The Making of Hitchcock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train by Stephen Rebello, Running Press 2025
Scott Sublett
Back when I taught film history to undergrads I touted Strangers on a Train as “the best Hitchcock movie you’ve never seen.” It is not his best film (for reasons we’ll get into later) but good luck deciding which one is. He made over 50, and everyone has a darling. Vertigo? Psycho? North by Northwest? The Birds? I like Rear Window because it’s secretly about masturbation, and what could be more cinematic, while Hitchcock’s personal favorite was Shadow of a Doubt, perhaps because it came out closest to the vision in his head. But Strangers is very worth examining as not just one of his best but furthermore for holding the distinction of being the project that broke a streak of artistic and commercial misfires in the late 1940s, thus inaugurating Hitchcock’s Golden Decade: the 1950s. What’s more, Strangers has perhaps more masterful suspense “set pieces” than any of the others with the possible exceptions of North by Northwest and Psycho.
By suspense “set pieces” one means those exciting sequences of suspense that live most vividly in the memories of moviegoers: The crows attacking the schoolhouse in The Birds. Cary Grant and the crop duster. Janet Leigh takes a shower. These suspense set pieces have more than one might imagine in common with the production numbers in the Golden Age MGM musicals or the extended comic bits in Chaplin like the dancing dinner rolls, and it’s this: as much as they seem to stand apart and on their own as discrete and even independent artistic entities, small works of art in and of themselves, they also must be fully integrated into the story that contains them. They must stand out from the narrative, yet not interrupt it. Not only must they be led into, and out of, smoothly—they must pull their narrative weight by forwarding plot and character like any other scene. It isn’t as easy as it looks.
And if you look closely, it doesn’t look easy. In his new book Criss-Cross: The Making of Hitchcock’s Dazzling, Subversive Masterpiece Strangers on a Train, film historian Stephen Rebello delves deeply into the construction of some of the film’s most masterful sequences: the retrieval of the lost cigarette lighter dropped down a storm grate; the climactic battle on an out-of-control merry-go-round; the murder at the amusement park; the mock strangulation of a society lady at a swanky Washington party; the fiercely fought tennis match; and the scene of the hero breaking into a mansion to—we think—commit murder, if only he can get past that growling Great Dane. Rebello’s analyses of these sequences are admirably meticulous, including panels from Hitchcock’s storyboards, but the most delicious pages in this consistently enjoyable and surprising book are those devoted to pre-production. Hitchcock famously walked onto the set with the whole film more or less finished in his mind, and amid the quotidian task of actual filming the Master of Suspense was known, occasionally, to doze off.
Rebello quotes Hitchcock as saying that, “To make a great film you need three things: the script, the script and the script.” While Hitchcock had a genius for story construction, he still needed writers and they had to be paid. Studio head Jack Warner was a brilliant, cruel and imperious narcissist whose studio (which he would more or less steal from the other Warner brothers a few years later), had churned out an incredible string of great movies in the ‘30s and ‘40s, with stars like Bogart and Bette Davis. Now, however, the industry was struggling with the advent of TV and the anti-trust Supreme Court decision that stripped it of its moviehouses. Budgets were lower, the stakes here higher.
Warner insisted Hitchcock choose a writer with a promotable name (this was a long time ago, when the names of littérateurs still mattered to the general public). Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Clifford Odets and numerous other luminaries turned down some very good money. Raymond Chandler said “yes.” In years to come, people seeing the renowned writer of private detective fiction topping the Strangers on a Train writing credits have assumed he contributed much to the film’s greatness, but assumptions like that are dangerous to make. Given the collaborative tangle that is feature filmmaking it’s usually almost impossible to parse credit for any given element in a finished film, and if an idea turns out to have been any good people seem always to remember very clearly that it was theirs.
