Alfred Hitchcock (84 page)

Hitchcock had a stubborn faith in
I Confess.
Priests intrigued him; he found it amusing when the ones he met confessed their enjoyment for his sexiest, most violent films. The director had casual friendships with faculty members of the Catholic Marymount College (later Loyola Marymount), and a longtime friend in Father Thomas James Sullivan, whom Hitchcock met at the time of
The Paradine Case
, and then stayed in regular touch with for thirty years. Priests found Hitchcock a willing donor to Catholic charities, and although it became well known that he contributed a generous amount (twenty thousand dollars) to building a new chapel at his alma mater, St. Ignatius College, in 1962, less reported is the fact that several times the Hitchcocks were benefactors of new chapels and churches scattered around California.

I Confess
was steeped in Catholicism as well as Hitchcockery, and he
was reluctant to let go of either. He stubbornly refused to abandon the story’s most controversial elements: the illegitimate child whose existence the priest is unaware of; and the ending where the priest is hanged. Even though Bernstein supported whatever Hitchcock wanted to do, he also warned the director repeatedly that censorship in England as well as America would zero in on these, his pet ideas for
I Confess.

Showing himself fearless where writers were concerned, Hitchcock made a stab at hiring another renowned novelist with ambivalent views of the cinema. Graham Greene, a Catholic convert whose thrillers were often suffused with religious and political themes, rarely worked directly for film and loathed most of the screen adaptations of his fiction. A harsh critic of Hitchcock during his stint as a reviewer for the
Spectator
and
Night and Day
in the 1930s, Greene had denounced the director in his heyday for his “inferior sense of reality,” and more than once said that he vastly preferred the films of the “German Hitchcock”—Fritz Lang.

After Storm let Transatlantic down, Hitchcock thought of Greene, whose talent, prestige, and deep-dyed Catholicism might yet salvage
I Confess.
The director spoke directly to Greene’s agent; then Bernstein followed up with a formal offer, to which Greene replied that he didn’t write pictures for hire. “It is a resolution I made some years ago,” Greene wrote, “and I don’t want to break it, even for Hitchcock. Thank you very much, however, for asking me.”
^*

Shortly thereafter Hitchcock visited Samson Raphaelson in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and performed his bedtime-story routine, enthusiastically telling the writer the whole story of the film (thus far). Perhaps the writer of
Suspicion
, which had been hampered by the Production Code, might be tempted by another Hitchcock film full of opportunities for even more flagrant code breaking. When Raphaelson sniffed that
I Confess
wasn’t his type of material, the director went away cross, and stymied.

This was shortly after the East Coast previews of
Stage Fright.
It was on the train back to California that the director was reading a new book by a first-time author named Patricia Highsmith. He was accompanied by Mrs. Hitchcock and Whitfield Cook, who passed around the galleys. Highsmith’s story concerns two people who meet accidentally on a train. One is a psychopath who enunciates his theory of a perfect crime: swapping murders with a total stranger.

Turning the pages of the new book excitedly, the three Hitchcocks began to talk about how easily
Strangers on a Train
could be transformed
into another run-for-cover crime film, allowing for yet another postponement of
I Confess.
The screen rights wouldn’t be very expensive, for High-smith was still an unknown commodity—and the story would lend itself to being photographed in black and white, inside the studio on a modest budget, even without major stars.

What Hitchcock really coveted was the springboard situation: the crisscrossing of two passengers on a train, one with murder on his mind. Otherwise, he thought the rest of the story was pretty expendable. Even before the rights had been sewn up, then, as the three Hitchcocks crossed the country by train and talked among themselves, they began replotting the story for film. With Alma eschewing actual writing, Cook got the job of integrating the torrent of ideas into a coherent treatment.

The major changes to Highsmith’s story began with the two main characters. In the book, the strangers—Bruno and Guy—actually
do
swap murder victims. Bruno, the psychopathic instigator, slays Miriam (Guy’s estranged wife), and afterward hounds Guy into killing his father. Bruno later dies in a boating accident, while a guilt-ridden Guy is finally cornered by a dogged detective.

Highsmith’s Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic, but now the three Hitchcocks began to reimagine him as more of a Hitchcockian killer—dapper and charming, at least on the surface. The homoeroticism that Highsmith hinted at in Bruno’s idolization of Guy would be preserved. Just as he had with
Rope
, Hitchcock would make Bruno’s sexuality a fascinating subtext of the film, for anyone who cared to notice it (as long as that someone wasn’t a studio or censorship official). Whitfield Cook knew how to code the signals from his circle of friends, and in his hands the film’s Bruno became a dandy, a mama’s boy who speaks French, and who professes ignorance of women.

Guy really got the bigger makeover. In Highsmith’s novel Guy is an architect; but tennis was a sport Hitchcock had played and observed for years, and so for the film Guy became a top amateur tennis player with aspirations for political office. (Bruno has avidly followed his athletic career and rocky love life in the newspapers.) To head off the censors, Guy became a decent guy who
refuses
to carry out his part of the crazed bargain, killing Bruno’s father.
^*

But there was also a subtext to Guy, hinted at in the film’s relocating of key action to Washington, D.C. The politically left-leaning Cook was the second writer drafted by Hitchcock expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters. Cook used Guy to make the film a parable “quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America,” in
the words of film scholar Robert L. Carringer. That hysteria was targeting homosexuals along with Communists as enemies of the state. Concurrent with the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ ongoing probe of Communists in Hollywood, and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on Soviet moles in the State Department, the U.S. Senate was busy investigating the suspicion that “moral perverts” in the government were also undermining national security—going so far as to commission a study, “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.”

