Strangers on a Train (film)
Encyclopedia
Strangers on a Train is an American psychological thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock
, and based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith
. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros.
on June 30, 1951. The film stars Farley Granger
, Ruth Roman
, and Robert Walker
, and features Leo G. Carroll
, Patricia Hitchcock
, and Laura Elliott.
The film is number 32 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills
.
Amateur
tennis
star Guy Haines (Farley Granger
) wants to divorce
his vulgar
and unfaithful wife Miriam (Laura Elliott), so he can marry the elegant and beautiful Anne Morton (Ruth Roman
), daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll
). While on a train
to meet Miriam, Haines meets Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker
), a forward stranger who recognizes Guy from gossip items in the newspapers that detail his marital problems. During lunch in Bruno's compartment, Bruno tells Guy about his idea for the perfect "Criss-cross" murder(s): he will kill Miriam and in exchange, Guy will kill Bruno's father. Since both are strangers, otherwise unconnected, there is no identifiable motive for the crimes, Bruno contends, hence no suspicion. Guy hurriedly leaves the compartment but leaves Bruno thinking he has agreed to the deal. Guy accidentally leaves his cigarette lighter behind, a gift from Anne to Guy, which Bruno pockets.
Bruno heads to Guy's hometown of Metcalf and follows Miriam and her two beaux to an amusement park, where he briefly illuminates her face with Guy's lighter, then strangles her to death. Guy's problems begin when his alibi
— an inebriated college professor on the same train as Guy — cannot remember their meeting. But they increase exponentially when Bruno makes repeated appearances into Guy's life as he seeks to remind Guy that he is now obliged to kill Bruno's father, according to the bargain he thinks they struck on the train.
Bruno sends Guy the keys to his house, a map to his father's room, and a pistol. Soon after, Bruno appears at a party at Senator Morton's house and hobnobs with the guests, much to Guy's apprehension and Anne's increasing suspicion. He demonstrates how to strangle someone while preventing them from screaming: with his hands around his "assistant's" neck Bruno looks up and sees Anne's younger sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock
). Her eyeglasses and resemblance to Miriam trigger a flashback for Bruno to Miriam's slaying, and he loses control of himself and begins to strangle his subject. After a moment he faints, and the frightened party guests pull him off the hysterical woman. Young Barbara rushes to her sister and tells her, "His hands were on her neck, but he was strangling me." Anne puts together the facts of the crime and confronts Guy, who finally admits the truth.
Guy finally agrees to Bruno's plan over the telephone and creeps into Bruno's home at night. When he reaches the father's room he tries to warn the older man of Bruno's intentions, but finds Bruno waiting for him instead, now aware that Guy's sudden change of heart suggests betrayal. Bruno tells Guy that because he will not complete his end of the bargain, he should be blamed for the murder which "belongs" to him — so he will frame Guy for the murder of Miriam.
Anne visits Bruno's house to tell his mother (Marion Lorne
) that her son is responsible for the death of a woman, but she does not believe Anne and fails to understand how dangerous her son is. Bruno overhears the conversation and lets Anne know that he has the lighter and plans to plant it at the scene of the crime during the night to implicate Guy. Anne reports back to Guy and the two devise a plan for Guy to beat Bruno to the scene of the crime after he finishes a tennis match that would be too suspicious for him to cancel.
Guy wins the tennis match but takes much longer than expected; likewise, Bruno is delayed when he drops Guy's lighter down a storm drain and must force his fingertips down the drain to recover it. Guy arrives at the park while Bruno is still waiting for sunset. The two men struggle on the carousel
, which spins out of control and crashes after its operator is accidentally hit by a bullet from the police meant for the fleeing Guy. Bruno, mortally wounded in the crash, manages to tell the police of Guy's guilt, but the lighter is found clutched in Bruno's hand, finally exonerating Guy. An amusement park employee who remembered Bruno's previous visit confirms that Bruno was in fact the murderer.
Reunited with Anne on a train home, Guy is asked by a friendly clergyman seated near them if he is Guy Haines. Starting to reply, Guy, remembering this is the way Bruno started their fatal conversation, stops himself and quickly leaves the club car with Anne, leaving the man perplexed.
Cast notes
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance in this movie occurs 11 minutes into the film. We see him carrying a double bass
as he climbs onto the train.
Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him "a reel of storytelling time", since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that didn't have to be spelled out. In his book-length interview with François Truffaut
, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock told Truffaut that he originally wanted William Holden
for the Guy Haines role, but Holden declined. "Holden would have been all wrong—too sturdy, too put off by Bruno", writes critic Roger Ebert
. "Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno's conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him."
Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack Warner
got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock's objections; the director found her "bristling" and "lacking in sex appeal" and said that she had been "foisted upon him." Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock's scorn throughout the production. Granger diplomatically describes it as Hitchcock's "disinterest" in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of Rope
(1948). "He had to have one person in each film he could harass", Granger said.
Kasey Rogers
(Miriam, credited as Laura Elliott) noted that she had perfect vision at the time the movie was made, but Hitchcock insisted she wear the character's thick eyeglasses, even in long shots when regular glass lenses would have been undetectable. Rogers was effectively blind with the glasses on, and needed to be guided by the other actors. In one scene, she can be seen dragging her hand along a table as she walks; this was in order for her to keep track of where she was.
Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment
that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext (only hinted at in the novel) into the story and softened Bruno from a coarse alcoholic into a dapper, charming mama's boy — a much more Hitchcockian villain. 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. Talks with Dashiell Hammett
got further, but here too communications ultimately broke down, and Hammett never took the assignment.
Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler
, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Double Indemnity, in collaboration with Billy Wilder
. Chandler took the job despite his opinion that it was "a silly little story." But Chandler was a notoriously difficult collaborator and the two men couldn't have had more different meeting styles: Hitchcock enjoyed long, rambling off-topic meetings where often the film wouldn't even be mentioned for hours, while Chandler was strictly business and wanted to get out and get writing. He called the meetings "god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business." Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!" Not surprisingly, this marked their last confab. Chandler completed that 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.
Next, Hitchcock tried to hire Ben Hecht
, only to find he was unavailable. Hecht suggested his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to write the screenplay. 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"—always a plus with Hitch. With his new writer, he wanted to start from square one:
There wasn't much time though — less than three weeks until location shooting was scheduled to start in the east. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock's associate producer Barbara Keon—disparagingly called "Hitchcock's factotum" by Chandler—and Alma (Mrs. Alfred) Hitchcock; together the three women, working under the boss's guidance and late into most nights, finished enough of the script in time to send the company east. The rest was complete by early November. Three notable additions the trio had made were the runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses.
There was one point of agreement between Chandler and Hitchcock, although it would come only much later, near the release of the film: they both acknowledged that since virtually none of Chandler's work remained in the final script, his name should be removed from the credits. Hitchcock preferred the writing credit of Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde, but Warner Bros. wanted the cachet of the Chandler name and insisted it stay on.
Even while the tortuous writing stage was plodding its course, the director's excitement about the project was boundless. "Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain." The more the film resolved in his mind's eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes' execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks
, who would go on to shoot every Hitchcock picture through Marnie
(1964) except Psycho. "Low-keyed, mild mannered", Burks was "a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an exceptionally apt choice for what would prove to be Hitchcock's most Germanic film in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding." None was more demanding than Bruno's strangulation of Miriam, shown in her eyeglass lens: "It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years—and Robert Burks captured it magnificently."
Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitch the best of his career: "You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Hitchcock insists on perfection. He has no patience with mediocrity on the set or at a dinner table. There can be no compromise in his work, his food or his wines." In the end, Strangers on a Train received only one Academy Award nomination: for its director of photography, Robert Burks.
matches at Forest Hills, New York, and while there had done some location scouting
. Exteriors would be shot on both coasts, and interiors on soundstages at Warners.
Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the east coast on October 17, 1950. 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.
By month's end they were back in California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee
in Chatsworth, California. The amusement park exteriors were shot there and at an actual Tunnel of Love
at a fairground in Canoga Park, California. Hitchcock had already shot the long shots for the tennis match at Forest Hills and would round out his 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
. The rest of the shooting would take place on Warner soundstages, including many seeming exteriors and locations which were actually done inside, in front of rear-projection screens.
Strangers on a Train marked something of a renaissance for Hitchcock after several years of low enthusiasm for his mediocre late-1940s output, and he threw himself into the micromanagement of some of its production. Hitchcock himself designed Bruno's lobster necktie, revealed in a close-up to have strangling lobster claws, and "he personally selected an orange peel, a chewing-gum wrapper, wet leaves, and a bit of crumpled paper that were used for sewer debris" in the scene where Bruno inadvertently drops Guy's lighter down the storm drain.
He also showed intense interest in a seldom-considered detail of character delineation: Food.
One of the most memorable single shots in the Hitchcock canon — it "is studied by film classes", says Laura Elliott, who played Miriam—is her character's strangulation by Bruno on the Isle of Love. "[I]n one of the most unexpected, most aesthetically justified moments in film," 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. The unusual angle was a more complex proposition than it seems. First Hitchcock got the exterior shots in Canoga Park, using both actors, then later he had Elliott alone report to a soundstage where there was a large concave reflector set on the floor. The camera was on one side of the reflector, Elliott was on the other, and Hitchcock directed Elliott to turn her back to the reflector and "float backwards, all the way to the floor... like you were doing the limbo." The first six takes went badly—Elliott thudded to the floor with several feet yet to go—but on the seventh take, she floated smoothly all the way. Hitchcock's even-strained response: "Cut. Next shot." Hitchcock then had the two elements "ingenious[ly]" double printed, yielding a shot of "oddly appealing originality [with] a stark fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful.... The astheticizing of the horror somehow enables the audience to contemplate more fully its reality."
Hitchcock was, above all, the master of great visual setpieces, and "[p]erhaps the most memorable sequence in Strangers on a Train is the climactic fight on a berserk carousel." While Guy and Bruno fight, the ride runs out of control until it tears itself to pieces, flinging wooden horses into the crowd of screaming mothers and squealing children. "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] Ziegler's eye."
The explosion is triggered by the attempts of a carnival man to stop the ride after crawling under the whirling carousel deck to get to the controls in the center. Although Hitchcock admitted to undercranking the shot (artificially accelerating the action), it was not a trick shot: the man actually had to crawl under the spinning ride, just inches from possible injury. "Hitchcock told me that this scene was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films", writes biographer Charlotte Chandler
. "The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. 'If the man had raised his head even slightly", Hitchcock said, "it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film."
The final scene of the so-called American version of the film has Barbara and Anne Morton waiting for Guy to call on the telephone. Hitchcock wanted the phone in the foreground to dominate the shot, emphasizing the importance of the call, but the limited depth-of-field of contemporary motion picture lenses made it difficult to get both phone and women in focus. So Hitchcock had an oversized phone constructed and placed in the foreground. 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. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up."
Principal photography wrapped just before Christmas and Hitchcock and Alma left for a vacation in Santa Cruz, then in late March 1951, on to St. Moritz for a 25th anniversary European excursion.
was Jack Warner's choice to score Strangers on a Train. While he had previous Hitchcock experience on 1943's Shadow of a Doubt
and would go on to score two more consecutive Hitch films, director and composer "simply never developed much of a kinship" and "the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin's best."
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." The powerful music accurately underscores the visuals of that title sequence — the massive granite edifice of New York's Pennsylvania Station, standing in for Washington's Union Station—because it was scored for an unusually large orchestra, including alto, tenor and baritone saxes, three clarinets, four horns, three pianos and a novachord.
Tiomkin's contrasting musical themes continue throughout the film, delineating two characters with substantial differences: "For 'Guy's Theme', Tiomkin created a hesitant, passive idea, made-to-order music for Farley Granger's performance." Bruno, who tells Guy on the train that he admires people "who do things", gets a more vigorous musical treatment from Tiomkin: "Harmonic complexity defines the motifs associated with Bruno: rumbling bass, shocking clusters, and glassy string harmonics. These disturbing sounds, heard to superb effect in cues such as 'The Meeting,' 'Senator's Office,' and 'Jefferson Memorial,' are not just about Bruno, but about how he is perceived by those whose lives he crosses—first Guy, then everyone in Guy's entourage."
But perhaps the most memorable music in Strangers is the calliope music 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. It was Hitchcock, not Tiomkin, whose idea brought the four evocative numbers — "The Band Played On
", "Carolina in the Morning
", "Oh, You Beautiful Doll
", and "Baby Face
" — to the soundtrack:
"The Band Played On" makes its final reprise during Guy's and Bruno's fight on the merry-go-round, even itself shifting to a faster tempo and higher pitch when the policeman's bullet hits the ride operator and sends the carousel into its frenzied hyper-drive.
Critic Jack Sullivan
has kinder words for Tiomkin's score for Strangers than does biographer Spoto
: "[S]o seamlessly and inevitably does it fit the picture's design that it seems like an element of Hitchcock's storyboards", he writes It is a score that "goes largely uncelebrated."
One studio press release gave rise to a myth that still lingers on today. Hitchcock and Patricia both were afraid of heights, and father offered daughter a hundred dollars to ride the Ferris wheel
— only to order the power cut, leaving her in the dark at the very top of the ride. The press release embellished the tale, claiming he left her "dangling in total darkness for an hour," only then allowing his "trembling daughter" to be lowered and released. Although that account continues to be published in books to this day, "it just wasn't true", avers Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. First of all, she wasn't up there alone: flanking her were the actors playing Miriam's two boyfriends — "and I have a picture of us waving." "This was good stuff for press agents paid to stir up thrills and it has been repeated in other books to bolster the idea of Hitchcock's sadism," but "we were [only] up there two or three minutes at the outside.... My father wasn't ever sadistic. The only sadistic part was I never got the hundred dollars."
Strangers on a Train previewed on March 5, 1951 at the Huntington Park
Theatre, with Alma, Jack Warner, Whitfield Cook and Barbara Keon in the Hitchcock party and it won a prize from the Screen Directors Guild. It premiered in New York on July 3, marking the reopening of the extensively remodeled Strand Theatre as the Warner Theatre, and in a dozen cities around the country. Hitchcock made personal appearances in most of them, and was often accompanied by his daughter.
Some audience feedback arriving at Jack Warner's office condemned the film for its sordid story, while just as many others were favorable. Of greater interest to Mr. Warner was the box office take, and the "receipts soon told the true story: Strangers on a Train was a success, and Hitchcock was pronounced at the top of his form as master of the dark, melodramatic suspense thriller."
s and visual metaphor
s that demonstrate a running motif of crisscross, double-crossing, and crossing one's double. Talking about the structure of the film, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever."
The two characters Guy and Bruno can be viewed as doppelgänger
s. As with Shadow of a Doubt
, Strangers on a Train is one of many Hitchcock films to explore the doppelgänger
theme. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis." Bruno embodies Guy's dark desire to kill Miriam, a "real-life incarnation of Guy's wish-fulfillment fantasy".
.
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!" and the other, far distant, makes a choking gesture.
All this doubling has no precedent in the novel; it was quite deliberately added by Hitchcock, "dictated in rapid and inspired profusion to Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon during the last days of script preparation." 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."
Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are opposites. The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they establish immediately the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes." They also demonstrate Hitchcock's gift for deft visual storytelling: For most of the film, Bruno is the actor, Guy the reactor, and Hitchcock always shows Bruno's feet first, then Guy's. And since it is Guy's foot that taps Bruno's under the table, we know Bruno has not engineered the meeting.
Roger Ebert writes that "it is this sense of two flawed characters — one evil, one weak, with an unstated sexual tension — that makes the movie intriguing and halfway plausible, and explains how Bruno could come so close to carrying out his plan."
At first glance, Guy represents the ordered life where people stick to the rules, while Bruno comes from the world of chaos, where they get thrown out of multiple colleges for drinking and gambling. Yet "[b]oth men, like so many of Hitchcock's protagonists, are insecure and uncertain of their identity. Guy is suspended between tennis and politics, between his tramp wife and his senator's daughter, and Bruno is seeking desperately to establish an identity through violent, outré actions and flamboyance (shoes, lobster-patterned tie, name proclaimed to the world on his tiepin)."
Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. "Me, I never do anything important." Yet as Bruno describes his "theories" over lunch, "Guy responds to Bruno — we see it in his face, at once amused and tense. To the man committed to a career in politics, Bruno represents a tempting overthrow of all responsibility." And at this point the blurring of good and evil accelerates: Guy fails to repudiate Bruno's suggestive statement about murdering Miriam ("What's a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.") with any force or conviction. "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." It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. "He is leaving in Bruno's keeping his link with Anne, his possibility of climbing into the ordered existence to which he aspires.... Guy, then, in a sense connives at the murder of his wife, and the enigmatic link between him and Bruno becomes clear. Guy is not a clear-cut hero, Bruno not an all-black villain: the continuum has been established.
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's executed his part of their "deal". "On one side of the street, [are] stately respectable houses; towering in the background, on the right of the screen, the floodlit dome of the U.S. Capitol, the life to which Guy aspires, the world of light and order." Bruno tells Guy what he's done and gives him the glasses. "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. Guy nervously steps into the shadows with Bruno, literally behind the bars of an iron fence; "You've got me acting like I'm a criminal", he says. "The scene gives a beautifully exact symbolic expression to Guy's relationship with Bruno and what he stands for."
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"; 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; 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."
, the so-called Red Scare
was truly gathering steam in the year 1950 with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
and the trial of Alger Hiss
. 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. Carrington writes of a political subtext to the film. Treatment writer Cook used Guy to make the film "a parable quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America."
Carrington argues that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic
climate. "To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype, an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed", writes Carrington; he is "a man of indeterminate sexual identity
found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised."
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."
between Washington, D.C. and New York — the novel ranged through the southwest and Florida, among other locales. The scripting team added the tennis match — and the crosscutting with Bruno's storm drain travails in Metcalf — added the cigarette lighter, the Tunnel of Love, Miriam's eyeglasses; in fact, the amusement park is only a brief setting in the novel.
Hitchcock's biggest changes were in his two lead characters:
The character called Bruno Anthony in the film is called Charles Anthony Bruno in the book. "Highsmith's Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic... but in [Whitfield Cook's] hands, the film's Bruno became a dandy, a mama's boy who speaks French
, and who professes ignorance of women." In the book, Bruno dies in a boating accident far removed from any merry-go-round.
In the novel, Guy Haines is not a tennis player, but rather a promising architect, and he does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno's father. In the movie, "Guy became a decent guy who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain..." writes Patrick McGilligan, "to head off the censors." In the novel, Guy is pursued, arrested and jailed by a tenacious detective.
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 straight jacket.
Showbiz bible Variety
liked it: ""Performance-wise, the cast comes through strongly. Granger is excellent as the harassed young man innocently involved in murder. Roman's role as a nice, understanding girl is a switch for her, and she makes it warmly effective. Walker's role has extreme color, and he projects it deftly."
Doyen critic Bosley Crowther
, writing in the New York Times, did not: "Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support. ... Perhaps there will be those in the audience who will likewise be terrified by the villain's darkly menacing warnings and by Mr. Hitchcock's sleekly melodramatic tricks. ... But, for all that, his basic premise of fear fired by menace is so thin and so utterly unconvincing that the story just does not stand."
Prolific critic Leslie Halliwell
walked the middle line: "This quirky melodrama has the director at his best, sequence by sequence, but the story is basically unsatisfactory. It makes superior suspense entertainment, however."
More recent criticism is generally, though not universally, more positive. The film review site Rotten Tomatoes
has the film ranked at a 97% "Fresh" rating. Roger Ebert
called Strangers on a Train a "first-rate thriller" among the top five of Hitchcock's films.
David Keyes, writing at cinemaphile.org in 2002, saw the film as a seminal entry in its genre: "Aside from its very evident approach as a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick, the movie is one of the original shells for identity-inspired mystery thrillers, in which natural human behavior is the driving force behind the true macabre rather than supernatural elements. Even classic endeavors like Fargo
and A Simple Plan
seem directly fueled by this concept...."
Almar Haflidason was effusive about it in 2001 at the BBC
website: "Hitchcock's favourite device of an ordinary man caught in an ever-tightening web of fear plunges Guy into one of the director's most fiendishly effective movies. Ordinary Washington locations become sinister hunting grounds that mirror perfectly the creeping terror that slowly consumes Guy, as the lethally smooth Bruno relentlessly pursues him to a frenzied climax. Fast, exciting, and woven with wicked style, this is one of Hitchcock's most efficient and ruthlessly delicious thrillers."
. Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director by the Directors' Guild of America. The film was nominated as Best Picture by the National Board of Review.
American Film Institute
Lists
(Lyn Erhard):
Warner's Region 2 DVD (Japan and Europe) release of the film is a 'flipper' (double sided) disc, with the "British" version on one side, and the 'Hollywood' version on the reverse. Warner also released a Region 1 'flipper' disc. The "British" version omits the final scene on the train.
on two occasions: on December 3, 1951 with Ruth Roman
, Frank Lovejoy
, and Ray Milland
and on April 12, 1954 with Virginia Mayo
, Dana Andrews
, and Robert Cummings
.
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
, and based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short-story writer most widely known for her psychological thrillers, which led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen numerous times, notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951...
. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
on June 30, 1951. The film stars Farley Granger
Farley Granger
Farley Earle Granger was an American actor. In a career spanning several decades, he was perhaps best known for his two collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.-Early life:...
, Ruth Roman
Ruth Roman
Ruth Roman was an American actress. One of her most memorable roles was in the Alfred Hitchcock 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train....
, and Robert Walker
Robert Hudson Walker
Robert Hudson Walker was an American actor. He is probably best known for his role as Bruno Anthony in Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train.-Early life:...
, and features Leo G. Carroll
Leo G. Carroll
Leo Gratten Carroll was an English-born actor. He was best known for his roles in several Hitchcock films and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Topper.-Early life:...
, Patricia Hitchcock
Patricia Hitchcock
Patricia "Pat" Hitchcock O'Connell is a British-born American actress and producer.-Early life and career:Born in London as the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939, as her father would quickly make his mark...
, and Laura Elliott.
The film is number 32 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills
AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills
Part of the AFI 100 Years… series, AFI's 100 Years…100 Thrills is a list of the top 100 heart-pounding movies in American cinema. The list was unveiled by the American Film Institute on June 12, 2001, during a CBS special hosted by Harrison Ford....
.
Plot
Amateur
An amateur is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study, or science, without pay and often without formal training....
tennis
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
star Guy Haines (Farley Granger
Farley Granger
Farley Earle Granger was an American actor. In a career spanning several decades, he was perhaps best known for his two collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.-Early life:...
