Synopsis
Strangers on a Train (1951) is Alfred Hitchcock's landmark thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) meets a chatty stranger named Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) in a railway car. Bruno has a proposition: two strangers swap murders — each kills the person the other wants dead, with no traceable motive. Guy laughs it off. Bruno doesn't.
The elegance of the trap is what makes the film so suffocating. Guy needs his cheating wife gone so he can marry a senator's daughter (Ruth Roman), and Bruno decides the deal is already done. Walker's performance is remarkable — charming, soft-spoken, completely unhinged — and cinematographer Robert Burks frames every scene in deep shadows and diagonal lines that underline the mounting dread. The climactic merry-go-round sequence was filmed on an actual spinning ride; crew members were reportedly injured making it.
Based on Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, with screenplay contributions from Raymond Chandler, the film was the first adaptation of Highsmith's work and remains the purest distillation of her moral universe. Watch Strangers on a Train (1951) online on iFILM.
Starring
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