Alfred Hitchcock (1951)
Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel (Raymond Chandler and an uncredited Ben Hecht were among those involved in the adaptation, along with Czenzi Ormonde and Whitfield Cook), Strangers on a Train has a beautifully simple starting point for a crime thriller. Two men meet on a train. One, a tennis star, wants to get out of a bad marriage into a better one (trading a small town shrew for a senator’s daughter). The other hates his father. The second man suggests to the first that, in order to avoid suspicion, each commits the other’s murder. As the wealthy, Oedipally-inclined Bruno Anthony, Robert Walker cuts a memorable figure – all the more memorable given that Walker died suddenly, at the age of thirty-two, less than two months after the film’s release. His slim, trim Bruno wears his hat at a jaunty angle and his suit like a disguise. The waspish petulance that Walker gives Bruno is both disquieting because it seems deeply absorbed and enjoyable because Walker’s readings are very witty. He’s so entertaining that I found myself rooting completely for Bruno. When he tries to retrieve a crucially important cigarette lighter from beneath the drain cover down which it’s fallen, I was very anxious for him to succeed. Hitchcock cross-cuts between Bruno’s desperate subterranean probing and a tennis match at Forest Hills which Guy Haines, the man whose wife Bruno has murdered as a result of their meeting on the train (but who is nonetheless a good Guy), is trying to finish off in straight sets. I wanted him detained on court for as long as possible.
As Guy, Farley Granger has a hard-to-pin-down but definitely unpleasant quality. This seems wrong in Guy’s inert, impacted scenes with the senator’s daughter Anne although at least it’s strong enough also to undermine them. Granger’s presence complicates interestingly the homosexual undercurrents in the exchanges between Bruno and Guy. In his introduction at BFI, Philip Kemp talked about this aspect of the story and mentioned that Granger is himself ‘gay or at least bisexual’. This struck me as irrelevant when Kemp said it but, having seen the film, I’m not so sure. While Bruno is suavely camp, Guy has a much less explicit homosexual quality in their conversations together. It’s possible that this comes through because Granger isn’t a good enough actor to submerge this aspect of himself (at least if he knows that it’s part of the subtext of a picture). Whatever the reason, you assume that Bruno is attracted to Guy and Granger radiates something that could allow Bruno to hope this is reciprocated. The fact that it isn’t chimes with Bruno’s readiness to carry out his part of the killing bargain, wrongly assuming that Guy will be equally ready to oblige. The fact that Guy, after his first encounter with Bruno, leaves behind in the carriage his cigarette lighter underlines the point. Guy’s leaving it for Bruno to pick up implies, as Philip Kemp also suggested, his ambivalence about Bruno’s murderous proposition. At another level, it could indicate that part of Guy would like to keep in touch with Bruno.
The sequences culminating in Bruno’s murder of Miriam, Guy’s shallow wife, are terrific. Screen crimes committed at a fairground nearly always seem to be – it must be the combination of the insistency of the tinny merry-go-round music and the crowds of other people around, distracted by the fun of the fair and unaware of the would-be killer in their midst. The music, of course, always continues remorselessly after the deed is done: Hitchcock uses the epitomising ‘The Band Played On’ here. Anyway, this fairground murder is especially expert – and I preferred it to the climactic (more celebrated?) struggle between Bruno and Guy on an out-of-control carousel, partly because the later sequence is so extended and partly because Hitchcock’s jolly heartlessness gets to be a bit much when the madly spinning machine is threatening the lives of other, terrified people riding on it. Miriam’s murder is a highlight too because of the quiet, ice-cold momentum built by Robert Walker as he pursues his prey and because of Laura Elliott, who plays Miriam. (According to Wikipedia, Elliott became better known – on American TV, particularly in Bewitched – under the name Kasey Rogers.) Miriam is no beauty – or at least she’s made to look no beauty, in her heavy spectacles. It’s hard to believe that she and Guy were ever a happy couple but Elliott gives Miriam a sexual avidity that registers strongly because she looks so ordinary. When Bruno keeps appearing at her side at the fairground, Miriam seems caught between nervousness and wanting more – Laura Elliott makes this uneasy lasciviousness very striking.
As usual in Hitchcock, there are some daft details. Bruno isn’t cut out for anonymity: his forename is embroidered – emblazoned – on his ties. On another train journey, Guy has a conversation with an inebriated mathematician, returning home from giving a lecture; Guy thus has an alibi for the night of Miriam’s murder but Professor Collins (John Brown) is so far gone that he later fails to recognise Guy when the police ask him to do so. Why doesn’t Guy at least point out that Collins told him he’d been giving a lecture on differential calculus or whatever, which would go some way at least to corroborating Guy’s story? The film goes improbably far in reflecting that Grand Slam tennis in 1951 was still an amateur game: Guy is seeded fifth at Forest Hills but whether he can practise depends on whether he can get a court! And the very last, wrapping-things-up scenes are lame – as if Hitchcock were showing the audience how silly the whole thing has been, how silly we’ve been to get so caught up in it.
These absurdities hardly matter, though, because the direction is supremely confident and, as seems to happen with all his best work, Hitchcock’s pleasure in his confidence is infectious. His amused callousness is embodied here, in a highly appropriate piece of casting, by his daughter Patricia, who plays the senator’s younger daughter. She revels in the details of murders she’s read about – but she also, and effectively, starts getting scared by Bruno. Patricia Hitchcock is a broad actress but, as in her much smaller role in Psycho, she’s likeable and fun. She and Leo G Carroll, as her drily exasperated father, compensate for the dullness together of Farley Granger and Ruth Roman, as the woman he supposedly loves. Ruth Roman seems to take an age to change her expression, let alone express an emotion. By contrast (and in keeping with the pattern of this film that it’s the morally unforgivable characters who are the most engaging), Marion Lorne is very funny as the woman Bruno definitely loves, his implacably doting mother.
24 May 2010
