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Panic!: Strangers on a Train

  • Saturday, November 16, 2024 / 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM (PST)
  • Pollock Theater
  • Screening Format: 4K digital projection (101 minutes)
  • With Phyllis Nagy (screenwriter of Carol)
  • Director: Alfred Hitchcock
     Starring: Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker
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Part of the CWC Classics series Part of the CWC Presents series

Adapted from the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Price of Salt) and set against the triumphant national iconography of Washington, D.C., Strangers on a Train (1951) is a sharply drawn, noirish thriller that taps the simmering paranoia of its Cold War context. The film follows amateur tennis star Guy Haines. Trapped in an unhappy marriage and seeking a divorce from his wife Miriam, Guy is recognized on a train by a dashing, smooth-talking stranger named Bruno Antony. Bruno, a psychopath with a grudge against his father, jokingly suggests to Guy that the two resolve their relationship woes by swapping murders, with Bruno killing Miriam, and Guy killing Bruno’s father. What begins as a grim joke quickly spirals into a deadly game of blackmail, manipulation, and murder. 

Produced amidst the growing anti-Communist hysteria of the post-War era and suffused with a potent queer subtext, the film draws on contemporaneous panics over homosexuality and the alleged threat it posed to US national security and morality (the so-called Lavender Scare). Strangers on a Train is a visually sumptuous glimpse into a national psyche riven by powerful anxieties over sex, politics, and suppressed desire.

Screenwriter and playwright Phyllis Nagy joined moderator Patrice Petro, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, for a post-screening discussion of Strangers on a Train.

Biographies

PhyllisNagy_Headshot

Screenwriter and playwright Phyllis Nagy

Phyllis Nagy is Professor and Head of Screenwriting at the UCLA School of Film, Theater and Television. She most recently directed Call Jane, starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, which was a Competition selection at the 72nd Berlinale, as well as an official selection of the Premieres section at the Sundance Film Festival.

Nagy’s screenplay for Carol, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, won the New York and Seattle Film Critics Circle awards and received Academy Award, BAFTA, Spirit Award, Gotham Award, and WGA Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, among numerous other awards and nominations.

She previously wrote and directed Mrs. Harris (HBO Films), which starred Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley. A Gala Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival, Mrs. Harris received twelve Emmy nominations, including nods for Nagy’s work as a writer and a director. It won a PEN Literary Award for its script, a Gracie Allen Award for its direction, and was nominated for multiple Golden Globe and SAG Awards.

Nagy served as Writer-in-Residence at The Royal Court Theatre, London, where four of her plays premiered: Weldon Rising, Disappeared, The Strip, and Never Land. Her other plays include Butterfly Kiss (Almeida Theatre, London); The Talented Mr. Ripley (Palace Theatre, Watford); The Seagull (Chichester Festival Theatre); The Scarlet Letter (Denver Center Theater, Classic Stage Company, New York and Chichester Festival Theatre); Trip’s Cinch (Actors Theater of Louisville Human Festival); and Delores (BBC Radio), a contemporary version of Euripides’s Andromache. Her plays have been translated into a dozen languages and have been performed across the globe.

Nagy is a member of the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she served as a member of the Writers Branch Executive Committee; the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA); the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; Writers Guild of America West; Directors Guild of America; and PEN American Center.

Patrice Petro, the Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center appears against a background of a bookshelf and a poster featuring Tina Modotti. She is wearing a black v-neck blouse, glasses, and dangly earrings.

Moderator Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)

Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest US professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.

 This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.

CWC Presents: Panic!

The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.

CWC Classics

The CWC Classics program celebrates cinema’s rich history, bringing classic films back to the big screen for critical viewing and discussion. These events feature filmmakers, academics, and professionals who can contextualize the production and historical impact of the films. The series occasionally presents classic films in their original 16 or 35 mm formats. CWC Classics events celebrate the history and significance of cinema’s enduring legacy.

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