# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Strangers on a Train is a 1951 American psychological thriller film noir produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30, 1951.

The film stars Farley Granger, Ruth Roman, and Robert Walker, and features Leo G. Carroll, Pat Hitchcock (the director's daughter), and Laura Elliott (later known as Kasey Rogers). It is number 32 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills.

The story concerns two strangers who meet on a train, a young tennis player and a charming psychopath. The psychopath suggests that because they each want to "get rid" of someone, they should "exchange" murders, and that way neither will be caught. The psychopath commits the first murder, then tries to force the tennis player to complete the bargain.

Amateur tennis star Guy Haines ( Farley Granger) wants to divorce his vulgar, promiscuous wife Miriam ( Kasey Rogers) so he can marry the elegant Anne Morton ( Ruth Roman), the daughter of a US Senator. On a train, Haines meets a smooth-talking and intrusive psychopath named Bruno Antony ( Robert Walker), who tells him about his idea for a murder scheme: two perfect strangers meet and "swap murders"-Bruno suggests he kill Miriam and Guy kill Bruno's hated father. Each will kill a total stranger with no apparent motive, so neither will be suspected.

Guy humors Bruno, whom he does not take seriously, by pretending to find his idea amusing, but Bruno mistakes Guy's response as agreement to the scheme. Eager to get away from Bruno, Guy forgets his monogrammed cigarette lighter, engraved "A to G" with crossed tennis rackets, which Bruno keeps.

Guy meets with Miriam, who is pregnant by someone else, at her workplace in Metcalf, their hometown. Miriam informs Guy that she no longer wants to end their marriage and threatens to blackmail him by claiming that the baby is his to thwart any divorce.

After they argue loudly in front of Miriam's co-workers and Guy shakes her violently, Guy calls Anne and, speaking figuratively, says he would like to kill Miriam. Later, Bruno follows Miriam to an amusement park and strangles her to death while Guy is traveling on a train. When Guy arrives home, Bruno informs him Miriam is dead and insists he honor their deal by killing Bruno's father.

Guy goes to the Mortons' Washington, D.C. home, where Anne's father, Senator Morton ( Leo G. Carroll), informs Guy that his wife has been murdered. Guy feigns ignorance, but Anne's sister Barbara ( Patricia Hitchcock) says that the police will think that Guy is the murderer as he has a motive. The police question Guy, but are unable to confirm his alibi: A professor ( John Brown) Guy met on the train was so drunk that he cannot remember their encounter. Instead of arresting Guy, the police assign a round-the-clock escort to ensure that he does not flee while they investigate.

To pressure Guy, Bruno follows him around Washington, introduces himself to Anne, and appears at a party at Senator Morton's house. To amuse another guest ( Norma Varden), Bruno demonstrates how to strangle someone by playfully putting his hands around her neck. His gaze falls upon Barbara, whose glasses and physical appearance resemble Miriam's. This triggers a flashback and he actually starts to strangle the woman before blacking out. Barbara tells Anne that Bruno was looking at her while strangling the other woman and Anne realizes that Barbara resembles Miriam. Her suspicions aroused, Anne confronts Guy, who tells her the truth about Bruno's crazy scheme.

Bruno sends Guy a pistol, a house key and a map showing the location of his father's bedroom. Guy pretends to agree to Bruno's plan. He creeps into Bruno's father's room hoping to warn him of his son's murderous intentions, but instead he finds Bruno there waiting for him. He tells Guy he became suspicious when he suddenly agreed to honor their bargain and made sure his father was away. Guy tries to persuade Bruno to seek psychiatric help; Bruno threatens to punish Guy for betraying him and make Guy pay for the crime from which he is benefiting.

Anne visits Bruno's house and unsuccessfully tries to explain to his mother ( Marion Lorne)-who seems merely befuddled but is actually severely disturbed herself-that her son is a murderer. Bruno mentions Guy's missing cigarette lighter to Anne and claims that Guy asked him to search the murder site for it; Guy correctly surmises Bruno intends to incriminate him by planting it there. After winning a match at Forest Hills, Guy eludes the police and heads for the amusement park to prevent Bruno from planting the lighter.

Bruno is delayed at Metcalf when he accidentally drops Guy's lighter down a storm drain and must retrieve it. When Bruno arrives at the amusement park, a carnival worker recognizes him from the night of the murder; he informs the police, who mistakenly think he means Guy. After Guy arrives, he and Bruno fight on the park's carousel. Thinking Guy is trying to escape, a police officer shoots at him but instead kills the carousel operator, causing the carousel to spin out of control. A carnival worker crawls under the fast-moving carousel and applies the brakes but the mechanism fails, causing the carousel to crash; Bruno is trapped underneath it and mortally injured. The worker who recognized Bruno tells the police chief that he has never seen Guy before.

Guy tells the police that Bruno was attempting to plant his lighter at the murder scene, Bruno continues to blame Guy, saying that the lighter is on the island, where Guy left it. As Bruno dies, his fingers open to reveal Guy's lighter in his hand. Guy calls Anne to meet him the next day, and while they are riding home on the train a stranger asks if he is Guy Haines. They quickly leave the car.

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearance in this movie occurs 11 minutes into the film. He is seen carrying a double bass as he climbs onto a train. Young Louis Lettieri, a child actor during the 1950s, plays a little boy who has his balloon maliciously popped by Bruno in the amusement park murder scene.

