Film Screening: Panic!: “Strangers on a Train”

Adapted from the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Price of Salt), Strangers on a Train (1951) is a sharply drawn, noirish thriller that taps the simmering paranoia of its Cold War context. The film follows amateur tennis star Guy Haines. Trapped in an unhappy marriage and seeking a divorce from his wife Miriam, Guy is recognized on a train by a dashing, smooth-talking stranger named Bruno Antony. Bruno, a psychopath with a grudge against his father, jokingly suggests to Guy that the two resolve their relationship woes by swapping murders, with Bruno killing Miriam, and Guy killing Bruno’s father. What begins as a grim joke quickly spirals into a deadly game of blackmail, manipulation, and murder. 

Produced amidst the growing anti-Communist hysteria of the post-War era and suffused with a potent queer subtext, the film draws on contemporaneous panics over homosexuality and the alleged threat it posed to US national security and morality (the so-called Lavender Scare). Strangers on a Train is a visually sumptuous glimpse into a national psyche riven by powerful anxieties over sex, politics, and suppressed desire.

In this event, screenwriter and playwright Phyllis Nagy will join moderator Patrice Petro, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, for a post-screening discussion of Strangers on a Train.