Part of July's BIG PICTURE: PRESENTING ALFRED HITCHCOCK
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1h 41m / PG / Crime, Drama, Thriller
TRAILER:
VENUE: Historic Duncan Auditorium
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Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) finds himself in quite a pickle. He wants a divorce from his wife Miriam, who is pregnant with another man’s child … oh and also he wants to marry Anne (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a U.S. Senator. But all this drama has to be kept out of the gossip columns or it’ll wreck his career. Then one day he meets a stranger on a train (Bruno, played by Robert Walker) who proposes an unconventional solution — he’ll murder Miriam, but in exchange Guy has to murder Bruno’s hated father. And because both murders will have no motive and perfect alibis, both men will walk away free. Guy, to his credit, is so horrified by this idea that he runs away. Less to his credit, he leaves behind an engraved lighter. And so Bruno, now armed with Guy’s darkest secrets and incontrovertible evidence, commences his plan anyway.
Alfred Hitchcock was a tricky director, and on Strangers on a Train he allowed himself the most trickiness to date (excepting Rope); the technical experimentation in shots like (avoiding spoilers) the reflected strangulation nest deliciously within the themes of doubling and dark mirroring. You’ll also note that the screenplay for Strangers on a Train is credited to Raymond Chandler. He was contracted to write a treatment (the story is based on the first novel by Patricia Highsmith, also the writer of The Talented Mr. Ripley) during a time when Hitch and the studio were shopping for a “name” writer for marketing purposes. John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder and Dashiell Hammett all turned it down. But Chandler and Hitchcock were incompatible; what started with disagreement about working style turned into open hostility. The final script had none of Chandler’s work in it, and both he and Hitchcock wanted his name removed from the project. But Warner Bros. wanted to promote the film as a Raymond Chandler script, so it stayed.
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