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  “Hitchcock was preparing a picture at the time called Strangers on a Train. When I told him about it, he said, ‘If this is important to you, I’ll get it in some way. I’ll work out something.’

  “I thought he would throw it in on a table or something, but one of the thematic points in the entire movie was the lighter. Well, you’re talking to the guy who planted that thing. Hitchcock made a picture about a lighter, and he did it for me as a favor.

  “We had dinner one night, and he said, ‘Gary, you better do a good job on this one, because I put your damn lighter in there.’

  “After that, I was a very big man with the company, and they should have given me a few thousand dollars for it. I got a set of the lighter and a platter. It was worth $125, cost them $49.”

  HITCHCOCK WAS IMPRESSED by a novel he had just read, Strangers on a Train, by the then unknown Patricia Highsmith. Though anxious to buy the film rights, he instructed his representatives not to reveal the bidder. It had been his experience that not only would they have to pay an “unreasonable” sum, but that sometimes the agents might decide the property had such an exalted value that it would never be purchased at all. “Terrible,” he said. “Writers can be difficult, but their agents, worse.”

  Hitchcock selected mystery writer Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay. As with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity, Chandler was an incompatible collaborator. Though he was a fast worker, Chandler’s first draft didn’t please Hitchcock, and Ben Hecht was asked to work on it. Being unavailable, Hecht recommended his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, who completed the script after shooting had begun.

  Hitchcock originally had wanted William Holden for the part of Guy Haines, the professional tennis player who unwittingly becomes involved in a murder by a clever madman. Farley Granger won the part. For the insane Bruno Anthony, Hitchcock wanted Robert Walker, casting him against type. Pat Hitchcock was cast as Barbara, the younger sister of Ruth Roman, the tennis player’s love interest. Strangers was the beginning of cinematographer Robert Burks’s long association with Hitchcock.

  The runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses were added for the film. Chandler had ended his version of the screenplay with Bruno straitjacketed in an asylum. Hitchcock remembered a runaway merry-go-round in an English novel called The Moving Toy Shop. In the novel Strangers on a Train, Guy, who is an architect, leaves a book in Bruno’s train compartment, not a lighter.

  This novel was for Hitchcock a “delicious” example of the kinds of characters he liked: the charming villain and a mixture of shades of gray in the hero, not just black and white, and the exchange-of-murders concept delighted him. The finished film was one of his favorites.

  Farley Granger and I met for coffee and cake at the Petrossian Café in New York City after Strangers had played the night before on television. In 2003, except for his silver hair, he looked very much like Guy Haines in 1951, ready for a set of tennis. I asked him if, when he made that film, he had any idea people would be watching it a half century later on television?

  He laughed. “I didn’t even know how important television was going to be, and I certainly didn’t know I’d be here to watch it!”

  He described how he came to be in Strangers on a Train.

  “I got a phone call to go to Hitch’s house. I’d just come back from Europe. We sat out on the terrace of this wonderful little house he had for years and years and years. And he told me the whole story of Strangers.

  “His telling it was as good as seeing it, because he was a wonderful storyteller. He said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ and I said, ‘Of course I would.’ And he said, ‘All right.’

  “He’d cast Robert Walker in the part of the murderer. A very interesting idea. Walker had a lot of trouble at this time. Drunkenness and everything, because he really did love Jennifer Jones, and he’d lost her to [David] Selznick. I said, ‘Oh, I think that’s terrific. He’s just a wonderful, wonderful actor.’ Hitch said, ‘Yes. Wouldn’t it be interesting if something happened during the movie.’ I said, ‘Hitch, that’s terrible to say that,’ and he laughed. I think he meant a scandal.

  “Walker had always, up to that moment, played the boy next door in movies like The Clock, but Hitchcock cast him as evil, manipulative, a nut case. It started his career up again, you know.

  “The last time I saw Robert Walker was at somebody’s house. He said, ‘We’ve got to get together. You know, we haven’t seen each other for a long time.’ I said, ‘Sure, we will.’ And he died, and we never did.

