Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, Strangers on a Train features one of the finest and most winningly flamboyant acting turns in the director’s oeuvre: Robert Walker as grinning psychopath Bruno Antony. When Bruno serendipitously encounters tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train, he proposes an audacious exchange of murders: Guy will dispatch Bruno’s judgmental father, Bruno will eliminate Guy’s estranged wife (Laura Elliott), and no one will suspect the otherwise unconnected perpetrators. Guy does indeed want to extricate himself from his unhappy marriage – he’s actively courting Anne (Ruth Roman), the daughter of a senator, and eying a transition to politics – but he dismisses Bruno’s scheme as a sick joke. The obsessive Bruno, however, remains fixated on the idea and proves impossible to dissuade. As the central couple, Granger and especially Roman pale next to Walker – who died before the film’s release at the shockingly early age of 32 – but Strangers on a Train features excellent support from Elliott as Guy’s joyfully promiscuous wife, Marion Lorne as Bruno’s dotty mother, and Patricia Hitchcock (the director’s daughter) as Anne’s amusingly uncensored sister.