Film Noir 2018
Screening Dates
  • August 17, 2018 6:30
  • August 19, 2018 8:15
  • August 23, 2018 6:30

“Intensely enjoyable—in some ways the best of Hitchcock’s American films … with some of the best dialogue that ever graced a thriller.”

Pauline Kael

Hitchcock’s 1951 classic is a nifty, nasty noir thriller with a great hard-boiled pedigree: it’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, with a screenplay co-credited to Raymond Chandler. Unhappily-married tennis star Guy (Farley Granger) chitchats with charming stranger Bruno (Robert Walker) on a train trip, and the two jokingly agree to ​“exchange murders”: Bruno will slay Guy’s troublesome wife in return for Guy killing Bruno’s hated father. When Bruno later fulfils his end of the mock bargain, Guy is horrified—and in a trainload of trouble. Walker’s extraordinary performance as diabolical Bruno is one of the most celebrated in the Hitchcock canon; the movie’s merry-go-round climax is also famed. Cinematographer Robert Burks was Oscar-nominated.