Alfred Hitchcock

by Patrick McGilligan

  These two women wrote the script of Strangers on a Train—crafting all the famous highlights (the stalking and strangling of Miriam, the tennis duel, the carousel explosion), the crisscross and doppelgänger conceits, all the symmetrical touches that knit the film together. Hitchcock was absent for long stretches, and later he would complain to Truffaut that the final script evinced “weaknesses.” Ormonde wasn’t privy in any case to all his thinking; indeed, as she insisted in an interview for this book, she wasn’t aware of the slightest homoerotic undercurrent between Bruno and Guy; Hitchcock certainly didn’t mention it, and in her opinion it doesn’t exist in the script or the film.

  The writing was left to Keon and Ormonde, while Hitchcock raced toward the start date. “When I took this assignment,” Raymond Chandler was still complaining to Warner’s, “I was told by Mr. Hitchcock that there was no hurry—no hurry at all; no pressure—no pressure at all. About halfway through it I heard from his factotum [Barbara Keon] that there was a shooting date of October 1, because Mr. Hitchcock had to go East before the leaves fall and he would have to have, or at least very greatly desired, the completed script some little time before that; and that there was even the possibility … that if a page marked ‘The End’ was not received by the studio by the end of October 1, then Mr. Hitchcock might not be allowed to begin shooting.”

  The Ormonde-Keon version wasn’t completed until November. A courtesy copy was sent to Chandler, who angrily informed his agent that his draft was “far better than what they finished with.” He demanded that Warner Bros. remove his name from the credits. When it came to listing writers on the screen, Hitchcock usually included everybody, but in this case he agreed with Chandler. His preference? Drop the famous name, and credit only Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde.

  But the studio wouldn’t budge. Just as with John Steinbeck and Lifeboat, Warner’s wanted Chandler’s name for its cachet, though inevitably his name overshadowed Cook’s and Ormonde’s. About the only thing Hitchcock ever said publicly about the hard-boiled novelist was that “our collaboration was not very happy.” Privately, the director always insisted that he had done everything possible to erase Chandler from Strangers on a Train.*

  Leading off the 1950s—the decade of his most sustained creativity—Strangers on a Train was a deceptive Hitchcock film: a run-for-cover that became one of his definitive masterworks.

  Behind the scenes, Hitchcock now assembled a photographic unit that would anchor his films for years to come. Low-key, mild-mannered Robert Burks was a Warner Bros. cameraman in the Jack Cox tradition: a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an especially apt choice for a film destined to be Hitchcock’s most Germanic in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding.

  As his editor Hitchcock once again called upon William Ziegler, who had proven himself on Rope. The climactic carousel explosion was a particular marvel of miniatures and background projection, acting close-ups and other inserts, all of it seamlessly matched and blended under Ziegler’s eye.

  Dimitri Tiomkin, a favorite of the studios, was hired to compose another Hitchcock score (his first being Shadow of a Doubt). But the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin’s best; the two simply never developed much of a kinship. Scenes without any music (or with handpicked songs) were still a more personal sound track for Hitchcock, and surely it was the director’s idea to insert into the first fairgrounds scene the calliope number, “The Band Played On,” as Bruno and his victim ride wooden horses. (“But his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded / the poor girl would shake with alarm …”)

  As much as possible the studio wanted Hitchcock to use its own contract players. Ruth Roman was cast as Anne, Guy’s trusting fiancée; Hitchcock complained later that the bristling actress was foisted on him, that she lacked sex appeal. While he treated her scenes almost as filler (“Anne was always a bit of a stick,” Raymond Chandler complained after seeing the film, “but now she’s a piece of spaghetti”), the role of her father gained in importance, becoming a U.S. senator. A favorite actor from outside the studio, Leo G. Carroll in his fifth Hitchcock role, became, like Cedric Hardwicke in Rope, the film’s voice of decency. (Upbraiding his family for joking about the fairgrounds killing, he says of Guy’s murdered wife, “She was a human being.”)

