Essay: Strangers on a Train (1951)
A gay "playboy" is the villain in this adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay by Raymond Chandler
Based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith liked writing about secretive, amoral characters who reflected both her inherent tension in being a closeted lesbian who never admitted to being gay and a bitter misanthropic streak in her personality. These amoral characters might appear as the antihero of a book, as in her five Tom Ripley books, or as a villain in the story.
During most of the 20th century, as late as the early 80s, homosexuality was, if not illegal, widely condemned as a perversion or (for the slightly more compassionate) as an illness. Gay people were expected to stay in the closet and never reveal or act on their attraction to people of the same sex. If an author or filmmaker were to create a book or film about a queer character, by the end of the story that character invariably had to die or wind up in prison.1
Such is the case with Bruno, the villain of Highsmith’s “Strangers on a Train” and of Alfred Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler’s 1951 film adaptation. Played by handsome leading man Robert Walker as an oily weirdo who charms older women with elaborate manners and slightly scandalous anecdotes, Bruno — apparently in his late 30s or so — is babied by his mother (Marion Lorne), shown laughing off his recent, apparently public threats to “blow up the White House” as she gives him a manicure. She seems like an ordinary mid-century rich lady with a mid-Atlantic accent until she shows him her latest painting, a horrific, surreal portrait of an agonized man. Faced with the painting, Bruno bursts into laughter. “That’s Father!” he exclaims, to the consternation of his mother, who replies “It is? I was trying to paint Saint Francis.”
So much for his family. The key relationship in the film is between Bruno and the protagonist, well-known amateur tennis champ Guy Haines. The film opens with their seemingly random encounter on a passenger train, whom he approaches in the salon car. Failing to charm the pants off him, Bruno resorts to his other strategy, a shocking proposal to “exchange” murders. Swiftly getting Guy to admit he’d like to get out of his marriage to Miriam, an unfaithful slut who works in a record store, in order to marry his true love Anne (Ruth Roman), Bruno offers to get rid of Miriam if Guy will sneak into his house and murder his father. Each will seem like a random murder by a stranger, Bruno promises: since no one would have reason to associate each victim with his killer, no one would ever suspect either of them, and they’d get off scot free.
This arresting idea at the center of the plot is classic Highsmith: first seducing the reader into identifying with the protagonist’s predicament — who among us has never fantasized about doing away with the most troublesome person we know? — and then providing an intriguing “solution.” Of course, it’s only a solution if the person carrying out the crime is completely amoral.
Bruno, like Tom Ripley, fits this description and kills Miriam without remorse. But Highsmith’s additional touch is what gives the middle of the film tension. Ordinary upstanding citizen Guy allowed himself to consider the proposal for just a moment, and though he immediately rejected it, he is wracked with guilt and paranoia when Bruno carries out his end of the “deal” unilaterally. These are also Highsmith trademarks: making the reader, or film viewer, understand how someone who has neither agreed to nor committed a crime could feel the same emotions as if he had actually done it.
Another classic Highsmith scene, appearing in work after work, is the protagonist being questioned by the police once an initial crime has been committed. It goes one or two ways: either, as in this case, the reader or viewer knows the protagonist is innocent but this scene announces to him and to us that he is in danger anyway; or, the reader or viewer knows the protagonist-antihero is guilty, but the police tell him or unintentionally show him that they already have a suspect and it’s someone else. In either case, the protagonist is allowed to walk free, but with the knowledge that the police have every intention of closing a noose.
His actions follow from that knowledge, but also as a result of actions by other characters. But before I go on, I think I’m going to stop comparing “Strangers on a Train” to a book featuring Ripley, because this is the other kind of story, where the protagonist is innocent. Suffice it to say that no matter which of these two types of story she’s telling, Highsmith invariably pulls some innocent into a shadow world and makes him (and her crime-oriented books always have a main character who is male) equivalent to a criminal, even if he never commits a crime.
