girlfriend Anne (Ruth Roman). Like Antony she is full of a morbid interest in crime and mystery stories, but unlike Antony she is not actually psychotic. In fact, she happens to be of a type that matches Miriam, Haines’s dead wife. The movie focuses on the fact that they both wear glasses, but they have other physical similarities too. Seeing Babs sends Antony into a psychotic trance, which, among other things, provokes him to lose control of himself comically strangling a fashionable older woman at that D.C. party. Did I remember to mention that Leo G. Carroll plays the father of Anne and Babs, a U.S. senator? Is any picture with him in it bad?
The use of “And the Band Played On” is nearly perfect as a subtle element. We hear it always as carnival music, from the merry-go-round, but we come to learn that it signals danger. We are conditioned to it over the length of the movie, where it becomes most effective in the last scenes. It’s similar to the use of “The Merry Widow Waltz” in Shadow of a Doubt, which appears to send Charlie Oakley into some kind of similar murderous trance. I’m not sure how much Hitchcock studied psychopaths as such, but it feels like he gets a lot of the points right. Robert Walker implements them perfectly. He is bottomlessly creepy, with an unsettling homoerotic note. Bruno Antony is one of the greatest creations of either Walker or Hitchcock.
My first Hitchcock fave too.
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