Behind the Scenes: Strangers on a Train (Hitchcock, 1951) with Farley Granger and Robert Walker

Strangers on a Train is one of Hitchcock's great films. It isn't as well known as some of the later films, but it begins a run of great Hitchcock films. He seems particularly engaged in this film. Everything, all the juices are flowing. He clearly relished this story right from the beginning when he sets up the two strangers with the two very different pairs of shoes coming toward the train, getting on the train and going to the dining car. And in that entire sequence, he sets up without ever seeing their faces. He sets up two very different kinds of characters. And then the accidental meeting when one shoe hits the other. That's just classic Hitchcock. And one of those great, memorable, cute meets. Only it's not even cute, as it turns out. Highsmith is the mistress of suspense, and Hitchcock is the master of suspense. So in a way, they are perfectly matched. They were both attracted to a dark subject matter, the fact that irrationality, perverseness, and strangeness, and the desire to commit crimes are in everybody, in normal people. And it goes back to Highsmith's idea that walking down the street, you can see a sadist and a murderer. And also this common ground of exploring the concept of guilt, which goes through both of their works. The idea that some people are guilty for nothing, and some people are terribly guilty for things that they do. Exploring those kind of ideas of duality, split identity, perverseness, all very fashionable concepts now, but both Hitchcock and Highsmith were exploring them 50 years ago. When he started shooting at Warner Brothers, it was the first picture that he was actually making at Warner Brothers, under his new contract, he told everyone on the set, this is my real first film. This is the real beginning of my American career. But what he meant, I think, was that now he had found a subject that absolutely delighted him, and this novel about two men who exchange murders. They meet on a train, they have no connection with each other, but each of them has someone he wants to get rid of, an inconvenient wife, an inconvenient father. In the book, Guy actually goes on and commits the murder, he kills Bruno's father, which is the whole point of the novel, the fact that a good person can be corrupted. In the film, as we know, Guy doesn't commit the crime, and there's much more of a sense of a Hollywood closure, the kind of moralistic ending. It's an extraordinary film on many, many levels. It has a number of different themes that are typical of Hitchcock, and that Hitchcock, you could say, was obsessed with. Not the least of which is the kind of the wrong man or the transference of guilt. It's a rather typically Hitchcockian situation in which both the heavy and the hero are profoundly mixed up. Strangers on a Train obviously takes place on a train. Some of the Hitchcock had used trains before Lady Vanishes comes to mind, North by Northwest, Lady. A train is a great place to have something happening because it's an enclosed space and it's moving, so you can't get off it, so it creates a kind of drama within itself. You could say a train is a kind of a metaphor for life, you know, you're enclosed and you're hurtling somewhere. Yeah, trains were a big item for Hitchcock. You know, he was so interesting. For example, he kept on his desk the European train schedule, and he would plan imaginary journeys. You know, he would plan these sort of intricate trips, sort of like the way you plan movies, you know, shot by shot. But the real thing about that movie, I think, is the absolute greatness of Robert Walker's performance. What I remember about Dad during this period was he'd come home from work in his gray suit, and the first thing he would have would be a highball. I still don't know what a highball is, but it was in a tall glass. And he'd sit down on the couch and cross his legs, and that was his, you know, the end of his day. And we'd chat a little, and sometimes he'd read to me from The Little Prince, and we'd have dinner, and I'd watch Hopalong Cassidy. He never played villains, until he did a Western called Vengeance Valley with Burt Lancaster just before Strangers on a Train, where he played a really kind of evil brother. And he made such a good villain in Strangers on a Train. But he's not somebody the public had ever seen before. I was 8 years old, and I know Dad was supposed to be the bad guy in this movie. I couldn't quite get my mind around that, because Dad was always the good guy, you know. But when I saw the movie, he was my favorite character in it. I mean, I was rooting for him, not because he was my dad, but because he was just such a bad guy, such a great, charming bad guy. The weakness, the implicit weakness, of Farley Granger in the role plays perfectly off of the obsessive drive of Bruno to work this thing out. And I think he's a perfect foil for Bruno. I mean, he's a handsome man, but there is a slight air of weakness about him. The studio called me and said, Hitchcock wants to see you, you know, go out to his house. So I went out to the Bellagio Drive. He invited me out on the terrace, and he said, sit down, I'm drinking. He said, I want to tell you a story. And he told me Strangers on a Train. And he said, do you like it? And I said, oh my God, it's terrific. And he said, well, you know, start working Monday in Washington, D.C. And I said, oh, that's sensational. But who's going to play Bruno? And he said, Robert Walker. And I said, Walker? Oh, that's so interesting. My father had, I don't know whether it was a good luck charm or what, of making an appearance in