Strangers on a Train may not be one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best known films but it still appears to be quite highly regarded. I got it from Broken Forum when they were talking about some of the more unusual premises for a murder. It doesn’t star anyone particularly famous but it does star Hitchcock’s own daughter Pat Hitchcock.

Guy Raines is a tennis star who regrets marrying his hometown sweetheart, Miriam. He wants to marry the beautiful Anne Morton instead and it certainly doesn’t hurt that her father is a senator and could give him a leg-up in politics, but Miriam won’t grant him a divorce. Bruno Anthony is the son of a wealthy industrialist who resents how his father controls every aspect of his life. So when they meet on a train and Anthony recognizes Raines from the society pages of the newspaper, he proposes that they swap murders. He would kill Miriam and Raines would kill his father, and since they are strangers with no connection to one another, the police will have no reason to suspect them. Raines believes that Anthony is making a morbid joke that is in poor tastes, but this being a Hitchcock film, he is really being perfectly serious.

As usual, the film opens with a well conceived establishing shot: two different pairs of feet walking around the station and onto the train to establish that Raines and Anthony are just strangers who met by happenstance. Unfortunately I can’t say that the other shots or even themes that Hitchcock uses here are as effective. The obvious motif here is that Raines and Anthony are dark doubles of each other, just as Anne Morton’s younger sister, who is played by Pat Hitchcock, is a double of the murdered Miriam. It’s an idea that has some merit but I don’t think it really works here. Instead, it merely reinforces how conveniently coincidental so much of the plot is. I also dislike the extended scene in which a tennis match is used to ratchet up tension. It feels blatantly artificial, especially when at the same time we see that Anthony is delayed in carrying out his plans due to something that is pure accident.

Robert Walker is suitably creepy as Guy Raines, perhaps too much so since it should be immediately obvious to everyone what a psychopath he is so no one would believe that he could get away with murder. None of the rest of the cast are especially notable though it’s interesting how Hitchcock chooses to use the character played by his daughter. The choking scene is memorable but it came out of left field for me and felt really weird. Ruth Roman as Anne Morton is the female lead but barely does anything in this film. Hitchcock supposedly felt he had been forced to cast this actress in his film and wasn’t interested in her at all.

I also felt that this film could have better with more moral ambiguity and less misogyny. Miriam is deliberately portrayed as a terrible shrew of a wife, shamelessly promiscuous and openly a gold-digger, so that no one really minds that she is dead. Raines is too much of a good guy in this film and gets a happy ending to boot. How much more interesting would this film be if Raines were actually hoping for Anthony to kill Miriam but felt guilty about it? As a Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train is still rather entertaining but I would consider it a stumbling misstep by the great director.