Hitchcock said that correct casting saved him "a reel of storytelling time", since audiences would sense qualities in the actors that did not have to be spelled out. Hitchcock said that he originally wanted William Holden for the Guy Haines role, but Holden declined. "Holden would have been all wrong-too sturdy, too put off by Bruno", writes critic Roger Ebert. "Granger is softer and more elusive, more convincing as he tries to slip out of Bruno's conversational web instead of flatly rejecting him."

Warner Bros. wanted their own stars, already under contract, cast wherever possible. In the casting of Anne Morton, Jack L. Warner got what he wanted when he assigned Ruth Roman to the project, over Hitchcock's objections. The director found her "bristling" and "lacking in sex appeal" and said that she had been "foisted upon him." Perhaps it was the circumstances of her forced casting, but Roman became the target of Hitchcock's scorn throughout the production. Granger diplomatically described it as Hitchcock's "disinterest" (sic) in the actress, and said he saw Hitchcock treat Edith Evanson the same way on the set of (1948). "He had to have one person in each film he could harass," Granger said.

Kasey Rogers (whose performance as Miriam is credited as Laura Elliott) noted that she had perfect vision at the time the movie was made, but Hitchcock insisted she wear the character's thick eyeglasses, even in long shots when regular glass lenses would have been undetectable. Rogers was effectively blind with the glasses on and needed to be guided by the other actors. In one scene, she can be seen dragging her hand along a table as she walks, so she could keep track of where she was.

Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext (only hinted at in the novel) into the story and softened Bruno from a coarse alcoholic into a dapper, charming mama's boy - a much more Hitchcockian villain. With treatment in hand, Hitchcock shopped for a screenwriter; he wanted a "name" writer to lend some prestige to the screenplay, but was turned down by eight writers, including John Steinbeck and Thornton Wilder, all of whom thought the story too tawdry and were put off by Highsmith's first-timer status. Talks with Dashiell Hammett got further, but here too communications ultimately broke down, and Hammett never took the assignment.

Hitchcock then tried Raymond Chandler, who had earned an Oscar nomination for his first screenplay, Double Indemnity, in collaboration with Billy Wilder. Chandler took the job despite his opinion that it was "a silly little story." But Chandler was a notoriously difficult collaborator and the two men could not have had more different meeting styles: Hitchcock enjoyed long, rambling off-topic meetings where often the film would not even be mentioned for hours, while Chandler was strictly business and wanted to get out and get writing. He called the meetings "god-awful jabber sessions which seem to be an inevitable although painful part of the picture business." Interpersonal relations deteriorated rapidly until finally Chandler became openly combative; at one point, upon viewing Hitchcock struggling to exit from his limousine, Chandler remarked within earshot, "Look at the fat bastard trying to get out of his car!" This would be their last collaboration. Chandler completed a first draft, then wrote a second, without hearing a single word back from Hitchcock; when finally he did get a communication from the director in late September, it was his dismissal from the project.

Next, Hitchcock tried to hire Ben Hecht, but learned he was unavailable. Hecht suggested his assistant, Czenzi Ormonde, to write the screenplay. Although Ormonde was without a formal screen credit, she did have two things in her favor: her recently published collection of short stories, Laughter From Downstairs, was attracting good notices from critics, and she was "a fair-haired beauty with long shimmering hair.-always a plus with Hitchcock. With his new writer, he wanted to start from square one:

There was not much time though - less than three weeks until location shooting was scheduled to start in the east. Ormonde hunkered down with Hitchcock's associate producer Barbara Keon-disparagingly called "Hitchcock's factotum" by Chandler-and Alma Reville, Hitchcock's wife. Together the three women, working under the boss's guidance and late into most nights, finished enough of the script in time to send the company east. The rest was complete by early November. Three notable additions the trio had made were the runaway merry-go-round, the cigarette lighter, and the thick eyeglasses.

Even while the torturous writing stage was plodding its course, the director's excitement about the project was boundless. "Hitchcock raced ahead of everyone: the script, the cast, the studio... pieces of the film were dancing like electrical charges in his brain." The more the film resolved in his mind's eye, the more he knew his director of photography would play a critical role in the scenes' execution. He found exactly what he needed right on the Warners lot in the person of staff cameraman Robert Burks, who would continue to work with Hitchcock, shooting every Hitchcock picture through to (1964), with the exception of . "Low-keyed, mild mannered", Burks was "a versatile risk-taker with a penchant for moody atmosphere. Burks was an exceptionally apt choice for what would prove to be Hitchcock's most Germanic film in years: the compositions dense, the lighting almost surreal, the optical effects demanding." None was more demanding than Bruno's strangulation of Miriam, shown reflected in her eyeglass lens: "It was the kind of shot Hitchcock had been tinkering with for twenty years-and Robert Burks captured it magnificently."

Burks considered his fourteen years with Hitchcock the best of his career: "You never have any trouble with him as long as you know your job and do it. Hitchcock insists on perfection. He has no patience with mediocrity on the set or at a dinner table. There can be no compromise in his work, his food or his wines." Robert Burks received the film's sole Academy Award nomination for its black and white photography.

With cast nailed down, a script in hand, and a director of photography in tune with Hitchcock's vision on board, the company was ready to commence filming. Hitchcock had a crew shoot background footage of the 1950 Davis Cup finals held August 25-27, 1950 at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, New York. While there, the crew had done some other location scouting. Exteriors would be shot on both coasts, and interiors on soundstages at Warners.

