Starting this week, I’ll post a bit about this week’s episode of Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics. We choose the films almost at random: one of us will watch (or rewatch) something and text the other guy. We then record without any previous conversation, recreating the enthusiastic conversations people have in the car on the way home from the theater. We also take requests, so leave a comment below if there’s a film you’d like us to cover. We’ve done over 250 and you can find them all here.
Strangers on a Train (1951) may not be the first film that jumps into one’s mind when thinking about what makes Hitchcock deserve all of the attention he still receives. But it has all the elements of great Hitchcock films that we have come to appreciate: the thematic doubling (Vertigo), dark humor (Rope ), intuitive camerawork that reveals character (Notorious), and a villain who steals every scene (Shadow of a Doubt).
If there’s any film in the Hitchcock canon it most resembles, it’s Foreign Correspondent (1940), not for any thematic or stylistic similarities but because it deserves more credit as top-shelf Hitchcock, or at least second-from-the-top. If it’s not on the same shelf as North by Northwest or Rebecca, it’s still far above Under Capricorn or The Trouble with Harry.
It’s also like Rear Window in its self-reflexiveness. Rear Window is perhaps the ultimate movie about movies: we’re all like Jimmy Stewart, confined to a chair in the dark and watching other people. (That’s why the moment in which Raymond Burr looks at the camera is so unsettling: it’s a near-breaking of the fourth wall, but not in the comic way this is usually done.) Strangers on a Train ends with one of Hitchcock’s greatest set-pieces: the fight between Farley Granger and Robert Walker on the carousel. All of the kids are screaming, but if you were one of them, wouldn’t you also think it was fun? When we watch one of Hitchcock’s best, we all get on the carousel, our heads spin, and then an old man crawls underneath the works to pull the lever and send us home. You can find the episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You may also be interested in this post, which describes my recent conversation with Eric G. Wilson of Wake Forest University, in which we talk about Hitchcock’s 19th-century counterpart: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
LOVE that movie. The tennis-watching scene is one of the best displays of off-ness in an audience member of all time (rivaled by DeNiro watching Problem Child in Cape Fear).