The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, December 9-15
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Who hasn’t wanted to get rid of somebody? In Strangers on a Train, murder is a matter of whim and circumstance; for old society women at a party it’s a parlor game; for carnival-goers a class or two lower it’s a lark. Everyone’s a snuff fan: most all bonkers playboy Bruno Antony (Robert Walker), who meets tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train and suggests they two economize: Bruno will kill Guy’s wife, freeing him to marry his girlfriend, and Guy will repay the debt by rubbing out Bruno’s bad old dad. No one would ever suspect the perpetrators of the crimes, since they would seem to lack any motive. Guy laughs it off, but Bruno, appearances all to the contrary, is a realist. The plot is as flimsy and appealing as Bruno’s logic, and in the meantime Hitchcock delivers midcentury America: snarling carousel horses and train schedules on which lives depend. Plots these days are no more elegant: mad wives fake their own deaths to implicate unfaithful husbands: Gillian Flynn and David Fincher are said to be working on a remake of this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s first book. Who hasn’t wanted to mess with a good thing? Elina Mishuris (December 13, 1:10pm, 5:10pm, 9:30pm; December 14, 9:55pm; December 15, 12:30pm at Film Forum’s “Women Crime Writers”)