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DARK CORRIDORS VOL 3, No. 1 |
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 takes a fresh look at the book and the film ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S FILM STRANGERS ON A TRAIN |
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the film cemented another
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If you haven't read Patricia Highsmith's novel nor seen Alfred Hitchcock's film, please do so before reading this column because crucial plot information is revealed . Ron Miller |
of TheColumnists.com
I don't believe it's possible to think of Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated 1951 film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's noir thriller "Strangers On A Train" without remembering such unforgettable cinematic moments as these:
* Hundreds of people are in the grandstand, watching a tennis match, their heads shifting back and forth in unison as they follow the ball from one side of the court to the other. But the camera singles out one sinister man in the center of the crowd, staring straight ahead. He's Bruno, the villain, stalking his quarry: Tennis player Guy Haines.
* The eyeglasses of Miriam, the murder victim, are dislodged when Bruno grabs her throat--and we watch her being strangled to death as reflected in the shattered lens of her spectacles.
* At the film's exciting climax, Bruno and Guy are locked in a desperate struggle aboard a carnival merry-go-round that speeds out of control and finally self-destructs in a horrendous crash.
But here's an interesting point to consider: None of those immortal motion picture scenes occurs in Highsmith's reverred novel. In fact, Highsmith's Guy Haines is an architect who never goes near a tennis court, her Miriam doesn't wear eyeglasses and nothing the least bit exciting happens on that merry-go-round in her story.
Yet Hitchcock's "Strangers On A Train" isn't another example of the movies trashing a classic novel for the sake of a few "visual" thrills the book didn't have. In fact, the film is one of the greatest masterworks of perhaps the greatest film auteur of the 20th century. It is by far my favorite among Hitchcock's films--and I've seen every one except one early silent film that no longer exists in any form.
On the other hand, the changes Hitchcock found it necessary to make in Highsmith's story doesn't mean Highsmith's novel is lacking in any way. In fact, the book, first published in 1950, was a popular best seller and established Highsmith's reputation, paving the way for all the books that followed, including "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and its sequels.
"Strangers On A Train" really is that uncommon phenomenon--a great book that was overhauled radically by a filmmaker, yet still served as the foundation for what turned out to be a classic American film.
The reason why the Highsmith and Hitchcock works turned out so different is simple: They were telling different stories within the same general plot framework.
Highsmith was communicating a volatile, controversial notion: That each of us is capable of committing an unthinkable crime, even murder. Hitchcock simply wanted to take us on a roller coaster ride of suspense, living in the skin of a man "caught up" in a situation that was out of his control.
For Highsmith, her first novel, "Strangers On A Train," was the opening round in what would become a lifelong fascination with the concept that seemingly normal people can, under certain circumstances, commit anti-social acts. Her story also neatly dovetailed with what Hitchcock had made his oeuvre--innocent people "caught up" in suspenseful situations--so it's obvious why he wanted to make a film of it.
In the book, young architect Guy Haines accidentally meets Charles Anthony Bruno, a dissolute, alcoholic playboy, when they wind up seated together on a cross-country train journey. Bruno is fascinated by Guy because he's a handsome, rising star in the medium of architecture--a celebrity. He's also everything Bruno isn't: A successful young man who actually does something worthwhile.
Bruno
is a dissolute character who lives with his doting mother. She
indulges his drinking and doles out spending money for him, over
the objections of Bruno's father, a ruthless businessman Bruno
hates so much that he wishes the old man were dead.
Guy is a much better balanced human being, although he has one
nagging problem: His estranged wife, Miriam, a sluttish woman
who's pregnant with another man's child. Guy hopes to divorce
her, so he can marry Anne, a woman from a wealthy and powerful
family. But Miriam is dragging her feet, perhaps anxious to cash
in on the big contract Guy has just landed to design a multi-million
dollar country club.
Once Bruno learns about Guy's "problem," he proposes a bizarre, though highly-creative solution: He should murder Guy's wife and Guy should murder Bruno's father. He reasons the police would never suspect either of them because there would be no motive. Each man would have killed a complete stranger.
Hitchcock was enthralled by this concept, but he knew he couldn't take it in the direction Highsmith does in the book. She wanted to demonstrate that the seeds of murder are in all of us. In the book, Guy at first resists Bruno's idea as the concoction of a madman. Then, when Bruno actually murders Miriam, Guy realizes the madman has taken control of his life because Bruno now can threaten to tell the police Guy was his willing accomplice if Guy should turn him in. Highsmith's Guy commits the second murder, then lives in terror that he'll forever be in bondage to the demented Bruno. (The movie also changes the character's name to Bruno Anthony.)