Hitchcock and his cast and crew decamped for the East Coast on October 17, 1950. For six days, they shot at Penn Station in New York City, at the railroad station at Danbury, Connecticut -which became Guy's hometown Metcalf-and in spots around Washington, D.C.

By month's end, they were back in California. Hitchcock had written exacting specifications for an amusement park, which was constructed on the ranch of director Rowland Lee in Chatsworth, California. The amusement park exteriors were shot there and at an actual Tunnel of Love at a fairground in Canoga Park, California. Hitchcock had already shot the long shots for the tennis match at Forest Hills and would add closer shots with Granger and Jack Cushingham, Granger's tennis coach off-screen and Guy's tennis opponent Fred Reynolds on-screen at a tennis club in South Gate, California. The rest of the shooting would take place on Warner soundstages, including many seemingly exterior and on-location shots that were actually done inside in front of rear-projection screens.

Strangers on a Train marked something of a renaissance for Hitchcock, after several years of low enthusiasm for his late-1940s output, and he threw himself into the micromanagement of some of its production. Hitchcock himself designed Bruno's lobster necktie, revealed in a close-up to have strangling lobster claws, and "he personally selected an orange peel, a chewing-gum wrapper, wet leaves, and a bit of crumpled paper that were used for sewer debris" in the scene where Bruno inadvertently drops Guy's lighter down the storm drain.

He also showed intense interest in a seldom-considered detail of character delineation: Food.

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 Magic Isle. "[I]n 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 soundstage 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 "ingenious[ly]" double printed, yielding a shot of "oddly appealing originality [with] a stark fusion of the grotesque and the beautiful.... The astheticizing of the horror somehow enables the audience to contemplate more fully its reality."

Hitchcock was, above all, the master of great visual setpieces, and "[p]erhaps the most memorable sequence in Strangers on a Train is the climactic fight on a berserk carousel." While Guy and Bruno fight, the ride runs out of control until it tears itself to pieces, flinging wooden horses into the crowd of screaming mothers and squealing children. "The climactic carousel explosion was a marvel of miniatures and background projection, acting close-ups and other inserts, all of it seamlessly matched and blended under film editor William H. Ziegler's eye."

The explosion is triggered by the attempts of a carnival man to stop the ride after crawling under the whirling carousel deck to get to the controls in the center. Although Hitchcock admitted to undercranking the shot (artificially accelerating the action), it was not a trick shot: the man actually had to crawl under the spinning ride, just inches from possible injury. "Hitchcock told me that this scene was the most personally frightening moment for him in any of his films", writes biographer Charlotte Chandler. "The man who crawled under the out-of-control carousel was not an actor or a stuntman, but a carousel operator who volunteered for the job. 'If the man had raised his head even slightly", Hitchcock said, "it would have gone from being a suspense film into a horror film."

Composer Dimitri Tiomkin was Jack Warner's choice to score Strangers on a Train. While he had previous Hitchcock experience on Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and would go on to score two more consecutive Hitchcock films, the director and composer "simply never developed much of a kinship" and "the Hitchcock films are not Tiomkin's best".

Nevertheless, the score does pick up on the ubiquitous theme of doubles - often contrasting doubles - right from the opening title sequence: "The first shot - two sets of male shoes, loud versus conservative, moving toward a train - carries a gruff bass motif set against Gershwin-like riffs, a two-part medley called "Strangers" and "Walking" that is never heard again." The powerful music accurately underscores the visuals of that title sequence - the massive granite edifice of New York's Pennsylvania Station, standing in for Washington's Union Station-because it was scored for an unusually large orchestra, including alto, tenor and baritone saxes, three clarinets, four horns, three pianos and a novachord.

But perhaps the most memorable music in Strangers is the calliope music, heard first at the fairground and again, later, when Bruno is strangling Mrs. Cunningham at Senator Morton's soirée, and experiences his unfortunate flashback and subsequent fainting spell. It was Hitchcock, not Tiomkin, whose idea brought the four evocative numbers - " The Band Played On", " Carolina in the Morning", " Oh, You Beautiful Doll", and " Baby Face" - to the soundtrack:

"The Band Played On" makes its final reprise during Guy's and Bruno's fight on the merry-go-round, even itself shifting to a faster tempo and higher pitch when the policeman's bullet hits the ride operator and sends the carousel into its frenzied hyper-drive.

Critic Jack Sullivan had kinder words for Tiomkin's score for Strangers than did biographer Spoto: "[S]o seamlessly and inevitably does it fit the picture's design that it seems like an element of Hitchcock's storyboards", he writes. It is a score that "goes largely uncelebrated."

With a release scheduled for early summer, the studio press agents swung into high gear early in 1951. Hitchcock, promotionally photographed many times over the years strangling various actresses and other women - some one-handed, others two - found himself in front of a camera with his fingers around the neck of a bust of daughter Patricia; the photo found its way into newspapers nationwide. He was also photographed adding the letter L to Strangers on the official studio poster for the film, thus changing the word to Stranglers.

