Short Take: Strangers on a Train

The 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train may be Alfred Hitchcock's most entertaining film. A rich layabout (Robert Walker) becomes acquainted with a champion tennis player (Farley Granger) during a train ride. He knows about the athlete's marital troubles, and he proposes what he considers a perfect bargain. In exchange for murdering the athlete's wife, he wants the athlete to do away with his detested father. That way, both their problems are solved. Since the two are otherwise strangers, neither would have a discernible motive, and the police would never suspect them. The athlete refuses to take the idea seriously, but the layabout is perfectly earnest. After the train ride ends, he won't accept their going their separate ways. He kills the athlete's wife, and tries to coerce the athlete with blackmail: Commit the murder, or be framed for one. The plotting is ingenious, and Hitchcock delivers some of his finest suspense sequences. They range from the spectacular (the climactic fight aboard a runaway merry-go-round) to the amusingly mundane (trying to retrieve a lighter from a storm sewer). The visual tropes, most notably the eyeglasses signifying murder, are used to brilliant and varied effect. The two stars are perfect. Farley Granger has a too-polite, go-along-to-get-along softness that makes his character seem a natural target for manipulation. Robert Walker takes the viewer right inside the layabout's joy in scheming and perversity. The best thing about the performance is the creepy, vaguely effeminate manner he affects. It gives the layabout's interest in the athlete a strong homoerotic edge, and one is never quite sure of where he wants to take their relationship. Overall, the various intrigues are marvelously played. The director has never seemed so light on his feet. The film is loosely adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1950 debut novel. The screenplay is credited to Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, although reportedly none of Chandler's work is present in the completed film. The actual script was written by Ormonde with Hitchcock and Hitchcock's wife Alma. Kasey Rogers, who plays the ill-fated wife, is credited as Laura Elliot. The other cast members include Ruth Roman, Marion Lorne, and Patricia Hitchcock (the director's daughter). The fine black-and-white cinematography is by Robert Burks.

Short Take: The African Queen

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

About as much goes wrong as goes right with the 1951 comedy-adventure-romance The African Queen. But what goes right is often inspired, and it’s undeniably one of the most charming films to come out of Hollywood. The setting is colonial Africa during World War I. Humphrey Bogart stars as the captain of a small river steamboat, and Katharine Hepburn plays opposite him as a spinster missionary. Bogart’s character brings her and her brother (Robert Morley) mail and supplies. However, after the Germans destroy the mission and the brother dies, he packs her up into the boat, hoping to evade the Germans and bring her to safety. She has different ideas, namely using the explosives on board to destroy a gunship that patrols a nearby lake. He grudgingly assents, and the two fall in love making their way down the river. The film works marvelously well as a romantic-comedy showcase for Bogart and Hepburn. His coarse, working-class manner plays off her fine-boned, bourgeois primness hilariously. The arc of the two characters coming together, from wariness to respect to love--each stage with its own set of tensions--couldn’t be better shaped or played. Neither actor has had a better performing partner onscreen. Unfortunately, the director, John Huston, never finds a tone that convincingly handles both the romantic and adventure elements. The film is too breezy for the adventure story to have much urgency. The comedy material also feels discordant with the location footage; the documentary realism seems a drag on the sparkling artifice. (About half of the film was shot in Africa.) By the end, Huston gives up trying to make the adventure material work, and plays it for absurdity. He seems to intuit that viewers just want to watch the two stars and smile. The script, adapted from the novel by C. S. Forester, is credited to Huston and James Agee. (The uncredited John Collier and Peter Viertel also contributed.) The color cinematography is by Jack Cardiff, and the overwrought score is by Allan Gray.