Random Hitchcock: Strangers On A Train

This is one Hitchcock's monstrously important films.  There is so much to say about it, that saying anything at all is difficult when I basically live blogging a special viewing festival that we are having in the house.  Sooo, I will just start with the basics.  This was one of the only screen adaptations for a Hitchcock film whose source material was written by a woman.  It is based on Patricia Highsmith's novel of the same name.  She was the kind of writer that Hitchcock (who many seriously maintain was a misogynist of some degree or other) could appreciate.  Her novels are filled with tons of very black humor, satire and strangeness that have been described as "macabre" (as in the Wikipedia links article above).  This HAD to one that Hitchcock just couldn't pass up because, let's face it, Hitchcock loved trains and put them in anywhere he could find a space for them!  Here was a book that came with built in "train suspense," no way he wouldn't go for this!  The tennis pro thing is pure Hitchcock.  Tennis seems to come in only second to his obsessions with trains.  Tennis moments and even plots are not as common in his films as trains, but they are in at least one movie per decade of his directorial career.  Though a lot of sources claim Hitchcock as having a great deal to do with the screenplay itself, it was, in fact, Raymond Chandler who was responsible party.  Hitchcock no doubt provided many of the broad strokes, but Chandler was the screenwriter (though I do have to wonder about Bruno death on the Merry-Go-Round....considering that Bruno's death in the novel comes when he falls overboard on a sailing vessel, that kids ride death...that just had to be Hitch!  

Below is a student trailer that was done as final in a film editing class that I thought was pretty dang cool!

The film brings back Farley Granger, who the world had seen in color in Hitchcock's 1948 Rope.  The plot is famous, it was even repeated as a storyline in a CSI episode:  You do my murder, I do yours.  The only problem; the guy with that suggestion come from a sociopath with very strong psychotic tendencies. Guy Haines (Granger) is the tennis pro who just happens to meet Bruno Antony on, you guessed it, a train.  Then came the plot from Antony.  He has read in the papers that the popular tennis player is having wife trouble; Bruno has, amongst a host of others, a daddy problem.  Burno thinks he has a brilliant way to deal with their "problems."  When Bruno murders Guy's unfaithful pregnant wife, and when Haines will not reciprocate with murdering Antony's father, Antony then turns to a type of blackmail--do it, or I'll frame you good!  Besides, the police already suspect tennis boy.