Many years ago I found myself at the Eastman House in Rochester NY. If you don’t know, George Eastman was the founder of Kodak. Kodak is a small scrap of what it once was, but it has been a leader in photography and film in the past.
The house is now a museum, an archive and a cinema. They have a huge vault of films and do restorations.
I went to see a film and a chat with one of the stars, Farley Grainger, from “Strangers On A Train”. It’s a Hitchcock film from 1950.
In case you don’t know the plot, the title tells most of it. Two men meet at random on a train. Both have personal problems. They hatch a plot to kill each other’s ‘problems’ and they will never be suspected as they have no obvious motive.
I am no big fan of Hitchcock or his films, especially the later ones. I hate how he gets his cameo into each, and it’s no different here.
The original Patricia Highsmith novel is altered significantly. Raymond Chandler was brought in to do the script but it was a painful experience for him and what you see on the screen is not his.
But the film is worth a watch and has some good moments, especially the end. The very bad process photography spoils much of it, though.