Film Review--Strangers on a Train (1951)

It’s every arrogant amateur athlete’s dream: sitting on the train minding your own business when some random person comes up and says, “Hey buddy, you’re so-and-so! You were really great in last week’s whatever!” It’s flattering at first, and Guy Haines (Farley Granger), amateur tennis stud and the main character in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, revels in it…at first. Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker, in his last film role before succumbing to a nervous breakdown and dying from complication with his meds in the asylum) is amiable enough and is clearly reveling in talking with his amateur tennis hero. Guy’s taken aback when Boris reveals how much he knows about Guy’s life: his tennis career, his impending divorce, the beautiful senator’s daughter he plans to marry when the issue is final. But he doesn’t know the details. Lucky for him, it takes very little ego stroking for Guy to offer up all of these sordid facts. Bruno becomes increasingly interested and finally gives out some information of his own. He loves his mother (a whole lot) but hates his dad enough to want him dead and, wait, Guy makes some allusions to things being easier if his current wife (who is, by the way, pregnant from another man) was dead and Bruno has a great idea. He’ll kill Miriam (Laura Elliot) and Guy will kill his father. They’ll switch murders; it’s the perfect plan! While Guy doesn’t exactly agree to the deal, he doesn’t really refuse it either and, unbeknownst to him, Bruno takes this as an affirmation of the plan. He finds Miriam, strangles her and then expects Guy to follow through on his end of the deal, though Guy never had any intention of doing so. Now Miriam is dead, the cops suspect Guy, and Bruno is everywhere, seemingly coming from the ether to remind him that he welched on their deal.

The plotting for Strangers on a Train is very sound in a lot of ways, and the deal Bruno “makes” with Guy really is a solid plan. Raymond Chandler adapted the screenplay from Patricia Highsmith’s novel and the film, in general, is one of Hitchcock’s best. That I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did some of his lesser movies says a lot about how I feel about his films at this point. For all the skills that Hitchcock displays in the film, for all the great scenes, there’s something that rubs me the wrong way at this point, and it comes from the performances. Robert Walker’s Bruno is excellent, an absolutely stunning portrayal of the incredibly intelligent, totally psychotic killer. The homosexual overtones, never explicitly discussed in the film (it could never happen in 1951), are perfect and, apparently, are completely in line with the original work. His face, his affected voice, his reactions to his mother’s coddling, it’s all perfect. However, without Walker, there wouldn’t be very much in the performances worth anything. Guy is the only other character given any intelligence or humanity, but Granger’s performance really leaves the character flat. This isn’t an anomaly in Hitchcock’s films, but the women in the film are all virtually worthless, barely serving the story in any way. Either they are murdered or speak exposition, but rarely have any integral role in the plot. Outside of Miriam, who needs to be killed to further the plot, all of the women could be eliminated and nothing in the story would change. The only other director I’ve seen with this kind of disdain for actresses is Brian DePalma, who has based his career around ripping off Hitchcock, so I guess that’s not so surprising to connect them in this way. Even the investigators who follow Guy around are brain dead Keystone Kops. Without Robert Walker as Bruno, I’m not sure how this film would hold up, because he carries the entire plot on his shoulders.

My feelings about the performances aside, Hitchcock is a true master of suspense and builds it up as well here as he ever did. The final scene at the carnival is masterfully cut together and the climax on the runaway carousel is a brilliantly tense scene (with special note for the toothless carnie who crawled underneath the track to get to the controls…it is not faked and looks about as scary as it, I’m sure, actually was for the actor). It seems, though, that the story serves the set pieces instead of the other way around. There’s no good reason in the plot to have this scene take place on a speeding merry-go-round, except that it’s a really good concept. That’s fine in itself; horror films do this all the time. The difference is that horror plots are often inconsequential to the action and serve the murder sequences. Why build such an intricate web when the consequences are so miniscule? I just don’t understand. For instance, before the climax at the carnival which, admittedly, is a phenomenal sequence, one of our stars is playing tennis while the other is trying to get his lighter out of a storm drain. The whole series of scenes is pointless. Hitchcock is trying to get us to nightfall so they can conduct the end in the dark. Why he needs these extraneous scenes to show us that time has passed, I can’t say. I sure could tell time was passing during this part; time was moving very, very slowly. This is one of many parts that seem like filler, and I think the film would have been more effective at about an hour running time.

I guess I’m making Strangers on a Train sound worse than I really think it is. The main set pieces are totally impressive and Robert Walker is as good a villain as can be. It’s a very entertaining film, but it’s not better than any number of more efficient noirs and mysteries that came out at the same time.