) wants to divorce
Divorce
Divorce is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties...
his vulgar
VULGAR
Vulgar is the fourth studio album released by Dir En Grey on September 10, 2003 in Japan and on February 21, 2006 in Europe. A limited edition containing an additional DVD was also released. It featured the video of the song "Obscure", albeit a censored version...
and unfaithful wife Miriam (Laura Elliott), so he can marry the elegant and beautiful Anne Morton (Ruth Roman
Ruth Roman
Ruth Roman was an American actress. One of her most memorable roles was in the Alfred Hitchcock 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train....
), daughter of a senator (Leo G. Carroll
Leo G. Carroll
Leo Gratten Carroll was an English-born actor. He was best known for his roles in several Hitchcock films and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Topper.-Early life:...
). While on a train
Train
A train is a connected series of vehicles for rail transport that move along a track to transport cargo or passengers from one place to another place. The track usually consists of two rails, but might also be a monorail or maglev guideway.Propulsion for the train is provided by a separate...
to meet Miriam, Haines meets Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker
Robert Hudson Walker
Robert Hudson Walker was an American actor. He is probably best known for his role as Bruno Anthony in Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train.-Early life:...
), a forward stranger who recognizes Guy from gossip items in the newspapers that detail his marital problems. During lunch in Bruno's compartment, Bruno tells Guy about his idea for the perfect "Criss-cross" murder(s): he will kill Miriam and in exchange, Guy will kill Bruno's father. Since both are strangers, otherwise unconnected, there is no identifiable motive for the crimes, Bruno contends, hence no suspicion. Guy hurriedly leaves the compartment but leaves Bruno thinking he has agreed to the deal. Guy accidentally leaves his cigarette lighter behind, a gift from Anne to Guy, which Bruno pockets.
Bruno heads to Guy's hometown of Metcalf and follows Miriam and her two beaux to an amusement park, where he briefly illuminates her face with Guy's lighter, then strangles her to death. Guy's problems begin when his alibi
Alibi
Alibi is a 1929 American crime film directed by Roland West. The screenplay was written by West and C. Gardner Sullivan, who adapted the 1927 Broadway stage play, Nightstick, written by Elaine Sterne Carrington, J.C...
— an inebriated college professor on the same train as Guy — cannot remember their meeting. But they increase exponentially when Bruno makes repeated appearances into Guy's life as he seeks to remind Guy that he is now obliged to kill Bruno's father, according to the bargain he thinks they struck on the train.
Bruno sends Guy the keys to his house, a map to his father's room, and a pistol. Soon after, Bruno appears at a party at Senator Morton's house and hobnobs with the guests, much to Guy's apprehension and Anne's increasing suspicion. He demonstrates how to strangle someone while preventing them from screaming: with his hands around his "assistant's" neck Bruno looks up and sees Anne's younger sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock
Patricia Hitchcock
Patricia "Pat" Hitchcock O'Connell is a British-born American actress and producer.-Early life and career:Born in London as the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939, as her father would quickly make his mark...
). Her eyeglasses and resemblance to Miriam trigger a flashback for Bruno to Miriam's slaying, and he loses control of himself and begins to strangle his subject. After a moment he faints, and the frightened party guests pull him off the hysterical woman. Young Barbara rushes to her sister and tells her, "His hands were on her neck, but he was strangling me." Anne puts together the facts of the crime and confronts Guy, who finally admits the truth.
Guy finally agrees to Bruno's plan over the telephone and creeps into Bruno's home at night. When he reaches the father's room he tries to warn the older man of Bruno's intentions, but finds Bruno waiting for him instead, now aware that Guy's sudden change of heart suggests betrayal. Bruno tells Guy that because he will not complete his end of the bargain, he should be blamed for the murder which "belongs" to him — so he will frame Guy for the murder of Miriam.
Marion Lorne
Marion Lorne MacDougall was an American actress. After a career in theatre in New York and London, Lorne made her first film in 1951, and for the remainder of her life, played small roles in films and television...
) that her son is responsible for the death of a woman, but she does not believe Anne and fails to understand how dangerous her son is. Bruno overhears the conversation and lets Anne know that he has the lighter and plans to plant it at the scene of the crime during the night to implicate Guy. Anne reports back to Guy and the two devise a plan for Guy to beat Bruno to the scene of the crime after he finishes a tennis match that would be too suspicious for him to cancel.
Guy wins the tennis match but takes much longer than expected; likewise, Bruno is delayed when he drops Guy's lighter down a storm drain and must force his fingertips down the drain to recover it. Guy arrives at the park while Bruno is still waiting for sunset. The two men struggle on the carousel
Carousel
A carousel , or merry-go-round, is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating circular platform with seats for riders...
, which spins out of control and crashes after its operator is accidentally hit by a bullet from the police meant for the fleeing Guy. Bruno, mortally wounded in the crash, manages to tell the police of Guy's guilt, but the lighter is found clutched in Bruno's hand, finally exonerating Guy. An amusement park employee who remembered Bruno's previous visit confirms that Bruno was in fact the murderer.
Reunited with Anne on a train home, Guy is asked by a friendly clergyman seated near them if he is Guy Haines. Starting to reply, Guy, remembering this is the way Bruno started their fatal conversation, stops himself and quickly leaves the club car with Anne, leaving the man perplexed.
Cast
- Farley GrangerFarley GrangerFarley Earle Granger was an American actor. In a career spanning several decades, he was perhaps best known for his two collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.-Early life:...
as Guy Haines - Ruth RomanRuth RomanRuth Roman was an American actress. One of her most memorable roles was in the Alfred Hitchcock 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train....
as Anne Morton - Robert WalkerRobert Hudson WalkerRobert Hudson Walker was an American actor. He is probably best known for his role as Bruno Anthony in Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train.-Early life:...
as Bruno Anthony - Leo G. CarrollLeo G. CarrollLeo Gratten Carroll was an English-born actor. He was best known for his roles in several Hitchcock films and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Topper.-Early life:...
as Senator Morton - Patricia HitchcockPatricia HitchcockPatricia "Pat" Hitchcock O'Connell is a British-born American actress and producer.-Early life and career:Born in London as the only child of film director Alfred Hitchcock and film editor Alma Reville, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1939, as her father would quickly make his mark...
as Barbara Morton - Laura ElliottKasey RogersKasey Rogers was an American actress, best known for playing the second Louise Tate on the popular U.S. television sitcom Bewitched.-Career:...
as Miriam Joyce Haines - Marion LorneMarion LorneMarion Lorne MacDougall was an American actress. After a career in theatre in New York and London, Lorne made her first film in 1951, and for the remainder of her life, played small roles in films and television...
as Mrs. Anthony - Jonathan HaleJonathan HaleJonathan Hale was a Canadian-born film and television actor.-Career:Born Jonathan Hatley in Ontario, Canada, Hale was well known as Dagwood Bumstead's boss, Julius Caesar Dithers, in the Blondie film series in the 1940s. He is also notable for playing Inspector Farnack in various The Saint films...
as Mr. Anthony - Norma VardenNorma VardenNorma Varden was an English actress with a long film career in Hollywood.Born in London, the daughter of a retired sea-captain, Varden was a child prodigy. She trained as a concert pianist in Paris and performed in England before deciding to take up acting...
as Mrs. Cunningham - John BrownJohn Brown (actor)John Brown was an English radio and film actor.He had major roles in several popular radio shows. He played Irma's love interest Al in My Friend Irma, Digby "Digger" O'Dell in The Life of Riley and "Broadway" in The Damon Runyon Theatre...
as Professor Collins - Robert GistRobert GistRobert Gist was an American actor and film director. He was married to actress Agnes Moorehead from 1954 to 1958, although they separated in 1955. They met during the filming of The Stratton Story .- Biography :...
as Detective Hennessey - Georges RenaventGeorges RenaventGeorges Renavent was an actor in American classic films, Broadway plays and operator of American Grand Guignol. He was born in Paris, France....
as Monsieur Darville (uncredited)
Cast notes
Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance in this movie occurs 11 minutes into the film. We see him carrying a double bass
Double bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...
as he climbs onto the train.
Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him "a reel of storytelling time", since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that didn't have to be spelled out. In his book-length interview with François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock told Truffaut that he originally wanted William Holden
William Holden
William Holden was an American actor. Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1954 and the Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1974...
for the Guy Haines role, but Holden declined. "Holden would have been all wrong—too sturdy, too put off by Bruno", writes critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
. "Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno's conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him."
Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack Warner
Jack Warner
Jack Leonard "J. L." Warner , born Jacob Warner in London, Ontario, was a Canadian American film executive who was the president and driving force behind the Warner Bros. Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California...
got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock's objections; the director found her "bristling" and "lacking in sex appeal" and said that she had been "foisted upon him." Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock's scorn throughout the production. Granger diplomatically describes it as Hitchcock's "disinterest" in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of Rope
Rope (film)
Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions...
(1948). "He had to have one person in each film he could harass", Granger said.
Kasey Rogers
Kasey Rogers
Kasey Rogers was an American actress, best known for playing the second Louise Tate on the popular U.S. television sitcom Bewitched.-Career:...
(Miriam, credited as Laura Elliott) noted that she had perfect vision at the time the movie was made, but Hitchcock insisted she wear the character's thick eyeglasses, even in long shots when regular glass lenses would have been undetectable. Rogers was effectively blind with the glasses on, and needed to be guided by the other actors. In one scene, she can be seen dragging her hand along a table as she walks; this was in order for her to keep track of where she was.
Pre-production
Hitchcock secured the rights to the Patricia Highsmith novel for just $7,500 since it was her first novel. Hitchcock kept his name out of the negotiations to keep the purchase price low. Highsmith was quite annoyed when she later discovered to whom she had sold the rights for such a small amount.Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment
Film treatment
A film treatment is a piece of prose, typically the step between scene cards and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture, television program, or radio play. It is generally longer and more detailed than an outline , and it may include details of directorial style that an outline omits...
that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext (only hinted at in the novel) into the story and softened Bruno from a coarse alcoholic into a dapper, charming mama's boy — a much more Hitchcockian villain. 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
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
and Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...
, all of whom thought the story too tawdry and were put off by Highsmith's first-timer status. Talks with Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...
got further, but here too communications ultimately broke down, and Hammett never took the assignment.
Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Double Indemnity, in collaboration with Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age...
. Chandler took the job despite his opinion that it was "a silly little story." But Chandler was a notoriously difficult collaborator and the two men couldn't have had more different meeting styles: Hitchcock enjoyed long, rambling off-topic meetings where often the film wouldn't even be mentioned for hours, while Chandler was strictly business and wanted to get out and get writing. He called the meetings "god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business." Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!" Not surprisingly, this marked their last confab. Chandler completed that 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.
Next, Hitchcock tried to hire Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of...
, only to find he was unavailable. Hecht suggested his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to write the screenplay. 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"—always a plus with Hitch. With his new writer, he wanted to start from square one:
There wasn't much time though — less than three weeks until location shooting was scheduled to start in the east. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock's associate producer Barbara Keon—disparagingly called "Hitchcock's factotum" by Chandler—and Alma (Mrs. Alfred) Hitchcock; together the three women, working under the boss's guidance and late into most nights, finished enough of the script in time to send the company east. The rest was complete by early November. Three notable additions the trio had made were the runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses.
There was one point of agreement between Chandler and Hitchcock, although it would come only much later, near the release of the film: they both acknowledged that since virtually none of Chandler's work remained in the final script, his name should be removed from the credits. Hitchcock preferred the writing credit of Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde, but Warner Bros. wanted the cachet of the Chandler name and insisted it stay on.
Even while the tortuous writing stage was plodding its course, the director's excitement about the project was boundless. "Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain." The more the film resolved in his mind's eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes' execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks
Robert Burks
Robert Burks, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer known for being proficient in virtually every genre and equally at home with black-and-white or color....
, who would go on to shoot every Hitchcock picture through Marnie
Marnie (film)
Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the novel of the same name by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. The original film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann.-Plot:...
(1964) except Psycho. "Low-keyed, mild mannered", Burks was "a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an exceptionally apt choice for what would prove to be Hitchcock's most Germanic film in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding." None was more demanding than Bruno's strangulation of Miriam, shown in her eyeglass lens: "It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years—and Robert Burks captured it magnificently."
Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitch the best of his career: "You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Hitchcock insists on perfection. He has no patience with mediocrity on the set or at a dinner table. There can be no compromise in his work, his food or his wines." In the end, Strangers on a Train received only one Academy Award nomination: for its director of photography, Robert Burks.
Production
With cast nailed down, a script in hand, and a sympatico director of photography on board, the company was ready to commence filming. Hitchcock had traveled east in midsummer to shoot background footage of the Davis CupDavis Cup
The Davis Cup is the premier international team event in men's tennis. It is run by the International Tennis Federation and is contested between teams of players from competing countries in a knock-out format. The competition began in 1900 as a challenge between Britain and the United States. By...
matches at Forest Hills, New York, and while there had done some location scouting
Location scouting
Location scouting is a vital process in the pre-production stage of filmmaking and commercial photography. Once scriptwriters, producers or directors have decided what general kind of scenery they require for the various parts of their work that is shot outside of the studio, the search for a...
. Exteriors would be shot on both coasts, and interiors on soundstages at Warners.
Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the east coast on October 17, 1950. For six days they shot at Penn Station in New York City, at the railroad station at Danbury, Connecticut
Danbury, Connecticut
Danbury is a city in northern Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It had population at the 2010 census of 80,893. Danbury is the fourth largest city in Fairfield County and is the seventh largest city in Connecticut....
—which became Guy's hometown "Metcalf"—and in spots around Washington, D.C.
By month's end they were back in California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee
Rowland V. Lee
Rowland Vance Lee was a U.S. film director, writer, and producer....
in Chatsworth, California. The amusement park exteriors were shot there and at an actual Tunnel of Love
Tunnel of love (amusement ride)
The Tunnel of Love is a type of amusement ride commonly found at carnivals and amusement parks. It is similar to a dark ride in that riders are taken through dark passages, in this case in pairs. There are two major themes: a relaxing romantic ride encouraging the couple to cuddle, or a spooky...
at a fairground in Canoga Park, California. Hitchcock had already shot the long shots for the tennis match at Forest Hills and would round out his 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
South Gate, California
South Gate is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The sixteenth largest city in Los Angeles County, it encompasses . South Gate is located just southeast of downtown Los Angeles It is part of the Gateway Cities region of southeastern Los Angeles County...
. The rest of the shooting would take place on Warner soundstages, including many seeming exteriors and locations which were actually done inside, in front of rear-projection screens.
Strangers on a Train marked something of a renaissance for Hitchcock after several years of low enthusiasm for his mediocre late-1940s output, and he threw himself into the micromanagement of some of its production. Hitchcock himself designed Bruno's lobster necktie, revealed in a close-up to have strangling lobster claws, and "he personally selected an orange peel, a chewing-gum wrapper, wet leaves, and a bit of crumpled paper that were used for sewer debris" in the scene where Bruno inadvertently drops Guy's lighter down the storm drain.
He also showed intense interest in a seldom-considered detail of character delineation: Food.