One studio press release gave rise to a myth that still lingers on today. Hitchcock and Patricia both were afraid of heights, and father offered daughter a hundred dollars to ride the Ferris wheel - only to order the power cut, leaving her in the dark at the very top of the ride. The press release embellished the tale, claiming he left her "dangling in total darkness for an hour," only then allowing his "trembling daughter" to be lowered and released. Although that account continues to be published in books to this day, "it just wasn't true", according to Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell. First of all, she was not up there alone: flanking her were the actors playing Miriam's two boyfriends - "and I have a picture of us waving." "This was good stuff for press agents paid to stir up thrills and it has been repeated in other books to bolster the idea of Hitchcock's sadism," but "we were [only] up there two or three minutes at the outside.... My father wasn't ever sadistic. The only sadistic part was I never got the hundred dollars."

Strangers on a Train previewed on March 5, 1951 at the Huntington Park Theatre, with Alma, Jack Warner, Whitfield Cook and Barbara Keon in the Hitchcock party and it won a prize from the Screen Directors Guild. It premiered in New York on July 3, marking the reopening of the extensively remodeled Strand Theatre as the Warner Theatre, and in a dozen cities around the country. Hitchcock made personal appearances in most of them, and was often accompanied by his daughter.

Some audience feedback arriving at Jack Warner's office condemned the film for its sordid story, while just as many others were favorable. Of greater interest to Warner was the box office take, and the "receipts soon told the true story: Strangers on a Train was a success, and Hitchcock was pronounced at the top of his form as master of the dark, melodramatic suspense thriller."

The film includes a number of puns and visual metaphors that demonstrate a running motif of crisscross, double-crossing, and crossing one's double. Talking about the structure of the film, Hitchcock said to Truffaut, "Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever."

The two characters, Guy and Bruno, can be viewed as doppelgängers. As with Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train is one of many Hitchcock films to explore the doppelgänger theme. The pair has what writer Peter Dellolio refers to as a "dark symbiosis." Bruno embodies Guy's dark desire to kill Miriam, a "real-life incarnation of Guy's wish-fulfillment fantasy".

The theme of doubles is "the key element in the film's structure," and Hitchcock starts right off in his title sequence making this point: there are two taxicabs, two redcaps, two pairs of feet, two sets of train rails that cross twice. Once on the train, Bruno orders a pair of double drinks - "The only kind of doubles I play", he says charmingly. In Hitchcock's cameo he carries a double bass.

Hitchcock carries the theme into his editing, crosscutting between Guy and Bruno with words and gestures: one asks the time and the other, miles away, looks at his watch; one says in anger "I could strangle her!" and the other, far distant, makes a choking gesture.

Guy and Bruno are in some ways doubles, but in many more ways, they are opposites. The two sets of feet in the title sequence match each other in motion and in cutting, but they immediately establish the contrast between the two men: the first shoes "showy, vulgar brown-and-white brogues; [the] second, plain, unadorned walking shoes." They also demonstrate Hitchcock's gift for deft visual storytelling: For most of the film, Bruno is the actor, Guy the reactor, and Hitchcock always shows Bruno's feet first, then Guy's. And since it is Guy's foot that taps Bruno's under the table, we know Bruno has not engineered the meeting.

Roger Ebert wrote that "it is this sense of two flawed characters - one evil, one weak, with an unstated sexual tension - that makes the movie intriguing and halfway plausible, and explains how Bruno could come so close to carrying out his plan."

Darkness-light continuum

It is those flaws that set up the real themes of Strangers. It was not enough for Hitchcock to construct merely a world of doubles - even contrasting doubles - in a strict polar-opposite structure; for Hitchcock, the good-and-evil, darkness-and-light poles "didn't have to be mutually exclusive." Blurring the lines puts both Guy and Bruno on a good-evil continuum, and the infinite shades of gray in between, became Hitchcock's canvas for telling the story and painting his characters.

At first glance, Guy represents the ordered life where people stick to rules, while Bruno comes from the world of chaos, where they get thrown out of multiple colleges for drinking and gambling. Yet "[b]oth men, like so many of Hitchcock's protagonists, are insecure and uncertain of their identity. Guy is suspended between tennis and politics, between his tramp wife and his senator's daughter, and Bruno is seeking desperately to establish an identity through violent, outré actions and flamboyance (shoes, lobster-patterned tie, name proclaimed to the world on his tiepin)."

Bruno tells Guy early on that he admires him: "I certainly admire people who do things", he says. "Me, I never do anything important." Yet as Bruno describes his "theories" over lunch, "Guy responds to Bruno - we see it in his face, at once amused and tense. To the man committed to a career in politics, Bruno represents a tempting overthrow of all responsibility." And at this point the blurring of good and evil accelerates: Guy fails to repudiate Bruno's suggestive statement about murdering Miriam ("What's a life or two, Guy? Some people are better off dead.") with any force or conviction. "When Bruno openly suggests he would like to kill his wife, he merely grins and says 'That's a morbid thought,' but we sense the tension that underlies it." It ratchets up a notch when Guy leaves Bruno's compartment and "forgets" his cigarette lighter. "He is leaving in Bruno's keeping his link with Anne, his possibility of climbing into the ordered existence to which he aspires.... Guy, then, in a sense connives at the murder of his wife, and the enigmatic link between him and Bruno becomes clear.

