A Film Canon

Strangers On A Train returns to the mental telegraphy of Shadow Of A Doubt, but tempers it with Hitchcock's increasing sympathy for the perpetrators, rather than the victims, of his revelatory object relations; or, alternatively, displaces tension from the possibility that two minds may recognise themselves to be one, as occurs with Charlie and Charley, to the complications that arise from that recognition, as occurs when Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) murders Guy Haines' (Farley Granger) wife, in the (correct) anticipation that, in turn, Guy will prove himself capable of murdering his father. To this end, Hitchcock relegates the railway imagery that concluded Shadow Of A Doubt to the opening scene, deflecting the breakdown of parallelism that it signified into a series of circuits, encompassing the to-and-fro movements of Guy's tennis career (particularly in the spectacular, penultimate scene), the 'Tunnel of Love' where the murder takes place, the rogue merry-go-round that concludes the film, and, above all, the 'criss-cross' of the murder plan itself, as well as the rope that takes its first victim. Combined with Granger's presence, the open secret of his bisexuality, and Bruno's obsession with Guy (compounded by his hatred for his father, dependence on his mother, yet contemptuous distance from both), this characterises homosexuality as the ultimate transgressive circuit, in which two ostensibly separate bodies find themselves locked in a unity that is detrimental to both, and translates Rope's romance from a sadistic to an infantile (and ultimately more sympathetic) register, bolstered by the marked absence of Technicolour's lurid, dehumanising potential.