Strangers on a Train

Film scholar Michael van den Bos explores the work of Alfred Hitchcock across four monochrome masterworks spanning three decades in the illustrious career of “the master of suspense”. This week, one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, Strangers on a Train.

“Anyone you walk past on the pavement anywhere might be a sadist, a compulsive thief or even a murderer,” Patricia Highsmith wrote to a friend. “I can think of nothing more apt to set the imagination stirring.” It’s the sort of sentiment that Alfred Hitchcock would surely endorse, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that Highsmith’s first novel, written in 1948, should have been snapped up by the movies’ “master of suspense”, and became one of his most enduring, popular films.

The idea is simple and fiendish. Sociopath Charles Bruno (played with silky insouciance by Robert Walker) strikes up a conversation with star tennis player Guy Haynes (Farley Granger) and makes him a gentleman’s proposition: Bruno will do Guy the kindness of getting rid of his unloved wife, on the understanding that he will return the favour. “Criss-cross.” Guy is appalled, of course. But not entirely innocent, either. Highsmith and Hitchcock both knew or suspected that in certain circumstances, any one of us might be capable of almost anything…

Another great crime writer, Raymond Chandler, cowrote the screenplay. And this abundantly entertaining movie ushered in what would be a golden era for Hitchcock, the decade that would produce Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Wrong Man among others.

I know no other recent film, in fact, which better conveys the condition of modern man, who must escape his fate without the help of the gods.

Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema