Blog Post 3

    Hitchcock as an adaptor of literature focuses on taking the bare idea of a work, such as the man on the run archetype from The Thirty-Nine Steps, and stripping away and refining the extraneous material to express his single idea. For example, in taking out the elaborate explanation of the 39 steps idea and changing it to a hunk of information in Mr. Memory's repertoire, he simplifies the outer trappings of the plot and turns it into a MacGuffin. What matters is not the information, but that the enemy will kill to keep that information from leaking. Another example of this approach comes with the change of Hannay from Scottish to Canadian. To intensify the man on the run idea and to inspire more identification with the protagonist, changing Scotland, the place where Hannay does much of his running around, to an unfamiliar place instead of his homeland accents the fact that Hannay is on the run and everything is foreign to him and out to get him. The most telling change is the addition of the love interest and the changing of Scudder to Anabella. Women are more unfamiliar to Hannay than men so his constant encounters with them make his journey more treacherous and sexually charged than if the cast had remained all male. I believe he respects the core of the original work, which is the appealing idea of an innocent man on the run with whom the audience can identify, while changing incidental details to heighten the suspense.

    In Strangers on a Train, the most startling and significant change is that the criss-crossed murder exchange is never completed; Guy does not kill Bruno's father. In my opinion, this ruins the plot. For me, the central charm of Highsmith's original novel is watching the slow psychological beatdown of Guy until he is dragged down to Bruno's level to the point where he considers him a brother. Hitchcock's approach as an adaptor of literature here is similar to that he used with Buchan's novel. He strips down and changes extraneous details (Guy is now a tennis player instead of an architect, Anne a politician's daughter instead of a designer) to come at the core of the novel. For instance, the change of Anne's career drives home the point that Guy has social standing to lose by going through with the murder. The loss of social standing as an architect lacks drama compared to that of a forfeited political career under Anne's father. However, I believe his approach fails here. While Buchan as a novelist has constructed a novel in which the man on the run idea drives the plot, Highsmith writes novels in which the subtle psychological interplay among characters creates conflict and moves the story along. In simplifying Guy and Bruno and having Guy ultimately shy from the murder, he removes much of what made Highsmith's novel great.

    The choices Hitchcock makes in adapting these two films reveal him as a director who values an idea and an archetype and the feelings these inspire over the details of plot and character. Film adaptation in general involves taking a story which exists on the page and making it visual enough to come alive on the screen. Therefore, the detailed psychological descriptions of Guy's capitulation are hard to translate without resorting to a thought voice-over and while a lot of complexity is lost, the change of Guy into a more standard hero for Hitchcock's film adaptation is the better cinematic choice.