Strangers on a Train is not a psychological study, however, but a first-rate thriller with odd little kinks now and then. It proceeds, as Hitchcock's films so often do, with a sense of private scores being settled just out of sight.

Director Hitchcock toys with this plot as lovingly as the crack-brained murderer, plays it for wry irony and unexpected humor as well as suspense. But he seems less interested in making his audiences believe in the story's outrageously rigged situations than in teasing, tricking and dazzling them with the masterful touch of a talented cinematic showoff.

Perhaps Strangers on a Train still hasn't yielded all its secrets.

Curiously contrasted characters and locales play their parts in the Hitchcock strategy, making for an enormously entertaining show.

Given a good basis for a thriller in the Patricia Highsmith novel [script adaption by Whitfield Cook] and a first-rate script, Hitchcock embroiders the plot into a gripping, palm-sweating piece of suspense.