Runaway thrillers

Is it just me, or is the ending to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train completely preposterous? Maybe I’m too young to understand the brute power of an old-style runaway merry-go-round—have the newer models been tamed out of safety concerns? (which I suppose I should refer to as merry-go-round alarmism)—but is it even remotely believable that one could spin so dangerously out of control that Farley Granger’s feet would be flying straight outward, Looney Toons style, while he engaged in stagey fisticuffs with the spoiled psychopath played by Robert Walker? Not to say the movie isn’t devilishly entertaining; Raymond Chandler’s script boils with a nearly toxic level of black humor, unusual for a Hitchcock film. And Senator Morton’s response when Granger mentions that he met a professor—“Harvard?” he asks hopefully—captures perfectly the way urban upper-crusters seem to automatically translate “college” to “Ivy League.” But really, an out of control train, even an out of control horse and buggy, I can buy. But an unhinged merry-go-round? Not even Michael Bay would attempt to spin that past his audience.

UPDATE: Chandler, not Carver. No excuse, really.