To celebrate the month of horror, “Kinostalgia” returns to the godfather of suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. Our program tonight contains „Strangers on a Train”, a film that blends suspense and terror, social etiquette and destructive impulses, plus a tiny sprinkle of Oedipal complexes, for flavor. 

The idea of the perfect crime, a sublime sphere of thought and action that burns all rebel trails and then closes upon itself without leaving any traces, was one of Hitchcock’s obsessions in the immediate post-war years. Compared to Rope (1948), his formal experiment set exclusively between four walls, Strangers on a Train (1951) is a sort of open counterpoint that offers the chance to sear through a large palette of bourgeois scenes (respectable parties, tennis matches, first-class trips) – yet willing to retain, at its core, the same tension between socially-acceptable behavior and the cold currents of unchained animality, that undermine it from underground. Farley Granger performs a regular tennis player, lost between two women, and between the duty of his carefully-embroidered club uniforms and the wish to defy all common sense. Robert Walker performs the deranged one – the man who proposes a deal that seems both utilitarian and sporty: through a cross-murder, they would both get rid of a burden and, on top of it, join a sort of informal hall of fame made up of those that are too skilled to be tracked down.

Walker’s character might have his own brand of insanity – but he lives under a truth that is much more consistent than that of the tennis player who is mired in bourgeois morality, which might be even more cynical, in fact. We understand that this individual isn’t concerned with the thought of his strangled wife – but with the need to save face at all costs. This is the source of this wonderful sequence where, with the help of alternate editing, Hitchcock ties the destiny of a banal tennis match saving (including in a religious sense) this volatile citizen. One could expect a Hollywood film to choose this profession for its protagonist out of sheer dandyism – but not for Hitchcock who, following the steps of Patricia Highsmith, shoots the tennis game with a close eye to details, worthy of Julien Farault’s genre films. For a moment, kineticism and pure gesture coexist with the corruption of the spirit, in the scene where his acolyte-turned-enemy tries to set him up by planting a lighter as evidence, only for him to drop it down a sewer drain and struggle to recover it. This is a rigorous antagonism of forces, which flirt with an imaginary split-screen: on the one hand, our hero clad in white, prancing around in gracious and gratuitous pirouettes for the plaisir of the rich; on the other, a sort of cancerous cell of the bourgeoisie, striving over above a manhole.

There is great irony in the way the film unfolds. It allows itself to pass everything through fire and flames, and to keep everyone alive for the sake of effect. Even though they all contribute to the general atmosphere of guilt and lies, no one is condemned except, at most, in extremis: how touching these wealthy people are, in their naive desperation to clear their names. It would be too easy for the anti-hero to carry a higher truth: he has his own struggle to bear, one that is no less sticker, with a suffocating mother (Marion Lorne, genius in her Hitchcockian contempt) and a father that wishes death upon him, horribly deflecting outside of a household that diminishes his masculinity in all ways imaginable. However, this irony is best seen – like in so many other cases – in a very unapparent directorial choice: in what was going to become a very common gesture of auteur cinema, Hitchcock films the spectators that are furrowing their brows, like in the films of Chaplin, staring left and right after the ball, in an almost mechanical gesture – only one man alone is sitting still, and, of course, he happens to be our man. 

Besides, it’s hard to imagine, for the sake of the game, a time when Hitchcock was regarded as an author of throwaway illustrations, only good for watching on the fly. Everything in this film signalizes rigor – who else with the sole exception of Fritz Lang, could plant a decor with such efficiency? – and inventive. Like in the final scene, when the two former accomplices face each other in an adventure park: the police fires a shot that hits a carousel, ricocheting into a poor employee, thus making the machine go haywire. The moment when law enforcement tries to intervene, but the ride violently expels them as if they were flies, is extraordinary. All that’s left is the chase between the two, plus an innocent kid that is caught up in their altercation – and I love so much how Hitchcock, with his rapid editing, has time to include a few shorts of the “rolling material” – some hideous horses, with grimacing snouts, that are seemingly participate directly in all this terror. Strangers on a Train blends the living and the non-living in so many shapes: from the macabre to the hilarious; but all are testimonies of a type of curiosity and intelligence that has not aged a second, to this very day.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.