Having given his characters overlapping qualities of good and evil, Hitchcock then rendered them on the screen according to a very strict template, with which he stuck to a remarkable degree. Ebert wrote:

Nowhere is this more evident than the scene where Guy arrives home at his D.C. apartment to find Bruno lurking across the street; Bruno killed Miriam that evening in Metcalf, and has her glasses to give to Guy almost as a "receipt" that he has executed his part of their "deal". "On one side of the street, [are] stately respectable houses; towering in the background, on the right of the screen, the floodlit dome of the U.S. Capitol, the life to which Guy aspires, the world of light and order." Bruno tells Guy what he has done and gives him the glasses. "You're a free man now", he says, just as a police car drives up, looking for the husband of a certain recent murder victim. Guy nervously steps into the shadows with Bruno, literally behind the bars of an iron fence; "You've got me acting like I'm a criminal", he says. "The scene gives a beautifully exact symbolic expression to Guy's relationship with Bruno and what he stands for."

Hitchcock continues the interplay of light and dark throughout the film: Guy's bright, light tennis attire, versus "the gothic gloominess of [Bruno's] Arlington mansion"; the crosscutting between his game in the sunshine at Forest Hills while Bruno's arm stretches into the dark and debris of the storm drain trying to fish out the cigarette lighter; even a single image where "Walker is photographed in one visually stunning shot as a malignant stain on the purity of the white-marble Jefferson Memorial, as a blot on the order of things."

Although its first rumblings came in 1947 with the trial and conviction of the "Hollywood Ten", the so-called Red Scare was gathering steam in 1950, with the espionage-related arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the trial of Alger Hiss. These events were the background to their work, while Hitchcock, Cook, Ormonde and Keon were preparing the script for Strangers, and film scholar Robert L. Carringer has written of a political subtext to the film. Treatment writer Cook used Guy to make the film "a parable quietly defiant of the Cold War hysteria sweeping America."

That hysteria was targeting homosexuals along with Communists as enemies of the state.... The U.S. Senate was busy investigating the suspicion that 'moral perverts' in the government were also undermining national security - going so far as to commission a study, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.

Carringer has argued that the film was crucially shaped by the Congressional inquiries, making Guy the stand-in for victims of the homophobic climate. "To all appearances Guy is the all-American stereotype, an athlete, unassuming despite his fame, conservatively dressed", wrote Carringer; he is "a man of indeterminate sexual identity found in circumstances making him vulnerable to being compromised." Hitchcock, who had drawn gay characters so sharply yet subtly in in 1948, "drafted the left-leaning Cook... expressly because he was comfortable with sexually ambiguous characters."

Even before sewing up the rights for the novel, Hitchcock's mind was whirling with ideas about how to adapt it for the screen. He narrowed the geographic scope to the Northeast corridor, between Washington, D.C. and New York - the novel ranged through the southwest and Florida, among other locales. The scripting team added the tennis match - and the crosscutting with Bruno's storm drain travails in Metcalf - added the cigarette lighter, the Tunnel of Love, Miriam's eyeglasses; in fact, the amusement park is only a brief setting in the novel.

Hitchcock's biggest changes were in his two lead characters:

The character called Bruno Antony in the film is called Charles Anthony Bruno in the book. "Highsmith's Bruno is a physically repugnant alcoholic... but in [Whitfield Cook's] hands, the film's Bruno became a dandy, a mama's boy who speaks French, and who professes ignorance of women." In the book, Bruno dies in a boating accident far removed from a merry-go-round.

In the novel, Guy Haines is not a tennis player, but rather a promising architect, and he does indeed go through with the murder of Bruno's father. In the movie, "Guy became a decent guy who refuses to carry out his part of the crazed bargain..." writes Patrick McGilligan, "to head off the censors." In the novel, Guy is pursued and entrapped by a tenacious detective.

The merry-go-round scene is not in the book, but is taken from the climax of Edmund Crispin's 1946 novel The Moving Toyshop. All the major elements of the scene - the two men struggling, the accidentally shot attendant, the out-of-control merry-go-round, the crawling under the moving merry-go-round to disable it - are present in Crispin's account, though he received no screen credit for it.

In Raymond Chandler's second draft script - which Hitchcock ceremoniously dropped into the wastebasket while daintily holding his nose - the final shot is Guy Haines, institutionalized, bound in a straitjacket.

Upon its release in 1951, Strangers on a Train received mixed reviews. praised it, writing: "Performance-wise, the cast comes through strongly. Granger is excellent as the harassed young man innocently involved in murder. Roman's role as a nice, understanding girl is a switch for her, and she makes it warmly effective. Walker's role has extreme color, and he projects it deftly."

Conversely, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times criticized the film: "Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support. ... Perhaps there will be those in the audience who will likewise be terrified by the villain's darkly menacing warnings and by Mr. Hitchcock's sleekly melodramatic tricks. ... But, for all that, his basic premise of fear fired by menace is so thin and so utterly unconvincing that the story just does not stand." Leslie Halliwell felt that Hitchcock was "at his best" and that the film "makes superior suspense entertainment," but called the story "unsatisfactory."

More recent criticism is generally, though not universally, more positive. The film holds a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert has called Strangers on a Train a "first-rate thriller" that he considers one of Hitchcock's five best films.

David Keyes, writing at cinemaphile.org in 2002, saw the film as a seminal entry in its genre: "Aside from its very evident approach as a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick, the movie is one of the original shells for identity-inspired mystery thrillers, in which natural human behavior is the driving force behind the true macabre rather than supernatural elements. Even classic endeavors like and A Simple Plan seem directly fueled by this concept..."

