One of the things Alfred Hitchcock had feared in his life was that he could be charged on a trumped-up charge. This concern is at the heart of the theme of many of his best films. This includes Train Freaks. In this film, a man's wife is strangled to death and he becomes an apparent suspect. He is highly suspicious because the original plan of the real murderer is extremely genius: two strangers will "exchange murders" to kill the person they want to kill. They have an impeccable alibi during the time of the crime, and there is no possible connection between the murderer and the victim.
It is an ingenious and unethical plot based on the first novel by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). In her Ripley series of novels and other novels, she is mesmerized by highly intelligent criminals who act not out of passion but on precise calculations, and who are usually able to escape punishment and get away with it. This "crossover" crime in Train Freaks should have been perfectly executed—yet only one stranger agreed to do so.
Fari Granger and Robert Walker
The famous tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) is recognized by Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) on a train, and from the dialogue, we can see that the latter knows his private life inside and out. In order to marry Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a U.S. senator, Guy wants to divorce his red-apricot wife, Miriam (Kasey Rogers). At lunch, Bruno reveals in his intimate sleeping compartment that he wants to kill his father. He proposes to commit a "perfect crime"—for him to murder Guy's wife and Guy to murder Bruno's father, so that neither of them will be suspected.
From the perspective of the way of dealing with the world, Bruno is good at limelight, obstinate, and has homosexual tendencies. Guy was offended by his reference to his private life, but inexplicably, he was reluctant to interrupt the conversation—the conversation ended in an ambiguous atmosphere: Bruno tried to get Gay to agree to the plan, and Guy tried to encourage him to act as quickly as possible and get rid of him. Bruno did murder Guy's wife and then demanded that Guy complete the remaining half of the deal between the two. In terms of plot, there is a neatness that Hitchcock has perceived that makes him irresistible—especially when Guy has a motive for murdering his wife: he had a public argument with her the day before her death, and he even told his fiancée that he was going to "strangle" Miriam.
Hitchcock said that choosing the right actor saves him a storyboard of film because the audience will feel the qualities of the actor without taking the time to elaborate. So of course Granger, who plays Guy, and Walker, who plays Bruno, are extremely important. Hitchcock was said to have wanted William Holden to play guy ("He's stronger." He told François Truffaut), but it would be bad if he were played by Hotden — he was too athletic and too easy to get rid of Bruno (although Hotden had an aging actress manipulate him in Sunset Boulevard). Granger is softer and more elusive, so it's more convincing when he tries to escape from the web of dialogue that Bruno weaves, rather than rejecting him outright. Bruno, played by Walker, is more flirtatious and provocative, sitting close to each other on their first meeting and then lying flat across from Guy in a private compartment. The meeting on the train, probably designed by Bruno, was more like a hunt than an encounter.
It is in the sense of two flawed characters—one evil, one weak, and with an unspoken sexual tension—that the film has a paradoxical sense of charm and helps us understand why Bruno almost succeeded in carrying out his plan. Haysmith is a lesbian whose novels have incredible psychological depth. Andrew Wilson said in her 2003 autobiography that she often fell in love with her straight daughter, and that her stories often used an unspoken subtext to imply same-sex attraction — as in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), her criminal protagonist, Tom Ripley, was committing crimes against his prey, Dickie Ripley. Dickie Greenleaf's personality and lifestyle have produced a good feeling. Although homosexuals were still afraid to justify themselves in 1951, Hitchcock was clearly aware of Bruno's sexuality and did distinguish between the American and British versions of the film— he cut the "seductive" tension in the American version. It is worth noting that Hitchcock also had Gran play a prominent role in the play in the "Soul Reaper" based on the Leopold-Loeb case. That's another story about murderers with potential homosexual tendencies.
