Strangers on a Train 1951

[8.3/10] We live in an age where anything you can imagine may be conjured up through the magic of CGI and green screen technology. There’s no place our heroes can’t visit, no foe they can’t fight, and no images that can’t be summoned in the process. By dint of spectacle alone, modern films should be able to awe, thrill, and grip us more than anything that predates such technological innovations.

And yet, the quiet miracle of Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography is that he can make the comparatively mundane feel like the most captivating, ominous, seat-gripping thing in the world. Strangers on a Train is not exactly a down-to-earth story. It involves a murder, and a mentally unbalanced homicidal stalker, and a minor celebrity caught in a web of bad luck and bad choices.

Despite that, though, it’s a lower tempo movie more often than not, more apt to string the audience along with the looming possibility of things going terribly wrong than pull the trigger on the fireworks. The movie lives in the tension of protagonist Guy Haines realizing a murder’s been committed in his name, fearing the consequences of who might get to him first: Bruno Antony or the law. The movie spends most of its runtime with the noose slowly tightening, more and more little things going wrong, until the release of all that stress in the film’s climax is as much a relief as it is cathartic.

What’s striking is how Hitchcock achieves that tension and transposes it onto so many seemingly prosaic activities. The juxtaposition of one man trying to finish a tennis match and another trying to fish a lighter out of a storm drain is the most suspenseful thing in the world when each is racing against time to pin a murder on the other. The mere presence of an unwanted visitor leering in the distance from the Jefferson Memorial chills the blood. And a runaway carousel ride at a local carnival has more cinematic electricity than all the CGI explosion-fests the world over.

It’s a cliché at this point to call Hitchcock the master of suspense. Still, the honorific is earned not just by the results on the screen, but by what common tools he uses to make them. The drama here is human, and the stakes are personal rather than earth-shaking, which allows the threats and possible calamities to be human-sized too. By keeping that focus on the small, the intrusions of the threatening and ominous feel that much larger, that much more likely to make you dig your fingers into the armrest, than stories and foes that are nominally bigger and scarier.

And there are few cinematic villains scarier than Bruno Antony. It’s a fantastic performance from Robert Walker who commands the screen every time he steps into the frame. What makes Bruno so terrifying is, again, the unremarkableness of him. Sure, he’s mentally unwell, having cooked up this famed “criss-cross” scheme and harboring no shortage of mommy and daddy issues. But he’s also someone who can pass, at least briefly, in polite company, whom you wouldn’t blink twice at if you walked by him on the street, who is a figure that would fade into the woodwork if you didn’t know what to look for.

Yet, he’s utterly terrifying. Hitchcock and director of photography Robert Burks see to that. Antony’s placid demeanor turns utterly menacing when he’s the only one staring amid a crowd of head-bobbers watching a tennis ball lobbed back and forth. He moves like a shark through a local carnival, pursuing Guy’s wife with an unnerving smile and steady gait. His run-of-the-mill small talk turns bizarre and disturbing if you let him get wound up long enough. A simple look from him sends Guy’s would-be sister-in-law into a panic. The superficially normal man spooks like a phantom when he’s framed in shadow or leans out of the darkness. The film’s grandest achievement may be turning a clever but simple man into an abjectly frightening cinematic creation.

That said, at the risk of being deemed one of Hitchcock’s hated “plausibles” -- people who question when a movie strays too far from reality -- there’s elements of Strangers on a Train that strain credulity.

The movie handwaves away the possibility that the two gentlemen who were with Guy’s wife at the carnival when she was killed would be treated as suspects. Guy’s girlfriend and her family advise him to act like everything’s normal despite the fact that the public would probably expect him to be at least a little emotional given the news of his wife’s demise, even if their relations were strained. And the police officer at the end seems pretty blasé about not searching Bruno for the engraved lighter that might at least partly exonerate Guy simply because Bruno claims he doesn’t have it.

Maybe there’s a cultural disconnect from American society now versus how these things might have been treated seventy years ago, but suffice it to say, they strike the modern viewer as profoundly odd reactions to what is admittedly a profoundly odd situation.

Regardless, that’s part of the unwitting charm of Strangers on a Train. For such a tightly-wound film, it has these funny little human moments that make it feel real. Amid Hitchcock’s trademark brilliant compositions and framings, built to let the images tell the story and build the tension, he injects these small interludes that serve no purpose but wonderful texture.

A hayseed bystander pesters Bruno and responds to a kiss off with, “So I’m not educated.” The police commandeer an old dowager’s car only to find she’s thrilled to be part of such drama. A small boy on the runaway carousel decides to interject himself into the struggle between Guy and Bruno like it’s a playground scuffle. Amid a high concept story, these little doses of well-observed reality and humor bring it home.

It’s in keeping with the way all this cinematic anxiety laid bare, all these tense moments stacked on top of one another, spin out from such humble beginnings. Bruno experiences a raft of good luck, running into a person famous enough that he can know the man’s troubles, with the time and resources to pursue his dreadful plan, and have enough things break in his favor, like the lack of a reliable alibi for his counterpart, to give him leverage.

And the reverse is true for Guy. From the simple act of running into one weirdo in a train car, his whole life is upended and nearly ruined. Words not meant seriously but spoken in anger tie him to the crime. A forgotten lighter gives his foil the chance to plant evidence. A fellow passenger’s intoxication deprives him of his alibi. So much goes wrong for Guy, that the viewer wonders what they would do in his situation, forced into a scenario where he’s innocent but cannot help but seem guilty to a neutral observer.

That central underlying tension -- between truth and falsity, between what really happened and what others would believe, between assauging and dangerous man and confronting him whatever the consequences -- fuels the film. Strangers on the Train is an unsettling take on the “For Want of a Nail” story, where one accidental shoe scuff leads to multiple deaths, veritable blackmail, and several more lives hanging in the balance.

Guy learns his lesson by the end of the movie, but it’s a lesson for filmmakers writ large at the same time. Sometimes the most terrifying, tense, and thrilling things emerge from the smallest sources. It’s a tribute to Hittcock’s virtuosity, and his team’s superlative efforts in an age before computer-generated sorcery, that they could make a chance meeting on the railway, and the sparks and consequences that unspooled from two distinctive but recognizable men, loom as large as anything their successors would awe audiences with half a century down the line.