Strangers on a Train is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s truly great works. The larger body of his thriller work can be largely divided into two subgenres: domestic dramas and stories of international intrigue. The director’s recurring explorations of main characters who are wrongfully accused of something fall into both categories, with domestic “wrong man” thrillers dating all the way back to The Lodger and including other notable examples like Young and Innocent, Spellbound, and, naturally, The Wrong Man. It’s also one of his most frequently homaged and parodied works, with Throw Momma from the Train as the most triumphant example. It’s well worth noting that this might be because the narrative passed through two notable authors before it hit the screen, with the story coming from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Carol fame) and the screenplay featuring work from hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler, seven years after the man’s first script, for Double Indemnity, which he co-wrote with director Billy Wilder.
Guy Haines (Farley Granger, previously of Rope) is an amateur tennis star traveling by train to visit his estranged wife Miriam, who has become pregnant by one of her extramarital affairs, in order to give her the money that she demands in order to retain a lawyer for their divorce. En route, he encounters an eccentric, lazy manchild of privilege named Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), who recognizes him from both the sports and society pages of the newspapers, as Guy has been romantically linked to Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll), in addition to the notoriety of his sports career. Bruno reveals that he wants nothing more than to draw income from his trust fund but that his attempts at a life of leisure are continuously foiled by his father’s insistence that he work, if not for a living then at least to contribute something and learn the value of a dollar. Bruno guesses at the source of Guy’s agitation and suggests that the two of them “swap murders,” so that Bruno kills Miriam and Guy slays Mr. Antony, in the belief that no one will be able to make the connection. Disturbed, Guy laughs off the suggestion and its supposed cleverness, and gets off at his stop. When he arrives home to Metcalf, Miriam reveals that she’s also become aware of Anne Morton and now refuses to divorce Guy, and will instead force him to support her child by another man. Their row over this is very public, which causes trouble for Guy later after Bruno tracks down and strangles Miriam at a fairground. Despite constant police surveillance, Guy finds himself harassed by Bruno to uphold his end of their “bargain.”
Although many of Hitchcock’s films contain noir elements (Shadow of a Doubt and Foreign Correspondent immediately come to mind), never do they come through as clearly as they do in Strangers on a Train. That really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given Chandler’s involvement in the picture, as Double Indemnity is the codifying work for many of the elements of that genre. Even in his most beautiful and sumptuous B&W pictures, none of them are as gorgeously monochromatically chiaroscuro as Strangers is. That’s not the only genre convention at play here, either. While we talk about Psycho as the ur-slasher, some of the less lurid elements of the genre are taken from Strangers. One could almost draw a direct line from Bruno’s dark figure cast against the white marble steps of a D.C. government building as a frightened Guy makes his getaway in a cab to the ominous sight of Michael Myers stalking Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. There’s even a kind of killer’s P.O.V. shot on the carnival’s “smoochers’ island” when Bruno finds Miriam alone and his hands come into shot with Guy’s lighter. The film also contains one of the best spectacle setpieces in the Hitchcock canon while also remaining one of the most grounded, as it takes something as commonplace and ordinary as a carnival carousel and turns it into a giant, deadly machine. In typical Hitchcock fashion, this is not the fault of the film’s villain, but of incompetent police who fire a gun into a crowd and miraculously only manage to kill the carousel operator.
Rope and Rebecca are usually thought of as Hitchcock’s major works in the queer canon, with Rope having been based on a play in which the characters were explicitly gay (toned down but still noticeable in the film) and Rebecca’s Mrs. Danvers having an erotic fixation on the late Mrs. de Winter that drives her to burn down Manderley. It would be remiss to leave Strangers on a Train out of that discussion, however. In her later years, Highsmith was insistent that Tom Ripley was not written as a gay man (having reread the novel again earlier this year, I call B.S.) and that the queerness of her work was all subtextual. From what I can gather without getting my hands on her novel (I’m fourth in line with a hold on two copies that my library has), the Guy and Bruno equivalents therein have a relationship that is not unlike that of Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, with one fixated upon the other in a way that transcends their “bargain.” It’s strong enough that, in the book, Guy does go through with killing Bruno’s father, which dramatically changes the ending. I can’t be certain until I give it a read, but I think that I prefer this ending. Why, without it, we wouldn’t get that wonderfully tense scene of Bruno almost losing the evidence he intends to plant in a storm drain!
Ruth Roman is a bit of a cypher here as Guy’s love interest — serviceable, but not that interesting or exciting. However, her inclusion ensures that we get to spend some time with her precocious kid sister, Barbara (Alfred’s daughter, Patricia Hitchcock), who is a total delight. Whenever Bruno meets Barbara, her similar glasses to Miriam’s gives him a flashback to the murder, which almost results in him throttling a socialite at a government function, which is a great scene that calls back to the gorgeous double composition of Miriam’s murder, reflected in both lenses of her fallen glasses. This is one of the larger roles that Alfie gave Pat, and it makes a case that she could have been included more, but perhaps she was too gracious to take the easy nepo baby route to stardom, unlike others who shall remain nameless.
If you’re planning to make November Noirvember, make sure to put this one on your list.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
