Strangers on a Train

"What are you so high and mighty about? I might be a psycho, but you're a block of wood."

And after a rough weekend, I return to Alfred Hitchcock. After my pre-written review of the abomination that is Torn Curtain, here is a fresh review of a Hitch film that's actual good.

This is only the third Hitchcock film I've reviewed for this blog (after Torn Curtain and The 39 Steps) - plus an IMDB comment on Frenzy - and with a fair amount of reason. In case you haven't noticed, I'm a literary and character-minded person, and dealing with a director as overtly stylistic as Hitch is problematic for me. It's not that Hitchcock's films don't have character or plot or interesting subtext and themes - I might even say the exact opposite is true - but I concede my limitations as a critic by admitting that I don't enjoy reading symbolism into every single frame, or every oddly-placed paperweight on a character's desk. And I'm not one for the laughably fake faux-Freudian "psychology" on display in many of films either - perhaps the reason I didn't care for Vertigo. And the excrutiatingly vague and lightweight plots of his movies tend to irritate at times - it's all a joke by Hitchcock that his MacGuffins don't really matter, I guess.

Still, in spite of such irritating foibles, Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors. And aside from a few missteps, it's hard to argue that he isn't one of the best. No director could ring as much out of a seemingly insignificant image or symbol as Hitchcock; few directors had such a brilliant sense of the dramatic, suspenseful, and almost no one could supercede him with style, use of color, shadows, close-ups and intercutting to create an indescribable style and atmosphere that leaps off the screen and engrosses. Hitchcock embodied pure cinema in his best work, in a way few other directors could hope to emulate.

Such is the case with Strangers on a Train. Although far from perfect, it is perhaps the quintessential Hitchcock movie, and certainly the best in my humble opinion. It has all of Hitchcock's greatest attributes, as well as many of his failings, and succeeds if for no other reason than having one of the most disturbing villains in movie history. It's a fine piece of work from beginning to end, with some of Hitchcock's greatest set-pieces and finest moments as a director.

The plot is classic Hitchcock, springing as always from his wonderfully sick and twisted sense of humor. Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is a big-shot tennis player in a bit of pickle: his philandering wife Miriam (Kasey Rodgers) won't grant him a divorce, even though he's fallen in love with pretty socialite Anne Morton (Ruth Roman). On a train ride, he runs into Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), a chatty and eccentric guy who he seems enamored with the idea of murder. Guy jokingly agrees to "criss-cross" murders with Bruno - killing Bruno's domineering father while Bruno takes care of Miriam. But Bruno does kill Miriam, and the situation immediately becomes serious. Caught in a web of circumstantial evidence (that's how you know it's a Hitchcock movie), Guy must find a way to clear his name and prevent Bruno from killing again.

Nevermind the plot, which rarely matters as such in a Hitchcock film anyway. Rather, Hitchcock was a master of set-pieces, of moments, and this film is bristling with strong scenes. I will focus on three of the film's exceptional sequences, to illustrate the brilliance that Hitchcock at his best was capable of achieving.

The first is the murder scene, where Hitchcock pulls out all the stops. This sequence is nothing short of astonishing. Hitchcock makes brilliant use of silence, using ony diagetic calliope music and background dialogue throughout, creating. The cinematography by Robert Burks is brilliant - Miriam and her male friends spend their time in the light, in the crowd, while Bruno remains hidden in the shadows, a barely visible, dim gray presence following them from shadow to shadow before he finally strikes in the darkness. The atmosphere of this scene is indescribable - seemingly banal and safe, but punctuated with dread and foreboding. We don't really care about trampy Miriam, but the palpable sense of menace is nonetheless inescapable.

The second is another key scene, where Guy plays a tennis match, hoping to win early in order to flee his police escort, while Bruno races to plant an incriminating lighter at the scene of the crime. This sequence makes brilliant use of editing (for which credit must go to William Ziegler as well as Hitchcock), turning two scenes - a tennis match and Bruno finishing for his lighter in a sewer grate - that on their own would mean nothing, into an exciting counterpoint of rising actions and effectively generating suspense for the climax.

The final scene, of course, is the chaotic, almost surreal carousel sequence which climaxes the film. It's extremely, feverishly over-the-top, but it works. After all of the subtle, repressive build-up, a frenetic action sequence is perhaps the only way to end the film satisfactorily, and the scene is endlessly thrilling even if the conclusion is obvious from the get-go (also a mite disturbing is that the film doesn't pay any attention to the children who were injured in the wreck, merely on our protagonists, but I imagine Hitch does so on purpose). The montage here is truly frightening - dreamlike yet very, very real and dangerous, with the children hopeless hostages and involved witnesses of the situation. Like the rest of the film, it's a nightmare, but of an entirely different sort than the Boogeyman in the shadows.

The movie has one huge flaw, which in any other film would have been a fatal one. The entire cast, with one exception, is dull, more wooden than a Keanu Reeves convention. Farley Granger gives a performance worthy of Orlando Bloom as our protagonist; he's a passive, emasculated wimp who is thrown around by the plot, and it's really hard to care much for or about him. Ruth Roman is stiff while Leo G. Carroll has nothing to do - only Patricia Hitchcock as Roman's smart aleck sister provides any levity. But fortunately, there is one truly exceptional performance to ballast this weak spot - Robert Walker as Bruno Anthony.

Bruno Anthony is truly one of Hitchcock's great creations. Superficially charming, yet immediately giving off a disturbing vibe, he's an unsettling character from the get-go. Many critics have read a homosexual subtext into Bruno's character - his voice and mannerisms, his affection towards Guy, his relationship with his mother - which I think has some degree of merit, but for one who is sick to his gallbladder of Criticspeak, it's much more important that he's a psychopath. The murder scene - where he stalks Miriam through with the expressionless determination of The Terminator - is genuinely chilling, as are the scenes of him watching Guy from a distance, or in a crowd. His machinations are clearly the product of a sick mind, and the fact that he genuinely believes what he's doing is, if not right, then certainly nothing unusual. He is a villain who is grimly determined and can't be escaped, can't be stopped, can't be negotiated with - a genuine psychopath. Hitchcock did villains very well - Judith Anderson in Rebecca, Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt, Claude Rains in Notorious, James Mason in North by Northwest, Barry Foster in Frenzy, and of course Anthony Perkins in Psycho - but none of those great characters quite match the psychotic genius of Bruno Anthony.

Robert Walker was an up-and-coming 32 year old actor, with an established screen image as a pretty boy romantic lead. For Hitchcock to cast him as a psychotic murderer was quite an audacious feat. It's a horrible shame that Walker died so shortly after the film's release, for he gives a pitch-perfect performance, capturing Bruno's nuances and slowly revealing him for the psychopath he is while maintaining an unsettling charm. In a film so bereft of interesting protagonists, it wouldn't be hard for even an adequate villain to steal the show; but Walker's performance certainly transcends that. It's an amazing performance from top to bottom, one of the most compelling screen villains in cinema history, and truly one of the best performances period.

Strangers on a Train is not a perfect film, but like its director, it does what it does better than pretty much any other movie. It's Hitchcock at his best, and you can't get much better than that.

Rating: 9/10 - Highest Recommendation