silver nitrate notes

Strangers on a Train and the Geometry of the Carousel

5 apr 2016

Alfred Hitchcock made Strangers on a Train (1951) at Warner Bros, his first film with the cinematographer Robert Burks (1909-1968). Burks would go on to photograph twelve of Hitchcock's next thirteen films, including Rear Window, Vertigo, and North by Northwest. Strangers on a Train is where the Hitchcock-Burks collaboration starts, and much of what Burks would do with Hitchcock over the next decade is visible here in its first form.

The premise is Patricia Highsmith's from her novel: two men meet on a train. One proposes they trade murders (he kills the other's inconvenient wife, the other kills his inconvenient father). The proposal is nominally a joke. One of them, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), takes it seriously. He performs his end of the deal without the other's consent. The film is about what the tennis-player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) does next.

Burks's photography is most visible in the set-piece sequences. The tennis match at Forest Hills, where Guy has to finish a professional match while trying to reach the scene of an impending crime, is shot with Burks cutting between the play and the crowd. The crowd watches the ball with their heads turning back and forth. One head in the crowd does not turn. The head belongs to Bruno. Hitchcock's joke is that the audience sees Bruno immediately; Guy, on the court, does not see him at all.

The carousel sequence at the end is the film's technical triumph. A carousel at the amusement park has run out of control at high speed; Guy and Bruno are on it, fighting; children and other passengers are trapped on the spinning machine. Hitchcock and Burks shot the sequence with a combination of on-set rigs (the carousel at high speed was actually achieved with compressed air; the fight was choreographed around it) and rear-projection close-ups of the actors against footage of the spinning carousel interior. When the carousel finally breaks apart, the break is achieved with a miniature: the full-scale carousel is shown crashing from one angle, a miniature from another, cut together so that the scale match reads as continuous.

Burks won an Oscar for cinematography on a later Hitchcock film (To Catch a Thief, 1955). He should have won for this one.

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sources
[1] Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Simon & Schuster, rev. ed. 1983.
[2] McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Regan, 2003.
[3] Spoto, Donald. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. Doubleday, 2nd ed. 1992.
[4] Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train. Harper & Bros., 1950.