Tonight it is Hitchcock's 1951 Film-Noir, Strangers on a Train starring Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, Robert Walker(his last film) and Leo G. Carroll, who was also in We're no Angels that was featured earlier.
Although Raymond Chandler is credited as the main author of the script, but it was almost completely written by Czenzi Ormonde who was credited as second author. Chandler disliked director Hitchcock for some reason, and when Hitchcock arrived at Chandler's home for a story meeting, Chandler shouted from the window, "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!"
When the movie was released in Germany in 1952, about five minutes were removed which were considered too brutal or sadistic. Later the scenes were re-added for TV, but they are subtitled, while the rest of the movie is dubbed, which is strange, considering Germans' past record in that department :eyebrows: Maybe they did not want to arouse them in case WW3 erupted.
Hitchcock bought the rights to the original novel anonymously to keep the price down, and got them for just $7,500(possibly why Chandler was irked), cost 1.2 mil dollars to make using 8 different locations plus studio work, and it turned into one of his most successful box office films, grossing over 7 mil dollars in the US alone.
The stunt where the man crawled under the carousel was not done with trick photography. Alfred Hitchcock claimed that this was the most dangerous stunt ever performed under his direction, and would never allow it to be done again.
For the record, Hitch's cameo is at the beginning getting on the train, I think with a double bass while Farley Granger gets off.
One of the most memorable single shots in the Hitchcock canon — it "is studied by film classes", says Laura Elliott, who played Miriam—is her character's strangulation by Bruno on the Isle of Love. "In one of the most unexpected, most aesthetically justified moments in film,"the slow, almost graceful, murder is shown as a reflection in the victim's eyeglasses, which have been jarred loose from her head and dropped to the ground. The unusual angle was a more complex proposition than it seems. First Hitchcock got the exterior shots in Canoga Park, using both actors, then later he had Elliott alone report to a sound stage where there was a large concave reflector set on the floor. The camera was on one side of the reflector, Elliott was on the other, and Hitchcock directed Elliott to turn her back to the reflector and "float backwards, all the way to the floor... like you were doing the limbo." The first six takes went badly—Elliott thudded to the floor with several feet yet to go, but on the seventh take, she floated smoothly all the way. Hitchcock's even-strained response: "Cut. Next shot." Hitchcock then had the two elements "ingeniously" double printed, yielding a shot of "oddly appealing originality with a stark fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful.... Thus the asthetics of the horror somehow enables the audience to contemplate more fully its reality." Or so I'm told :eek:
