For the rest of October and all of November, Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I will be watching cozy or comfy movies and some of them will have a little mystery or adventure added in.

This week we watched Strangers on a Train directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Robert Walker, Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Kasey Rogers, and Pat Hitchcock (Aflred’s daughter). This was yet another movie based on a book. This one was based on Patricia Highsmith’s first book. She also wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley.

This movie kicks right off. No leading into things slowly.

The main characters immediately meet on a train (hence the title) aaaaand immediately I felt uncomfortable with both of them.

The younger one, Guy Haines, a tennis player just seemed quite monotone and bored in his delivery and also anxious to get a divorce from his wife so he could run off with the senator’s daughter. Later, though, I learned the wife was not so nice so I felt better about him. My first impression was not good.

My first impression of Bruno Antony was definitely not good.

Dude gave off serial killer vibes from second one.

For good reason, I might add.

He wants to know, pretty quick into the movie, what way Guy would like to kill his wife. Then he talks about how he’d like to kill his own father.

Then there is this convo:

Bruno: That reminds me of a *wonderful* idea I had once. I used to put myself to sleep at night – figuring it out. Now, let’s say that – that you’d like to get rid of your wife.

Guy: That’s a morbid thought.

Bruno: Oh, no, no, no, no. Just suppose. Let’s say you had a very good reason.

Guy: No, let’s – let’s not say…

Bruno: No, no! Let’s say. Now, you’d be afraid to kill her. You’d get caught. And what would trip you up? The motive. Ah. Now here’s my idea.

Guy: I’m afraid I haven’t time to listen, Bruno.

Bruno: Listen, it’s so simple, too. Two fellows meet accidentally, like you and me. No connection between them at all. Never seen each other before. Each one has somebody he’d like to get rid of. So they swap murders.

Guy: Swap murders?

Bruno: Each fellow does the other fellow’s murder. Then there’s nothing to connect them. Each one has murdered a total stranger. Like you do my murder and I do yours. Criss Cross.

Guy humors Bruno enough to get off the train at his stop and when Bruno says, “So, you liked my plan,” Guy is like, “Sure, sure. Gotta go, dude.”

When we see Bruno later at home with his mother, we see how serious he was about this whole murder thing. That and he may be pretty far out there mentally. Like lunatic level.

His mother is filing his fingernails and wants to know if he’s given up that crazy notion he’d had about blowing up the White House.

Mrs. Anthony: Well, I do hope you’ve forgotten about that silly little plan of yours.

Bruno: Which one?

Mrs. Anthony: About blowing up the White House.

Bruno: Oh, Ma, I was only fooling. Besides, what would the President say?

Mrs. Anthony: You’re a naughty boy, Bruno.

Only, we, the viewers, are pretty sure Bruno wasn’t kidding at all. Not like even a little bit.

Meanwhile, Guy has confronted his ex-wife who is a real “winner”. She says she wants a divorce but then she says maybe she doesn’t, now that Guy wants to marry the senator’s daughter. It’s in all the papers that they are going to get married and Miriam, the estranged wife, doesn’t like that at all. She threatens Guy by telling everyone that he wants to divorce her even though she’s pregnant. She’s pregnant, by the way, with another man’s baby.

Or…is she?

This is all called into question later when she’s running around with two guys at a carnival. That’s where Bruno catches up to her and proves to the viewers that he really is a psychopath who thinks if he kills Guy’s wife then Guy will kill his father.

As in all of Hitchcock’s movies, the angles and cinematography are insanely captivating.

It isn’t a spoiler to say Bruno takes Miriam out and when he does so we watch the killing through the reflection of Miriam’s glasses, which she knocked off in the struggle.

After the deed is done, Bruno can’t wait to tell Guy.

Guy is horrified, not thrilled, and tells Bruno he’ll call the police.

Bruno, however,  says, “You can’t call the police. We were both in on it, remember? You’re the one who benefits, Guy. You’re a free man now. I didn’t even know the girl.”

