The District has an all-or-nothing cinematic history. Washington is the setting for some of the best American political films, including All the President’s Men and the 1979 satire Being There, as well as one of the best journalism movies (Broadcast News) and perhaps the most successful horror film of all time (The Exorcist). After that, it’s mostly crickets. Unlike New York or Los Angeles, D.C. is rarely a town you shoot in just for the local color. Filmmakers come here to comment on America.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train might be the most undersung D.C. movie, if only because there are so many other ways to read the story. The 1951 film was important to Hitchcock’s career. Coming after a series of flops, its success paved the way for Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, The Birds, and Psycho. A sharp and unwavering glance into the heart of evil, Strangers on a Train revolves around Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), a psychopath who meets tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train from D.C. to New York and imposes on him a plan for each to murder an acquaintance of the other. Guy is separated from his wife and plans on marrying a Senator’s daughter, but the wife won’t grant him a divorce. Bruno is eager to get his father, who wants him committed to a mental hospital, out of the way. He suggests a bargain: “You do my murder, and I do yours. Criss cross!” Guy laughs off Bruno’s thought experiment but finds himself in an uncomfortable position when Bruno follows through on his end and tries to blackmail Guy into doing the same.
On one level, it’s a perfectly enjoyable thriller that traffics in Hitchcock’s unique brand of euphoric tension. As always, the director precisely locates an untouched terror of the human heart—in this case, the fear that a chance encounter with a stranger could destroy your precarious life. The taut narrative of Strangers on a Train is supported by some of the best visual filmmaking of Hitchcock’s career. It was his first collaboration with cinematographer Robert Burks (they went on to make 11 more movies together). Burks contributed to both the unforgettable shot in which a murder is filmed in the reflection of the victim’s glasses, and a climactic scene set aboard an out-of-control carousel that is as kinetic as anything you’ll find in a modern action film.
Hidden within these sumptuous visual pleasures, however, are razor blades dripping with poison. There is, for example, a thorny queer subtext to the film that defies easy judgment. Bruno is coded as a stereotypical gay man of the late 1940s to early 1950s when queerness was basically outlawed. He wears fancy shoes, enjoys getting manicures, and has an unreasonably close relationship with his mother. With the restrictions of the Production Code, Hitchcock was unable to come right out and announce Bruno’s sexual identity, but the insinuation creates a more interesting tension. On the one hand, Strangers on a Train seems to imply a link between homosexuality and sociopathy. The trope of the queer and trans serial killer became an unfortunate trend in subsequent decades (see Cruising, Silence of the Lambs, and about a hundred others), but it may have started with Hitchcock, who leaned on it to a troubling degree (see also Rope and Psycho). Perhaps Strangers is a work of pure homophobia, but a more generous reading suggests that Bruno has been driven to desperation by the confines of the closet. His father wants to lock him up for his perceived transgressions, and murder might be the only way out. The fact that he seems to be attracted to Guy is just a happy coincidence, and that their meeting on the train takes on the tenor of an intimate rendezvous might just be another happy coincidence.
Bringing in the D.C. element makes the plot even spicier. Strangers on a Train was made during the “lavender scare,” in which the government targeted queer citizens and especially federal workers within its anti-Communist witch hunt. Setting the film amid the recognizable landmarks of D.C.—including scenes at Union Station and the Jefferson Memorial—hints at a general sickness at the core of the American soul, itself a subversive idea in an era whose pop culture was generally marked by postwar optimism. The queer shading of Guy’s dilemma, however, is unmistakable. As Guy prepares for a career in politics, he socializes with his new fiancee, Anne (Ruth Roman), her Senator father (Leo G. Carroll), and all his powerful friends, but Bruno is never far from the scene, threatening to blow up Guy’s life unless he murders his father for him. Technically, the implicit threat in Bruno’s presence is to implicate Guy the murder of Guy’s wife, but, in the world in which Strangers was created, simply being associated with a man coded as gay would be enough to make a young, aspiring politician quake in his tennis shoes.
In the best and worst ways, Strangers on a Train is a product of its era when coded portrayals of homosexuality comprised a “celluloid closet” that both reflected and affected true turmoil in the LGBTQIA population. It would be easy to condemn Strangers for portraying queerness as a dangerous perversity or praise it for subtly exposing the homophobia of its day, but its true perspective remains elusive because Hitchcock puts his thrills first. Agitprop is easy, but telling a story that can appeal to the conservative masses, while challenging them on one of the most sensitive issues of its day, is hard. More than 70 years later, the Production Code is gone, and queer filmmaking has come into glorious full bloom, but Strangers on a Train stands as a time capsule that was somehow a little ahead of its time.
Strangers on a Train screens at AFI Silver July 7 through 13. silver.afi.com. $10–$13.