Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Strangers on a Train
1951 · Alfred Hitchcock · Strangers on a Train on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 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.
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 for Tiomkin's music sitting between festive and wrong. (sound)
Dimitri Tiomkin scores the film with cues that sit between festive and wrong. The same instruments that sell a good time start to push.
Payoff: Pleasure and dread arrive on the same soundtrack, so you cannot relax inside a scene that looks like fun.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Every time two things are paired in the frame, ask who is holding the connection between them. It is you.