every movie. And I think it all started in England when they would do crowd scenes, and everybody on the set would have to be in the crowd scene. Well, on Strangers on a Train, we thought it would be fun if I would direct him, which took exactly three minutes, because all he had to do was walk up carrying a cello onto a train. And we did it, and that was it. Again, this is another movie with great character people. Leo G. Carroll and Marion Lorne, who went on to have a great success on television, in the Mr. P. Goose television series, and Pat Hitchcock again, Laura Elliott, who played Miriam, who gets killed in it. Just a wonderful, wonderful supporting cast. And their parts aren't large. They're very small parts, those character people, but they're so vivid, and you remember them so distinctly. I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and I was going to stay in London, or in England, and go into repertory theater. But then my father said to me that there was a really good part in his next movie, and that was Strangers on a Train. It was what I would call basically comic relief in the middle of all the trauma that's going on. And I think one of the nicest things was working with Leo G. Carroll, who played my father. And that was just a lot of fun. We enjoyed that. My mom's character on Strangers on a Train, I enjoy watching because there is a little bit of her in that character, where she will speak her mind. She has the fun to her, she has the wit, and is really not afraid to say whatever she feels she needs to say, which reminds us a lot of her still to this day. My memories of Ruth Roman, I got on very well with her. We became very good friends, and we used to go down to Palm Springs on weekends. And I had a great time with her, and I'd known Folly Granger for years and years and years. Marion Lorne gives a great performance as Bruno's mother. It's one of the great, great movie performances of him. You can sort of see where he comes from when you meet her completely daffy mother. Hitchcock loved to subvert the idea of mom and apple pie. Hitchcock never plays a middle-aged woman as anything but a monster. And this is perhaps, in a way, the most monstrous of them, because she's as crazy as Bruno. I feel that people like that who are truly psychopaths often do have a very strong relationship with their mother. And the reason why mothers are so responsible for this very often is because they won't let go. I mean, could anything have moved her away from her son? Could you tell her anything that would have made a difference? Those are all great things that are so uniquely Hitchcock that are not showing off as much as they really add to the effectiveness and the off-kilter feeling of the story. My very favorite part of the movie, I think, was when the first time you see him in the amusement park and all that foreplay before he murders her. And when he comes to the strongman machine, you know, and looks at his hands, and there's some power there, and he takes the sledgehammer and whacks it. You just got this sense of foreboding. You knew this was going to happen, but you didn't know exactly how. But you knew what would happen, because he was too insanely intent on what he was about. You got right away that this man, after he popped that little kid's balloon, he just knew that he was capable of anything. And that one line of dialogue, he was able to communicate that, that charm and that murderous intent. They were doing the merry-go-round sequence in the amusement park, and I wasn't in any of that, but my mother and I went out to visit them. And so my father said to me, joking, how much money would you want to go up in the Ferris wheel? And I said, well, I wouldn't go up, because I'm scared of heights. And he said, no, seriously, how much money do you want? I said, well, I'd want $100. So the two boys who were with Lorelli in the scene went up with me. They stopped at the top. They turned off the lights for, I would say, five seconds at the outside. I came down. The sadistic part of the whole thing was I never got the $100. And that was the story of the Ferris wheel. The main attraction for me of Strangers on a Train was when Bruno murders the girl with the glasses, and they get knocked off. It was brilliance that didn't get in the way of the feeling of the movie. And I felt like Hitchcock often did that. He would go out of his way to do it differently, and you would know it was being done differently, but it didn't bother you. I hate directors who are on the screen when they're shooting a movie. I can't stand a movie where I know the director's giving direction. And I never have felt that with Hitchcock. You could say Robert Walker is one of the first stalkers in movies. It was a term that hadn't come into use in those days. But there he is everywhere Bonnie Granger goes, reminding him that he owes him something. He owes him his freedom. I thought the sequence where he's discussing murder and murderers with the two elderly ladies, and then he puts his hands around one's neck in order to demonstrate something, and then loses control and starts killing. I thought that that sequence was one of the best sequences I've ever seen anywhere in any movie. It was just so brilliantly constructed. It was like the worst murder serial killer in the world is sitting in my house telling my wife about murderers, and he puts his hands around her neck and starts to kill her. So it seemed to me that his passing out as a result of what he was doing, that this other Bruno had taken control of him, was the redeeming scene for the character. It just thrilled me. I don't know how else to put it. The movie is so full