Strangers on a Train (1952)

Strangers meet Hitchcock opens this electrifying film by showing two sets of male feet, those of Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), hurrying towards a train. Guy wears conservative-looking shoes, Bruno black-and-white spectator shoes, and their very movements suggest their distinctive personalities. Once on the train, the two men meet in the club car, have drinks, and share some chit-chat; then Bruno asks Guy if he can join him in his compartment to carry on their "interesting" discussion.

Bruno quickly reveals an astounding amount of information about tennis pro Guy. He knows all about Guy's money-grubbing wife, Miriam (Laura Elliot), how Guy has been separated from her and is now in love with Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a U.S. senator (Leo G. Carroll), and how Miriam refuses to give him a divorce so he can marry Anne and be happy. He has a similar problem, says Bruno. He has a rich father Mr. Antony (Jonathan Hale) whom he hates, a stern disciplinarian who is displeased at Bruno's playboy lifestyle. (Bruno has been kicked out of three colleges for drinking and gambling.) Both of them are in the same boat, he says, but there's one way to solve their problems. He proposes, in theory, of course, that they each murder the person vexing the other's life. If Bruno murdered Miriam and Guy murdered Mr. Antony, there would be no way to link the killings, neither man having a motive for murdering a total stranger. Guy is appalled at the idea and tells Bruno that he's crazy. Well, Bruno shrugs, it was only an idea.

When Guy gets to Washington, Bruno phones him and insists that they must go through with their plan. Guy tells him he has agreed to no plan and hangs up. The would-be killer has no intention of letting the idea drop and keeps after Guy until the tennis pro confides in Anne that he's dealing with some sort of maniac. On one occasion, Guy looks out to the street to see Bruno standing in the shadows, smoking a cigarette, smiling in his direction (one of the creepiest scenes Hitchcock was ever to film). Bruno calls again and tells Guy that the next night will be perfect for killing Bruno's father, giving him instructions on how to enter the enormous mansion where Mr. Antony lives, describing which room to go to, and how to murder Mr. Antony.

Guy takes down the details and prepares to go through with the bizarre murder scheme, or so it seems. The next evening Guy goes to Bruno's huge mansion, enters, and makes his way upstairs to a master bedchamber. As he stands over a bed with a sleeping form in it, he leans forward and says, "Mr. Antony, Mr. Antony, wake up, I want to speak to you about your son— about Bruno." In a frightening flash the covers are thrown back and the lamp next to the bed switches on to reveal Bruno, fully clothed, grinning maniacally. As Guy steps back in horror, Bruno calmly sits up and accuses Guy of going back on their arrangement. Bruno says he suspected that Guy didn't have the heart to carry out his end of the bargain and therefore Bruno has arranged this little test. But now Bruno insists Guy go through with his end of the double murder scheme and tells him that if he falters, he, Bruno, has a way of making him live up to his commitment. Again Guy tells him he needs psychiatric help and departs.

Bruno decides that he must kill Guy's wife to get the tennis pro to act. He follows Miriam to an amusement park and takes a boat ride to an island where lovers spoon. Miriam, though accompanied by two young men, sees the dapper Bruno out of the corner of her eye and, flattered that he is following her, encourages him with suggestive movements. He grabs her when she becomes separated from her friends; he pretends to embrace her but actually places his hands around her throat and strangles her. Miriam's thick-lensed glasses fall from her face as she struggles with the madman and (in one of Hitchcock's most inventive camera angles ever) the actual killing is seen through a lens of the spectacles as they lie on the grass, an upward and strangely distorted perspective on murder. Having killed Miriam, Bruno leaves the island.

He has done his job, he tells Guy, and now Guy must live up to his end of the bargain. When he reads of his wife's murder, Guy knows he cannot call the police because he would be implicated. All he can do is tell the persistent Bruno to stay away from him and Anne's family. This goads the lunatic into crashing a high-society party given by Sen. Morton (Carroll) and Anne, where he jocularly tells murder tales to interested society matrons, one of whom, Mrs. Cunningham (Norma Varden), encourages him, witlessly thinking his macabre tales interesting.

As he is demonstrating strangulation technique by placing his hands about Mrs. Cunningham's throat, Anne's younger sister Barbara Morton (Patricia Hitchcock), the director's daughter), appears, wearing glasses similar to those of his murder victim on the island. Her resemblance to Miriam takes Bruno back to the island. His grip around Mrs. Cunningham's throat begins to tighten, and he starts to choke the woman in the middle of the crowded party, reliving his murder of Miriam. Mrs. Cunningham, now terrified, screams loudly; jarred from his grim reverie by her screams, he mumbles some apology about having had too much to drink and is finally induced to leave.

