Strangers On A Train
"Your wife, my father....crisscross..."
As actor Robert Walker subtly delivers that line to Farley Granger, therein begins one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable suspense films. "Strangers on a Train" made people afraid to meet a complete stranger whilst riding a train...well not really...but this film, which made AFI’s list of the 100 Most Thrilling Films, was trimmed by 2 minutes back in the day for its homosexual undertones.
Along with Walker and Granger, "Strangers" features other Hitchcock stalwarts such as his hammy daughter Patricia and Leo G. Carroll. Adapted by detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler, the feature film slightly varies from the novel, where complete strangers offer to take on each other’s murder of the person they want dead. This macabre tale ends memorably at a carnival, where a merry-go-round becomes a death trap.
Like the previously released DVD, the Blu-ray features the uncut British version, inserting the once previously thought "frank" dialogue exchanged between Walker and Granger when they first meet. This version is not in high-definition.
Six other features are included:
An audio commentary featuring Peter Bogdanovich, Pat Hitchcock, and about 10 others makes this a distracting and over-involved commentary.
"Strangers on a Train: A Hitchcock Classic" is a making-of feature broken down into 5 segments. Director M. Night Shyamalan gets his own feature, telling us how Hitchcock obviously influenced his filmmaking. The Hitchcock family fondly remembers the famous director in "The Hitchcocks on Hitch", and "Alfred Hitchcock’s Historical Meeting" is a campy spoof on the film.
"Strangers on a Train"
Blu-ray
$19.98
www.warnerblu.com