One of the most memorable single shots in the Hitchcock canon — it "is studied by film classes", says Laura Elliott, who played Miriam—is her character's strangulation by Bruno on the Isle of Love. "[I]n one of the most unexpected, most aesthetically justified moments in film," 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. The unusual angle was a more complex proposition than it seems. First Hitchcock got the exterior shots in Canoga Park, using both actors, then later he had Elliott alone report to a soundstage where there was a large concave reflector set on the floor. The camera was on one side of the reflector, Elliott was on the other, and Hitchcock directed Elliott to turn her back to the reflector and "float backwards, all the way to the floor... like you were doing the limbo." The first six takes went badly—Elliott thudded to the floor with several feet yet to go—but on the seventh take, she floated smoothly all the way. Hitchcock's even-strained response: "Cut. Next shot." Hitchcock then had the two elements "ingenious[ly]" double printed, yielding a shot of "oddly appealing originality [with] a stark fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful.... The astheticizing of the horror somehow enables the audience to contemplate more fully its reality."
Hitchcock was, above all, the master of great visual setpieces, and "[p]erhaps the most memorable sequence in Strangers on a Train is the climactic fight on a berserk carousel." While Guy and Bruno fight, the ride runs out of control until it tears itself to pieces, flinging wooden horses into the crowd of screaming mothers and squealing children. "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] Ziegler's eye."
The explosion is triggered by the attempts of a carnival man to stop the ride after crawling under the whirling carousel deck to get to the controls in the center. Although Hitchcock admitted to undercranking the shot (artificially accelerating the action), it was not a trick shot: the man actually had to crawl under the spinning ride, just inches from possible injury. "Hitchcock told me that this scene was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films", writes biographer Charlotte Chandler
Charlotte Chandler
Charlotte Chandler is an American biographer and playwright who has written biographies of Groucho Marx, Federico Fellini, Billy Wilder, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Alfred Hitchcock...
. "The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. 'If the man had raised his head even slightly", Hitchcock said, "it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film."
The final scene of the so-called American version of the film has Barbara and Anne Morton waiting for Guy to call on the telephone. Hitchcock wanted the phone in the foreground to dominate the shot, emphasizing the importance of the call, but the limited depth-of-field of contemporary motion picture lenses made it difficult to get both phone and women in focus. So Hitchcock had an oversized phone constructed and placed in the foreground. 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. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up."
Principal photography wrapped just before Christmas and Hitchcock and Alma left for a vacation in Santa Cruz, then in late March 1951, on to St. Moritz for a 25th anniversary European excursion.
Music
Composer Dimitri TiomkinDimitri Tiomkin
Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin was a Russian-born Hollywood film score composer and conductor. He is considered "one of the giants of Hollywood movie music." Musically trained in Russia, he is best known for his westerns, "where his expansive, muscular style had its greatest impact." Tiomkin...
was Jack Warner's choice to score Strangers on a Train. While he had previous Hitchcock experience on 1943's Shadow of a Doubt
Shadow of a Doubt
Shadow of a Doubt is a 1943 American thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story for Gordon McDonell...
and would go on to score two more consecutive Hitch films, director and composer "simply never developed much of a kinship" and "the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin's best."
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." The powerful music accurately underscores the visuals of that title sequence — the massive granite edifice of New York's Pennsylvania Station, standing in for Washington's Union Station—because it was scored for an unusually large orchestra, including alto, tenor and baritone saxes, three clarinets, four horns, three pianos and a novachord.
Tiomkin's contrasting musical themes continue throughout the film, delineating two characters with substantial differences: "For 'Guy's Theme', Tiomkin created a hesitant, passive idea, made-to-order music for Farley Granger's performance." Bruno, who tells Guy on the train that he admires people "who do things", gets a more vigorous musical treatment from Tiomkin: "Harmonic complexity defines the motifs associated with Bruno: rumbling bass, shocking clusters, and glassy string harmonics. These disturbing sounds, heard to superb effect in cues such as 'The Meeting,' 'Senator's Office,' and 'Jefferson Memorial,' are not just about Bruno, but about how he is perceived by those whose lives he crosses—first Guy, then everyone in Guy's entourage."
But perhaps the most memorable music in Strangers is the calliope music 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. It was Hitchcock, not Tiomkin, whose idea brought the four evocative numbers — "The Band Played On
The Band Played On
The Band Played On, also known as Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, was a popular song, with lyrics by John F. Palmer and music by Charles B. Ward , written in 1895.The lyrics of the refrain:* , on IMDb*...
", "Carolina in the Morning
Carolina in the Morning
"Carolina in the Morning" is a popular song with words by Gus Kahn and music by Walter Donaldson, first published in 1922 by Jerome H. Remick & Co....
", "Oh, You Beautiful Doll
Oh, You Beautiful Doll
"Oh, You Beautiful Doll" is a ragtime love song published in 1911 with words by Seymour Brown and music by Nat D. Ayer. The song was one of the first with a twelve-bar opening. It is well-known by its chorus:*...
", and "Baby Face
Baby Face (1926 song)
Baby Face is a popular song. The music was written by Harry Akst, the lyrics by Benny Davis. The song was published in 1926. That same year, Jan Garber had a number one hit with the song....
" — to the soundtrack:
"The Band Played On" makes its final reprise during Guy's and Bruno's fight on the merry-go-round, even itself shifting to a faster tempo and higher pitch when the policeman's bullet hits the ride operator and sends the carousel into its frenzied hyper-drive.
Critic Jack Sullivan
Jack Sullivan (literary scholar)
Jack Sullivan is an American literary scholar, essayist, author, editor, musicologist, and short story writer. He is one of the leading modern figures in the study of the horror genre, particularly the ghost story....
has kinder words for Tiomkin's score for Strangers than does biographer Spoto
Donald Spoto
Donald Spoto is an American celebrity biographer, Catholic theologian, and former monk. He is best known for his best-selling biographies of film and theatre celebrities such as Alfred Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Tennessee Williams, Ingrid Bergman, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly,...
: "[S]o seamlessly and inevitably does it fit the picture's design that it seems like an element of Hitchcock's storyboards", he writes It is a score that "goes largely uncelebrated."
Promotion and release
With a release scheduled for early summer, the studio press agents swung into high gear early in 1951. Hitchcock, photographed many times over the years strangling various actresses and other women — some one-handed, others two — found himself in front of a camera with his fingers around the neck of a bust of daughter Patricia; the photo found its way into newspapers nationwide. He also had himself photographed adding the letter L to Strangers on the official studio poster for the film.One studio press release gave rise to a myth that still lingers on today. Hitchcock and Patricia both were afraid of heights, and father offered daughter a hundred dollars to ride the Ferris wheel
Ferris wheel
A Ferris wheel is a nonbuilding structure consisting of a rotating upright wheel with passenger cars attached to the rim in such a way that as the wheel turns, the cars are kept upright, usually by gravity.Some of the largest and most modern Ferris wheels have cars mounted on...
— only to order the power cut, leaving her in the dark at the very top of the ride. The press release embellished the tale, claiming he left her "dangling in total darkness for an hour," only then allowing his "trembling daughter" to be lowered and released. Although that account continues to be published in books to this day, "it just wasn't true", avers Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. First of all, she wasn't up there alone: flanking her were the actors playing Miriam's two boyfriends — "and I have a picture of us waving." "This was good stuff for press agents paid to stir up thrills and it has been repeated in other books to bolster the idea of Hitchcock's sadism," but "we were [only] up there two or three minutes at the outside.... My father wasn't ever sadistic. The only sadistic part was I never got the hundred dollars."
Strangers on a Train previewed on March 5, 1951 at the Huntington Park
Huntington Park, California
Huntington Park is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 58,114, down from 61,348 at the 2000 census.- History :...