Yikes. Now Guy is trapped and the way the bars of the fence he is standing outside of fall across his face they look like prison bars.

If you want to know if he gets out of trouble, you will have to watch the rest of the movie, which involves a heart-pounding climax where Guy tries to make sure Bruno can’t pin the murder on him by planting Guy’s lighter at the scene.

Almost every scene with Bruno freaks me out but when he starts showing up everywhere Guy is, asking people weird questions like if they’ve ever thought about how to murder people, I really got freaked out.

Especially the scene where he asks a woman at a fancy party at the senator’s house how she would kill her husband. Then he starts to talk about how to strangle a person and offers to show her and – again. Creepy.

He says to her, as he puts his hands around her neck, “You don’t mind if I borrow your neck, do you?”

Shudder.

You’ll have to watch the movie but it’s pretty messed up.

It’s also very messed up to me that Bruno seems to get a thrill from talking about and committing murder. Like a sexual thrill. Yuck. He also seems to have a crush on Guy and when he tells Guy, “I like you,” Guy punches him so I am pretty sure Guy has the same impression.

 You can find plenty of critiques of this movie online, including one by Adrian Martin on filmcritic.com.au that states: “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.”

See? I wasn’t the only one that got the vibe that Bruno was “after” Guy.

My husband read that the man who played Bruno (Robert Walker) actually died shortly after production. He accidentally died after he had a psychological breakdown and his housekeeper called a doctor. The doctor gave him amobarbital but Walker had drank alcohol earlier and the two interacted and he died at the age of 32. Ahem. He does not look 32. I thought for sure the dude was in his 50s. Either way, his death was very sad, especially because there is some mystery surrounding it. A friend claims he was there at the time and Walker was acting normally but that the doctor showed up and said he needed an injection and the friend actually held the man down when Walker refused. Walker died not long after. The friend is not mentioned as having been there in the official inquiry, however. Very strange.

A little aside here about Hitchcock: in case you don’t know, he was a sexist. He didn’t like certain women and really liked other women. So if he didn’t like a woman he harassed them nonstop on set. If he really liked them he stalked them. Not a great guy in real life even if he was a brilliant movie maker.

His issues with women showed up in this movie as well as shown in this paragraph on Wikipedia, which is also backed up by other articles about the making of the movie: “Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton (the senator’s daughter), Jack L. Warner got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock’s objections. The director found her “bristling” and “lacking in sex appeal” and said that she had been “foisted upon him.” Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock’s scorn throughout the production. Granger described Hitchcock’s attitude toward Roman as “disinterest” in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of Rope (1948). “He had to have one person in each film he could harass,” Granger said.”

Hitchcock also didn’t get along with author Raymond Chandler who he hired to write the screenplay for the movie. Chandler didn’t like Hitchcock’s changes to the original novel, for one, and he also hated working with Hitchcock who liked to ramble and analyze what they should do in the movie instead of just getting to the point and letting Chandler write the screenplay. Chandler apparently became so annoyed at Hitchcock that at one point, while watching Hitchcock get out of his car, Chandler said loudly, where Hitchcock could hear him, “Look at that fat b****** trying to get out of that car.” He quit not long after and the screenplay was written by Czenzi Ormond, a beautiful woman, which Hitchcock liked. There is a bunch of information online about his relationship with her as well, but you can look that up if you are curious. Ormond finished the screenplay with associate producer Barbara Keon and Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville.

The production section of the Wikipedia article is very interesting, but I only have so much space for a blog post so I’ll leave the link here if you want to check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_on_a_Train_(film)

If you want to read Erin’s impression of the movie you can see it here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2023/10/19/comfy-cozy-cinema-strangers-on-a-train/

If you want to follow along with us for our next movies, here is the list:

Rebecca (Oct. 26)

Little Women (November 2)

Tea with The Dames (November 9)

A break for Thanksgiving

And

Sense and Sensibility (November 30^th)

You can also link up today below if you watched Strangers on a Train as well.

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