Reading Patricia Highsmith’s novel Strangers on a Train in her recently published Selected Novels and Short Stories (W.W. Norton) is a double revelation. We can see how Alfred Hitchcock brilliantly transformed her story into a classic movie that actually moves and that Highsmith was no mere pulp crime novelist but a keen observer at the dark end of the human condition. Strangers on a Train is a case where the book was neither better nor worse than the movie. Both versions fully inhabited their medium, using the particular potential of literature and film to tell quite different stories populated by the same characters.
Hitchcock had to work around the strictures of the Hollywood Production Code, which limited what could be said on camera; literature was freer in those years, giving Highsmith the opportunity to more fully explore the depravity of her characters. Naturally, their internal musings are easy to display on the printed page while in film what’s key is showing the results. Hitchcock cast sympathetic leading man Farley Granger as Guy, made him the focus of the movie and changed his occupation from architect to tennis pro. Playing tennis is more cinematic than drawing blueprints. In the novel we spend much more time with the sociopath Bruno, the spoiled rich kid with a puppy dog’s persistence, an insight into psychology, a plan for the perfect murder and a perverse fondness for Guy.
The film is an edge of the seat thriller but the novel is an American Crime and Punishment, a study of moral responsibility, deceit, weakness, conscience and the rippling effect of hatred set on a psychological knife’s edge.
