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The Guardian (15/Aug/1999) - Strangers on a Train

(c) The Guardian (15/Aug/1999)

Strangers on a Train

Between the screening of "The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat" in the Lumieres' first programme in 1895 to the Fifties, train movies were a staple of the cinema and never more so than in the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Five of his pictures feature romantic encounters between hero and heroine on a train; two end with appalling train crashes; his personal favourite concludes with the villain falling to his death from a speeding locomotive; and the axis of his bold, obtuse "Strangers on a Train" (1951) is the railroad between Washington DC and New York. There is something about trains - their restricted space, the lines they run on, the fixed schedules, the enforced meetings between strangers - that appealed to Hitchcock.

The subtle opening sequence of "Strangers on a Train", which is in effect a homosexual seduction, could only have got past the censors and been acceptable to a mainstream audience by being on a train. The apparently straight tennis player Guy (Farley Granger), unhappily married, lower-middle-class, penniless, meets the rich, epicene Bruno (Robert Walker) in a railway lounge car and until their feet touch under a table we only know Guy through his sensible brogues and Bruno through his two-tone co-respondent shoes. Bruno has been stalking his quarry and after a few lines of well- placed flattery, he lures Guy, who only has a carriage seat, to his private compartment for lunch and the proposition that Guy should kill Bruno's oppressive father in exchange for Bruno disposing of Guy's obstructive wife.

"Strangers" is full of marvellous set pieces and uses the architecture of Washington to dramatic effect. The colourless Farley Granger serves to focus our attention on the fascinating villain, and Robert Walker is at his most menacing when standing there doing nothing - the fixed gaze among the sea of swivel ling faces watching a tennis match; the one well-dressed man at a cheap amusement park, insolently sizing up his victim. Bruno is an Iago and black humour constantly bubbles up in the picture.

However, the film's best-known joke - the pay-off in which the hero and heroine recoil from an Anglican clergyman in a railway observation car - is missing from the print currently being revived. This version, which contains a few extra lines of dialogue, was apparently prepared by Hitchcock for the first British screening in 1951, though there are doubts as to whether it was ever actually released. It would have pleased Raymond Chandler, who in a highly critical, but sharply intelligent letter (one he never posted) took Hitchcock to task for weakening the script he'd written for him. Among other things, Chandler attacked what he thought was the glib humour of the ending. More than incidentally, Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia, who plays the heroine's sister, a bloodthirsty girl fascinated by crime, is seen to be reading a paperback of Chandler's "The Big Sleep".

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