Alfred Hitchcock once again implicates us, the audience, in this adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel about a tennis star (Farley Granger) who contemplates murder for about half of a second, and it proves to be half a second too long. On a train ride, Granger’s Guy Haines meets Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), one of those incessant conversationalists who doesn’t seem to mind if he’s the only one talking. The discussion turns to the problem people in each man’s life – Guy’s faithless, manipulative wife; Bruno’s domineering father – and how they could probably get away with it if they traded murders (“Criss cross”). Guy rejects the idea, but Bruno is too busy talking to notice. What follows is another one of Hitchcock’s explorations of gullibility and guilt, highlighted by some of his most ingenious camera work and a deeply creepy performance by Walker. Granger, meanwhile, is the perfect audience surrogate: slightly culpable and entirely sympathetic.
