BY LEE PFEIFFER
In the wake of their success with "Gone Girl", Ben Affleck and director David Fincher will re-team for a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1951 thriller "Strangers on a Train". The original film is regarded as one of Hitchcock's best. The movie starred Farley Granger as a dapper young tennis pro who has a chance encounter with a man of similar age, played by Robert Walker, with whom he shares a compartment on a train. To pass the time, the men engage in a macabre "what-if" scenario to see if they can construct the perfect crime. They come up with what appears to be a foolproof plan. Both men name a bothersome real life person as the presumed "victim". They then agree that if each man carried out a murder on behalf of the other man, they would never be caught because they have no ties to each other and don't even know the person they will murder. The two men part company but Granger is horrified when he discovers Walker took the conversation literally and has murdered the person Granger had named as the victim. Worse, he now insists that Granger carry out his part of the plan or be murdered himself. The ingenious story line has a timeless appeal but Affleck and Fincher are walking on thin ice in terms of incurring the wrath of Hitchcock enthusiasts who regard his work as sacred. On the other hand, they obviously hope to appeal to young audiences, among whom many probably never even heard of Hitchcock, let alone the original film. The original has also been analyzed extensively for what many consider to be a homo-erotic attraction between the characters played by Granger and Walker, who had a field day creating one of the era's most memorable movie villains. Given Affleck will star, chances are this element of the original film will not be present in the remake. Click here for more.