Fari Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker
Still, Train Freak isn't a psychological case, but a first-rate thriller with a little whimsy from time to time. As often done in Hitchcock films, the film always gives the impression that something has been sneaked out of our sight as the story progresses. His love of unjust, false and wrongly decided cases was undoubtedly related to a traumatic experience he had suffered as a child: his father had sent the mischievous little Hitchcock to the police station and left a note for the police squad leader that said he would lock him up before coming to pick him up. Interestingly, in the context of the film, it is Hitchcock who has his daughter Patricia Hitchcock play the role of Barbara Morton, the outspoken young sister of Guy's fiancée Annie. Patricia Hitchcock looks a bit like Cathy Rogers and wears very similar glasses. Bruno jokingly demonstrates strangulation techniques at a party, then meets Barbara, and the movie flashes back to the murder scene, and then he is completely out of control. Little Sister speaks the creepiest lines in "Train Freaks," especially in the scene at the beginning of the movie where Guy meets the hospital family. She kept blurting out what others didn't dare to say.
Alfred Hitchcock and Fari Granger are behind the scenes of "Train Freaks". 1951
Hitchcock was first and foremost a master of the visual arts, and there are many famous passages in Train Freaks. One of the best known is when Guy looks at the spectators during a tennis match and notices that their heads are turning left and right to the rhythm of the players' blows — with the exception of Bruno's. He looked straight at Guy. (The same technique was also used by Hitchcock in Foreign Correspondent [1940], in which all the windmills were spinning in the same direction—except for one.) Another impressive scene is on carnival night, where Bruno's boat floats on a lovers' tunnel. Miriam and her two boyfriends were at the front of the boat, and the shadows on the wall clearly showed that Bruno had caught up with them. There is also a scene in which Guy walks up the stairs of Bruno's house in the dark. Hitchcock told Truffaut that it occurred to him that he had the idea of using giant dogs to divert the viewer's attention from what they might have found upstairs. There is also a very famous passage where the out-of-control carousel is slapped, with Guy and Bruno wrestling on it, and workers creeping under the carousel's chassis, trying to turn off the switch. (This shot is notoriously unmixed, and the stuntman is likely to die.) Hitchcock later said he would never take such a risk again. Another great shot is of Bruno's white-faced face that appears at the brim of his hat.
Hitchcock was a classical craftsman who was able to navigate the image with ease, and he used the screen space in a way that the audience did not always realize, thus reinforcing the tension of the scene. His compositional habits are: the left side of the screen is the bad guy and/or the weak guy, while the right side of the screen is either the good guy or the temporarily dominant one. Imagine the scene where Guy enters his Georgetown home and Bruno whistles at the other end of the street to summon him. Bruno stood behind an iron gate, the shadow of the metal fence cast on his face, and Guy stood to his right, outside the door. Then a police car pulled up in front of Guy's house, and he quickly moved to the back of the door and stood with Bruno. They were all now standing behind the fence, and he said, "You make me feel like a criminal." ”
Robert Walker's performance benefited from Bruno's delicate emergency, which may also reflect events in his private life. After the film was completed, he suffered a short-term nervous breakdown, was taken to the hospital for systematic treatment, and finally died of an accident of over-taking tranquilizers. (Unused close-ups from this film were used to complete his final film, My Son John [1952]). Although Hitchcock said in interviews throughout François Truffaut that he didn't like the two actors very much, Walker's role as Bruno has been called one of the best villains in a Hitchcock film. And Hitchcock agreed with Truffaut that the audience sympathized with Granger more than he played as a clumsy boy.
The film is usually ranked as Hitchcock's best film (I only rank it after Ecstasy, Notorious (1946), Horror, and possibly Shadow of a Doubt [1943]). Its appeal may lie in associating the plot of genius with creepy hints. This union first came from High Smith, whose novels were unjustly shelved in the crime fiction category, despite the fact that she was writing mainstream novels about crime. One user on the Internet Movie Database website claimed that he discovered that Haysmith was making a cameo appearance in the film. In the record store scene early in the film, she stands behind Miriam, recording something in a notebook. Highsmith's cameo is not mentioned in all the materials for the film (attention has been drawn to Hitchcock's iconic cameo role), but you can look for yourself, and the sixth part of the dvd of the movie begins at the twelfth minute and sixteen seconds of the film. Imagine she might have been in that place all these years.