Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Strangers on a Train
1951 · Alfred Hitchcock · Strangers on a Train on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the shoes in the opening. Two pairs, two directions. (camera)
Before you see a face, Hitchcock keeps the camera low on a station platform. Flashy co-respondent shoes swagger one way, plain oxfords walk the other, and the lines of travel converge until one toe taps the other.
Payoff: Nothing has happened and a bond already exists. The film builds out of pairings rather than deeds. In the reading: the relation-image (mental-image). The reading calls this the relation-image: the shot is about a link between two men that only the audience is holding.
Follow Guy's cigarette lighter every time it changes hands. (setting)
It starts as an ordinary keepsake with an inscription. Once Bruno has it in his pocket, every appearance of it carries the whole arrangement between them, and Hitchcock keeps putting it back in the frame.
Payoff: One small object becomes the visible thread of a pact one man never agreed to. In the reading: mark. The reading calls the lighter a mark: an object that means through the chain it belongs to, so seeing it is enough to expect trouble.
Count the crossings: train tracks, the tennis net, fence shadows. (camera)
Criss-cross is Bruno's own word for his plan, and Robert Burks keeps rhyming it in the images. The wrought iron at the Morton house throws bars across Guy. The court is a grid.
Payoff: The design knows these two men are doubles long before either of them admits it.
Watch Robert Walker lean in and grin at the wrong moments. (performance)
Bruno is always a little too eager, a little too close, a little too delighted. Walker keeps the boyishness and the menace in the same gesture, and never plays one without the other.
Payoff: The charm is the threat. You keep enjoying his company and that enjoyment is what the film is working on.
Listen to the fairground band music go sour. (sound)
Dimitri Tiomkin scores the amusement park with cues that sit between festive and wrong. The same instruments that sell a good time start to push, and the carousel music accelerates with the machinery.
Payoff: Pleasure and dread arrive on the same soundtrack, so you cannot relax inside a scene that looks like fun.
Once you have seen it
Look at the strangulation shown in a fallen pair of glasses. (camera)
Hitchcock refuses the direct shot. The whole act arrives as a distorted fisheye reflection in thick lenses lying on the grass beside a fairground lake, lit by Burks in hard black and white.
Payoff: You are made a spectator rather than a witness, watching a beautiful image of something you should not be enjoying.
Watch Bruno freeze at the party when Barbara enters his sightline. (staging)
He is half-playing a parlor demonstration on a society woman's neck and losing himself in it. Patricia Hitchcock's Barbara wears glasses identical to Miriam's. The whole room keeps going. He stops.
Payoff: An object that should mean nothing breaks the routine and puts his private compulsion on public display. In the reading: demark. The reading calls the matching glasses a demark: the anomaly that snaps a habitual chain and forces everyone, including you, to interpret.
Time the cross-cut between the tennis match and the storm drain. (cutting)
William Ziegler alternates sunlit stadium and shadowed fairground, and the cutting accelerates as the two spaces close on one deadline. Guy has to finish a match. Bruno has to reach something down a drain.
Payoff: The classic last-minute race is turned into a vise of complicity. You are hurrying a man toward proving what he already failed to say.
Carry this in: Every time two things are paired in the frame, ask who is holding the connection between them. It is you.