  Warner’s liked Hitchcock’s bold idea for an actor to play Bruno. Robert Walker was the husband Jennifer Jones had left for David O. Selznick. After that humiliation, Walker suffered a series of breakdowns, and then, after a brief marriage to Barbara Ford (John Ford’s daughter), spent time in the Menninger Clinic for alcoholism. Walker was not quite a major star; film audiences knew him, characteristically, as an endearing boy-next-door type—including as Jones’s soldier boyfriend in Selznick’s tear-jerking Since You Went Away. But Hitchcock was aware of Walker’s tormented side, and he would revamp his image with his inspired countercasting.

  In contrast, the studio balked at Hitchcock’s choice for Guy. William Holden was a bitter dramatic actor, not yet a major star, fresh from playing a psychotic killer in The Dark Past. But hiring Holden would entail a complicated loan-out from Columbia and would tax the film’s budget. The studio countered with Farley Granger, whom Hitchcock had directed in Rope.

  The director got Walker; the studio got Granger—but Granger’s casting changed a key idea of Hitchcock’s. Bruno’s homosexuality is implied in the script, but there’s no question of Guy’s heterosexuality: he’s in the middle of a messy divorce and has a girlfriend. If Guy had been portrayed by a man’s man like William Holden, Hitchcock believed, Bruno’s attraction to him would really make Guy (and audiences) squirm. But as it was, the director had to accept an odd crisscross in the casting: a straight actor (Robert Walker) playing a homosexual, who comes on to a “super-straight” (to borrow Robert L. Carringer’s word) played by a homosexual (Granger).

  It added an unintended layer to Strangers on a Train that Hitchcock scholars are still trying to unravel—and on-screen Walker delivered a mesmerizing performance, overpowering Granger’s. His Bruno is on par with the best of the Hitchcock villains for pure creepiness.

  As for Granger, he did an earnest job in his role. Hitchcock could be unkind when reflecting on certain actors, and Granger was another he decided he didn’t especially care for—“too easygoing,” à la Joel McCrea. Unsurprisingly, Granger found the director “emotionally detached” during the filming, more interested in the effects than the performers. It was certainly true that Hitchcock had lost interest in Guy, who “should have been a much stronger man,” he was still insisting years later. “The stronger the man, the more frustrated he would have been in the situation.” He never forgot his preference for William Holden.

  If Strangers on a Train was Teutonic in its camera work, it was Russian in its montage wizardry. As with The Ring in 1927, Hitchcock ordered up a small amusement park, and the film’s first visit there—when Bruno strangles Guy’s wife, Miriam—had a tour de force moment, with the killing refracted through the victim’s eyeglasses, which have fallen to the ground. Hitchcock put as much effort and planning into that single shot as some directors put into entire films, and how it was done serves as a paradigm of his genius.

  Although he sometimes told stars the entire story of the film, other times he deliberately withheld information from actors; as with his writers, Hitchcock briefed actors on a need-to-know basis. Laura Elliott, the Paramount contract player hired to portray Miriam, was ordered to wear glasses so that she would resemble Anne’s bespectacled younger sister, Barbara. The glasses she was given were so thick “I literally could not see the blur of my hand passing in front of my eyes,” Elliott recalled. “If you can imagine this, all I could see was just a little bit out of the sides, on either side. And that was the pair Hitchcock wanted me to wear, because in reverse they made the eyes look very small—very ‘pig-eyed,’ as he called it. I did the entire film without being able to see. I could not see Farley Granger�
�s face when I looked at him. I could not see the merry-go-round when I was trying to jump on—I could not see! And Hitchcock insisted that I wear those glasses even in the long, long shots, out of doors.”

  For the strangulation scene, Hitchcock first shot the exteriors with the other actors; then one day Elliott was summoned alone to a large, bare soundstage for her part in the puzzle. “Hitchcock had this big, round, like two-and-a-half, three-foot diameter, concave-type mirror sitting on the concrete floor of the sound stage,” the actress recalled. “The camera was on one side, shooting down at the mirror, and Hitchcock said, ‘Now go to the other side of it and turn your back.’ I did, and my reflection was now in the mirror. He said, ‘Now, Laura, I want you to float to the floor. Float backwards to the floor.’ Like I was doing the limbo, bending backwards under a stick. He said, ‘Float to the floor,’ and I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Hitchcock.’

