Trains
In Hitchcock's films, trains are often used as a sexual euphemism. Extended sequences on trains feature in a number of Hitchcock films, including
- Number Seventeen
- Shadow of a Doubt
- The 39 Steps
- The Lady Vanishes
- Strangers on a Train
- North by Northwest
In The 39 Steps and North by Northwest, the limitations imposed by train travel on characters' movements enhances the suspense as the lead character is pursued for a crime he did not commit.
Hitchcock's most-extended train sequence is in The Lady Vanishes, where the inability to exit the train except at stations forces the two lead characters to accept that the lady for whom they are searching must still be aboard. The vertiginous excitement of moving around the outside of a moving train is exploited in Number Seventeen and The Lady Vanishes.
Read more about this topic: Themes And Plot Devices In The Films Of Alfred Hitchcock
Famous quotes containing the word trains:
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
—E.B. (Elwyn Brooks)
“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)