The film includes a number of puns and visual metaphors that demonstrate a running motif of crisscross, double-crossing, and crossing one's double. Talking about the structure of the film, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever."[5]
The two characters, Guy and Bruno, can be viewed as doppelgängers. As with Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train is one of many Hitchcock films to explore the doppelgänger theme. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis."[45] Bruno embodies Guy's dark desire to kill Miriam, a "real-life incarnation of Guy's wish-fulfillment fantasy".[45]
Doubles
The theme of doubles is "the key element in the film's structure,"[46] and Hitchcock starts right off in his title sequence making this point: there are two taxicabs, two redcaps, two pairs of feet, two sets of train rails that cross twice. Once on the train, Bruno orders a pair of double drinks—"The only kind of doubles I play", he says charmingly. In Hitchcock's cameo he carries a double bass.
There are two respectable and influential fathers, two women with eyeglasses, and two women at a party who delight in thinking up ways of committing the perfect crime. There are two sets of two detectives in two cities, two little boys at the two trips to the fairground, two old men at the carousel, two boyfriends accompanying the woman about to be murdered, and two Hitchcocks in the film.[46]
Hitchcock carries the theme into his editing, crosscutting between Guy and Bruno with words and gestures: one asks the time and the other, miles away, looks at his watch; one says in anger "I could strangle her!" and the other, far distant, makes a choking gesture.[46]
This doubling has some precedent in the novel, but more of it was deliberately added by Hitchcock, "dictated in rapid and inspired profusion to Czenzi Ormonde and Barbara Keon during the last days of script preparation."[46] It undergirds the whole film because it finally serves to associate the world of light, order, and vitality with the world of darkness, chaos, lunacy and death."[47]
Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are opposites. The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they immediately establish the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes."[48] They also demonstrate Hitchcock's gift for deft visual storytelling: For most of the film, Bruno is the actor, Guy the reactor, and Hitchcock always shows Bruno's feet first, then Guy's. And since it is Guy's foot that taps Bruno's under the table, we know Bruno has not engineered the meeting.[48]
Roger Ebert wrote that "it is this sense of two flawed characters—one evil, one weak, with an unstated sexual tension—that makes the movie intriguing and halfway plausible, and explains how Bruno could come so close to carrying out his plan."[4]
Darkness–light continuum
It is those flaws that set up the real themes of Strangers. It was not enough for Hitchcock to construct merely a world of doubles—even contrasting doubles—in a strict polar-opposite structure; for Hitchcock, the good-and-evil, darkness-and-light poles "didn't have to be mutually exclusive."[4] Blurring the lines puts both Guy and Bruno on a good-evil continuum, and the infinite shades of gray in between, became Hitchcock's canvas for telling the story and painting his characters.
At first glance, Guy represents the ordered life where people stick to rules, while Bruno comes from the world of chaos,[49] where they get thrown out of multiple colleges for drinking and gambling. Yet both men, like so many of Hitchcock's protagonists, are insecure and uncertain of their identity. Guy is suspended between tennis and politics, between his tramp wife and his senator's daughter, and Bruno is seeking desperately to establish an identity through violent, outré actions and flamboyance (shoes, lobster-patterned tie, name proclaimed to the world on his tiepin)."[50]
Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. "Me, I never do anything important." Yet as Bruno describes his "theories" over lunch, "Guy responds to Bruno—we see it in his face, at once amused and tense. To the man committed to a career in politics, Bruno represents a tempting overthrow of all responsibility."[48] And at this point the blurring of good and evil accelerates: Guy fails to repudiate Bruno's suggestive statement about murdering Miriam ("What's a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.") with any force or conviction. "When Bruno openly suggests he would like to kill his wife, he merely grins and says 'That's a morbid thought,' but we sense the tension that underlies it."[48] It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. "He is leaving in Bruno's keeping his link with Anne, his possibility of climbing into the ordered existence to which he aspires.... Guy, then, in a sense connives at the murder of his wife, and the enigmatic link between him and Bruno becomes clear."[51]
Light and dark onscreen