  “‘Okay, roll ‘em,’ he said, and I started learning back and back and back. But you can only get so far until, suddenly, THUNK—you drop two feet to this concrete floor! He’d say, ‘Cut! Laura … fllloat to the floor.’ [in a despairing voice] ‘Yes, Mr. Hitchcock.’ And we’d do it again and I’d get just-so-far, and go THUNK on the cement floor. Seven takes but on the seventh take, I literally floated all the way to the floor. And he said, ‘Cut. Next shot.’ ”

  What happened next was an ingenious feat of double printing, one Hitchcock boasted about to François Truffaut: the floating shot was photographed in a concave mirror, and then printed into the lenses of the girl’s glasses frames. It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years—and Robert Burks captured it magnificently. In the end, Strangers on a Train’s single Oscar nomination went to its director of photography.

  Strangers on a Train would be a film of stunning visual effects. Yet like other great Hitchcock films, it contained layers of subtle meaning at every level, from the script and the imagery to the actors themselves.

  One other actress who came from outside the Warner Bros. roster was none other than Pat Hitchcock, who played Anne’s younger sister, Barbara. The biggest, most devious of the roles Hitchcock’s daughter played in one of her father’s films, Barbara was presented as a cheerful crime aficionado. She is Guy’s biggest booster, and her physical resemblance to his dead wife is evoked in the flame of Guy’s lighter—one of Hitchcock’s throwaway flourishes. Indeed, Barbara resembles Miriam so closely that Bruno blacks out from shock after noticing her at the senator’s party, and then nearly asphyxiates a matron he is prankishly pretending to strangle. Later, Barbara is closely integrated into the climax, when she and her sister conspire to fool the gullible police and help Guy escape from the tennis stadium.

  Pat Hitchcock said in interviews that she had to audition for roles in her father’s films just like any other actress, and that he treated her like anyone else on the set. But it is inconceivable that Hitchcock didn’t invent Barbara, a character absent from the book, purely for Pat.

  And he did treat her like a daughter on the set. Studio publicity had fun with the father-daughter angle, cranking out a release saying that she was afraid of heights (like her father), and that one day the director dared his daughter to ride the Ferris wheel on the set. When Pat took him up on the dare he stopped the Ferris wheel with her at the top, leaving her dangling in total darkness for an hour, and only then, according to the publicity, Hitchcock allowed his “trembling daughter” to be lowered and released.

  This was good stuff for press agents paid to stir up thrills, and it has been repeated in other books to bolster the idea of Hitchcock’s sadism. But the Ferris wheel incident took “all of three minutes,” Pat has insisted tirelessly in interviews; far from being alone, she was flanked by the two actors who played Miriam’s friends; and afterward they all “had a good laugh about it.”

  Pat reveled in the Hitchcockian sense of humor, and indeed shared it. While she was growing up, she has said, her father would sneak in and paint a scary face on her as she slept, giving her a start when she woke up and looked in the mirror. The director’s daughter doubles the joke in a film full of mirrored meanings—acting like a kind of Greek chorus in Strangers on a Train, a constant reminder that behind the camera her father is chuckling.

  Filming on Strangers on a Train was completed by Christmas. The Hitchcocks booked a twenty-fifith anniversary return to St. Moritz, Switzerland, where they were joined by family friends, including Whitfield Cook. Hitchcock had lost a fair amount of weight—he was back down to 225 pounds—and insisted on squeezing into ski pants, which took “about half an hour,” Cook recalled. After which the director sat on the veranda and read, while his wife and Cook went skiing.

  Hitchcock, astonishingly, hadn’t had a bona fide vacation in more than ten years. His few studio contracts hadn’t included paid-vacation clauses; his efforts to build a name for himself in America had kept him busy—and his work ethic, his dedication to planning and making his films, also set him apart. Since moving to Hollywood in 1939, he had directed fourteen feature films, plus a handful of war propaganda films. In the 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock directed more films, for example, than either Howard Hawks or William Wyler.