  “Hitchcock had to take Ruth Roman because it was a Warner’s movie, and no one else in the cast was under contract to Warner’s. I thought she was good, but he didn’t like her much, and she didn’t go for him, because she felt he hadn’t wanted her.

  “He treated Pat [Hitchcock] as just one of the cast. And she behaved like that. They had evidently made a bargain, and they were totally professional.”

  “Were you really that good a tennis player?” I asked.

  “No, but I played. A lot of it is me. I was proud of that. As soon as I knew I was doing it, they set me up taking lessons, but I’d been playing tennis for quite a while at Charlie Chaplin’s house. So, I did know pretty well. Chaplin wanted people to come and play tennis, and I just got to know him and his wife Oona, who was the daughter of Eugene O’Neill.”

  “What was the most difficult scene for you?” I asked.

  “The merry-go-round.”

  Hitchcock told me that this was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films. The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. “If the man had raised his head even slightly,” Hitchcock said, “it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film.”

  “Hitchcock was a genius,” Granger continued. “You felt his mind always working under that calm exterior, which didn’t show any strain. The technical people loved and respected him. He not only understood what they were doing, he had conceived it and created the effects, and he could explain it to them, how to achieve more than they thought they could, like with actors. A thing I loved was if you went up on a line or something wasn’t right with what you did, he’d say, ‘Let’s do another one.’ I’d say, ‘Oh, damn it! I’m sorry, Hitch,’ and he’d say, ‘It’s only a moo-vie.’

  “I love that thing with our feet in the beginning, the contrast in the shoes we were wearing, and what it tells about us, and then how it’s our shoes that meet first. And Hitchcock making his cameo carrying a double bass fiddle. He could poke a little fun at himself.

  “Sometime at home, in front of guests, he’d say something terrible and outrageous. And Alma would say, ‘Oh, Hitchie! Oh, Hitchie!’

  “You know, when we were making this film, it was a thrill to work with the master, Hitchcock, and we thought the picture was really good, but we didn’t know it was going to be one of the greats, and that half a century later, we’d appreciate it more, those of us who are around to appreciate it. I look so young, and I’m proud of my performance.

  “Something that really impressed me was that he was so very formal and always wore a dark suit and tie, even when we were working outside on the tennis court, when it was nearly a hundred. Hitch never took off his jacket. He didn’t even loosen his tie. I took it as an act of respect for the film.

  “Hitch talked a lot with Robert Burks, the cinematographer. He seemed to think a lot of him.”

  This was the first of twelve films Burks would do for Hitchcock, the last of which would be Marnie. He missed Psycho because Hitchcock used his television crew.

  Granger continued: “I remember Hitchcock said to me one night when we were shooting that he was bored because he knew how the story ended. I took it straight when he said it to me, because I was really new to everything, but I think he was really worried about getting the picture up there on the screen as good as the one he’d seen in his head.

 
; “He had absolutely everything figured out and had this wonderful memory, so he never forgot anything. I wish I had his memory. Well, maybe not. Sometimes there are a few things you want to forget.

  “I don’t think I ever saw him get emotional so it showed, and some of the time he must have been frustrated. He seemed detached to some people, but I think he felt a great deal. He just had to keep this detachment, so he would always seem in perfect control. He was always very kind to me, and I liked him. Still do.

  “We never discussed any homoerotic attraction Walker’s character had for me, but I think Hitch did that with Walker, and he just wanted me to act kind of normal and not be aware of too much undercurrent. Of course, Hitch understood all of this, and he knew what he could do, and what we could do. He had a light touch. It was his way, and it worked because he got the best out of you.

  “I’m asked more about Strangers on a Train than any of my other films. Strangers has a wonderful aura. The darkness of it, and then the brightness of the tennis. It’s still so funny. I love it.”

