STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951)
"I certainly admire people who do things."
[I originally intended for this to be a roundup of four films, but I found I had more to say - and time to do it in - than originally thought.]
A rising tennis star (Farley Granger) and a charming dandy (Robert Walker) meet on a train traveling to New York from Washington D.C.. The men are complete strangers to each other, but Bruno - the dandy - recognizes Guy - the tennis player - from press about his private life, and strikes up a conversation.
Guy, we learn through Bruno’s prodding, is in a high-profile relationship with Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a U.S. Senator, but is still legally (and unhappily) married to a promiscuous woman named Miriam (Kasey Rogers) who won’t give him a divorce.
Despite Bruno coming on strong, the two manage to get on fine before Bruno brazenly makes an indecent proposal:
Bruno: Want me to tell you one of my ideas for murdering my father?
Guy: [pointing to his crime book] You've been reading too many of these.
Bruno: Didn't you ever want to kill somebody? Say one of those useless fellows Miriam was running around with?
Guy: You can't go around killing people just because you think they're useless.
Bruno: …Some people are better off dead, Guy. Take your -- wife and my father, for instance. It reminds me of a wonderful idea had once. I used to put myself to sleep at night -- figuring it out. Now, let's say you want to get rid of your wife.
Guy: Why?
Bruno: Let's say she refuses to give you a divorce… You'd be afraid to kill her because you'd get caught. And what would trip you up? Motive. Now here's the plan...
Guy: I'm afraid I haven't time to listen.
Bruno: It's so simple, too. A couple of fellows meet accidentally, like you and me. No connection between them at all. Never saw each other before. Each of them has somebody he'd like to get rid of, but he can't murder the person he wants to get rid of. He'll get caught. So they swap murders… Then there is nothing to connect them. The one who had the motive isn't there. Each fellow murders a total stranger. Like you do my murder and I do yours.
Though it indulged in some wishful thinking, Guy is dismissive and shrugs Bruno off when they arrive in New York. He doesn’t pay this encounter much mind - that is until Bruno shows up at Guy’s home to proudly confess to murdering Miriam for him and asks him to hold up his end of the bargain.
Strangers on a Train has one of those can’t-lose premises, and Hitchcock must have surely recognized this when he read Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name. It’s endured over the years on the strength of this premise1 and execution2, even while making significant (and arguably less interesting!) departures from the book to appease the censors.
There is a gay subtext between Guy and Bruno, though it’s harder to discern than the one in Rope. It is much easier, however, to see the two as doppelgängers - two sides of nature, wrestling for control over the other’s desires. Guy aspires to a life in politics and lives in the public eye, while Bruno lives with his mother and struggles to maintain his impulses in any environment he’s in. Commenting on a scene in which Bruno nearly kills an old woman in a “pretend” strangling at a party, critic Robin Wood writes: “The scene leads us straight to the essence of Hitchcock: that ordered life depends on the rigorous and unnatural suppression of a powerfully seductive underworld of desire: and we see the reason for the stiff formality of the world of order in the film.”
Rather than comment on the plot or themes further, I’d like to instead turn to the film’s bravura sequence (and possibly one of Hitchcock’s best): Bruno’s pursuit and killing of Guy’s wife Miriam. It’s a dance between a sadist and an inviting victim, the latter realizing only too late what her pursuer’s true intentions are.
Coming at the end of the first act, the sequence begins with Miriam leaving the safety of her family and suburban home (domesticity she’s also refused Guy) to go to the carnival with two boyfriends. Unbeknownst to her, Bruno has hid in waiting and now follows along.
Once at the fairgrounds, Miriam asks the boys for ice cream and hot dogs, who laugh at her enormous appetite. We learned in an earlier exchange with Guy that Miriam is pregnant with another man’s child, though the reactions of the boyfriends suggest they don’t know this (it’s likely neither is the father). At this moment, Miriam spots Bruno and recognizes he’s following her. This doesn’t alarm her; rather, it intrigues her. Her boyfriends are just that: boys. They laugh and carry on, but neither seems to be winning in the contest for her affection and the chance to bed her. Bruno, by contrast, projects a stronger, more dangerous presence. When neither of her boys can ring the bell at the “Test Your Strength” machine, it is Bruno she looks for to see how he fares. He wins, handily, proving himself the more virile and superior of the men present.
Miriam and her boys go to the carousel next. Bruno follows; the boys don’t notice, but she does. The carousel starts to spin and a song begins to play. She encourages her boys to singalong. The song is “The Band Played On,” a darkly comic waltz about a man who’s so “loaded” that he’s frightening the girl he’s dancing with. In a medium on them both, Miriam turns from the camera to look back at Bruno and he sings directly to her. She turns back around, seemingly unfazed (if not a little amused) while the horses continue to bob and down in a sexual rhythm. The carousel comes to a halt and Miriam points to where she wants to ride next: the Tunnel of Love.
What follows is the sexual culmination of all the foreplay that preceded. For this, Hitchcock saves his best visual pun for last: seeing Miriam’s strangulation first from behind Bruno, then in the reflection of her fallen glasses, allowing us to watch her murder through her own disembodied eyes. Bruno has finished.
This scene’s ending is a truly perverted flourish, delivered with all the formal rigor we’ve come to expect from Hitchcock. You can watch it below.
Strangers on a Train isn’t currently available from a streamer, but it is available to rent through most major digital platforms.
Up Next
I Confess, which is available from Warner Archive to rent through most major digital platforms.
Cameo
Approximately 11 minutes in, Hitchcock can be seen struggling to get on to the train with a cello case.
Supplemental Materials
Here’s a Spotify playlist with soundtrack selections from what we’ve watched thus far.
References
The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki: The Hitchcock Cameos
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York, Harper Perennial, 2004.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Film’s Revisited. New York, Columbia University Press, 2002.
Wikipedia: Strangers on a Train
Screen captures sourced from DVD Beaver
The film’s treatment came from Whitfield Cook, who added the gay subtext between the leads, while a first and second draft came from novelist Raymond Chandler, though these were reportedly discarded. The bulk of the work seemed to come from Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville and Ben Hecht’s assistant Czenzi Ormonde - who had just recently found success with her short story collection. Neither were properly credited.
Strangers on a Train marked the first collaboration between Hitchcock and cinematographer Robert Burks. They would continue working together for 14 years.