The insiduous Bruno will not let up on Guy now, calling him incessantly on the phone to remind him that he must kill Mr. Antony, pursuing him everywhere. At one point Guy is in a car, driving, when he sees Bruno, all in black, standing before the pristine, white-marbled Jefferson Memorial, a hideous blot on the spotless historical monument. (Hitchcock included many famous monuments in this film, shot on location in Washington, D.C.) On the phone Bruno reminds Guy that he really desired to have his wife dead: "But Guy, you wanted it—we planned it together. You're just as much in it as I am—. You're a free man now." In one of their clandestine meetings, Guy practically pleads with Bruno to leave him alone, reminding the killer that he, Guy, never once agreed to a double murder scheme. Guy stands behind iron-barred gates encircling a Washington mansion. In the distance, we have seen the lighted dome of the Senate House.

As the two men talk, Hitchcock displays them with the shadows of the bars on their faces, both now psychological prisoners of the lethal machinations hatched in Bruno's demented brain. "You've got me acting like a criminal now," Guy tells him and warns him emphatically to leave him alone. Bruno ignores him, blithely reminding him that he possesses his monogrammed lighter, having "accidentally" picked it up on the train during their first meeting. Bruno dogs Guy's life, even following him to tennis matches to stare down at him like a dark sentinel beckoning from hell. In one of the most spectacularly terrifying scenes Hitchcock ever created, Guy is nervously playing a tennis match, moving frantically on the court, when suddenly the perspective changes to encompass a huge crowd looking down on the match, all the heads moving back and forth with the ball, except one, which the camera closes in on: Bruno, incongruously dressed in a business suit, sits motionless, his eyes riveted downward not on the moving ball but on Guy. Bruno now demands that Guy kill his father. His only rationale to Guy's objections is a total indifference to human life: "What is a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead."

Guy can bear his secret no longer and confides the details to Anne, explaining the swap killings Bruno envisioned and how Bruno actually went through with murdering Miriam. Before the couple can figure out what to do next, Guy gets another call from Bruno, who threatens to plant Guy's monogrammed lighter on the island near the amusement park so that police still looking into the Miriam killing will conclude that she was murdered by her irate husband. He is a suspect, anyway, having been shown at the beginning of the film arguing with Miriam in a music shop where she worked and later overheard telling Anne on the phone that Miriam will not give him a divorce, the tennis player so angry that he blurted out: "I'd like to break her foul, useless little neck—. I said I could strangle her!" Guy races to the amusement park, as does Bruno. En route, Bruno accidentally drops the monogrammed lighter into a sewer and desperately forces his hand and arm through the grating to retrieve it, as passersby urge him on, unwittingly encouraging a homicidal maniac in his heinous plans. Hitchcock's cameras almost side with the killer, shots aimed downward into the sewer and upward from it showing Bruno's sinister-looking face. He is finally triumphant and gets a little cheer from those watching him.

At the amusement park Guy and Bruno struggle for the lighter on a merry-go-round. As they fight, the operator of the machine shouts at them to stop and has a heart attack on the spot, falling forward and onto the controls, which makes the merry-go-round accelerate violently. All of the children are gotten off just as the ride increases in speed, except one terrified little child whom Guy tries to reach while Bruno, now as completely out of control as the machine, attempts to kill Guy. After a brilliant, terrifying sequence in which the machine whirls violently out of control, its mechanical horses with their painted grinning mouths plunging and rearing furiously, the whole merry-go-round eventually begins to wobble and break apart, its mechanism screeching like a dying animal. Guy makes a last dive and picks up the little child, leaping to safety at the very last second while Bruno remains trapped by the collapsing machine and is crushed by its weight when it crashes inward on itself. With police surrounding him—they have been summoned by the double-dealing Bruno to find the lighter he intended to plant—Guy begins to explain that Bruno tried to frame him. The dying psychopath insists to the last that he had nothing to do with Guy's wife and doesn't know Guy. As Bruno dies it appears that Guy is doomed, but Hitchcock's camera closes in on Bruno's clenched fist. Slowly the hand opens, and there is the lighter, which proves the dead man's guilt. Guy is next shown on a train traveling with Anne. Approached by a total stranger trying to make light conversation, he dummies up, not taking a chance at meeting another Bruno. In the closing shot the train speeds away.

