Strangers on a Train (1951) - 75th Anniversary Screening

IN ATTENDANCE: STEPHEN REBELLO

The program will feature a screening of the film followed by an on-stage conversation hosted by Author and Film Historian Foster Hirsch.

Alfred Hitchcock directed this classic suspense tale - widely considered one of the master's best works - tapping into the evil that lies hidden just beneath the surface of each of us. When two strangers - tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger), whose wife will not grant him a divorce, and wealthy but deranged young Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), who wants to be rid of his father - happen to meet on a train from Washington to New York, the conversation casually turns to a possibly perfect crime: what if each committed M**der for the other? There is nothing to connect the two men. No apparent motive for either killing. When the trip ends, Guy believes the conversation was hypothetical and that he will never see Bruno again. Then his wife is murdered...and Brunoreturns for payback. Hard-boiled crime novelist Raymond Chandler co-wrote the screenplay of this film adaptation of the novel by Patricia Highsmith.101mins.

ABOUT STEPHEN REBELLO

Stephen Rebello is a screenwriter and the bestselling author of ten nonfiction books. He has written screenplays for Disney, Paramount, and Focus Features. His magazine features and cover stories appeared in GQ, Playboy, Movieline, Hollywood Life, Statement, More, and Cosmopolitan. Born in Southern New England, he is a longtime resident of both Southern California and the Central California coast.

ABOUT MODERATOR FOSTER HIRSCH

Foster Hirsch is Professor of Film at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and the author of sixteen books on film and theatre, including "Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties," “The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir,” “Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King,” and “A Method to their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio.” He has lectured on film in India, China, Dubai, Israel, France, Germany, England and New Zealand. He is a frequent host/moderator at many venues including the Players Club, the Harvard Club, the Film Forum, the American Cinematheque, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Take a deep dive into the shadows and light of one of the most subversive, corrosively funny, and beloved suspense thriller masterworks as author Stephen Rebello unravels for the very first time the tense and drama-filled story of the making Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.
As entertaining as it is to watch Strangers on a Train, so too is the previously untold backstory that packs all the suspense, drama, and twists of a thriller. After all, what are the hallmarks of a great Hitchcock movie? A larger-than-life, complex cast of characters, each with something to prove, lose, or hide. Check. Tremendous risk, outsized conflict, and emotion as those men and women confront challenges off the set. Check. Feuds, deceptions, unlikely alliances, and double-crosses. Check. Coming off a 5-year-string of flops, Alfred Hitchcock gambled big on adapting Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, which critics called “preposterous” and “unconvincing,” in addition to “unsavory,” and “sick” (1950s code words for “gay” and “perverted”). Each step of the production was fraught with battles, but Hitchcock masterfully stayed two steps ahead of his opponents as he fought to bring his vision to life. Strangers on a Train became not only a creative high-water mark and box-office smash for Hitchcock, but also kicked off his unmatched decade of classics including Dial M for M**der, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. Richly documented, meticulously researched, and stylishly written, Criss-Cross is more than an authoritative film book. It is a portrait of an especially politically paranoid, misogynistic, and homophobic era in America, a time of dramatic transition in the entertainment industry, and a day of reckoning for Alfred Hitchcock and a few other talents with whom he made a dark, resonant, and prescient work of art.

Hollywood in the 1950s was a period when the film industry both set conventions and broke norms and traditions—from Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision to the epic film and lavish musical. It was a decade that saw the rise of the anti-hero; the smoldering, the hidden, and the unspoken; teenagers gone wild in the streets; the sacred and the profane; the revolution of the Method; the socially conscious; the implosion of the studios; the end of the production code; and the invasion of the ultimate body snatcher: the “small screen” television.

Here is Eisenhower’s America—seemingly complacent, conformity-ridden revealed in Vincente Minnelli’s Father of the Bride, Walt Disney’s Cinderella, and Brigadoon, among others. And here is its darkening, resonant landscape, beset by conflict, discontent, and anxiety (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Asphalt Jungle, A Place in the Sun, Touch of Evil, It Came From Outer Space) . . . an America on the verge of cultural, political and sexual revolt, busting up and breaking out (East of Eden, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Sweet Smell of Success, The Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Jailhouse Rock).

An important, riveting look at our nation at its peak as a world power and at the political, cultural, sexual upheavals it endured, reflected and explored in the quintessential American art form.

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