Two suspense thrillers by women writers, Rebecca and Strangers on a Train. By Kevin Rush.

How many times have you heard someone say, “Oh, the book is so much better!” It’s practically the mating cry of literary snobs. Yet, how often do we put that claim to the test? I grew up watching classic movies on our tiny 19 inch black and white TV, so if ever there was motivation to get a more expansive view of a story, that would have been it. Yet, rarely did I turn off the TV thinking, “Ooh, now I’ve got to get the book!” Okay, I was watching the Bowery Boys, but still. People who spent two weeks reading the book when a movie only took a couple of hours were peculiar to say the least. I’m thinking of Maria H., my high school acquaintance who claimed to have read Gone With the Wind six times and would recite the opening passage at the least provocation. (This is the only reason I know that Scarlet O’Hara had eyebrows like bat wings.) I remember feeling like such a big boy, when I had read The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three during the summer after eighth grade and the film was released the following fall. This put me on par with my buddy Tom S., who had read Jaws in advance of the definitive summer blockbuster. (He hinted at the racy chapter Spielberg had omitted, but never gave us the whole scoop.) As I’ve matured, I’m still more likely to read a contemporary novel that’s going to be made into a film than to scour my local library for movie source material, especially when it’s a half-century-old bestseller that didn’t make the canon of my college English curriculum. But this summer I decided to change that. I decided to explore the novels that became movies, and what better place to start than two books Alfred Hitchcock used for his films

Rebecca — Nominated for 11 Oscars and winning two, the original 1940 version of Daphne du Maurier’s novel was director Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film and, to that point, the crowning achievement of his career. The Oscar Winner for Best Picture and Best Black and White Cinematography had a stellar cast: a darkly brooding Laurence Olivier, who had brooded darkly to great effect in 1939’s Wuthering Heights; relative newcomer Joan Fontaine, whom Hitchcock would imperil again in 1941’s Suspicion; and Judith Anderson, whose turn as Mrs. Danvers set the standard for Gothic housekeepers for decades to come. (In the 1946 Abbott and Costello comedy The Time of Their Lives, a grim provincial maid greets a party of visitors, prompting the group’s designated wise-cracker to ask, “Didn’t I see you in Rebecca?” I’d also wager that Cloris Leachman owes much of her inspiration for Frau Blücher to Anderson’s eerie domestic.) Audiences flocked to see Rebecca, which was the top-grossing movie of the year.  

The film’s success was hard-won. Legend has it that Olivier had wanted his then girlfriend, later wife, Vivien Leigh to play the female lead, and treated Fontaine horribly. Hitchcock, no doubt hoping such treatment would spill over into the character of a lone woman surrounded by inexplicable hostility, reportedly informed Fontaine that others on the set despised her. And Hitchcock had his own problems; shooting had begun just as Britain entered the war against Hitler’s Germany, weighing emotionally on the British members of cast and crew. Hitch was also at loggerheads with producer David O. Sleznick, who like his director was an obsessive perfectionist. In these days of “safe work spaces,” it’s hard to imagine any good emerging from what was certainly a toxic work environment by contemporary standards, but the proof is on the screen. Rebecca would be the only Best Picture Oscar winner in Hitchcock’s career. Though he was nominated five times as Best Director, including for Rebecca, Hitchcock would never win a competitive Oscar.

I had not seen Rebecca for maybe 25 years before sitting down this summer to read Daphne du Maurier’s classic thriller. I’d forgotten who, save Laurence Oliver, had been in the cast, but the final scene was seared into my memory, and I wondered if the book would be spoiled for me. Happily, it was not. What I discovered was a brilliantly plotted thriller enriched by fine characterizations. The unnamed narrator (Fontaine’s character) is a bit cloying at times. Early in what I’d call the second act, her self-pity was a drag, but her character did not remain stagnant. In fact, many of the characters had surprising depth and personal arcs that made the book work on many levels. The story had numerous plot twists that make you snap your head up from the page and go “Wow!” As for the ending I knew was coming, it’s handled more subtly here than in the film, so the story ends on a haunting note of mystery. If you’re looking for escapist fiction that’s intriguing and artfully crafted, Rebecca is well worth your time, even if you’ve seen the film.