Strangers on a Train ranks with Hitchcock's most accomplished works, a masterpiece so carefully constructed, with characters so well developed, that the viewer is quickly drawn into the story—long before Walker turns killer. The basic thrust of this startling tale is to show two men who are, in many ways, one.

After reading the novel, Hitchcock paid novelist Patricia Highsmith $7,500 for the film rights and then went about having a rough draft written for the screen, later bringing in the renowned mystery-novelist Raymond Chandler to do the finished script. The two did not get along well. At first Hitchcock insisted on working out every detail of the film with Chandler, a routine that soon had the brilliant Chandler upset. He complained to friends and his agent that Hitchcock was "smothering" him, and he came to dread the appearance of the director, who was driven daily by limousine from Los Angeles to La Jolla, where Chandler lived, to work on the script. The author, who had written great film noir screenplays such as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Blue Dahlia (1946), found it impossible to continue working with Hitchcock. He finished a first draft and sent it to the director but heard nothing back, which caused Chandler to write to a friend: "Not even a phone call. Not one word of criticism or appreciation. Silence. Blank silence then and since—. There are always things that need to be discussed. There are always places where a writer goes wrong, not being himself a master of the camera. There are always difficult little points which require the meeting of minds, the accommodation of points of view. I had none of this. I find it rather strange. I find it rather ruthless. I find it almost incomparably rude." Oddly, Chandler had complained when Hitchcock was with him, working out the script, then carped because the director left him too much alone. Hitchcock himself later remembered that his experience with Chandler "was not very happy. After a while I had to give up working with him. Sometimes when he was trying to get the idea for a scene, I would offer him a suggestion. Instead of giving that some thought, he would remark to me, very discontentedly, ‘If you can go it alone, why the hell do you need me?’ He refused to work with me as a director."

Chandler's script nevertheless was the basic one employed by Hitchcock, although the director later asked his favorite writer, Ben Hecht, to come in and "spruce it up." Hecht was busy at the time writing several other screenplays, but he assigned Czenzi Ormonde, who worked for him, to clean up some of the dialogue and tighten some scenes which he, Hecht, then looked over and edited before Hitchcock began shooting.

Granger is excellent as the innocent victim of the evil plot of the movie, and the supporting cast members shine in their roles, even Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia. But the compelling character of this film was that superlative actor Walker, whose sly and smiling ways, coupled with his mechanical way of killing (although only one body is produced in this chiller, a minimum record for Hitchcock), terrify every viewer who sees the film. He is not only Hitchcock's most frightening character, but one of the most horrific creations in any film; he is Hyde with no trace of Jekyll at all. Hitchcock was asked how he came to cast Walker, the one-time all-American boy of movies, as a homicidal maniac. "It was typecasting," replied Hitchcock. "I think that somebody once said the better the heavy, the better the story." In the same interview, Hitchcock recalled how strange Walker was in real life: "I remember one night we had him at a party, God rest his soul— a little party after the picture's showing at our house and my wife gave him brandy. Someone said: ‘Oh, you should never do that, never give him brandy, because he'll be gone.’ And he was gone, too. He had two or three. Then he took my wife aside and talked about me. He said: 'You know, I love him, but I hate him at the same time!' This was Robert Walker. It's scary, isn't it? In our own home!"

Everything about Strangers on a Train is vivid and vital, and it proved a success at the box office. Walker, who had had minimal impact up to the time of this film, suddenly became an important star, and it was thought that he would emerge as one of Hollywood's more accomplished dramatic actors. But, after performing in one more film, My Son John (1952), a contrived but intriguing drama about communists infiltrating the American family, he died prematurely of a heart attack, probably brought on by heavy drinking. His fascinating portrayal of Bruno Antony lingers in the imagination, however, and one wonders what Walker might have accomplished had he lived longer.

Cast:

Performer, Character

Farley Granger, Guy Haines

Ruth Roman, Anne Morton

Robert Walker, Bruno Antony

Leo G. Carroll, Sen. Morton

Patricia Hitchcock, Barbara Morton

Laura Elliot, Miriam

Marion Lorne, Mrs. Antony

Jonathan Hale, Mr. Antony

Howard St. John, Capt. Turley

John Brown, Prof.. Collins

Norma Varden, Mrs. Cunningham

Robert Gist' Hennessey

John Doucette, Hammond

Production Credits:

Producer, Alfred Hitchcock

Director, Alfred Hitchcock

Screenwriters, Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook {based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith)

Editor, William Ziegler

Cinematographer, Robert Burks

MusicDirector, Ray Heindorf

Composer, Dimitri Tiomkin