Almar Haflidason was effusive about Strangers on a Train in 2001 at the BBC website: "Hitchcock's favourite device of an ordinary man caught in an ever-tightening web of fear plunges Guy into one of the director's most fiendishly effective movies. Ordinary Washington locations become sinister hunting grounds that mirror perfectly the creeping terror that slowly consumes Guy, as the lethally smooth Bruno relentlessly pursues him to a frenzied climax. Fast, exciting, and woven with wicked style, this is one of Hitchcock's most efficient and ruthlessly delicious thrillers."

Patricia Highsmith's opinion of the film varied over time. She initially praised it, writing: "I am pleased in general. Especially with Bruno, who held the movie together as he did the book." Later in life, while still praising Robert Walker's performance as Bruno, she criticized the casting of Ruth Roman as Anne, Hitchcock's decision to turn Guy from an architect into a tennis player, and the fact that Guy does not murder Bruno's father as he does in the novel.

According to Warner Bros' records, the film earned $1,788,000 domestically and $1,144,000 in foreign territories.

American Film Institute listed the film as #32 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills.

An early preview edit of the film, sometimes labeled the "British" version although it was never released in Britain or anywhere else, includes some scenes either not in, or else different from, the film as released. According to biographer Charlotte Chandler (Lyn Erhard), Hitchcock himself did not like either the "British" or the "American" version:

In 1997, Warner released the film onto DVD as a double sided disc, with the "British" version on one side, and the "Hollywood" version on the reverse. Between the two versions of the film, the "British" version most prominently omits the final scene on the train. A two-disc DVD edition was released in 2004 containing both versions of the film, this time with the "British" version titled "Preview Version" and the "Hollywood" version titled "Final Release Version." The film was later made available on Blu-ray in 2012 with the same contents as the 2004 DVD edition.

Strangers on a Train was adapted for the radio program Lux Radio Theatre on two occasions: on December 3, 1951, with Ruth Roman, Frank Lovejoy, and Ray Milland, and on April 12, 1954, with Virginia Mayo, Dana Andrews, and Robert Cummings. In 2015, it was announced that director David Fincher and writer Gillian Flynn are working on a remake for Hitchcock's film, retitled as Strangers, which is said to be a "modern take" on the story.

BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Play broadcast on 29 September 2011 was Strangers on a Film by Stephen Wyatt, which gives an imagined account of a series of meetings between Hitchcock ( Clive Swift) and Raymond Chandler ( Patrick Stewart), as they unsuccessfully attempt to create the screenplay for Strangers on a Train.

The film has also been the inspiration for other book, film or television projects with similar themes of criss-cross murder, often treated comically. They include:

An episode, "One False Step", of the TV series 77 Sunset Strip in 1958;

Bones episode "The Bodies in the Book";

Breaking the Girls, a 2012 thriller directed by Jamie Babbit;

"The Double Down", an episode of , an American television program, the investigation being further complicated as the four investigators are competing against each other to solve the two separate cases;

"A Night at the Movies" and "Tell-Tale Hearts", episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, an American television program.

Double Cross, a US 2006 made for television film;

"Perfect Strangers", a 1997 episode of Due South, a Canadian television program;

A 2015 storyline in British TV soap Emmerdale;

The episode "Bedfellows" in season 6 of Law & Order: Criminal Intent;

"Strangers on a Treadmill", a 2010 episode (season 2, episode 4) of US sitcom Modern Family;

Episode 12 of season 7 of the Canadian murder-mystery series Murdoch Mysteries, titled "Unfinished Business";

NCIS episode "The Inside Man";

Once You Meet a Stranger, a 1996 made for television film remake;

"Dream Job", an episode of , a British TV series starring Mitchell and Webb;

A two part episode "Covenant" of series 20 of Silent Witness, first aired on BBC TV in January 2017;

"Dial "M" for Murder or Press "#" to Return to Main Menu", part of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XX" in 2009;

Soch, a 2002 Indian film;

Strangers, a 2007 Indian film;

"Strangers in Death" (novel) by J.D. Robb;

Sweet Revenge, a 1998 film

Vishaka Express, a 2008 Indian Telugu film.

Do Qatil Ki Paheli, an episode from CID (Indian TV series)

Season 2 of Unforgotten, a British detective series, which features a three-way murder swap.

"Strangers on a Train", a 2012 sketch in BBC Radio 4's 'John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme': Season 2, Episode 3.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Strangers on a Train is a 1951 American psychological thriller film noir produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30, 1951.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Vertigo is a 1958 American film noir psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts ( From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.

The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson. Scottie is forced into early retirement because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia (an extreme fear of heights) and vertigo (a false sense of rotational movement). Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin's wife Madeleine ( Kim Novak), who is behaving strangely.

The film was shot on location in San Francisco, California, and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. It is the first film to use the dolly zoom, an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation, to convey Scottie's acrophobia. As a result of its use in this film, the effect is often referred to as "the Vertigo effect".

Vertigo received mixed reviews upon initial release, but is now often cited as a classic Hitchcock film and one of the defining works of his career. Attracting significant scholarly criticism, it replaced Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film ever made in the 2012 British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' poll. In 1996, the film underwent a major restoration to create a new 70 mm print and DTS soundtrack. It has appeared repeatedly in polls of the best films by the American Film Institute, including a 2007 ranking as the ninth-greatest American movie of all time.