Theatre, with Alma, Jack Warner, Whitfield Cook and Barbara Keon in the Hitchcock party and it won a prize from the Screen Directors Guild. It premiered in New York on July 3, marking the reopening of the extensively remodeled Strand Theatre as the Warner Theatre, and in a dozen cities around the country. Hitchcock made personal appearances in most of them, and was often accompanied by his daughter.
Some audience feedback arriving at Jack Warner's office condemned the film for its sordid story, while just as many others were favorable. Of greater interest to Mr. Warner was the box office take, and the "receipts soon told the true story: Strangers on a Train was a success, and Hitchcock was pronounced at the top of his form as master of the dark, melodramatic suspense thriller."
Themes and motifs
The film includes a number of punPun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
s and visual metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
s that demonstrate a running motif of crisscross, double-crossing, and crossing one's double. Talking about the structure of the film, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever."
The two characters Guy and Bruno can be viewed as doppelgänger
Doppelgänger
In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
s. As with Shadow of a Doubt
Shadow of a Doubt
Shadow of a Doubt is a 1943 American thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, the film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story for Gordon McDonell...
, Strangers on a Train is one of many Hitchcock films to explore the doppelgänger
Doppelgänger
In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
theme. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis." Bruno embodies Guy's dark desire to kill Miriam, a "real-life incarnation of Guy's wish-fulfillment fantasy".
Doubles
The theme of doubles is "the key element in the film's structure," 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. Once on the train, Walker orders a pair of double drinks — "The only kind of doubles I play", he says charmingly. In Hitchcock's cameo he carries a double bassDouble bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...
.
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!" and the other, far distant, makes a choking gesture.
All this doubling has no precedent in the novel; it was quite deliberately added by Hitchcock, "dictated in rapid and inspired profusion to Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon during the last days of script preparation." 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."
Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are opposites. The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they establish immediately the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes." They also demonstrate Hitchcock's gift for deft visual storytelling: For most of the film, Bruno is the actor, Guy the reactor, and Hitchcock always shows Bruno's feet first, then Guy's. And since it is Guy's foot that taps Bruno's under the table, we know Bruno has not engineered the meeting.
Roger Ebert writes that "it is this sense of two flawed characters — one evil, one weak, with an unstated sexual tension — that makes the movie intriguing and halfway plausible, and explains how Bruno could come so close to carrying out his plan."
Darkness–Light continuum
It is those flaws that set up the real themes of Strangers. It wasn't enough for Hitchcock to construct merely a world of doubles — even contrasting doubles — in a strict polar-opposite structure; for Hitchcock, the good-and-evil, darkness-and-light poles "didn't have to be mutually exclusive." Blurring the lines puts both Guy and Bruno on a good-evil continuum, and the infinite shades of gray in between become Hitchcock's canvas for telling the story and painting his characters.At first glance, Guy represents the ordered life where people stick to the rules, while Bruno comes from the world of chaos, where they get thrown out of multiple colleges for drinking and gambling. Yet "[b]oth men, like so many of Hitchcock's protagonists, are insecure and uncertain of their identity. Guy is suspended between tennis and politics, between his tramp wife and his senator's daughter, and Bruno is seeking desperately to establish an identity through violent, outré actions and flamboyance (shoes, lobster-patterned tie, name proclaimed to the world on his tiepin)."
Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. "Me, I never do anything important." Yet as Bruno describes his "theories" over lunch, "Guy responds to Bruno — we see it in his face, at once amused and tense. To the man committed to a career in politics, Bruno represents a tempting overthrow of all responsibility." And at this point the blurring of good and evil accelerates: Guy fails to repudiate Bruno's suggestive statement about murdering Miriam ("What's a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.") with any force or conviction. "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." It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. "He is leaving in Bruno's keeping his link with Anne, his possibility of climbing into the ordered existence to which he aspires.... Guy, then, in a sense connives at the murder of his wife, and the enigmatic link between him and Bruno becomes clear. Guy is not a clear-cut hero, Bruno not an all-black villain: the continuum has been established.
Light and dark onscreen
Having given his characters overlapping qualities of good and evil, Hitchcock then renders them on the screen according to a very strict template with which he sticks to a remarkable degree. Writes Ebert: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's executed his part of their "deal". "On one side of the street, [are] stately respectable houses; towering in the background, on the right of the screen, the floodlit dome of the U.S. Capitol, the life to which Guy aspires, the world of light and order." Bruno tells Guy what he's done and gives him the glasses. "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. Guy nervously steps into the shadows with Bruno, literally behind the bars of an iron fence; "You've got me acting like I'm a criminal", he says. "The scene gives a beautifully exact symbolic expression to Guy's relationship with Bruno and what he stands for."
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"; 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; 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."
Political subtext
Although its first rumblings came in 1947 with the trial and conviction of the "Hollywood Ten"Hollywood blacklist
The Hollywood blacklist—as the broader entertainment industry blacklist is generally known—was the mid-twentieth-century list of screenwriters, actors, directors, musicians, and other U.S. entertainment professionals who were denied employment in the field because of their political beliefs or...
, the so-called Red Scare
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
was truly gathering steam in the year 1950 with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union...
and the trial of Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...
. 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. Carrington writes of a political subtext to the film. Treatment writer Cook used Guy to make the film "a parable quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America."
Carrington argues that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
climate. "To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype, an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed", writes Carrington; he is "a man of indeterminate sexual identity
Sexual identity
Sexual identity is a term that, like sex, has two distinctively different meanings. One describes an identity roughly based on sexual orientation, the other an identity based on sexual characteristics, which is not socially based but based on biology, a concept related to, but different from,...
found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised."
Hitchcock, who had drawn gay characters so sharply yet subtly in Rope
Rope (film)
Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions...
in 1948, "drafted the left-leaning Cook... expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters."
Differences from the novel
Even before sewing up the rights for the novel, Hitchcock's mind was whirling with ideas about how to adapt it for the screen. He narrowed the geographic scope to the Northeast corridorNortheast Corridor
The Northeast Corridor is a fully electrified railway line owned primarily by Amtrak serving the Northeast megalopolis of the United States from Boston in the north, via New York to Washington, D.C. in the south, with branches serving other cities...
between Washington, D.C. and New York — the novel ranged through the southwest and Florida, among other locales. The scripting team added the tennis match — and the crosscutting with Bruno's storm drain travails in Metcalf — added the cigarette lighter, the Tunnel of Love, Miriam's eyeglasses; in fact, the amusement park is only a brief setting in the novel.
Hitchcock's biggest changes were in his two lead characters:
The character called Bruno Anthony in the film is called Charles Anthony Bruno in the book. "Highsmith's Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic... but in [Whitfield Cook's] hands, the film's Bruno became a dandy, a mama's boy who speaks French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, and who professes ignorance of women." In the book, Bruno dies in a boating accident far removed from any merry-go-round.
In the novel, Guy Haines is not a tennis player, but rather a promising architect, and he does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno's father. In the movie, "Guy became a decent guy who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain..." writes Patrick McGilligan, "to head off the censors." In the novel, Guy is pursued, arrested and jailed by a tenacious detective.
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 straight jacket.
Critical reaction
Upon its release in 1951, Strangers on a Train got mixed reviews:Showbiz bible Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
liked it: ""Performance-wise, the cast comes through strongly. Granger is excellent as the harassed young man innocently involved in murder. Roman's role as a nice, understanding girl is a switch for her, and she makes it warmly effective. Walker's role has extreme color, and he projects it deftly."
Doyen critic Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther
Bosley Crowther was a journalist and author who was film critic for The New York Times for 27 years. His reviews and articles helped shape the careers of actors, directors and screenwriters, though his reviews, at times, were unnecessarily mean...
