Cinema
Strangers on a Train (PG, selected cinemas)
Starring Hitchcock
Mark Steyn
In her first novel, Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith wrote: But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, and one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it ... Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it ... There was that duality permeating nature ... Two people in each person. There's also a person exactly the opposite of you, like the unseen part of you, somewhere in the world, and he waits in ambush. At the time, Miss Highsmith had never met Alfred Hitchcock. Even when she sold the film rights, she had no idea until after- wards that it was Hitch who'd bought them — for a paltry $7,500. But she managed nonetheless to articulate the abiding theme of his oeuvre. In Strangers on a Train, reis- sued next week to mark this month's Hitch- cock centenary, opposites attract to fatal effect, when an accomplished young tennis player and an alcoholic psychotic playboy meet in the club car and wind up jokingly discussing committing murder for each other. In this film, opposites are always close by: on the one hand, the broad day- light and open spaces of the tennis court; on the other, the dark shadows and sudden brutalities of the fairground. But you could say the same of Psycho and what Hitchcock called the film's 'basic geometry' — the bisecting horizontals and verticals estab- lished by the construction crane on the Phoenix skyline, and carried through from the prone Janet Leigh and upright John Gavin in the opening bedroom scene to the horizontal Bates Motel and the vertical Victorian house looming above it. And Hitchcock himself understood all too well the idea of 'two people in each person'. `He could be two different men,' said Tippi Hedren, his leading lady in The Birds. 'He was a meticulous and sensitive director who gave so much to each scene and who got so much emotion into it — and he was a man who would do anything to get a reaction from me.' He was an intelligent man of great psychological insights, but what he really liked to do was make crude, scatalogical cracks to his leading ladies just before the camera rolled. He was one of Hollywood's few true artists, but he did such a superb job of playing the town clown that they didn't realise.
One hundred years after his birth in Ley- tonstone, Hitchcock's position seems more 'We bought it abroad while on holiday — it was a lot cheaper there.' assured than ever. Even the unique tribute of last year's shot-for-shot remake of Psy- cho had been prefigured by the remakes of 1950s episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock TV series: they junked the old squaresville black-and-white actors, re-shot them with hip full-colour casts, replaced everybody . . . except Hitchcock, whose arch 30-year old intros were left as is.
Whether on-screen (as in the TV show) or off- (as in the movies), he was the star. Steven Spielberg is a big-time movie direc- tor, but he's never going to fascinate us the way Hitchcock does. What's really going on behind the deadpan stare and the mono- tone voice? The director himself under- stood the power of his persona and alluded to it in one of his best TV episodes, based on A.E.W Mason's 'The Crystal Trench'. This is a short story about a man frozen in a glacier and the wife who waits for years for a thaw to free him. In his direction, Hitchcock showed little interest in the woman and the complexities of her emo- tions. Instead, he focused on the blank stare of the husband, who looks out of the ice in bland contentment, even though he's actually frozen in guilt: he's clutching a tell- tale locket which proves he's cheating on his wife. Hitchcock was offering a sly hint of emotional autobiography. The expres- sionless face of the husband mimicked the director's own on-camera identity, while the theme of furtive passion had its echoes in his own life: he was happily married to his wife Alma for decades — well, more `happily' than most Hollywood folk — but he had unconsummated yearnings for almost all his most famous leading ladies. 'The Crystal Trench' is an exquisite minia- ture of Hitchcock's art and makes you appreciate that one of the reasons his char- acters are more rounded than most movies' is because he put so much time and effort into creating his own rounded character. In the end, we know very little about what's behind the expressionless gaze.
When the American Film Institute brought together all his great stars to salute him a year before his death in 1980, he sat at the table of honour with a look as blank as the guy in the glacier's. In his speech, he re-told the same anecdote he'd selected decades earlier to sum up his East End childhood: as a six-year-old boy he'd gotten into some mischief, which his father thought sufficiently serious that he sent him along to the local police station with an explanatory note; the constable read it and then locked him in a cell for five min- utes saying, 'This is what we do to naughty boys.' To you young people,' concluded Hitchcock, 'my message is: stay out of jail' No proof exists that the incident ever occurred: it doesn't sound much like a British police station. But Hitchcock was doing what all immigrants do — picking and choosing what to take with him and what excess baggage to leave in the old country. In so doing, he created one of the all-time great movie characters — himself.
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