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By Hitchcock out of Highsmith via Chandler, 'Strangers on a Train' also carnes an unacknowledged debt to a classic English mystery novel, says Graham Petrie
Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 film Strangers on a Train, made the year after the publication of Patricia Highsmith's novel (her first), is a key example of the 'transfer of guilt' theme identified by Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in their influential 1957 book on the director: one person commits a crime; another takes on the responsibility or feels guilt for it or feels tainted by it. Though this theme is present in the novel - we are told on page 1 20 of the Penguin edition that Guy felt "at least partially guilty of Miriam's death" book and film diverge radically after about the halfway mark.
Hitchcock's film is too well-known to require detailed exposition, but a brief summary is needed to isolate the differences between book and film. In the latter Guy, a famous tennis player, encounters (probably not by accident) Bruno, an implied homosexual with a mother fixation, during a train journey. Aware of Guy's marital problems and his wife's refusal to divorce him so he can marry his girlfriend Anne, Bruno proposes an exchange of murders: Bruno will dispose of Guy's wife, Miriam, if Guy kills Bruno's hated father. Guy doesn't take the suggestion seriously so, to force his hand, Bruno murders Miriam at a fairground and tries to incite Guy into fulfilling his part of their 'bargain'. Pretending to agree, Guy attempts instead to warn the father, but is forestalled by Bruno, who decides to revenge himself on Guy, framing him for the murder of Miriam. In a climactic fairground scene, suspicious detectives who have been tailing Guy kill Bruno, and Guy is exonerated, leaving him free to marry Anne.
The first half of the book is roughly similar: Guy is a famous architect here and Bruno much less suave and superficially charming than in the film - though more explicitly homosexual. Bruno suggests the bargain and murders Miriam at the fairground, but in the book, Guy does kill Bruno's father and what follows is not the alienation of the two men, but an increasing complicity and even friendship between them, despite Guy's feelings of guilt....