- The world is full of strangers, and not just on trains. Walking past you on the street, sitting next to you on the bus, shopping at the same grocery store--it's tough to imagine a time when you're not surrounded by strangers. Most of them are normal people like yourself. Some, like Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), are much more dangerous. When tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) first meets Bruno, he has no way of knowing that this particular stranger is a complete lunatic. Sure, Bruno is oddly chatty and uncomfortably interested in Guy's personal life, but maybe Bruno's theory about a "perfect murder" is nothing more than an eccentric bit of idle conversation. Then again, maybe not.
- As Bruno eagerly elaborates, his plan involves "swapping murders" with Guy. Bruno would kill Guy's inconvenient wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers) and in exchange would expect Guy to kill Bruno's father (Jonathan Hale). Although Miriam's death certainly would allow Guy to marry his sweetheart, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), we gather that he hardly considers murder to be a viable solution to his problems. "You think my theory's okay? You like it?" Bruno asks. "Sure, Bruno, sure. They're all okay," Guy replies. In Guy's mind, he's just found the least impolite way to end a disturbing conversation with an odd man. From Bruno's twisted perspective, the two of them have just entered into a murder pact. "Criss-cross, criss-cross," Bruno mutters happily to himself.
- Not long after Guy professes an understandable desire to strangle Miriam, a profligate partier if ever there was one, Bruno steps in to fulfill this wish in a very literal way. In an amazing set of scenes, the playfully menacing Bruno stalks Miriam and her friends through an amusement park. It would have been frightening enough to have Bruno lingering in the shadows, but the film instead boldly chooses to keep him out in the open, where Miriam notices him several times. Surprisingly, this makes the entire sequence even more suspenseful, as Miriam is constantly glancing back over her shoulder to keep tabs on her creepy admirer. Finally, at an island "lover's lane," Bruno completes his half of the imagined bargain, the details of which are reflected in Miriam's dropped glasses. Needless to say, Guy is surprised when Bruno later shows up at his apartment to inform him that the deed is done. Of course, Bruno is equally surprised that Guy has no intention of reciprocating. With an alibi unfortunately "full of bourbon," Guy must now find a way to implicate the increasingly ubiquitous Bruno before ending up in jail himself.
- Strangers on a Train contains so many great scenes that it is a challenge even to mention them all, let alone to discuss them in any detail. While the final nightmarish carousel ride is probably the film's most famous scene, the most imitated may be the one in which Bruno desperately reaches into the storm drain for Guy's lighter, one of the quintessential Hitchcock MacGuffins. Another great scene takes place in the middle of the film, when an overly enthusiastic Bruno demonstrates his strangulation technique at a society ball. As Bruno's mother (Marion Lorne) might say, "he sometimes goes a little too far." Like a later Hitchcock psychopath, Robert Walker does such a great job with the role that it is difficult to imagine anyone else as Bruno. It's enough to make you look around and wonder what other kinds of strangers are out there.
- I spotted Hitchcock carrying a bass onto the train.
- Apparently, Raymond Chandler was a writer although he seems not to have gotten along very well with Hitchcock. Obviously, the story was adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel.
- I missed mentioning that Patricia Hitchcock and Leo G. Carroll were also in this film.
- Much of the film takes place in Washington DC. The Jefferson Memorial and Capitol are both easily visible.
- This was Robert Walker's last completed film before his untimely death.
