"I have always given it careful consideration, so that my characters never eat out of character. Guy wants to move into a career in politics and has been dating Senator Morton's daughter Anne while awaiting a divorce from his wife. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack L. Warner got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock's objections. Guy had also made some unfortunate statements about Miriam after she had refused to divorce him. It is a typical film of Hitchcock. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks, who would continue to work with Hitchcock, shooting every Hitchcock picture through to Marnie (1964), with the exception of Psycho. "[47] It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. After meeting by chance, they discover that they both believe that their happiness is being thwarted by a family member. [45], Hitchcock carries the theme into his editing, crosscutting between Guy and Bruno with words and gestures: one asks the time and the other, miles away, looks at his watch; one says in anger "I could strangle her!" "[12], Even before sewing up the rights for the novel, Hitchcock's mind was whirling with ideas about how to adapt it for the screen. The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they immediately establish the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes. "[52], Hitchcock continues the interplay of light and dark throughout the film: Guy's bright, light tennis attire, versus "the gothic gloominess of [Bruno's] Arlington mansion";[45] the crosscutting between his game in the sunshine at Forest Hills while Bruno's arm stretches into the dark and debris of the storm drain trying to fish out the cigarette lighter;[53] even a single image where "Walker is photographed in one visually stunning shot as a malignant stain on the purity of the white-marble Jefferson Memorial, as a blot on the order of things. [15] Although Ormonde was without a formal screen credit, she did have two things in her favor: her recently published collection of short stories, Laughter From Downstairs, was attracting good notices from critics, and she was "a fair-haired beauty with long shimmering hair. Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the East Coast on October 17, 1950. [42] First of all, she was not up there alone: flanking her were the actors playing Miriam's two boyfriends — "and I have a picture of us waving. [11], Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Double Indemnity, in collaboration with Billy Wilder. They argue loudly. Variety praised it, writing: "Performance-wise, the cast comes through strongly. [10] Highsmith was quite annoyed when she later discovered who bought the rights for such a small amount. "[I]n one of the most unexpected, most aesthetically justified moments in film,"[28] the slow, almost graceful, murder is shown as a reflection in the victim's eyeglasses, which have been jarred loose from her head and dropped to the ground. ― Tom Nolan, The Los Angeles Times "Strangers on a Train is filled with paranoia and anxiety, and through its twists and turns, we, like poor Guy Haines, are also drawn into psychopath Bruno's web." There are two sets of two detectives in two cities, two little boys at the two trips to the fairground, two old men at the carousel, two boyfriends accompanying the woman about to be murdered, and two Hitchcocks in the film. "[28], Hitchcock was, above all, the master of great visual setpieces,[31] and "[p]erhaps the most memorable sequence in Strangers on a Train is the climactic fight on a berserk carousel. "[49], Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. You May Also Like. It is full of stylistic techniques to achieve a desirable effect of suspense. "He had to have one person in each film he could harass," Granger said. "[46], Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are opposites. Follow/Fav Strangers On a Train. "[45] It undergirds the whole film because it finally serves to associate the world of light, order, and vitality with the world of darkness, chaos, lunacy and death. [51], Nowhere is this more evident than the scene where Guy arrives home at his D.C. apartment to find Bruno lurking across the street; Bruno killed Miriam that evening in Metcalf, and has her glasses to give to Guy almost as a "receipt" that he has executed his part of their "deal". The romance was peculiar, surreal and stretched the imagination. I expected more from this author. While he had previous Hitchcock experience on Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and would go on to score two more consecutive Hitchcock films, the director and composer "simply never developed much of a kinship"[21] and "the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin's best". [6] For six days, they shot at Penn Station in New York City, at the railroad station at Danbury, Connecticut—which became Guy's hometown Metcalf—and in spots around Washington, D.C.[6]. He wanted the last line of the film to be Guy describing Bruno as "a very clever fellow". "Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain. Guy and Anne coldly walk away from him. [8] Hitchcock had already shot the long shots for the tennis match at Forest Hills and would add closer shots with Granger and Jack Cushingham, Granger's tennis coach off-screen and Guy's tennis opponent Fred Reynolds on-screen at a tennis club in South Gate, California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee in Chatsworth, California. Strangers on a Train marked something of a renaissance for Hitchcock, after several years of low enthusiasm for his late-1940s output,[24] and he threw himself into the micromanagement of some of its production. "[22], Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitchcock the best of his career: "You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Bruno Antony thinks he has the perfect plot to rid himself of his hated father, and when he meets tennis player Guy Haines on a train he thinks he's found the partner he needs to pull it off. [12] With treatment in hand, Hitchcock shopped for a screenwriter; he wanted a "name" writer to lend some prestige to the screenplay, but was turned down by eight writers, including John Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder, all of whom thought the story too tawdry and were put off by Highsmith's first-timer status. These events were the background to their work, while Hitchcock, Cook, Ormonde and Keon were preparing the script for Strangers, and film scholar Robert L. Carringer has written of a political subtext to the film. For example, Guy could kill his father and he could get rid of Guy's wife Miriam, freeing him to marry Anne Morton, the beautiful daughter of a U.S. "[19] Hitchcock, who had drawn gay characters so sharply yet subtly in Rope in 1948, "drafted the left-leaning Cook... expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters. Loving the Alien. That evening, Bruno follows Miriam to an amusement park and strangles her to death while Guy is traveling on the train back to Washington. A retired jewel thief sets out to prove his innocence after being suspected of returning to his former occupation. [66] According to biographer Charlotte Chandler (Lyn Erhard), Hitchcock himself did not like either the "British" or the "American" version: Hitchcock told [Chandler] that the picture should have ended with Guy at the amusement park after he has been cleared of murdering his wife. In Raymond Chandler's second draft script — which Hitchcock ceremoniously dropped into the wastebasket while daintily holding his nose — the final shot is Guy Haines, institutionalized, bound in a straitjacket. "[4], The two characters, Guy and Bruno, can be viewed as doppelgängers. Highsmith isn’t exactly sympathetic to the almost perpetually drunken Bruno, but she lets his character … View production, box office, & company info. "[20] Robert Burks received the film's sole Academy Award nomination for its black and white photography.