Strangers on a Train
Posted by J on September 11, 2008
There is nothing about Strangers on a Train that is not corrupt. There is not one good person in the movie,
maybe except for the innocent witnesses. And the entire movie is based on a twisted scheme. Bruno Anthony, a disturbed man who wants to murder his father, suggests to star tennis player Guy Haines that each of them murder the other’s inconvenient attachment. Haines, you see, has a wife, and the wife is in the way of Haines’ ability to marry his glamorous mistress.
Yet Strangers on a Train succeeds marvelously at exposing the immorality of its own audience, we viewers. Throughout the movie we are caught rooting for Haines to resist Anthony’s temptations. When Haines gets sucked into Anthony’s schemes, we desire him to get out. And we feel sorry for Haines’ mistress, who looks like the girl next door. What makes us feel this way is the skill of Hitchcock’s direction, which provokes us to care when we should want to remain distant.
But Haines’ adultery makes our sympathies with him a huge problem. What kind of hero cheats on his wife and really does want to get rid of her? Ultimately, once yoked with Anthony’s horrendous evil, there is no escape for a petty sinner like Haines. He cannot turn to the law, and he cannot turn away from darkness.
When the movie finally ends, Haines has seemingly freed himself from Anthony. We are supposed to feel good about the happy ending. And yet Haines has gotten away with adultery, and has become a worse man for it. In the final moments, he kisses his partner in adultery and shies away from the Christian minister who asks him an innocent question.
Strangers on a Train shows the dark underbelly of the 1950s, a decade portrayed in recent pop culture as an innocent time of cool cars, bobby pins, and mom-and-pop soda joints. But innocent it surely was not. How else could it produce the disatrous war and the rebellious counterculture of the next decade? Something was terribly wrong then.
Most people really do love murder, just in socially acceptable ways. Most of Hitchcock’s movies–and this is the first of his that we have recommended on this site–expose this love. There is great evil in the hearts of men.
Entertainment:8
Intelligence: 8
Morality: see above