In his analysis of
Strangers on a Train
, Carringer persuasively argues that the film was crucially shaped in part by these Cold War events. The very blandness and decency of Guy, wrote Carringer, made the character a stand-in for victims of the antihomosexual climate. “To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype,” Carringer writes, “an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed.” Guy is “a man of indeterminate sexual identity found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised.” Guy’s decency also sets him up for Bruno’s revenge, which becomes the excuse for Hitchcock’s spectacular crosscutting between the two sequences he had in mind to climax the film.

Besides Washington, D.C., which isn’t in the book, Hitchcock envisioned other settings different from the Highsmith book. The novel had long sections set in the Southwest and Florida, but Hitchcock planned to stick to the corridor of East Coast cities linked by rail, which figure only fleetingly in the novel. One of Highsmith’s settings, however, was a Connecticut amusement park, and Hitchcock homed in on that favorite locale—changing the particulars for Bruno’s fairgrounds murder of Miriam, and then staging Bruno’s return to the fairgrounds as the film’s crescendo.

These changes and new ideas first coalesced in the treatment Cook began to work up on the train—“not a treatment exactly,” in the words of Czenzi Ormonde, the final scriptwriter of
Strangers on a Train
, but something “called a ‘step line’ and it was in great detail.”

On this run-for-cover project, Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio. Already on this auspicious train trip, pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain. He moved quickly in sewing up the rights for a pittance, and in getting the go-ahead from Warner Bros. to substitute
Strangers on a Train
for
I Confess.
To a studio still concerned about the director’s preoccupation with Catholic priests and capital punishment, the Highsmith novel looked like a return to a more familiar, more comfortable brand of Hitchcock suspense.

While Hitchcock developed
Strangers on a Train
, Sidney Bernstein could further develop
I Confess.
In London, the Transatlantic producer engaged Paul Vincent Carroll—a cofounder, along with James Bridie, of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre—for another treatment of the wrong-priest story.

After finishing his treatment, Whitfield Cook moved back east to concentrate on novels, and once again Hitchcock went shopping for a writer—a name author, like Steinbeck or Thornton Wilder, who could lend prestige to the film. Like first-rank actors, however, prestigious writers turned Hitchcock down more than once in America. Weeks turned into months as Cook’s treatment for
Strangers on a Train
circulated around Hollywood. A host of writers dismissed Hitchcock’s distasteful little drama. “Eight writers turned me down,” Hitchcock told Charles Thomas Samuels. “None of them thought it was any good,” he told Truffaut.

One of these was the hard-boiled novelist Dashiell Hammett. By midsummer, though, Raymond Chandler, second only to Hammett in the pantheon of American crime fiction, had surfaced as an alternative. Chandler lived in nearby La Jolla, and occasionally dabbled in film: the script he had recently cowritten for Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity
had even been nominated for an Oscar. Approached through his agent, Ray Stark, Chandler read the Highsmith novel and the Whitfield Cook treatment, and agreed to take the assignment, though privately he sided with the other notables who had deemed it “a silly enough story.” But Chandler would do it partly for the money and “partly because I thought I might like Hitchcock, which I do.”

Chary of Hollywood, Chandler refused to drive to Burbank for meetings at Warner Bros., but that didn’t seem to bother Hitchcock. Starting in early August, he and Barbara Keon—late of Selznick International, now working as Hitchcock’s associate producer—made several limousine trips to the house in La Jolla, where Chandler was living with his semi-invalid wife.

Chandler avoided studio appointments largely because he distrusted lengthy discussion about scripts. As much as Hitchcock enjoyed talking and socializing, Chandler preferred to get down to the writing. At first appreciative of the director (“a very considerate and polite man”), he soon grew tired of their meetings, which were like the tennis matches in the film—full of fast and furious volleys. “Every time you get set,” Chandler wrote to one intimate, “he jabs you off balance by wanting to do a love scene on top of the Jefferson Memorial or something like that.”

Surprise of surprises, Chandler proved one of those dread “plausibles” who wanted all the film’s characters to have motivations, and every plot twist an airtight explanation. He wanted to spell things out with
words
, rather than leave any of the writing to the camera. He was underwhelmed by Hitchcock’s digressions—his anecdotes about
Champagne
, for example, which were intended to convey his visual philosophy, but which were Greek to Chandler.

Hitchcock was too ready “to sacrifice dramatic logic (insofar as it exists) for the sake of a camera effect,” Chandler griped in one letter. He preferred a man “who realizes that what is said and how it is said is more important than shooting it upside down through a glass of champagne.”

The trips to La Jolla yielded diminishing returns. The personal chemistry between the two men evaporated, and Chandler’s behavior turned odd and belligerent. All Chandler wanted to do, it seemed, was debate what Hitchcock had decided must be done. The crime novelist argued that Highsmith’s original story was superior to Hitchcock’s version, and kept trying to restore the book. The tension was heightened by the fact that Chandler drank heavily, and spent some of their meetings either tippling or fighting off a hangover. That kind of unprofessionalism irked Hitchcock. But he couldn’t fire Chandler—who had a firm contract—without alarming Warner’s.

Hitchcock decided to make one last trip to La Jolla, but resolved to avoid an argument with Chandler if the author’s obnoxious attitude persisted. Upon arrival, the director sat down in his usual chair, taking his usual posture. Chandler, in his cups that day, began a scathing rant about why Hitchcock should stick to the book and forget all of his devious plot and camera tricks. The director let him go on … and on. Barbara Keon had to speak up during the silences, when it became embarrassingly clear that Hitchcock wasn’t going to utter a word.