Strangers on a Train

no. 5 on the list of Kiddo Watching Hitchcock

Hitchcock 1951

Oo! Screenplay by Raymond Chandler, this can't go wrong. Yet, it turns out the plot is unlike Chandler novels. hm.

The strangers are identified by choice in cab, luggage, shoes, and the music accompanying them through the term. No faces—the camera follows only their feet as they exit their taxis and enter the train station. So effective. They are strangers even to the audience so far. Even so, it seems like a simple set-piece idea. The biggest set piece of the film is at the very end, an allegorical trampling of men with carousel horse hoofs, which is very fun, but by no means plausible. In fact it's the most ridiculous thing I've seen Hitchcock try to pull off. The set pieces don’t end there. What seems worst about Strangers on a Train, is the Hammer Horror sort of reliance on set pieces strung together with suspense.

The best of them is the map and flashlight at minute 63. The map is only on A4 size paper, and the flash light isn't too large, but only an inch-wide circle illuminates any part of the map at any time while our hero blunders around in the middle of the night in the murderer’s mansion. Pretty adorable way of making the audience feel claustrophobic and, therefore, building tension, similar to how Beowulf never shows you the monster, and The Blair Witch Project only uses a hand held camera.

Though, here, it is just another way in which Hitchcock stolidly refuses to create tension through melodramatic music (see anything by JJ Abrams) or killing off of random people (see anything from Gene Roddenberry). It is truly, as many before me have noticed, visionary and inherently superior movie making

But, double layering tension from the tennis match with reaching for a lighter just isn't enough to create the same intensity seen in other Hitchcock movies. And certainly doesn't live up to the artificial claustrophobia of the map/flashlight.

Longer reaching tension is found in the setting up of evidence for and against each stranger and their murder. The lighter, the glasses, acknowledging that Haines is playing a different style of tennis than ever before. Various people witnessing various things. Anthony getting off the ride, skeptically observed by someone on the dock. Someone asking the Anthony for a light on the train, and Anthony's big show of using matches instead of the lighter. Presumably, these could all be gathered in the same way that Caller of Delaware Tech, another stranger met on another train, was gathered in the initial questioning of Haines' alibi. This time, though, to build up against the real killer. Phew, justice is a-comin!

No amount of intriguing set pieces and chance encounters with nut balls, though can hide a mediocre presentation. Strangers, though, has all no bodies and not a really good one between them. All the lines are carried out with such flat ceremony it seems they had only just memorized the things to say without thinking of actually how to deliver them. There's not a single memorable facial expression, gesture or intonation at all. I felt like I was watching the first run through blocking. In his other films, H uses either big stars (Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, Carey Grant, Ingrid Bergman) or brilliant no names (Anthony Perkins).

What's up here? It's not like H hadn't been making movies with actors for 30 years already. Notorious was a couple before this one, and Notorious was excellent. Not just thanks to Grant and Bergman.

Not as strong as any of the others I've seen so far, but not a bad film. I guess starting with Rear Window is just silly, it's all downhill from there.