“Strangers on a Train” (Note to self: when are you going to get back to the “30s Hitch” series?)

I cannot for the life of me, remember why I wanted to see “Strangers on the Train”. Usually, when I rewatch a film with my sister, it has something to do with a conversation or an idea or something somehow related. This time around, I have no clue.

That said, does anyone, ever, really need an excuse to watch Hitchcock? Especially, if it is one of his masterpieces. 

I certainly don’t think so. If you wake up in the morning and the urge hits you to watch “Rebecca” or “Vertigo” or “North by Northwest”, for example, I suggest getting your cereal, coffee, and orange juice, and firing up whatever media you are going to watch it on. Maybe even “Strangers on a Train”!

There is not mincing words: this is such a great piece of mindfuckery. “I’ll kill your ex-wife, you kill my dad, and we’ll be each other’s alibi” is essentially what Robert Walker’s Anthony Bruno pitches to the hapless Guy Haines played by a callow Farley Granger. This was Patricia Highsmith’s first novel being adapted by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde and it is glorious in its perversity, tension, and general metaphysical unfairness. In other words, perfect fodder for Hitch. 

Ormonde wound up writing most of the script, by the way. Chandler was miffed with Hitchcock’s lack of communication and Chandler famously disliked the picture and wrote Hitchcock a petulant missive underscoring his, ah, disappointment. Not that it matters (it really, really does not; this is a peach of a film.)

“Strangers” was cinematographer Robert Burks’ first outing with Hitchcock; he would be shooting everything up through “Marnie” and using the camera as a psychological microscope ever frame of the way. Burks would score an Oscar for “To Catch a Thief” and would lend his talents to an easy dozen of some of the finest films in the fifties and sixties. 

Dmitri Tiomkin’s score is rich, lush, and intentionally obtrusive. I swear Hitchcock must have told his composers to crank it to eleven and started chuckling every time. In some cases, I think Hitch’s use of soundtrack is overbearing, but more often than not, he tends to use it for misdirection rather than as sonic cues to evoke this or that emotion. In his classic work, the score is as valuable and necessary as the visuals. Here, in “Strangers…”, it serves to render operatic what might an already fraught with despair scenario. But there is also a sense of emphasis on details that are either so obvious that when the next moment ratchets up the tension, the irony of the situation is layered in more subtly. 

I have in mind Guy’s climbing the stairs at the Anthony’s mansion and confronting a Great Dane at on the landing. It is one of the weirdest, most anomalous, and because of that, funny moments in Hitchcock that oddly, not only does not take me out of the flick, but kind of re-establishes just how weird the Anthony family is and by extension, that nothing is ever innocuous with Bruno Anthony. When Guy enters Bruno’s father’s room to ostensibly kill him but then, begins with warning Mr. Anthony about his amoral, homicidal maniac of a son, and Bruno pops up out of the bed, you are surprised, but so very not. If anything, it is just one more beat in a dirge of depression and dead ends. 

As usual, with Hitchcock, the more depraved the villain grows over the course of a film, the more compromised the “good guys”. In this case, the constellation of doubt, frustration, failure and circumstantial evidence coalesces to a fever pitch that almost explodes in the last act. Granted, this is par for the course in much of the master’s oeuvre, but in “Strangers…”, the action comes so swiftly and each machination draws out and increases the tension so that the catharsis is mostly complete, but still muted (though not blunted) by exhaustion.

I wonder how many times watching a Hitchcockian nail biter, the peak emotion is more relief than elation? I honestly cannot recall any of his films where I might actually feel like cheering at the end. The heroes of his movies have overcome often insurmountable odds; they have been lied to, compromised, abandoned, and worse, and the best I can muster is a huge sigh of relief. 

Of course, this has all to do with Hitchcock the artist. He did not see the human world as a sphere of redemption or triumph per se. He was fairly adamant that what happens after a film is over may not be happily ever after, something he establishes in the course of almost all of his work where domestic happiness, expectation of reward, or anything remotely highly positive is not to be trusted and very often, proves to be vapor in the onslaught of pernicious forces that require fighting for those positive outcomes.

His Catholicism is often in full view in his distrust of finding of lasting happiness in this world. Unlike Scorsese, Hitch isn’t going to let the audiences bask in anything like exhilaration. You get the relief, but anything more might come in the afterlife.

Hitchcock would not allow this kind of drivel to be an element in his constructions; the man enjoyed entertaining by shocking the shit out of the viewer and while historically, we are aware of his broader worldview, at the end of the day, his films were as much works to thrill and be enjoyed as they were expressions of any philosophy or worldview. And they are better for that.

That said, an awful of lot of Hitchcock subversion is on view here. Bruno’s homosexuality was codified by Robert Walker and Hitchcock during rehearsals where they developed behaviors to give some kind of expression to his sexuality. I am really on the fence about much of Hitchcock’s attitudes toward sexuality in general, and non-hetero sexualities specifically. 