  Tennis star Guy Haines (Farley Granger) meets a stranger on the Washington–to–New York train who offers to exchange murders. The stranger, Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), will kill Guy’s estranged wife if Guy will kill Bruno’s hated father. Guy doesn’t take Bruno seriously until his wife, Miriam (Laura Elliott), is found murdered in an amusement park.

  Guy becomes the chief suspect, which threatens his tennis career, his romantic involvement with a U.S. senator’s daughter, Anne Morton (Ruth Roman), his hopes for a political career, and even his life.

  When it becomes evident to Bruno that Guy isn’t going to kill his father, he tells Guy he intends to establish Guy’s guilt conclusively by planting his monogrammed cigarette lighter on the island where Miriam was murdered.

  With Anne’s help, Guy is able to stop Bruno after rushing through an important tennis match and racing to the amusement park, where Bruno is killed in a chase on a runaway merry-go-round.

  Bruno dies with the cigarette lighter in his hand, and Guy is cleared.

  The British Strangers on a Train lasted two minutes longer than the American. The ending on a train with a minister unsuccessfully trying to have a conversation with Guy and Anne was cut for American audiences as well as in some British prints.

  Hitchcock told me that the picture should have ended with Guy at the amusement park after he has been cleared of murdering his wife. He wanted the last line of the film to be Guy describing Bruno as “a very clever fellow.” This ending, however, was not acceptable for Warner Brothers.

  For the American ending, in which Anne and Barbara are waiting for Guy’s call, Hitchcock had an oversized telephone built and put in the foreground, to emphasize the importance of the call they were expecting, while enabling the cameraman to keep the foreground and background in focus.

  When the phone rings, Anne reaches for it and then answers a normal-sized phone. “I did that on one take,” Hitchcock explained, “by moving in on Anne so that the big phone went out of the frame as she reached for it. Then a grip put a normal-sized phone on the table, where she picked it up.”

  One of the most memorable images in a Hitchcock film is the reflection in Miriam’s fallen eyeglasses of Bruno strangling her.

  “This scene is studied by film classes,” Laura Elliott, who played Miriam, told me. “Bob Walker strangles me, and my glasses fall to the ground. To get the shot, the camera seems to shoot into the lens, and you see me floating down to the earth, Bob Walker standing up with his hands held out and his hat on and the leaves around him.

  “We shot that on an absolutely empty soundstage, and Robert Walker was not even there.

  “We shot the master in the exterior. Where he puts his hands around my throat, he was there, of course. Then the glasses fall off, I fall, and you cut to the shot on the soundstage. On the floor was a round, maybe three-foot-diameter kind of concave reflector, not a mirror, but a reflector, and the camera shot into that reflector.

  “Mr. Hitchcock said, ‘All right, Laura, now go stand with your back to the mirror,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I want you to float backwards, all the way to the floor.’

  “I looked at him. ‘You want me to float to the floor?’

  “‘You know,’ he said, ‘like you were doing the limbo.’

  “He said, ‘Okay, action,’ so I leaned back and back and back and back, and I get so far, I go rap! onto the cement floor. He would cut and say, ‘Laura—float to the floor,’

  “About the seventh take, I literally floated all the way down to the floor. Don’t ask me how. All he said was ‘Cut. Next shot.’ He didn’t say, ‘Oh, that was wonderful,’ or ‘That was good.’ It was just, ‘Cut. Next shot.’”

  Elliott, who enjoyed a long, successful career in films and on television, sometimes under her real name, Imogene or “Kasey” Rogers, recalled being cast as Miriam.

  “I was under contract to Paramount, which is why the name Laura Elliott. They always gave you a movie star name, and I thought it was lovely, so I did twenty-eight films as Laura Elliott, and one of them, a loan-out to Warner Brothers, was, of course, Strangers on a Train.

  “I remember there was another girl under contract to Paramount who three or four months before came in and said, ‘Oh, I just read the most wonderful role, and you’re perfect for it.’ I looked at her, and thought, she and I are so different. She’s a song-and-dance girl, I’m not, so I thought there’s certainly nothing there for me. Then my agent called and said go and audition for this role. I told him, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna be right for it,’ and he says, ‘You go anyway.’

