Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)Adam & Sam's takeChoosing a shot for this one was hard. There are so many of them ! Both of the fairgrounds sequences (with the murder seen through the reflection in the glasses being the highlight), the tennis match, the dog guarding the stairs (Hitchcock sure does love stairs), the opening focusing on the eponymous strangers' shoes... This one, with the murderer looking straight at the camera while the rest of the public follows the tennis ball, is an excellent example of visual characterization : he is in some ways a proto-Norman Bates, and as such must stand out in a crowd, in a pretty disturbing way.
I was just giddy with excitement watching this. A great premise, a great performance by Robert Walker (giving the performance Joseph Cotten wished he had in Shadow of a Doubt), finally a simple, efficient plot with no MacGuffins, and a few amazing sequences : namely the murder itself and the climax. The murder is the typical Hitchcockian meeting of sexuality and violence, perfectly executed. The ending sequence wraps everything perhaps a bit too neatly, but is nonetheless an impressive and visually striking setpiece.
In many ways this feels like an improvement over Shadow of a Doubt like North by Northwest is an improvement over The 39 Steps and Saboteur. Not as directly, but there are a few similar beats, such as Bruno strangling an old lady in the middle of a room full of upper-class socialites, which feels like a much more effective version of that dinner monologue in SoD, combined with some of that gallows humour too. And have I mentioned how great Robert Walker is yet ? Because he is. Farley Granger as the "hero" falls just on the right side of bland, which works pretty well as he then almost works as an audience surrogate (as Adam & Matt observe, there are many shots from his point of view).
Something that occured to me during the tennis match sequence is how much I enjoy Hitchcock's willigness to obfuscate information from his audience. The famous "surprise vs suspense" quote with the ticking bomb under the table seems to indicate the contrary, but he can do both, and this is an excellent example* : we know our protagonist has some sort of a plan but that's it, and it's really not that impressive of a plan but because we don't know exactly where this is going it ends up being thrilling, despite the fact that we are really just watching people play tennis. For a pretty long time, which really sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does.
9/10I'm not entirely sure why I'm not calling this a masterpiece quite yet... maybe it's just that it gives me an excuse to revisit it later. Definitely gets in my top 100 regardless.
*Another one would be in North by Northwest when the FBI guy gives his instructions to Cary Grant just as a plane is taking off next to them, which basically amounts to Hitchcock coming on screen and winking at us. Loved it, failed to mention in in the top 100 club thread so I'll do it here.