Strangers on a Train (Warner Bros., 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 16) I watched Eddie Muller’s presentation on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” program of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 masterpiece Strangers on a Train, which I first saw at the Surf Interplayers Theatre revival house in 1970 or so (it was on a double bill with John Huston’s Beat the Devil, but I liked the Hitchcock film considerably better). Muller co-hosted it with actress Rosie Perez, who made her feature-film debut for Spike Lee in 1989’s Do the Right Thing. Perez called Strangers on a Train Hitchcock’s best film (I’d rate it along with Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious as my top three, and it’s significant that those were three of the four Hitchcock films Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini and Robert Porfirio included in The Film Noir Encyclopedia; their fourth was The Wrong Man, though I think they should also have included Rear Window and Vertigo and suspect the only reason they left those out is they were in color). Strangers on a Train is a movie I’ve seen many times since, including at a special screening in the early 2010’s at which one of its stars, Farley Granger, appeared to promote his autobiography Include Me Out. I remember that event well because I went with my late home-care client and roommate John Primavera, and because Granger was so out of it mentally that, despite the autobiography being co-credited to him and his partner Robert Patrick, I suspect Patrick really wrote it himself based on his memories of the anecdotes Granger had told him over the years they were together. I asked Granger about the reports that Hitchcock had privately conferred with the film’s co-star, Robert Walker, to play his scenes with Granger as Gay cruises, and Granger vehemently denied it, saying that the Motion Picture Production Code would have strictly forbidden any such thing. (There is an alternate version of the film released in Hitchcock’s native United Kingdom, where the British Board of Film Censors was considerably looser about sex and stricter about violence than their American counterparts, that contains a longer and significantly Gayer version of the first scene between Walker and Granger than the one we got.)

It’s a movie that fires on almost all cylinders; I could quibble about the music score by Dmitri Tiomkin (he’s not one of my favorite film composers and I wish Franz Waxman or Bernard Herrmann would have written it), and at the screening with Granger I suddenly found myself questioning Ruth Roman’s casting. Hitchcock made this film at Warner Bros., and one of Jack Warner’s conditions for allowing Hitchcock to go off lot for casting the men was that the female lead be one of his contractees. But in the great scene in which Roman’s character asks Granger’s, “How did you get him to do it?” – meaning murder his wife so he and she would be free to marry – I found myself wishing that Hitchcock’s great discovery, Grace Kelly, could have played it instead. (In Kelly’s three films with Hitchcock, Dial “M” for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief, Hitchcock managed to make Kelly seem sensual and alluring. In all her other eight movies, she’s so icy she could have sunk the Titanic.) Interestingly, TCM showed Dial “M” for Murder right after Strangers on a Train (though my husband Charles, who came home from work two-thirds of the way through Strangers, and I didn’t watch it), and Hitchcock biographer John Russell Taylor argued that Dial “M" could be seen as a sequel to Strangers, with Ray Milland in Granger’s role as the former tennis player who “married up” and now wants to murder his wife by getting somebody else to do it. The basic story of Strangers on a Train is pretty familiar, but here goes: rising tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is dating Ann Morton (Ruth Roman), daughter of an influential U.S. Senator (Leo G. Carroll), but there’s an obstacle in the way: a previous wife, Miriam (Laura Elliott, true name Kasey Rogers), back in his old home town of Metcalf. On a train from New York to Washington, D.C. Guy runs into Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), spoiled rich son of an indulgent mother (Marion Lorne) and an imperious father (Jonathan Hale). The two start talking, and Bruno suggests to Guy that since they both have inconvenient people in their lives they’d like to get rid of – Guy’s wife and Bruno’s father – they swap murders, with each killing the other’s desired victim so the police would have nothing to go on since each would have no apparent motive. Guy thinks this is all just a macabre joke, until he receives word that Miriam Haines has actually been killed and Bruno keeps calling him demanding that he fulfill his end of their bargain and actually kill Bruno’s father.

Strangers on a Train began life as a novel by Patricia Highsmith published in 1950, a year before Hitchcock made the movie. As in Young and Innocent (1937), Hitchcock’s British adaptation of Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles, Hitchcock used only about one-third of the book. He first hired Whitfield Cook to set the basic parameters of an adaptation, and then he hired Raymond Chandler to write the actual script. Hitchcock was dissatisfied with Chandler’s work on the project, and the feeling was mutual; Chandler wrote a letter to a friend lamenting the preposterousness of the opening scene between Guy and Bruno and in particular the way he was supposed to make the audience believe that Bruno thought they had made a binding deal while Guy regarded the whole thing as a macabre joke. Interestingly, Chandler wrote a script that ended with Bruno alive at the end but hopelessly insane, sitting in a mental institution in a straitjacket muttering to himself. Hitchcock did not use that ending in Strangers on a Train but he did in Psycho nine years later – and Strangers on a Train and Psycho have a lot of similarities, notably in how Hitchcock cast the psychos. Both Robert Walker and Anthony Perkins had reputations as boy-next-door “types,” and it was a real revelation when Hitchcock cast them both as villains. (Walker died after making just one more film, Leo McCarey’s anti-Communist propaganda piece My Son John – in fact Walker died before My Son John was finished and Hitchcock gave McCarey outtakes from Strangers on a Train to use to complete Walker’s role – but Perkins lived decades later and got saddled with increasingly badly written psycho roles to capitalize on his success in Hitchcock’s film.) Also both Bruno Antony and Norman Bates have mutually destructive psychotic relationships with their mothers, though unlike Mrs. Bates, Mrs. Antony is alive during the film’s story and played onscreen by Marion Lorne. Indeed, there’s one great scene between them in which Mrs. Antony has just painted a grimly Expressionist portrait and Bruno sees it. Immediately he starts laughing his head off and saying she’s captured his father perfectly, and she says, “I meant it to be St. Francis!” Once Hitchcock rejected Chandler’s script and fired him, later telling Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse that he got along better with writers who didn’t specialize in crime fiction, he sought out Ben Hecht for a rewrite. Hecht was too busy to take on the assignment, but he recommended a writer on his staff named Czenzi Ormonde, and in presenting the film Rosie Perez made a big deal about how the film was effectively written by two women, Highsmith and Ormonde. (Later Highsmith would return to the theme of two men, a relatively normal one and a psycho who lures him into a web of intrigue, in her most famous novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as four sequels to it.)