In 1989, Vertigo was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

After a rooftop chase, where his fear of heights and vertigo result in the death of a policeman, San Francisco detective John "Scottie" Ferguson retires. Scottie tries to conquer his fear, but his friend and ex-fiancée Midge Wood says that another severe emotional shock may be the only cure.

An acquaintance from college, Gavin Elster, asks Scottie to follow his wife, Madeleine, claiming that she is in some sort of danger. Scottie reluctantly agrees, and follows Madeleine to a florist where she buys a bouquet of flowers, to the Mission San Francisco de Asís and the grave of one Carlotta Valdes (1831-1857), and to the Legion of Honor art museum where she gazes at the Portrait of Carlotta. He watches her enter the McKittrick Hotel, but on investigation she does not seem to be there.

A local historian explains that Carlotta Valdes committed suicide: she had been the mistress of a wealthy married man and bore his child; the otherwise childless man kept the child and cast Carlotta aside. Gavin reveals that Carlotta (who he fears is possessing Madeleine) is Madeleine's great-grandmother, although Madeleine has no knowledge of this, and does not remember the places she has visited. Scottie tails Madeleine to Fort Point and, when she leaps into the bay, he rescues her.

The next day Scottie follows Madeleine; they meet and spend the day together. They travel to Muir Woods and Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive, where Madeleine runs down towards the ocean. Scottie grabs her and they embrace. Madeleine recounts a nightmare and Scottie identifies its setting as Mission San Juan Bautista, childhood home of Carlotta. He drives her there and they express their love for each other. Madeleine suddenly runs into the church and up the bell tower. Scottie, halted on the steps by his acrophobia, sees Madeleine plunge to her death.

The death is declared a suicide. Gavin does not fault Scottie, but Scottie breaks down, becomes clinically depressed and is in a sanatorium, almost catatonic. After release, Scottie frequents the places that Madeleine visited, often imagining that he sees her. One day, he notices a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, despite her different appearance. Scottie follows her and she identifies herself as Judy Barton, from Salina, Kansas.

A flashback reveals that Judy was the person Scottie knew as "Madeleine Elster"; she was impersonating Gavin's wife as part of a murder plot. Judy drafts a letter to Scottie explaining her involvement: Gavin had deliberately taken advantage of Scottie's acrophobia to substitute his wife's freshly killed body in the apparent "suicide jump". But Judy rips up the letter and continues the charade because she loves Scottie.

They begin seeing each other, but Scottie remains obsessed with "Madeleine", and asks Judy to change her clothes and hair so that she resembles Madeleine. After Judy complies, hoping that they may finally find happiness together, he notices her wearing the necklace portrayed in the painting of Carlotta, and realizes the truth, and that Judy had been Elster's mistress, before being cast aside just as Carlotta was. Scottie insists on driving Judy to the Mission.

There, he tells her he must re-enact the event that led to his madness, admitting he now understands that "Madeleine" and Judy are the same person. Scottie forces her up the bell tower and makes her admit her deceit. Scottie reaches the top, finally conquering his acrophobia. Judy confesses that Gavin paid her to impersonate a "possessed" Madeleine; Gavin faked the suicide by throwing the body of his wife from the bell tower.

Judy begs Scottie to forgive her because she loves him. He embraces her, but a shadowed figure rises from the trapdoor of the tower, startling Judy, who steps backward and falls to her death. Scottie, bereaved again, stands on the ledge, while the figure, a nun investigating the noise, rings the mission bell.

Uncredited

Margaret Brayton as the Ransohoff's saleslady

Paul Bryar as Capt. Hansen (accompanies Scottie to coroner's inquest)

Dave McElhatton as the radio announcer (alternative ending)

Fred Graham as Scottie's police partner (falls from rooftop)

Nina Shipman as the girl mistaken for Madeleine at the museum

Sara Taft as nun during closing scene

Dorothy Ball as the flower salesperson in the Podesta scene (she was an actual Podesta Baldocchi employee). Erroneously listed in IMDb as Miliza Milo.

Alfred Hitchcock makes his customary cameo appearance walking in the street in a gray suit and carrying a trumpet case.

Charles Barr in his monograph dedicated to the study of Vertigo has stated that the central theme of the film is psychological obsession, concentrating in particular on Scottie as obsessed with the women in his life. As Barr states in his book, "This story of a man who develops a romantic obsession with the image of an enigmatic woman has commonly been seen, by his colleagues as well as by critics and biographers, as one that engaged Hitchcock in an especially profound way; and it has exerted a comparable fascination on many of its viewers. After first seeing it as a teenager in 1958, Donald Spoto had gone back for 26 more viewings by the time he wrote The Art of Alfred Hitchcock in 1976. In a 1996 magazine article, Geoffrey O'Brien cites other cases of 'permanent fascination' with Vertigo, and then casually reveals that he himself, starting at age 15, has seen it 'at least thirty times'."

Critics have interpreted Vertigo variously as "a tale of male aggression and visual control; as a map of female Oedipal trajectory; as a deconstruction of the male construction of femininity and of masculinity itself; as a stripping bare of the mechanisms of directorial, Hollywood studio and colonial oppression; and as a place where textual meanings play out in an infinite regress of self-reflexivity." Critic James F. Maxfield has suggested[citation needed ] that Vertigo can be interpreted as a variant on the Ambrose Bierce short story " An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890), and that the main narrative of the film is actually imagined by Scottie, whom we see dangling from a building at the end of the opening rooftop chase.

