By David in TN
Saturday, November 25, 2017 at 12:32:00 A.M. EST
The TCM Film Noir of the Week for Sunday, November 26, at 10 a.m. ET is Strangers on a Train (1951). Alfred Hitchcock was the director. Robert Walker and Farley Granger star as, respectively, a psychopath and a tennis player who meet on a train and talk about murdering someone they don't like. In other words, "swap murders."
Granger's character thinks it wasn't serious. Walker's does, and he promptly murders Granger's estranged (pregnant by another man) wife, with whom Granger had been seen in public having a violent argument.
Granger’s character was hoping to marry Ruth Roman, daughter of a U.S. Senator. He hoped it could be a springboard for a political career of his own.
Hitchcock makes Granger look like a selfish, unsympathetic character, with poor judgement. Not unusual for Hitchcock. In other films he tries to make the audience almost root for a killer.
Strangers on a Train has a spectacular climax on a wild merry-go-round. Walker, who makes a convincing psycho, died at age 32, shortly after the film's release.
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TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Sunday, December 3, at 10 am ET, is Pushover (1954). It stars Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak in the standard Noir trope of a sap who falls for a woman and gets himself deeper and deeper into bad trouble. This time the sap is a cop gone wrong
Novak's plays the girlfriend of a bank robber who MacMurray is trying to catch as part of an undercover operation. Novak tempts MacMurray into a plan to kill her boyfriend and run off with the bank heist loot. Things go bad from there.
Fred MacMurray plays a character similar to his most famous role in Double Indemnity, in which he was an insurance salesman. In Pushover he is a detective.
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