Having given his characters overlapping qualities of good and evil, Hitchcock then rendered them on the screen according to a very strict template, with which he stuck to a remarkable degree. Ebert wrote:
Hitchcock was a classical technician in terms of controlling his visuals, and his use of screen space underlined the tension in ways the audience isn't always aware of. He always used the convention that the left side of the screen is for evil and/or weaker characters, while the right is for characters who are either good or temporarily dominant.[52]
Nowhere is this more evident than the scene where Guy arrives home at his D.C. apartment to find Bruno lurking across the street; Bruno killed Miriam that evening in Metcalf, and has her glasses to give to Guy almost as a "receipt" that he has executed his part of their "deal". "On one side of the street, [are] stately respectable houses; towering in the background, on the right of the screen, the floodlit dome of the U.S. Capitol, the life to which Guy aspires, the world of light and order."[53] Bruno tells Guy what he has done and gives him the glasses. "You're a free man now", he says, just as a police car drives up, looking for the husband of a certain recent murder victim. Guy nervously steps into the shadows with Bruno, literally behind the bars of an iron fence; "You've got me acting like I'm a criminal", he says. "The scene gives a beautifully exact symbolic expression to Guy's relationship with Bruno and what he stands for."[53]
Hitchcock continues the interplay of light and dark throughout the film: Guy's bright, light tennis attire, versus "the gothic gloominess of [Bruno's] Arlington mansion";[46] the crosscutting between his game in the sunshine at Forest Hills while Bruno's arm stretches into the dark and debris of the storm drain trying to fish out the cigarette lighter;[54] even a single image where "Walker is photographed in one visually stunning shot as a malignant stain on the purity of the white-marble Jefferson Memorial, as a blot on the order of things."[55]
Political subtext
Although its first rumblings came in 1947 with the trial and conviction of the "Hollywood Ten," the so-called Red Scare was gathering steam in 1950, with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the trial of Alger Hiss. These events were the background to their work, while Hitchcock, Cook, Ormonde and Keon were preparing the script for Strangers, and film scholar Robert L. Carringer has written of a political subtext to the film.[13] Treatment writer Cook used Guy to make the film "a parable quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America."[13]
That hysteria was targeting homosexuals along with Communists as enemies of the state.... The U.S. Senate was busy investigating the suspicion that 'moral perverts' in the government were also undermining national security—going so far as to commission a study, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.[21]
Carringer has argued that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic climate.[21] "To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype, an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed," wrote Carringer; he is "a man of indeterminate sexual identity found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised."[21] Hitchcock, who had drawn gay characters so sharply yet subtly in Rope in 1948, "drafted the left-leaning Cook... expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters."[13]
Differences from the novel
Even before sewing up the rights for the novel, Hitchcock's mind was whirling with ideas about how to adapt it for the screen. He narrowed the geographic scope to the Northeast corridor, between Washington, D.C., and New York—the novel ranged through the southwest and Florida, among other locales.[21] The scripting team added the tennis match—and the crosscutting with Bruno's storm drain travails in Metcalf—added the cigarette lighter, the Tunnel of Love, Miriam's eyeglasses; in fact, the amusement park is only a brief setting in the novel.[21]
Hitchcock's biggest changes were in his two lead characters:
The character called Bruno Antony in the film is called Charles Anthony Bruno in the book.[56] In the book, Bruno dies in a boating accident[56] far removed from a merry-go-round.
In the novel, Guy Haines is not a tennis player, but rather a promising architect, and he does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno's father.[56] In the movie, "Guy became a decent guy who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain..." writes Patrick McGilligan, "to head off the censors."[13] In the novel, Guy is pursued and entrapped by a tenacious detective.[17]
The merry-go-round scene is not in the book, but is taken from the climax of Edmund Crispin's 1946 novel The Moving Toyshop.[57] All the major elements of the scene—the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to disable it—are present in Crispin's account,[58] though he received no screen credit for it.