[22]. [21], Nevertheless, the score does pick up on the ubiquitous theme of doubles — often contrasting doubles — right from the opening title sequence: "The first shot — two sets of male shoes, loud versus conservative, moving toward a train — carries a gruff bass motif set against Gershwin-like riffs, a two-part medley called "Strangers" and "Walking" that is never heard again. In Hitchcock's cameo he carries a double bass. Pure Hitchcock. The band plays on through Bruno's stalking of his victim and during the murder itself, blaring from the front of the screen, then receding into the darkness as an eerie obbligato when the doomed Miriam enters the Tunnel of Love.[38]. There are two respectable and influential fathers, two women with eyeglasses, and two women at a party who delight in thinking up ways of committing the perfect crime. The police question Guy, but are unable to confirm his alibi: a professor Guy met on the train was so drunk that he cannot remember their encounter. Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him "a reel of storytelling time", since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that did not have to be spelled out. He is the perfect victim for Walker, and is a weakling who won't even go to the police when the murder swapping scenario begins. Doctors Jo Wilson, April Kepner, and Andrew DeLuca share the episodes they think are essential to understanding their characters. July 17, 2020 August 7, 2020 davidmvining #18 in my Ranking of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Guy creeps into Bruno's father's room to warn him of his son's murderous intentions, but instead he finds the suspicious Bruno there waiting for him; the father is not at home. Strangers On A Train is a psychological thriller. Maybe Commodus Was the Good Guy. Ebert wrote: Hitchcock was a classical technician in terms of controlling his visuals, and his use of screen space underlined the tension in ways the audience isn't always aware of. He makes an excellent suspect because of the genius of the actual killer's original plan: Two strangers will "exchange murders," each killing the person the other wants dead. But perhaps the most memorable music in Strangers is the calliope music,[21] heard first at the fairground and again, later, when Bruno is strangling Mrs. Cunningham at Senator Morton's soirée, and experiences his unfortunate flashback and subsequent fainting spell. A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people. It is number 32 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills. In a conventional movie, the tune would play in the background as a clever ironic backdrop. I read the book after seeing the movie and I was biased by the images from the film that kept popping before my eyes. Each will murder a total stranger, with no apparent motive, so neither will be suspected. As usual, Hitchcock kept his name out of the negotiations to keep the purchase price low. "The climactic carousel explosion was a marvel of miniatures and background projection, acting close-ups and other inserts, all of it seamlessly matched and blended under film editor William H. Ziegler's eye. Although Hitchcock admitted to undercranking the shot (artificially accelerating the action),[33] it was not a trick shot: the man actually had to crawl under the spinning ride, just inches from possible injury. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock's associate producer Barbara Keon—disparagingly called "Hitchcock's factotum" by Chandler[17]—and Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife. Written by [3] "Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno's conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him. [19], Carringer has argued that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic climate. "[54], Although its first rumblings came in 1947 with the trial and conviction of the "Hollywood Ten," the so-called Red Scare was gathering steam in 1950, with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the trial of Alger Hiss. The story, with many deep subtexts, was based on the novel by … Guy meets with Miriam, who is pregnant by someone else, at her workplace in Metcalf, their hometown. This piece of film he then enlarged and projected onto a vast screen, positioning actors around and in front of it so that the effect is one of a mob of bystanders into which plaster horses and passengers are hurled in deadly chaos. Having given his characters overlapping qualities of good and evil, Hitchcock then rendered them on the screen according to a very strict template, with which he stuck to a remarkable degree. To amuse another guest, Bruno demonstrates how to strangle someone by playfully putting his hands around her neck. Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, David Foster Wallace, Farley Granger, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond … [27] Anne reaches for the big phone, but actually answers a regular one: "I did that on one take", Hitchcock explained, "by moving in on Anne so that the big phone went out of the frame as she reached for it. "You're a free man now", he says, just as a police car drives up, looking for the husband of a certain recent murder victim. Chandler completed a first draft, then wrote a second, without hearing a single word back from Hitchcock; when finally he did get a communication from the director in late September, it was his dismissal from the project.[15]. "When Bruno openly suggests he would like to kill his wife, he merely grins and says 'That's a morbid thought,' but we sense the tension that underlies it. Then I saw "Strangers On A Train" and his performance in that film changed my mind and how!! "Strangers on a Train is a moral-vertigo thriller: Crime and Punishment for a post-atomic age." "[11] Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit from his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot, "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car! Strangers on a Train is a 1951 American psychological thriller film noir produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. An early preview edit of the film, sometimes labeled the "British" version although it was never released in Britain or anywhere else, includes some scenes either not in, or else different from, the film as released. Hitchcock's even-strained response: "Cut. The theme of doubles is "the key element in the film's structure,"[45] and Hitchcock starts right off in his title sequence making this point: there are two taxicabs, two redcaps, two pairs of feet, two sets of train rails that cross twice. 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