Loving Highsmith

A young Patricia Highsmith

Delicately ambiguous as a title, Loving Highsmith also turns out to be a clever way of signalling the approach of its director, Eva Vitija, to its subject matter. It is both fan letter to the writer of classics such as Strangers on a Train (she really loves her Highsmith), and an attempt to delve into the love life of the author herself – what Highsmith was like to love. Highsmith’s dates are 1921 to 1995 but you’ll struggle to get that information out of this documentary. It isn’t full of details of that sort, and there isn’t particularly a timeline that can clearly be followed. Watch it with the Wikipedia page to one … Read more

Strangers on a Train

930 strangers on a train blu ray x01

Remakes are always being mooted – one far-fetched internet rumour had Ricky Gervais starring in one of them – but whatever eventually pops out, it’s unlikely to eclipse this warped 1951 original, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by Patricia Highsmith, surely one of cinema’s most misanthropic couplings. Hitchcock, as book after book delights in telling us, loved torturing blondes. The lesbian Highsmith, on the other hand, loved to torture homosexuals – see The Talented Mr Ripley, for example. And it’s Highsmith who comes out on top in this thriller about two men agreeing to swap murders. Robert Walker plays Bruno Anthony, the psychotic ball of mother-love who wants his horrible father dead. … Read more