Alfred Hitchcock's The Strangers On A Train

With I Confess, Hitchcock broke his professional lull after The Strangers on a Train (1951). Setting the film in Quebec, Canada, with a strong French heritage & a city steeped in Catholicsm and its striking church architecture served well for the story. Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) acted as a true Catholic priest, friend and employer who hasn’t disclosed the confessional secret of Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse), the caretaker of local catholic church and thus putting his own life in jeopardy. At last Father Logan got cleared of the charges against him. The film also mentions the past of Father Logan who was in love with now married Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter) and he became a priest after returning from war. The film can be seen as an
Hitchcock imbibing the true sentiments of Americans delineated its culture in myriad forms and hues through his films. In The Wrong Man (1956), when the Italian descent Manny asks his mother’s opinion at the time of despair and hopelessness, she advices her son to pray. Manny knows clearly that in the modern world he must stride a “straight and narrow” path as David Sterrit puts it (69). The real robber is brought to the justice system soon after the protagonist Manny’s anguished prayer to The Sacred Heart of Jesus. Hitchcock shows the close-up of a praying Manny (Henry Fonda) dissolving over the emerging face of the real culprit. A technique Hitchcock used deliberately to bring home this catholic idea of divine intervention through camera technique. Here we can find Hithcock’s ideology about a man who keeps strong faith in the conventional value system irrespective of the secular modernity he had to choose in a world that revolves around uncaring and anxiety ridden people who are detached from their past. (Pomerance 182). Hitchcok has given a Catholic handling of the prayer scene. He might also kept in mind the Pope in Italy as Manny was an