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Film critics pick the 50 best movies of all time

From film critics Gail Kinn and Jim Piazza's new book 'The Greatest Movies Ever,' their picks for the 50 greatest films

31. 'Strangers on a Train'

  • By Molly Driscoll

"Like so many of the best thrillers of the era... things really get cracking on a train," Kinn and Piazza write of the 1951 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. "In Hitchcock's world the good guy with the enviably untroubled existence always makes the ideal victim because, at heart, as much as we're supposed to identify with him, nothing gets our pulse racing, our imagination fired, like a dedicated villain."

In an interview with Boston Phoenix writer Gerald Peary, author Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the book of the same name on which "Strangers" was based, said she felt actor Robert Walker "was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother," though she disliked the fact that the character Guy (Farley Granger) is a tennis player in the movie rather than an architect as in her novel. "I thought it was ludicrous that he's aspiring to be a politician, and that he's supposed to be in love with that stone angel [the character of Ann Morton, played by actress Ruth Roman]." 

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Mark Sappenfield
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