I am kind of the mind that he didn’t trust “the passions” and that for him, sex was a dark realm across the board. He had famously strange relationships with many of his actresses and was not above adding severe stress into his direction to get the performances he wanted, but also, it seems, just out of a kind of sublimated sadism. Thus, any expression of a non-hetero sexuality is likely to be less than supportive. Naturally, coming up in England in the early twentieth century and shooting through the years of the sexual revolution no doubt provided a number of points of friction for him.

In any case, Walker’s performance is chilling. His neediness and initial attraction to Granger’s Guy (as I write that, I can’t help but feel the names are weighted for a number of sexual references) is annoying and then grows more and more absorbing - very much not in a good way - until Bruno’s sheer amorality and obsession are nearly all-consuming. Which brings us to the subsuming, if not submersion, of Guy and his supporters’ “purity”.

This last underscores the twinning that provides the compositional and thematic structure of the film. Guy and Bruno are negative doppelgängers and the polarities only deepen the farther along the film progresses. This is emphasized by placing Bruno on the left side of the screen (the “bad” side, the Lefthanded Way) in relation to Guy. Even the backgrounds shift according to where each is placed; Bruno in the shadows early on when he tells Guy that Guy’s ex-wife is now out of the way and it is Guy’s turn to return the favor by killing Mr. Anthony. Guy is seen illuminated on his way home and then brought into the shadows by Bruno. 

The “twinning” is all about doubling and double-crossing; but there is another dimension, too, one that Hitchcock has exploited in different ways elsewhere in his work. In some sense, Guy and Bruno aren’t merely “opposing doubles” of one another, it could very well be that Guy is somewhat aware that Bruno actually did help him out. Guy told his fiancée Ann (a terrific Ruth Roman) that he could strangle Miriam, his ex- (more accurately, estranged) wife because she refused to sign the divorce papers. In other words, Guy may not be as morally upright as we would like him to be and Hitchcock implicates us all in these muddied motivations. Again, this world is impure and the expiation of sins is not to be found in it. 

Of course, there is also the similarity in appearances between Anne’s little sister Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock turning in a rich and often funny performance) and Guy’s ex Miriam (Kasey Rogers). Both wear thick glasses of similar design. The two characters are drawn differently with Miriam “playing the field”, shall we say? And Barbara with an unabashed romantic strain in her (although I love when - after hearing the mess Guy is in - she blurts out to Anne how romantic it is to have a guy who would strangle his ex-wife to be with her and there’s plenty more where that came from). Nevertheless, in a pivotal scene, Bruno loses himself in Barbara’s glasses at a party when he begins to strangle a woman while looking at Barbara. It is a harrowing, untethered moment and as Barbara says later, “he was strangling me”. 

There is also the comparisons between families: Anne’s is close and supportive; Bruno’s is fragmented and dysfunctional - his father abusive and his mother an enabler and Bruno himself a psychopath. Still, I think Hitchcock would have us ask if the differences are more of a degree than kind. He could argue that it was Guy who actually initiated contact with the Devil by touching Bruno’s feet on the train (a sure invitation to a gay man and perhaps the reason why Bruno insisted on Guy coming to his car with him for lunch; it reads as obnoxious but on reflection, to Bruno, it would be perfectly normal) and that subsequently, this contact taints the goodness of the Mortons (Anne and Barbara’s family). 

Guy himself exists in a kind of limbo, as well. The Mortons are his family but not really his family; he is not a native to the area and he is in transition to pursue politics, perhaps. His identity is not seen as defined by anything solid, but is only relational. Even to Anne, in light of what he tells her, she harbors doubts concerning Guy’s innocence. 

These are all themes that Hitchcock exploited and explored throughout his career, but here they come into sharp focus and provide an entertainment of considerable depth. Well, it wouldn’t be Hitchcock were that not the case. He was one of that generation of directors who was certainly aware of what he was doing and that there was more depth and weight to his work than much of the public probably “got”, but who if you asked him, would have told you he just wanted to tell engrossing stories.

A number of his contemporaries - think Walsh, Hawks, Wilder, and Ford - had all created great entertainments but if that is all they did, if the films were merely superficial baubles, we would not care about, much less, return to them again and again. All of them began in the silent era and knew what cinema could do. That much of their finest work came later should be no surprise; there is a maturity that lends substance to what could be described as “a whodunnit”, “a shoot-em-up”, or “laff riot”, and so on. 

I could write forever about “peak Hitchcock” but it is on the one hand, too easy; and on the other, I won’t say “too hard” but there is so much that has been said, it’s difficult to see what new insights yet remain right now. Consequently, I will be returning to “30s Hitch” soon. There is a lot more to mine there.