  But the nonstop activity wasn’t healthy; it had begun to wear him down. Ever since finishing Stage Fright, friends and associates had been pleading with him to take some time off. Hitchcock wasn’t sure what film he would be directing next, anyway. The latest treatment of I Confess, by Paul Vincent Carroll, still missed the mark. Warner’s, pleased with Strangers on a Train, agreed to let him take a sabbatical during the first half of 1951.

  Pat had accepted a featured role in her third Broadway play, a murder mystery called The High Ground, set in a convent. The Hitchcocks leased John Houseman’s apartment on West Ninth Street in Greenwich Village for their daughter, and in between bouts of editing and postproduction on Strangers on a Train, they traveled back and forth between the coasts, visiting with Pat, and stealing long weekends in Santa Cruz when they could.

  The idea of an extended vacation outside the United States grew on him, and after Pat’s play closed (she liked to joke that she was “queen of the three-week run”), Hitchcock announced that the family was going to Europe for an “indefinite stay.” At the end of March they booked passage on the Italian line, shipping a car ahead to Naples. Alma did the driving to Capri and then Rome, where they stayed at the Hotel Excelsior.

  “We saw a great deal of Ingrid [Bergman],” Mrs. Hitchcock reported back in a letter. “The baby is just sweet! [Roberto] Rossellini was in Paris, thank goodness. Ingrid is very thin, almost gaunt. Smartly dressed, jewelry etc., so on first appearance she strikes you as being hard. She seemed very pleased to see us and once the first strain was over, it wasn’t so bad. She seems to talk incessantly and speaks Italian fluently.”

  From Rome the Hitchcocks drove to Florence, and then to Venice, where they rendezvoused with Broadway scenic designer Lem Ayers and his wife. North of Venice they made a sentimental stop at Lake Como, checking into the same Villa d’Este where they had stayed during the filming of The Pleasure Garden twenty-five years earlier. From Italy they headed to Innsbruck and Bavaria, taking a tour of Hitler’s residence, and then visiting Munich, where they were chastened to see the still-bombed-out places they remembered from 1925, when they had lived in the German city for months.

  In mid-April, after passing through Berlin, the Hitchcocks arrived in Paris, their favorite city in the world. The weather was gorgeous—though letters home suggest that, in spite of all his success, Hitchcock was still worrying about financial security. Alma, who held the purse strings, said they were “counting the pennies and really watching our step.”

  That is why Hitchcock quarreled with Sidney Bernstein in London, where they decamped after Paris. Because of substantial losses on Transatlantic’s first two films, Hitchcock had not been paid the final twenty-five thousand dollars he was owed for directing Rope. When Bernstein insisted that sacrifices were necessary, Hitchcock rep
lied that any sacrifices ought to be made by future agreement, without amending past agreements. He wanted the money on the spot, and in the end he extracted it; the situation was awkward for both of them.

  “Have spent most of the time in London looking for stories,” Hitchcock wrote his secretary in mid-May. “Some are possible but not certain.” Then it wasn’t until late May, after nearly two months abroad, that the Hitchcocks flew home—via Canada, where he got back into a working frame of mind by touring Montreal and Quebec City. Hitchcock later told interviewers that he chose Quebec City as the setting for I Confess because it was the only North American city where priests walked around out of doors in their cassocks. But Quebec was also a convenient substitute for the Paris he loved. The sprinkling of Gothic churches gave it an Old World quality that made it a cinematic natural. The Canadian Cooperation Project had launched an entente with Hollywood, and just recently Otto Preminger, for one, had journeyed there to shoot his film The 13th Letter.

  Once again the Hitchcocks’ car had been shipped ahead, and they drove down the Maine coast through Boston to New York City in time for the June premiere of Strangers on a Train. With this and other Warner Bros. films, the studio took full advantage of Hitchcock’s easy relationship with the press; displaying instincts inherited from her father, Pat Hitchcock also gave interviews, joining her father in a mini-publicity tour of the East Coast.

  Forever after, Hitchcock reflected that this two-month vacation in 1951 was one of the most sensible things he ever did—and in the years ahead, he made room annually for similar long vacations and world travel between films. As a parent, he also knew he would never again spend as much concerted time with Pat, for on the crossing to Italy their twenty-two-year-old daughter met and fell in love with a young man named Joseph E. O’Connell Jr.