Writers: Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith (novel), Czenzi Ormonde
Composer: Dmitri Tiomkin
Director of Photography: Robert Burks
Cast:
Joel Allen.......................Policeman
Murray Alper.....................Boatman
Monya Andre......................Dowager
John Brown.......................Professor Collins
John Butler......................Blind Man
Leonard Carey....................Butler
Leo G. Carroll...................Senator Morton
Edward Clark.....................Mr. Hargreaves
John Doucette....................Hammond
Laura Elliot.....................Miriam Haines
Roy Engel........................Policeman

     After Under Capricorn and Stage Fright, Hitchcock returned to Hollywood and produced Strangers on a Train, a film that at once reestablished him in the high esteem of critics and the public; for over forty years, it has remained one of the most discussed and analyzed thrillers in the medium and one of the director's most frequently screened films. Strangers on a Train is based on the Highsmith novel of that name, but very much was changed and those changes reflect some of Hitchcock's most pointed concerns. From the book he took the double murders and the subtheme of homosexual courtship, but the major visual metaphors of doubles and of crossings, the tennis, the lighter, the setting in Washington, the dark backgrounds, are all significant changes or additions. In the novel, Guy is an architect who has designed a hospital and a country club; in the film, his role as a tennis pro carries forward the element of crisscrossing, of "matched doubles." The film's cigarette lighter with its crossed racquets -- telling the whole story in a single early image -- is in the novel simply a volume of Plato, a prop to reunite the two men after their initial meeting.
      The story is straightforward. On a journey from Washington D.C. to Long Island, tennis pro Guy Haines and idle playboy Bruno Anthony meet accidentally, as strangers on a train. Bruno seems to know all the details of Guy's public and private life -- most of all, that he is a champion tennis player whose desire to marry a famous senator's daughter is being thwarted by his wife's refusal to divorce him. Bruno proposes an exchange of murders: he will kill Guy's wife if Guy will kill Bruno's hated father -- crimes which, Bruno insists, can be accomplished with impunity because the police will be unable to establish motives or suspects. He has the entire scheme worked out.
      Predictably, Guy regards the whole things as outrageous -- but Bruno fulfills his part, following Guy's wife Miriam to an amusement park one night and calmly strangling her. He then contacts his "friend" Guy, demanding that he keep his side of the deal. When Guy refuses, recognizing Bruno as an authentic psychopath, Bruno decides to implicate him in Miriam's murder by placing at the scene of the crime Guy's cigarette lighter, left behind after the luncheon on the train.