Strangers On A Train (1951)

I was reading, and have since finished, Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers On A Train (and reviewed it here) and on a whim decided to track down and watch Alfred Hitchcock’s take.

It is entertaining enough with Hitchcock employing all his standard bags of tricks and rolls along nicely, though by no means a classic.

I was not much taken with Highsmith’s novel, given as she was in it too rather too much cod psychology, which is unconvincing and progressively dull. But describing a character’s inner life is one trick writers can get away with (or try to get away with) whereas on that score films are, with notable exceptions, rather stymied.

Whether that was why Hitchcock used the novel as source material and kept the essential plot of a stranger

suggesting to another that they should take over murdering a figure in the other’s life of whom they would happilybe I don’t know.

But he did make changes, some less important that others. Thus although the psychopathic character who comes up with the idea remans the young, wayward alcoholic scion of a wealthy Connecticut, Hitchcock merely alters his name from Charles Bruno to Bruno Anthony.

The second stranger, whose wayward estranged wife the madman murders has his profession changed, from ‘genius’ architect in the novel to semi-pro tennis player.

Crucially, Hitchcock does away with all Highsmith psycho flim-flammery (perhaps also as unimpressed with it as I was) and produces more or less one of his mainstream thrillers.

A central character, or better a peripheral central character in the novel, a New York PI who little by little solves the mystery of the psychopath’s father’s murder is done way with as in Hitchcock’s version the guy is not killed.

Instead, as in the novel, the young psycho has killed the ‘hero’s’ estranged wife and proceeds to try to frame the hero. Conveniently, a new character introduced by Hitchcock, the younger sister of the tennis player’s fianceé is the dead spit of the murdered woman, a fact which in one notable scene sets off the young psycho.

Overall, this is vintage Hitchcock avec the odd camera angles he liked at al. The denouement, on a merry-go-round in fairground where the original murder took place, is a tad rushed and, er, also a tad ridiculous with the ‘hero’ finally coming off the hook in the nick of time.

But what the hell.