Highsmith now is regarded as much more than a "mystery" writer by literary critics. Her detailed examination of the undercurrents of human life in her many novels finally has earned her the admiration and respect she never really achieved within her lifetime. (She died in 1995.) Her Bruno rather obviously is a latent homosexual who wants to be the most important person in Guy's life--and so he uses Guy's growing guilty conscience to make a place for himself in Guy's much more desirable world.
This might have been the foundation for a truly important film, but probably not a very popular one. Highsmith's protagonist is too much like Dostoyevsky's Raskalnikov in "Crime and Punishment"--a "hero" so unsavory that he's never really been successfully adapted to stage or screen. If Hitchcock had stayed with her story, it would have required an audience to identify with Guy, a man who actually becomes a murderer, then spends the rest of his life trying to privately atone for it while also covering his tracks, so the police don't catch him. That's a hard sell for a filmmaker.
To help him find ways to make Highsmith's core story filmable, Hitchcock then played a bold card: He hired the most respected mystery writer in America to help write the screenplay--Raymond Chandler, author of "The Big Sleep," "Farewell, My Lovely" and the other Philip Marlowe novels that redefined the American detective genre in the 1940s.
Though it's said Hitch and Chandler didn't get along very well over the course of the project, it's clear Chandler brought his special noir sensibility to the film and livened up the dialogue considerably. Working with Chandler and his co-writer Czenzi Ormonde from the initial adaptation by Whitfield Cook, Hitchcock found an ideal solution to the problem of having a guiltridden murderer as their hero. They would have Guy seem to be going through with the murder, but instead have him plan to warn Bruno's father at the very last minute that his son was a murderer. By redeeming the character of Guy, they made him the legitimate hero of the movie because thereafter it becomes a duel between Guy and Bruno or, if you will, good and evil. (Bruno, suspicious of Guy, hides in his father's bed on the night of the proposed murder and thwarts Guy's plan.)
Hitchcock also knew Guy's architecture background was cinematically dull, so the movie turns him into one of the nation's top amateur tennis players, a well-liked celebrity-in-the-making whose eventual goal is to enter politics, perhaps with the aid of his future wife's father, a U.S. Senator.
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in Hitchcock's film version of "Strangers On A Train." |
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That also gave Hitch the opportunity to create one of the most exciting last reels of his movie career. In the film version, Guy learns that Bruno intends to plant Guy's monogrammed cigaret lighter at the scene of Miriam's murder. He plans to do this the same day that Guy is playing the most important match of his career in fornt of a huge crowd at Forest Hills. That enabled Hitchcock to create an amazing sequence in which Guy attempts to defeat his opponent in just three sets, so he can rush to the murder scene and stop Bruno.
By intercutting the scenes of Guy's desperate tennis match with Bruno's trip to the murder scene, Hitchcock builds tremendous tension that never develops in Highsmith's original story. Both men face terrible obstacles. Guy's opponent rises to the challenge and turns the match into a battle that brings the crowd to its feet. Meanwhile, Bruno accidentally drops Guys's lighter down a storm drain, then attracts an unwelcome crowd as he struggles to retrieve it.
The sequence ends with Guy and Bruno savagely fighting each other for the lighter aboard a runaway merry-go-round. (A policeman fires a shot at Guy, but hits the operator of the ride instead, causing him to collapse on the lever that controls the speed of the merry-go-round.) Nobody but Hitchcock could come up with the stunning montage sequence that follows: Children holding on for dear life as the merry-go-round turns into a killing machine, whirling at faster and faster speeds, the painted horses bobbing up and down, their carved hooves striking down at the two fighting men while a toothless old maintenance man risks his life to crawl under the careening machine and reach the control switch.
The way the movie alters the basic story can serve as a primer for the differences between literary and cinematic storytelling. Film stories must be simple in order to move. The movie decides early that Guy is good and Bruno evil. It makes Miriam a much nastier character, so that our sympathy shifts more quickly to Guy. Hitchcock also added a character not in the book--the precocious sister of Guy's fiancee--to serve as a sort of Greek chorus, letting everybody know what might happen to Guy as a suspect in his wife's murder. Hitchcock also gave the part of the sister to his own daughter, Patricia, who makes it her best-ever performance on film.
Despite all the changes Hitchcock needed in Highsmith's story, it's still remarkable how perfectly the material suited the director's style. In the book and the movie, Bruno is a frequently amusing character, which seems to add to his menace. Hitch knew that territory well and he gives the film a special air of whimsy that seems to temper some of the horrifying things that go on around it.
For example, he uses cinematic shorthand to introduce the characters at the movie's start by showing us Bruno's and Guy's feet before he ever shows their faces. Guy is wearing dark, conservative shoes, but Bruno is wearing outrageous two-tone shoes. We watch as the two pair of feet make their way through the crowded railway station, into the same railroad car to the same table where their feet accidentally touch, giving them an excuse to speak to each other. By then, though, we already know these two fellows pretty well. It's an amusing way to get the dark storyline going.
Later, when an irritating child carrying a balloon appears beside Bruno in the amusement park where he is stalking Miriam, Bruno pops the kid's balloon with his lighted cigaret. It's something many of us might have wanted to do, but wouldn't because it would be considered mean-spirited. Bruno, who's sort of a big kid anyway, has no such restraints.
Yet Hitch is very cold-blooded in other parts of the film. Bruno seems to be flirting with Miriam as he stalks her and she glows from the attention. Yet, when she finds herself alone in a dark place with Bruno, Hitch shows us just her face as he asks, off camera, "Is your name Miriam?" She answers, "Why, yes..." Then her expression changes as his hands close around her throat and her glasses fall away. Hitch plays the murder without any extraneous noise except the distant carnival sounds. As we watch a distorted view of the strangling through Miriam's shattered eyeglasses, we feel our blood start running cold.
Hitchcock loved the gimmick of the eyeglasses, though Miriam didn't wear any in the book. For one thing, it makes her seem more vulnerable, even though he's gone to lots of trouble to make sure we get the fact that she's a slut. They're rather tasteless and unattractive glasses, too, which helps further define Miriam's character as considerably less sophisticated than Guy's new love, Anne. The glasses also are so distinctively ugly that we readily associate them with the rather plain Miriam.
Later in the film, Hitch uses the glasses again for a special purpose: Bruno brings them to Guy as evidence that he's not kidding aobuit murdering Miriam. When Guy sees the familiar glasses, the look on his face tells us he knows the nightmare is for real. Still later, Hitch again calls on the glasses by putting a very similar pair on Barbara, Anne's usupicious sister. When Bruno sees them he actually has a mental flashback to Miriam and the murder. It's a chilling moment as Barbara prattles on, unaware that Bruno is seeing her as the reincarnation of the hateful slut he already has killed once.
Hitchcock really has a ball with the climactic sequence in the amusement park, giving Bruno a series of near-comic mishaps as he blunders his way into planting the evidence that might convict Guy of Miriam's murder.
And the merry-go-round finale is quintessential Hitchcock. HIghsmith put Bruno and Miriam on a merry-go-round in her stalking-murder chapter, but there is no carnival finale in her book. Hitch saw it as a whimsical, yet breathtakingly suspenseful way to resolve everything. The merry-go-round might be seen as a symbolic reference to Guy's normal world, suddenly running out of control because of Bruno. Hitch even reminds us who the good guy is in that sequence by showing a little boy about to be flung off the machine by its whirling momentum--until Guy pauses long enough in his struggle with Bruno to lift the kid to safety. Hitch even makes the normally placid wooden horses' faces look as if they're panicky real-life steeds. At times, the distorted horse faces even look like the ones in Picasso's immortal La Guernica.
Young Farley Granger, who plays Guy in the film, was an inspired choice for the role. He's handsome, but has that slight off-center look in his eye that makes you believe he'd be vulnerable to someone like Bruno. But the film belongs to Robert Walker, whose slightly sissified, part-goofy Bruno becomes one of the screen's most memorable villains. It was beyond doubt the best performance Walker ever gave and it's the heart of this great film.
Hitchcock's "Strangers On A Train" is still thoroughly enjoyable half a century after it became a major box office hit. It's a film that young cinema fans should study for all it can tell them about the essentials of manipulative filmmaking. Yet I also highly recommend fans of the movie search out Highsmith's novel and read it, too. The book has grown in stature over the years and its message seems even more relevant today when it seems there are hordes of Brunos out there, doing nothing but dreaming up nasty things to do to normal folks.
© 2001 by Ron Miller. The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The book cover reproduction is from the Norton edition of "Strangers On A Train." The video cover is from the 1987 Warner Home Video edition of the film. The photo is from Warner Bros.
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