Behind Bars

Writing About the Movies
I tried to explain how Alfred Hitchcock uses visuals to state his themes in Strangers on a Train, but I'm happy to report that the students were often ahead of me. There is, for example, the evening scene in which the two main characters discuss a murder. In each shot, at least one of the men is shown with the bars of a gate in front of him, or at least the shadow of those bars. The point is that the threat of prison hangs over the men, the murder and the entire conversation. The minute I started showing that scene in class, at least some of the students seemed to know what was going. What can I say? Very cool!

Scary Scene

Writing About the Movies

It was Fox Day at Rollins, which means that my class was unexpectedly cut short by a half hour. There wasn't time to do much more than show Strangers on a Train, one of my favorite Hitchcock films. It's also a good one to show students because Hitchcock's use of visuals to state his themes is so clear. Also, there's an exciting merry-go-round scene at the end that was, of course, filmed without today's CGI camera tricks. After filming it, Hitchcock is said to have vowed that he'd never do anything so dangerous again.