Here we have Guy walking around with the knowledge that Bruno has murdered his wife. But that’s not enough — Bruno doesn’t flee or disappear to avoid being caught, he makes himself more obvious, attempting to prod Guy into following through on his part of their deal. (Bruno never agreed to a deal in the first place.) In one scene, Bruno delivers a map to his own house with arrows pointing to his father’s bedroom, and a gun to carry out the murder. Another time he invites himself to a reception at the house of his fiancé’s father, a U.S. senator, where he can’t help gayly sitting down with a couple of older ladies and pouring on the charm. He also can’t help being a psycho. Intent on showing how to kill someone without a gun or knife, he almost chokes one of the ladies to death. And this is the turning point of the film — not the fact that he has almost killed someone in front of a whole party, but the reason he goes into a sort of trance and forgets to stop.
Earlier in the movie we meet Guy’s fiancé’s sister. This character, played by Hitchcock’s own daughter Patricia, has been a lovable comic element up to this point. She’s on a sort of Nancy Drew kick and plays girl detective about everything. She also happens to resemble Guy’s now-dead wife. So when Bruno spots her while he happens to be demonstrating how to choke someone, he falls into a fugue state in which he’s re-enacting the murder. That’s why he nearly murders someone else.
(The other weird thing about this movie is that because she is dressed and coiffed like a middle-aged woman, it’s absolutely impossible to guess the character’s age. It’s also hard to guess the age of her sister Anne, the woman Guy is in love with, for the same reasons, but at least we can assume that she is slightly younger than him, because every character in a Hitchcock movie except for the villain is extremely conventional. So every scene with what must be her kid sister (albeit one who looks approximately 43 years old2) has a weird vibe.
It’s not Barbara Hitchcock’s fault. In her Nancy Drew mode she acts every bit the kid sister; I half expected her to start braying “Meet me in Saint Louie, Louie!” or “Que Sera, Sera.”3 Later, fixed in Bruno’s gaze, she stops being comic and acts appropriately horrified, and does a good job of it.
Even this ridiculous behavior — nearly murdering someone at a senator’s reception while already having murdered a woman — does not succeed in calling the attention of the police to Bruno. The incompetence of the police is another tried-and-true theme of the author. Without their failures of imagination and inability to see perpetrators right in front of their eyes, the Highsmith villain might actually be in danger of being caught.
Enough about Highsmith. This is a piece about the Hitchcock movie, after all, and there’s plenty to praise: The spooky, extremely effective night lighting. The characteristic Hitchcockian shots of American monuments (in this film, the Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington Memorials; in “North by Northwest,” visages of the same presidents appear on Mount Rushmore); the single shot which makes use of distortion (here, Miriam’s murder reflected in her eyeglasses; stairways in “Vertigo” or the shower drain in “Psycho”); the comic shot of a tennis crowd turning their heads back and forth in unison to watch a match.
Then there are two scenes, shot in an amusement park, that occur at different points in the film. Each is a masterful sequence. In the first, Bruno tracks Miriam through the town to the fun fair, through a Tunnel of Love attraction, and finally to an artificial lake, where he murders her. The second comprises the film’s climax. Now Guy is tailing Bruno, while the police — now almost convinced that Guy is the suspect — trail him. After one of the cops (those incompetents) fires a gun and kills the operator of a merry-go-round, the contraption runs amok, leading to an absolutely riveting (and somehow still comic) moment when an elderly carny volunteers to crawl underneath the whirling thing to reach the controls and stop it. This heroic actor, one Harry Hines, doesn’t even appear in the film’s credits, but you will never forget him.
The fact that Highsmith’s character Tom Ripley, antihero of five novels, escaped both of these fates is possibly due to the fact that he is not explicitly portrayed as gay. Though readers of the first Ripley book find in him some gay chracteristics — inscrutability, a sense of superiority combined with profound alienation from personal relationships and society, and an ambiguous attraction to another character — by the second of five books he is shown as having a wife, and explicit gay themes are never discussed.
The actress was 22 years old in 1950 when the movie was shot.
“Que Sera, Sera” is a song from Hitchcock’s later “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956). In that film, star Doris Day sings it first as a lullaby and later as a danger signal, belting it out in a bizarre way much as Margaret O’Brien, a child actor with no grace whatsoever, belts out the title song in the 1944 “Meet Me in St. Louis,” which has nothing else whatsoever to do with the work of Patricia Highsmith or Alfred Hitchcock, but wouldn’t it be great if it did?