Strangers on a Train is one of the quintessential Hitchcock classics. It has a great premise, interesting and often chilling characters, and is basically a massive collection of tense scenes and fantastic shots. While I watched it I was marveling at how well thought out each and every shot was and how nearly everyone helped to build the dramatic tension. In a modern age of cinematic crap, most directors and editors seem to believe that it is rapid edits and incomprehensible sequences of action that build tension as opposed to real cinematography. I’ve come to the conclusion that film is not so much an art anymore, but just a means of making money with whatever product they can turn out, no matter how lazily shot and edited it is. Hitchcock predates this era, hell even his death predates this era. He is from a time of classic movie making in which films were edited carefully and manually, not sloppily and on a computer. Film is expensive and he knew he had to make every shot count. And that’s exactly what he did.
Of course as I said before the shots build tension, and this tension is essential for the plot. The film opens with a tennis pro on a train to go divorce his estranged wife who is pregnant with another man’s baby. On the train a man recognizes him and introduces himself. They have a somewhat awkward interaction before the man invites the tennis pro to his compartment for lun
ch. There they drink and discuss various matters. Then the man suddenly mentions how much he and his father hate each other and how sometimes he wishes his father were dead. It is then he presents his idea for the perfect murder. He proposes that the tennis pro kill his father and that he will kill the tennis pro’s wife. Of course the tennis pro marks this off as drunken banter and doesn’t give it a second thought when he gets off the train. In short, the wife refuses to get the divorce she had wanted and the man kills her. The rest of the movie is then him stalking the tennis pro, trying to convince him to carry out the other end of the bargain. It all culminates to a spectacular climax on an out of control carousel.
Bes
ides the wonderful cinematography, I mentioned above that the characters are great. This is completely true. Each has a function and each carries it out. The strongest however is the man from the train played by Robert Walker. Walker manages to play murderous and deranged in such a subtle manner that it brings tension to the screen every time he walks into frame. He is also the subject of many of the great shots in the film. Perhaps the most famous shot is of a tennis match in which the pro is playing. The man is in the audience and Hitchcock gives us a shot of the audience following the ball with their eyes back and forth. However one person is not turning their head. It is the man. He is staring directly at the pro. This fantastic yet simple shot gives me goosebumps every time. And it all builds the tension required by the film’s plot. We watch as things escalate and eventually explode. It is an exciting experience that is rare in modern cinema.
Verdict? Definitely a must see for any fan of Hitchcock, murder, suspense, thrillers, tennis, old movies, new movies, basically anyone! So rent it or download it, just see it any way you can. You wont regret it.
Up Next: Whatever movie I feel like reviewing. I’ll probably watch some stuff this weekend, though don’t expect a review for Transformers 3 or anything like that.
Of the five Hitchcock movies I watched last night I found this one to be the most chilling. Not because it included murder or deception, but because it is a true story. The main character in The Wrong Man is Manny, a Jackson Heights family man who plays the base at a local club. He, his wife, and their two children barely scrape by on his $85 a week. But they do scrape by. The first ten minutes of the film very productively and sufficiently establish Manny’s character. He goes to work, comes home to his wife, socializes with his children and helps them sort out their conflicts, he even goes to visit his parents when his mother phones to say his father isn’t feeling well. Manny is a good guy, making a living the best he can and supporting his family. However, we learn very early that Manny’s wife needs to have her wisdom teeth removed and it will cost them $300. Manny decides to go to the insurance office to see how much they could borrow on his wife’s policy for the surgery. While there, the women working in the office identify Manny a man who had held them up a few months earlier. Later that evening as he is on his way home, Manny is arrested. He is not told what for until he is at the police station and is in fact told very little altogether. I wont even get into the horrible police work done by the 110th Precinct in this film, except to say that they didn’t even let Manny have a phone call. Schmucks.
One of the few Hitchcocks I’ve seen previously, Dial M for Murder is one of my favorites. The story, adapted from a play, takes place almost entirely in a single room and is told primarily through dialogue. On screen this can be tedious and boring but Hitchcock manages to keep the pace up by constantly toying with our perceptions of who the protagonist is and who is in the right. In the story a former tennis pro is married to a young Grace Kelly. He finds out that she has been seeing a young, American TV writer and decides that the best option is to kill her, that way he can inherit her wealth. So he hires a man, someone he knew back from college, to kill his wife. He has it planned to the last detail and calls it the “perfect murder.” But of course things don’t unfold the way he expects and he is forced to improvise. I wont reveal how it all turns out though just in case you wanna watch it yourself.
Another one Hitchcock’s lesser films, I Confess is decent thriller. It has stakes, it has murder, and it has characters that you don’t want to see get put away. The concept is simple, what if a murderer confessed to a priest who was then bound by the church to not reveal the man’s identity. Simple, but Hitchcock adds a twist, without the real murderer’s confession, the priest becomes the primary suspect. Another standout quality about the plot is that the murderer is not a crazed madman who kills for the sake of killing, he is a frightened immigrant, desperate and when he confesses to the priest, he means it.
This little piece of 1950s Hitchcock is one of his lesser known films and seldom makes it on anyone’s top five list. I guess I understand why. While it was a sufficient “thriller” of sorts, it did have some flaws. The primary flaw is one I still see in films and TV today. It showed a flashback of something that in the end turned out to be false. Flashbacks imply a memory of an earlier event and therefore imply truth. It can be overly misleading to show a flashback of something that is in the end not what really happened. For the entire movie the audience is under the belief that a character is innocent while in the end, in an abrupt reveal, we realize he isn’t. The film therefore has very little potency in its effect.
