Donald Spoto has recorded that, as a boy, Hitchcock

Hitchcock's boyhood obsession was equally with the means of transport themselves, and this preoccupation shows clearly in his films. There are relatively few of his films in which cars are the dominant mode of transport, and these are mostly late in his career. Hitchcock's characters tend to travel quite a lot, but journeys of any length are more usually undertaken by public transport. As a consequence, there are many scenes in his films set on trains and boats in particular. Planes and buses feature less prominently, but they are still sufficiently popular to each constitute a motif. With trains and boats, I have concentrated on scenes which actually take place on the means of transport, excluding for the most part mere arrivals or departures. With planes and buses, for reasons which will be discussed, I have extended the examples.

TRAINS

Although in three of his films the hero and heroine first meet on a train, this does not mean that Hitchcock considers it a romantic setting. In THE 39 STEPS, Hannay enters Pamela's compartment and kisses her in order to try and fool the pursuing police, but she promptly turns him in anyway. Johnnie's emergence out of the darkness created by a train tunnel at the beginning of Suspicion hints at his suspect persona, amply confirmed by later events. Roger and Eve's love scene on the train in NORTH BY NORTHWEST is followed by the revelation that she is (apparently) working for the villains. A meeting with a glamorous ‘stranger on a train’ in a Hitchcock movie is invariably full of risk: one cannot be sure how trustworthy the stranger is. The same is true of Guy's meeting with Bruno in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN: later Guy discovers that Bruno took their conversation as approval for his plan that they ‘swap murders’.