“A great favourite of mine”: the 1951 movie that inspired Christopher Nolan half a century later
Most people, when they think of Alfred Hitchcock movies, will quite understandably have in mind the big ones, the really famous ones, your Psycho, your Vertigo, your Rear Window. And that’s fine, they’re incredibly good.
However, as Christopher Nolan will tell you, should you ever run into him, the Master of Suspense’s catalogue runs far, far deeper than that.
Hitchcock was making movies for decades before those James Stewart classics, with early masterpieces including Rebecca, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Notorious and The 39 Steps all produced before the 1940s were out. The guy was an unbelievable talent, and much like The Beatles, the influence and quality of his output is discovered by generation after generation as the years roll on.
Nolan is a director who cites Hitchcock as a direct inspiration, and you can clearly see that in many of his movies, with similar themes employed, including madness, conspiracies and greed, plus a love of the darker side of humanity. Nolan also uses his camera in similarly inventive ways to the great man, telling stories full of suspense and twists, relying on the visual rather than dialogue. Both also use intricate, fiendish plots, sometimes manipulating time, and often with a sense of impending dread that makes it difficult for the viewer to turn away.
Nolan also highlights a deeper Hitchcock cut than the obvious one in the inspiration he took when making one of his own lesser-known movies, the 2002 remake of Insomnia with Al Pacino and Robin Williams. Nolan spoke of Hitchcock’s twisting psychological thriller from 1951, stating: “Strangers on a Train is a great favorite of mine.”
The premise of Hitchcock’s film is that two men meet on a train and one convinces the other that if they were to murder each other’s most hated people, they’d get away with it. It is similar to Nolan’s later movie in that both films feature two men in a moral quandary, one of whom is a psychopath. The latter is played by Williams in Nolan’s movie, and he said: “In my conversations with Robin (Williams), I did actually say to him, ‘This is something we’ll only talk about, but the guy could be unreal,’ as in, he might not exist. He’s very much (Al Pacino’s character) Dormer’s conscience, like a (fictional Pinocchio character) Jiminy Cricket – that was Robin’s take on it.”
In both films, the situations unravel to deadly effect without anything the central protagonists can do about it, and both main leads eventually learn the truth about themselves, even when it’s far too late. Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which was originally drafted by famed novelist Raymond Chandler before the two fell out quite spectacularly, was not an immediate hit, although it did go on to make money at the box office and has been reevaluated as one of Hitchcock’s greatest.
Insomnia, meanwhile, was a box office success, and is considered a decent Nolan film, although not in the same class as Interstellar, Inception or the Batman trilogy. He will soon release his latest epic, The Odyssey, this July, which stars a host of big names, including Matt Damon and Robert Pattinson and promises to have a similar effect as his award-sweeping historical nuclear drama Oppenheimer in 2023, which earned 13 Oscar nominations, winning seven, including ‘Best Director’ for Nolan.
