The 2008 Hollywood Portfolio: Hitchcock Classics 

Strangers on a Train, 1951 
Emile Hirsch and James McAvoy. Photograph by Art Streiber.

Guy, a tennis pro, meets Bruno, a psychopath fan, while traveling on a train. Bruno proposes the perfect crime—a murder exchange. Bruno will murder Guy’s wife, and in return Guy will murder Bruno’s domineering father. As Truffaut remarked to Hitchcock, “Both characters might very well have had the same name. Whether it’s Guy or Bruno, it’s obviously a single personality split in two.”

Yet one wonders whether this appealing ambiguity is not the inadvertent result of casting decisions.  Hitchcock may have exaggerated when he called “the ineffectiveness of the two main actors” one of the film’s main flaws, but had Guy been played by a stronger figure than Farley Granger—such as Hitchcock’s first choice, William Holden—he might have been more sympathetic as a hero. As it stands, it’s hard not to root for the villain, played by Robert Walker, especially when he has his hands around the neck of Guy’s fat, loathsome, unfaithful wife, and begins to squeeze. Then again, that may have been Hitchcock’s intent all along.

The original still: Farley Granger and Robert Walker.