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Strangers on a Train
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Murderous, transgressive desire suddenly floods
mundane, daily life – and all because of one mere, unforseen, random train
encounter between two men (Farley Granger as Guy and Robert Walker as Bruno) in
Alfred Hitchcock’s classic morality-thriller, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s
1950 novel.
The film is ingeniously structured like an obsessive,
inescapable nightmare – with uncanny repetitions of events, ghostly echoes of
small details, and an ambiguous, implicitly homoerotic emotional transference
between the central characters.
Hitchcock himself suggested that the formal patterns
of the film are intricate enough to deserve (and demand) repeated, close
viewings; Raymond Durgnat ranks high among those exegetes who have devoted
themselves to uncovering this logic. For my part, I shall pick out only one
aspect of Hitchcock’s patterning process here: the level of film style I have
elsewhere described as social mise en
scène. As an artist and storyteller, Hitchcock was deeply drawn to the
public aspect of seemingly intimate, private moments – the supervising or
prying eyes of others, their looks and gestures of alarm or disapproval – and how all this played out in concretely
spatial and architectural forms.
Hitchcock was, in fact, a voracious student of details
from everyday life that revealed a social mise en scène of this kind. What
attracted him, for example, in Victor Canning’s novel The Rainbird Pattern – which formed the basis for his final film, Family Plot (1976) – was a
detail he found delightful and true: if a Bishop were to be kidnapped right in
the middle of a Catholic Mass, no one in the congregation would immediately
move to rescue him, or even check on what was going on – because such behaviour
would be deemed impolite or unseemly in such a refined, ritual setting!
It is dizzying to calculate how often Hitchcock seized
on such private/public occasions for his juiciest effects: auctions (North by Northwest, 1959), political
rallies (The 39 Steps, 1935) … Even
the very title Strangers on a Train instantly cues us to codes of social mise
en scène: how do you deal with a pushy stranger encountered in a public
place, especially on public transportation, where you cannot easily flee?
Hitchcock was particularly observant about how ordinary citizens react – often
with great inhibition, indicating an underlying, perhaps irrational sense of
shame or guilt – in the face of authorities of various stripes, and within the
forbidding architecture of law-enforcement institutions. (Alain Resnais took a
leaf from the Hitchcockian book on this score.)
Hitchcock often found ingenious ways to tweak the
basic private/public relation, as in the celebrated fairground ride scene of Strangers on a Train. Bruno is stalking
Miriam (Laura Elliot) from a distance, with intent to kill; Miriam, sharing an
ice cream with her two male companions at the confectionary stand, becomes
aware of this handsome stranger’s gaze, and she is instantly caught in an
erotic game mixing excitement and menace. As Miriam proceeds through the
various zones of the fairground, she casts secret glances back at Bruno, but
maintains the facade of her jolly evening out. A key shot in the scene shows
her looking, with hope, back into the crowd where Bruno no longer is – but, the
moment she turns to the front again, a slight reframing reveals the shock (for
Miriam as for us) of him standing right next to her.
The moment of riding the wooden horses on the Merry Go
Round arrives, and Bruno climbs on a seat directly behind the threesome. What a
splendidly tense and suspended moment of stasis-in-motion: the ride goes
around, the song (“The Band Played On”) repeats, and the seeming chase – Bruno
on the horse behind, pursuing Miriam – cannot be resolved, since the interval
between the bolted-in faux-animals can never be closed.
Yet, even within this ingeniously locked situation,
Hitchcock finds a way to introduce nuance: as Bruno leans forward, catching
Miriam’s eye, his vocal rendition of the piped song is lifted in the sound mix,
and she (unbeknownst to her pals) ‘answers’ him with her similarly, aurally
enhanced singing of the next line. What a master of cinematic nuance Hitchcock
was!
MORE Hitchcock: The Birds, Lifeboat, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Rear Window, Vertigo, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious © Adrian Martin January 1993 / April 2014 |