of those things, those moments that you don't expect. I remember Hitchcock saying to me that it was the one sequence as a director that absolutely befuddled him. He had tons and tons of footage of this tennis match, and cutting it, getting it into a shapely order for his film drove him crazy because Hitchcock was a guy who really liked to storyboard every shot and used to say, well, I don't even like going out and shooting a movie. I've already shot it in my head, and I've already drawn it out on storyboards and all that stuff, so shooting it is almost an irrelevancy to me. He said, I just want people to appear in the shot where I've imagined that they should appear, and I don't want them to argue with me. I mean, I think Hitchcock really thought that once you get on the set or on the location, the only thing that can happen to you is something bad. You know, somebody's going to upset his calculations. Part of the ambiguity and subversiveness of Hitchcock's movies is that he plays with the audience's emotions. Somebody who's thwarted in their desires and is trying to break through is something Hitchcock knows the movie audience will relate with and will usually root for them, even if they're wrong, as is clear in that sequence with the lighter. You know, you cannot help but put yourself in his place. That's me, and I've got to get that lighter. That's a great Hitchcockian moment because it brings Bruno with all his grandiose plans for the perfect crime down to some kind of very primitive, basic human level. And honestly, I guess you could say that the things that are likely to screw up the perfect crime or the maybe-not-perfect-but-nearly-perfect crime, they're always going to be some kind of little human moment, you know, that prevents the perfect crime from being perfect, and I think that's a great example of that. The ending of Strangers with this merry-go-round out of control was designed by Hitchcock, who had an excellent sketch artist, storyboard artist, working with him for the first time on that film, and mentor Huebner. Hitch told me that one of the few times he was ever really terrified on the shoot was the shot of the little man crawling under the carousel while it's out of control, that that was real. And Hitch said, you know, my palms sweat when I didn't think about it, But he did. We did it on the stage, you know, and we had a process screen behind us and a wind machine going and, you know, all kinds of things happening to make it look real and make it work, and it did. It's a satisfying conclusion, which Hitchcock only came up with at the 9th hour because it enabled him to show Bruno dying, never giving up on his intention to incriminate Guy, not saying it was me all along, and then the hand opening in death in the lighter. The music score of a film was extremely important to Alfred Hitchcock. He almost heard it before it was written, and I think when he worked with the composers, he was very, very respectful because they had a language that he didn't know. He couldn't read music. But they had to convince him in some way that what they were going to do would be right, and you know how he reacts if it isn't right. Out goes the score. So his work with Tiamkin was wonderful, I thought, because Tiamkin had written many, many wonderful scores and would continue to. Dimitri's music for Strangers on a Train was definitely one of his finer scores because of the variety. Hitchcock had asked Dimitri to use popular songs for the merry-go-round scene, which he felt would contrast with the sinister and very dark subject that was actually portrayed on the picture. Tiamkin was one of the top composers in Hollywood, and Hitch's feeling was, by the time you get to sit in his office and talk with him, you know what you're doing, so I'll trust you, which was a wonderful, wonderful way for a director to be. We don't have that anymore. This is the beginning of a long collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Birks. Almost all of the great American Hitchcock films were shot by Robert Birks, and they developed a language and a look together which just got more extraordinary in each successive film. Robert Birks was nominated for Strangers on a Train, but I think, to me, the big disappointment was that Hitchcock was not and should have been, but I think the biggest disappointment to me is that Robert Walker wasn't nominated because he could have actually been nominated in the Best Actor or Supporting Actor category for that performance. I mean, they could have snuck him in as Supporting Actor, and he was sensational, and he was never nominated for an Academy Award and died that year. As I said, he had a problem with alcohol, although he never imposed it on us. You know, we never saw him. And I guess one night, my brother and I were having a sleepover at some friend's house, and I remember saying goodbye to Dad. He was in bed. He wasn't feeling all that well. I'm saying goodbye to him, and see you tomorrow. And apparently that night, he tied one on and got a little out of control. I'm not sure how, but our nurse called in his psychiatrist to come. You know, she needed some help because he just was out of control. And so the psychiatrist came and gave him an injection, I think, of something. They didn't know in those days you don't give a serious depressant to somebody who's dead drunk, and it just shut down his system. And they called in the fire department, and they tried to resuscitate him, and they couldn't. He just stopped breathing. I think I'm very fortunate that I had a father who did work that if he were alive today, I know he would be proud of, but that I am proud of for him. That's a gift.