  “I read this scene, and I thought, ‘This is just wonderful. I just love this.’ So I read with the casting director, he liked it, and he decided that I would test with six other girls. We all did the same scene in the music store there, same stage, same everything, same crew, and we had no direction. What we brought in is the way we interpreted the role. I had never met Mr. Hitchcock. I did the test, and I got chosen.

  “I was elated. I mean, I was thrilled to work with Hitchcock, and it was an unusual role, because usually I’d do the little ingenue thing. I guess he liked what he saw in the tests, because he didn’t change anything.

  “I met him after I had been told I would get the role. I remember, I dressed very conservatively. I think I had a gray suit on, and a little hat. We wore hats in those days.

  “He was very cordial, but he said, ‘Why do you dress so severely?’ because I had my hair pulled back.

  “He said, ‘I want you to get some glasses. I want you to wear glasses for this role. Just pick out any frame, anything you think would be fine.’ He told me where to go, the place where they make the glasses, and we got six pair of glasses. We had two pair that were so thick that I literally could not see my hand in front of my face. These are the ones I wore in the movie.

  “I could not see anything. So, when I’d look at Farley, I couldn’t see him. When I tried to ring up a cash register sale, I couldn’t see the cash register. To jump on the merry-go-round, I couldn’t see the merry-go-round. He said, ‘I want your eyes to look very little, pig-eyed, very small like little pigs.’

  “We got two big lenses, two medium lenses, and we got two with clear glass that supposedly I could wear in the long shots. But I never had them on. When we got out at night to do the merry-go-round, all this stuff, the exteriors, he had me wear the same thick glasses. I don’t know why. I was only twenty-something years old. I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Hitchcock, yes, Mr. Hitchcock.’

  “The next time you look at the film, you’ll notice when I come out of the little booth chasing Farley, I run after him yelling, into a big close-up. I had already counted my steps to where the counter was. Then I turned and had my hand on the counter and ran along yelling at him, and when I came to the end of the counter, I stopped because I knew I had hit my marks. I was in place for the close-up, and that’s where I yelled the last line, ‘You can’t throw me away like an old
shoe,’ or whatever.

  “When the two boys come to pick me up, you’ll notice all the time one’ll always hold his hand out, and I trip down the stairs. Then one will help me up to the bus. It works wonderfully. I couldn’t see the bus. I couldn’t see the merry-go-round, but I liked the challenge.

  “The traveling amusement park was one they brought to an exterior location. I think it was at Chatsworth Lake in the San Fernando Valley, but it’s drained now. It was a thirty- or forty-minute drive from the studio.

  “It was freezing cold out there. All the crew had on these big furry parkas, and as soon as they’d say ‘Cut,’ I’d say, ‘Give me my jacket!’

  “There are people who believe that you are the roles you play, that if you are playing a character who is bad, there must be bad in you.

  “When it was in release, I remember making a great charity type of tour. It was a busload of celebrities, and of course nobody knew the name Laura Elliott.

  “So I said to the guy who was producing it, ‘You know, I’m just currently out of Strangers on a Train. I played Miriam.’ He announced it next time, and the entire audience gasped and looked at me like, ‘Oh, you terrible person.’ And I loved it! Because I had convinced them. It’s fun to be a bitch. That’s a witch gone bad.

  “After I got excellent reviews from the Reporter and Variety, Paramount didn’t acknowledge anything, and they had me holding up color swatches for the camera crews to test color film.

  “Hitchcock was always ‘Mr. Hitchcock,’ and if you saw him on his television show, that was who he was. One of the things he did, I think, was he saw in an actor or actress the qualities he wanted for a specific role. He usually picked people who had done more than I had, you know. I was a newcomer. But he would see what he wanted and cast them, and just let them do their thing. I didn’t see him giving direction to Robert Walker or to Farley or to me. We just went into the scene, and he said, ‘Walk here,’ ‘Walk there,’ ‘Okay.’