Strangers on a Train — Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 debut novel earned critical praise as well as moderate commercial success. Though it never cracked the New York Times Bestseller List, Strangers on a Train caught the unblinking side-eye of Alfred Hitchcock, who promptly bought the film rights, bidding anonymously to keep the price down. Hitchcock’s 1951 version of Strangers starred Fairly Granger as the squeaky-clean Guy Haines, who late one night on a train trip meets a flamboyant, drunken psychopath, Bruno Antony (played deliciously by Robert Walker), and gets drawn into his sinister plan to “trade murders.” Hitchcock had directed Granger in his 1948 experimental thriller Rope, one of a string of postwar mediocrities (The Paradine Case (1947), Under Capricorn (1949), Stage Fright (1950)) that incited whispers that maybe Hitch had lost his touch. The once-and-future Master of Suspense badly needed a hit to buff the tarnish off his image, and Strangers delivered, ushering in the decade that would arguably produce Hitchcock’s finest work.

It’s somewhat ironic, however, that Hitchcock’s film is most famous for two vignettes which do not appear in the book: the tennis match and the merry-go-round catastrophe. Moviegoers will remember that Guy has a match at Forest Hills on the day he suspects Bruno will return to the scene of the first murder and plant incriminating evidence against him. Guy has to get home to foil Bruno, but must play the match, because withdrawing would bring him under further suspicion. The match, naturally, goes into overtime and the suspense builds to an excruciating pitch. The scene is not in the book, because Highsmith’s protagonist is not a tennis player, he’s an architect. And even though the movie is faithful to the book in placing the first murder in an amusement park, the book does not depict a climactic return to the scene of the crime.

The memorable out-of-control merry-go-round crash is not Highsmith’s invention. Rather, it’s lifted in all its major details from a 1946 British crime novel, The Moving Toyshop, by Bruce Montgomery, writing under his pseudonym Edmund Crispin. The Crispin books are noted for combining edge-of-the-seat suspense with high-spirited humor, so it stands to reason Hitchcock would have read them. One can imagine Hitch reading Highsmith’s chilling sequence—where Bruno stalks Guy’s wife Miriam to and through Lake Metcalf’s Kingdom of Fun—and musing, “We’ll have to go back there for that Crispin cataclysm.” Neither Crispin nor Montgomery is credited in the screenplay, which lists Whitfield Cook, Czenzi Ormonde (then an assistant to Ben Hecht, whom Hitchcock wanted but was unavailable), and Raymond Chandler.

Given the departures the film takes from the book, it’s reasonable to ask whether the book is worth reading, but it absolutely is. Patricia Highsmith enjoyed a prolific, though by some measures an underappreciated, career as a crime novelist, giving us classics, such as The Price of Salt (produced for the screen as Carol) and the Ripley series. She was a pioneer in weaving sexual deviancy into her examinations of killer psychology. In Strangers, Highsmith strongly hints at Bruno’s homosexuality and his attraction to Guy, a theme which is present, but muted, in the performances of Walker and Granger. Highsmith also takes a darker turn in her narrative than Hitchcock would dare with a mainstream Hollywood feature, especially when he was much in need of a hit. Hi-jinx on a calliope served his purposes much better than a chilling examination of the human soul. Highsmith, who had nothing to lose on her first effort, was willing to risk shocking and alienating her audience by blurring the line between Guy and Bruno, while Hitchcock framed the tale as a more-or-less clear battle between good and evil, rational and insane. As an artist, Highsmith deserves praise for her daring, which makes her novel edgy and intriguing even 70 years after its initial release.

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