Rebello reports that Chandler wrote his draft with little interference, and that Hitchcock hated it—at one point literally holding his nose as he dropped Chandler’s manuscript into a wastebasket. This was not done in Chandler’s presence. Hitchcock was too much of a wimp for that. Chandler considered Hitchcock the problem and Rebello quotes the novelist writing to Jack Warner that Hitchcock was “always ready to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect or mood effect.” That isn’t quite right—Hitchcock simply understood that deftly eliding pesky, inconvenient facts could maximize audience delight. There are things the audience doesn’t want explained. Moreover, when it came to dramatic logic, Chandler wasn’t always pure as the driven snow: he once admitted he didn’t know who committed one of the murders in The Big Sleep. Was Chandler a better screenwriter than Hitchcock thought? Hard to say, but Rebello tells us that Hitchcock wasn’t the only pantheon director Chandler alienated. Billy Wilder, who worked with the novelist on “Double Indemnity,” and hated Chandler even more than did Hitch did, branded him a “dilettante,” and recalled, “He was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence. ‘There is nothing as empty as an empty swimming pool.’ That is a great line. It sure is. Now go try to film it.” Then again, Chandler got a 1946 Academy Award nomination for The Blue Dahlia, an original screenplay for an Alan Ladd picture that he wrote solo and finished under doctor’s supervision, the doctor being literally present to limit his drinking.
Rebello’s forensics into the development of the script indicate that from the original literary source material, Patricia Highsmith’s novel, the main thing Hitchcock felt he got was the premise of two men meeting by chance on a train and trading murders. Hitchcock family friend writer-novelist Whitfield Cook wrote the first “treatment” that gave the film its overall shape. Then came Chandler, then came Czenzi Ormonde, a young woman who was a protégée of legendary screenwriter-playwright Ben Hecht, who was too busy for the assignment. She, with input from Hitchcock, Hitchcock’s longtime production assistant and screenwriter Barbara Keon, and Hitchcock’s most important collaborator his wife Alma Reville, wrote the final draft. Hitchcock and Ormonde were offended by Chandler’s screen credit but couldn’t do anything about it. According to Rebello, key elements were indeed contributed by Chandler, but the vivid characterizations and brilliant dialogue expected from Chandler were not forthcoming. In the end the script got written and it was good.
In years to come, Hitchcock would say that casting was what kept Strangers on a Train from being his best work. He desperately wanted Montgomery Clift for the psychotic killer Bruno, but secretly gay Clift might have been scared off by the film’s homoerotic subtext. Rebello reports that Hitchcock briefly considered testing a hot new star named Marlon Brando for the role, but scheduling difficulties interfered, and he ended up casting against type: Robert Walker, who specialized in playing sensitive, earnest, All-American boys. Walker’s creepy Bruno was widely considered the best performance in the film but the troubled young actor would die of an overdose soon after the film’s release. He had never gotten over producer David O. Selznick stealing his wife Jennifer Jones and rubbing his face in it. For Guy Haines, the wholesome tennis player caught in Bruno’s web, Hitchcock courted William Holden, who said no, so he cast Farley Granger, a dreamboat idol of the bobbysoxers who had previously appeared in Hitchcock’s Rope.
Hitchcock’s biggest casting disappointment was his leading lady. Jack Warner foisted Ruth Roman on Hitchcock because she was a contract player and he was paying her anyway. Earthy and sensual, Roman is the least Hitchcockian heroine in the director’s oeuvre: a convincing actress and a compellingly sexy presence, but lacking the serene, haughty unattainability we associate with a Hitchcockian love object. The part called for an uptown golden girl—aspirational, out of reach. Roman seemed, well, available. Hitchcock wanted instead an unknown actress from TV and the theatre—Grace Kelly, who would later star in several of Hitchcock’s greatest films and wind up as Her Serene Highness The Princess of Monaco. Warner said no.
In the end, Strangers on a Train was a great work of cinema and a middling box office success. Hitchcock lived to fight another day. Still, what one would pay to see the Strangers on a Train starring Montgomery Clift, William Holden, and Grace Kelly—and who knows, perhaps artificial intelligence will one day make it for us.
