The MacGuffin: News and Comment (07/Jan/2004)
(c) Ken Mogg (2004)
January 7
The 'criss-cross' motif in Strangers on a Train is strong in the film - far more than in Patricia Highsmith's novel - and is made explicit by Bruno when he speaks gaily of 'swapping' murders: 'you know, criss-cross'. The only such reference in the novel, I believe, is an innocuous mention of a 'criss-cross wire fence' outside a school, early in Chapter 3. But Hitchcock had recently seen his fellow director Robert Siodmak's film noir Criss Cross (1949), starring Burt Lancaster and Yvonne DeCarlo, and he wasn't going to pass up an opportunity of having fun with such a suitable phrase. The motif forms the very basis of the 'exchange of guilt' idea that runs through Hitchcock's film (and which French critics would later interpret as a conscious intention of countless other films by him - though he seems to have been amazed when they first pointed it out to him). It is literally signalled, very cleverly, by the railway crossing sign we see when Guy disembarks from his train at Metcalf; it practically forms the raison d'être of the central scene of Guy's championship tennis match (in the novel Guy is an architect, not a tennis player) which is cross-cut with Bruno's attempt to extricate a cigarette lighter from a storm drain. And another key scene in the film - the moment when Guy joins Bruno behind a barred gate and he speaks the line, 'Now you've got me acting like a criminal' - is Hitchcock's invention, after a fashion, not Patricia Highsmith's. I say 'after a fashion' because in fact the moment is taken from Siodmak's film Criss Cross! True! Hitchcock was never one, in such matters of professional eclecticism, to follow Polonius's advice, 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be'! Particularly when it came to his friendly rivalry, it seems, with Siodmak. I have previously pointed to this rivalry in an article elsewhere on this website called "Out of Hitchcock's filing cabinet", and how it seems to have originated in a couple of things: (1) Hitchcock's natural interest in following the work of German expatriate filmmakers such as Siodmak, Billy Wilder (with whom Siodmak had collaborated on Menscen am Sonntag [1930]), Fritz Lang (of course), William Dieterle, and Curtis Bernhardt; and (2) the fact that, for a period of time in the 1940s, Hitchcock and Siodmak shared a producer, Joan Harrison, who had come out from England in 1939 as Hitchcock's assistant. Scholar Jeanine Basinger has noted that Harrison produced two Siodmak films for Universal: The Suspect (1944) and Uncle Harry (1945). She writes: 'In both films a seemingly ordinary and/or innocent man is drawn into a tangled web of murder, while retaining the audience's sympathy.' That's another good reason, one supposes, why Hitchcock may have had Siodmak in mind when making Strangers on a Train. (He probably still had him in mind two years later when making I Confess: when a woman munches on an apple while watching Father Logan nearly mobbed that detail is borrowed from the courtroom climax of Siodmak's Phantom Lady [1944] - though it, in turn, comes from E.A. Dupont's famous German film Variete [1925].) Next week I may have something further to say about 'eclecticism' - which Peter Ackroyd has lately categorised as a very English thing ...
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