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Strangers on a Train (1951)
nice
Theatre is theatre, film film. Right? Actually not any more as the two mediums increasingly converge. And the bizarre fact about this production, although based on the 1949 Patricia Highsmith novel rather than the subsequent Hitchcock movie, is that it feels, for much of the evening, like a piece of film noir. This is theatre turning into cinema rather than borrowing from it. The evening begins with the image of an onrushing train. We then shift to a public compartment where Guy Haines has his fateful encounter with Charles Bruno. But everything about the first half suggests we are in for a night at the movies. We get multiple short scenes. Tim Goodchild's busily revolving set is shadowed by Peter Wilms's video projections so that we see the landscape through which the train is passing. To clinch matters, the sound design deliberately echoes the nerve-jangling scores that Bernard Herrmann wrote for Hitchcock. Craig Warner has written the script. It felt sometimes as if it was more the work of Warner Brothers.