In Highsmith’s original, Guy is an architect who actually kills Bruno’s father and then lives the rest of his life in a fog of guilt until the police finally overhear his confession and arrest him. In the film Guy is a tennis player with aspirations to get into politics (and as the son-in-law of a Senator he'll obviously have a leg up!), which Muller suggested Hitchcock and whichever writer thought of it may have done as a way to butch up Guy’s character. Indeed, Muller made a big deal out of Hitchcock casting the genuinely Gay Farley Granger as a straight man and the genuinely straight Robert Walker as his male seducer. (In his other Hitchcock film, Rope, based on the real-life Leopold-Loeb case, Granger played one-half of a young Gay couple who kill a boyhood friend for thrills; John Dall played his partner, and true to form Hitchcock cast the queenier Dall as the more butch one in Rope.) One of the things I like best about Strangers on a Train is it inverts the standard noir cliché of the femme fatale and makes Bruno Guy’s homme fatal. Another aspect of Strangers that stands out today is Robert Burks’s cinematography, which is all-out noir even during scenes that take place outdoors in daylight. Hitchcock rescued Burks from his role as cinematographer for Warner Bros.’ montage department (where he worked for two people who later became full-fledged feature directors, Don Siegel and Byron Haskin). Strangers on a Train was the first Hitchcock/Burks collaboration, and Burks would go on to shoot all but one of Hitchcock’s subsequent films (the one exception was Psycho, for which Hitchcock used John L. Russell because he’d established a reputation for quick work on another low-budget film by a major director, Orson Welles’s Macbeth) until Burks and his wife died tragically in a house fire right after he’d finished Marnie. Strangers on a Train is a perfectly constructed film (Hitchcock strived for that on all his projects – he was reportedly the first director to storyboard a live-action film, and his early training as a commercial artist enabled him to do that – but he didn’t always achieve it), and it’s full of brilliant scenes but each one contributes to the action instead of just sitting there.

Among the highlights are Bruno’s actual murder of Miriam – Hitchcock said that he thought love scenes should be filmed like murders, and murders like love scenes, and he does just that here (as well as in one of his less-regarded films, Topaz, in which the head of the Cuban secret police murders his mistress for having betrayed him to the U.S. government and once again Hitchcock shoots it like a love scene). There are also neat little touches like the electric boats at the amusement park (itself redolent of the granddaddy of all horror films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which a tale of horror and homicidal madness is played against the backdrop of a carnival). All the boats have five-letter names; the one Miriam and her two boyfriends (Roland Morris and Tommy Farrell) get on is the innocuous “DAISY,” while the one Bruno takes on his way to killing Miriam is named “PLUTO,” after the Roman god of the underworld. The climax takes place at the carnival’s merry-go-round, where Bruno has gone to plant a cigarette lighter inscribed “A to G” (Anne to Guy) and frame Guy for Miriam’s murder. A trigger-happy cop shoots the man running the ride, causing it to spin out of control. Another man (Harry Hines) volunteers to edge his way under the speeding ride to get to the control and turn it off, and Hitchcock shocked both François Truffaut and Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg by telling them that Hines really executed that stunt even though it could have been fatal for him if he’d raised his ass off the ground. “You couldn’t fake it because it was a forward movement,” Hitchcock told Higham and Greenberg. This happens after Guy and Anne have engineered his escape from a tennis match at Forest Hills (where Bob Dylan gave one of his most notorious concerts 14 years later, one of his first appearances playing an electric guitar with a rock band behind him) where he’s had to dispatch his opponent in a hurry and get to Metcalf before dark, and the plainclothes police detectives who’ve been tailing him, Hennessey (Robert Gist) and Hammond (John Doucette), briefly lose him before calling ahead to the authorities in Metcalf. The merry-go-round sequence recalls the train accident that precipitated the climax of Hitchcock’s British film The Secret Agent (1936) in its sense of total chaos amidst a world run amok, and there are neat touches like a boy who’s thrilled by the out-of-control ride while his parents freak out at the danger he’s in. (That reminded me of a real boy I saw at one of the Balboa Park organ concerts when it started to rain; his parents had taken the option of going onstage and sitting outside the rain, and they frantically waved to him to join them. The kid loved being in the rain and stayed where he was.) Strangers on a Train has acquired the reputation of being one of Hitchcock’s greatest films, one it fully deserves, as well as doing some well-oiled variations on the standard noir clichés.