Strangers on a Train
1951
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Black, white and grey's dance to the seamless symphony of interplay between light and shadows. Conniving partner, gentleman killer, fancy suits and polished boots, white reflective curtains, table lamps and street lights, innovative use of reflective surfaces as lenses, fascinating setup for blocking, noisy giggles and ghastly screams. Strangers on A Train made me envious of a rather simple era with what little they had yet how passionately they used to employ those details without having to succumb to grand designs and ungodly tech that for the turn of the worse have contrived the quality down low in contemporary cinema. Hitchcock forces you to contemplate how basic ideas grounded in reality with rough imperfections around the edges make it look all the more like a creation of humanity that branches out with the involvement and invocation of a complex web of sophisticated codes and machines.