Strangers on a Train (1951)
In a 1973 interview , when asked what was the thing that frightened him the most, Alfred Hitchcock replied he was "scared stiff of anything having to do with the law". The slightest idea of being accused of a crime he didn't commit and all the implications that would come of it, he said, were enough to send a chill down his spine. His fear was, he himself admitted , rooted in an episode of his childhood, in which he was locked in a prison cell by the local constable at his father's request, as a punishment for having been naughty. This "unjust incarceration" would come to play a big role in his life, whose entire filmography can be seen as a means of coming to terms with that experience: in virtually all his movies, innocent people are discredited and/or wrongly accused, being thus put in a position where they have to prove their innocence to authority figures too obtuse to track the real culprit themselves. Believing suspense to be not a genre, but