, writing in the New York Times, did not: "Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support. ... Perhaps there will be those in the audience who will likewise be terrified by the villain's darkly menacing warnings and by Mr. Hitchcock's sleekly melodramatic tricks. ... But, for all that, his basic premise of fear fired by menace is so thin and so utterly unconvincing that the story just does not stand."
Prolific critic Leslie Halliwell
Leslie Halliwell
Robert James Leslie Halliwell was a British film encyclopaedist and television impresario who in 1965 compiled The Filmgoer's Companion, the first one-volume encyclopaedia devoted to all aspects of the cinema. He followed it a dozen years later with Halliwell's Film Guide, another monumental work...
walked the middle line: "This quirky melodrama has the director at his best, sequence by sequence, but the story is basically unsatisfactory. It makes superior suspense entertainment, however."
More recent criticism is generally, though not universally, more positive. The film review site Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
has the film ranked at a 97% "Fresh" rating. Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
called Strangers on a Train a "first-rate thriller" among the top five of Hitchcock's films.
David Keyes, writing at cinemaphile.org in 2002, saw the film as a seminal entry in its genre: "Aside from its very evident approach as a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick, the movie is one of the original shells for identity-inspired mystery thrillers, in which natural human behavior is the driving force behind the true macabre rather than supernatural elements. Even classic endeavors like Fargo
Fargo (film)
Fargo is a 1996 American dark comedy-crime film produced, directed and written by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. It stars Frances McDormand as a pregnant police chief who investigates a series of homicides, William H...
and A Simple Plan
A Simple Plan (film)
A Simple Plan is a 1998 drama film directed by Sam Raimi, based on the novel of the same name by Scott Smith, who also wrote the screenplay of the film. It was shot in Delano, Minnesota and Ashland and Saxon, Wisconsin. Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor...
seem directly fueled by this concept...."
Almar Haflidason was effusive about it in 2001 at the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
website: "Hitchcock's favourite device of an ordinary man caught in an ever-tightening web of fear plunges Guy into one of the director's most fiendishly effective movies. Ordinary Washington locations become sinister hunting grounds that mirror perfectly the creeping terror that slowly consumes Guy, as the lethally smooth Bruno relentlessly pursues him to a frenzied climax. Fast, exciting, and woven with wicked style, this is one of Hitchcock's most efficient and ruthlessly delicious thrillers."
Awards and honors
Strangers on a Train was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography, which was overseen by director of photography Robert BurksRobert Burks
Robert Burks, A.S.C. was an American cinematographer known for being proficient in virtually every genre and equally at home with black-and-white or color....
. Alfred Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director by the Directors' Guild of America. The film was nominated as Best Picture by the National Board of Review.
American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
Lists
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - Nominated
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills - #32
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
- Bruno Antony - Nominated Villain
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - Nominated
Alternate versions
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 himself did not like either the "British" or the "American" version, according to biographer Charlotte ChandlerCharlotte Chandler
Charlotte Chandler is an American biographer and playwright who has written biographies of Groucho Marx, Federico Fellini, Billy Wilder, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Alfred Hitchcock...
(Lyn Erhard):
Warner's Region 2 DVD (Japan and Europe) release of the film is a 'flipper' (double sided) disc, with the "British" version on one side, and the 'Hollywood' version on the reverse. Warner also released a Region 1 'flipper' disc. The "British" version omits the final scene on the train.
Adaptations
Strangers on a Train was adapted for the radio program Lux Radio TheaterLux Radio Theater
Lux Radio Theater, a long-run classic radio anthology series, was broadcast on the NBC Blue Network ; CBS and NBC . Initially, the series adapted Broadway plays during its first two seasons before it began adapting films. These hour-long radio programs were performed live before studio audiences...
on two occasions: on December 3, 1951 with Ruth Roman
Ruth Roman
Ruth Roman was an American actress. One of her most memorable roles was in the Alfred Hitchcock 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train....
, Frank Lovejoy
Frank Lovejoy
Frank Lovejoy was an American actor in radio, film, and television. He was born Frank Lovejoy Jr. in Bronx, New York, but grew up in New Jersey. His father, Frank Lovejoy Sr., was a furniture salesman from Maine...
, and Ray Milland
Ray Milland
Ray Milland was a Welsh actor and director. His screen career ran from 1929 to 1985, and he is best remembered for his Academy Award–winning portrayal of an alcoholic writer in The Lost Weekend , a sophisticated leading man opposite a corrupt John Wayne in Reap the Wild Wind , the murder-plotting...
and on April 12, 1954 with Virginia Mayo
Virginia Mayo
Virginia Mayo was an American film actress.After a short career in vaudeville, Mayo progressed to films and during the 1940s established herself as a supporting player in such films as The Best Years of Our Lives and White Heat .Mayo remained an A-list actress into the mid-'50s, but then went...
, Dana Andrews
Dana Andrews
Dana Andrews was an American film actor. He was one of Hollywood's major stars of the 1940s, and continued acting, though generally in less prestigious roles, into the 1980s.-Early life:...
, and Robert Cummings
Robert Cummings
Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings , mostly known professionally as Robert Cummings but sometimes as Bob Cummings, was an American film and television actor....
.
Inspirations
Strangers on a Train has inspired film and tv projects with similar themes of criss-cross murder, often treated comically. They include:- Throw Momma from the TrainThrow Momma from the TrainThrow Momma from the Train is a 1987 American black comedy film. It was inspired by the 1951 Alfred Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train, which also plays a role in the film...
, a 1987 comedy film. - "The Double Down", an episode of CastleCastle (TV series)Castle is an American comedy-drama television series, which premiered on ABC on March 9, 2009. The series is produced by Beacon Pictures and ABC Studios. On January 10, 2011, Castle was renewed for a fourth season...
, an ABC television program. - "A Night at the Movies", an episode of CSI: Crime Scene InvestigationCSI: Crime Scene InvestigationCSI: Crime Scene Investigation is an American crime drama television series, which premiered on CBS on October 6, 2000. The show was created by Anthony E. Zuiker and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer...
, a CBS television program. - "Strangers on a TreadmillStrangers on a Treadmill"Strangers on a Treadmill" is the fourth episode of the second season of the American sitcom, Modern Family. The episode originally aired October 13, 2010 on American Broadcasting Company...
", an episode of Modern FamilyModern FamilyModern Family is an American television comedy series created by Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, which debuted on ABC on September 23, 2009. Lloyd and Levitan serve as showrunner and executive producers, under their Levitan-Lloyd Productions label...
, an ABC television program. - Horrible BossesHorrible BossesHorrible Bosses is a 2011 black comedy film directed by Seth Gordon, written by Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, based on a story by Markowitz. It stars Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, Kevin Spacey and Jamie Foxx...
, a 2011 comedy film.. - BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Play broadcast on 29 September 2011 was Strangers on a Film by Stephen WyattStephen WyattStephen Wyatt, born in 1948 in Beckenham, Kent , and brought up in Ealing, west London, is a British writer.- Education :He was educated at Latymer Upper School and then Cambridge University...
, which gives an imagined account of a series of meetings between Hitchcock (Clive SwiftClive SwiftClive Walter Swift is an English character comedy actor and songwriter. He is best known for his role as character Richard Bucket in the British television series Keeping Up Appearances. He is less known for his role as character Roy in the British television series The Old Guys...
) and Raymond Chandler (Patrick StewartPatrick StewartSir Patrick Hewes Stewart, OBE is an English film, television and stage actor, who has had a distinguished career in theatre and television for around half a century...
) as they unsuccessfully attempt to create the screenplay for Strangers on a Train.
- SochSochSoch is a 2002 Hindi language film starring Sanjay Kapoor, Raveena Tandon, Arbaaz Khan, Danny Denzongpa and Aditi Govitrikar among others...
, a 2002 Bollywood film which was inspired by Strangers on a Train.