The screenplay of Vertigo is an adaptation of the French novel D'entre les morts ( From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock had attempted to buy the rights to the previous novel by the same authors, Celle qui n'était plus, but he failed, and it was made instead by Henri-Georges Clouzot as Les Diaboliques. Although François Truffaut once suggested that D'entre les morts was specifically written for Hitchcock by Boileau and Narcejac, Narcejac subsequently denied that this was their intention. However, Hitchcock's interest in their work meant that Paramount Pictures commissioned a synopsis of D'entre les morts in 1954, before it had even been translated into English.

In the book, Judy's involvement in Madeleine's death was not revealed until the denouement. At the script stage, Hitchcock suggested revealing the secret two-thirds of the way through the film, so that the audience would understand Judy's mental dilemma. After the first preview, Hitchcock was unsure whether to keep the "letter writing scene" or not. He decided to remove it. Herbert Coleman, Vertigo's associate producer and a frequent collaborator with Hitchcock, felt the removal was a mistake. However, Hitchcock said, "Release it just like that." James Stewart, acting as mediator, said to Coleman, "Herbie, you shouldn't get so upset with Hitch. The picture's not that important." Hitchcock's decision was supported by Joan Harrison, another member of his circle, who felt that the film had been improved. Coleman reluctantly made the necessary edits. When he received news of this, Paramount head Barney Balaban was very vocal about the edits and ordered Hitchcock to "Put the picture back the way it was." As a result, the "letter writing scene" remained in the final film.

There were three screenwriters involved in the writing of Vertigo. Hitchcock originally hired playwright Maxwell Anderson to write a screenplay, but rejected his work, which was titled Darkling, I Listen, a quotation from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. According to Charles Barr in his monograph dedicated to Vertigo, "Anderson was the oldest (at 68) [of the 3 writers involved], the most celebrated for his stage work and the least committed to cinema, though he had a joint script credit for Hitchcock's preceding film The Wrong Man. He worked on adapting the novel during Hitchcock's absence abroad, and submitted a treatment in September 1956."

A second version, written by Alec Coppel, again left the director dissatisfied. The final script was written by Samuel A. Taylor-who was recommended to Hitchcock due to his knowledge of San Francisco- from notes by Hitchcock. Among Taylor's creations was the character of Midge. Taylor attempted to take sole credit for the screenplay, but Coppel protested to the Screen Writers Guild, which determined that both writers were entitled to a credit, but to leave Anderson out of the film writing credits.

Vera Miles, who was under personal contract to Hitchcock and had appeared on both his television show and in his film The Wrong Man, was originally scheduled to play Madeleine. She modeled for an early version of the painting featured in the film. Following delays, including Hitchcock becoming ill with gallbladder problems, Miles became pregnant and so had to withdraw from the role. The director declined to postpone shooting and cast Kim Novak as the female lead. By the time Novak had tied up prior film commitments and a vacation promised by Columbia Pictures, the studio that held her contract, Miles had given birth and was available for the film. Hitchcock proceeded with Novak, nevertheless. Columbia head Harry Cohn agreed to lend Novak to Vertigo if Stewart would agree to co-star with Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, a Columbia production released in December 1958.

Initial on-site principal photography

Vertigo was filmed from September to December 1957. Principal photography began on location in San Francisco in September 1957 under the working title From Among the Dead (the literal translation of D'entre les morts). The film uses extensive location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters' cars are almost always pictured heading down the city's steeply inclined streets. In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself. Visiting the San Francisco film locations has something of a cult following as well as modest tourist appeal. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of Chris Marker's documentary montage Sans Soleil.

The scene in which Madeleine falls from the tower was filmed at Mission San Juan Bautista, a Spanish mission in San Juan Bautista, California. Associate producer Herbert Coleman's daughter Judy Lanini suggested the mission to Hitchcock as a filming location. A steeple, added sometime after the mission's original construction and secularization, had been demolished following a fire, so Hitchcock added a bell tower using scale models, matte paintings, and trick photography at the Paramount studio in Los Angeles. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the film's version. The tower's staircase was later assembled inside a studio.

List of shooting locations

Scottie's apartment (900 Lombard Street) is one block downhill from the "crookedest street in the world". The facade of the building remained mostly intact until 2012, when the owner of the property erected a wall enclosing the entrance area on the Lombard side of the building.

The Mission San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine falls from the tower, is a real place, but the tower had to be matted in with a painting using studio effects; Hitchcock had first visited the mission before the tower was torn down due to dry rot, and was reportedly displeased to find it missing when he returned to film his scenes. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the film's version.

The Carlotta Valdes headstone featured in the film (created by the props department) was left at Mission Dolores. Eventually, the headstone was removed as the mission considered it disrespectful to the dead to house a tourist attraction grave for a fictional person. All other cemeteries in San Francisco were evicted from city limits in 1912, so the screenwriters had no other option but to locate the grave at Mission Dolores.

Madeleine jumps into the sea at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

The gallery where Carlotta's painting appears is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Carlotta Valdes portrait was lost after being removed from the gallery, but many of the other paintings in the background of the portrait scenes are still on view.

What purports to be Muir Woods National Monument in the film is in fact Big Basin Redwoods State Park; however, the cutaway of the redwood tree showing its age was copied from one that can still be found at Muir Woods.

The coastal region where Scottie and Madeleine first kiss is Cypress Point, along the 17 Mile Drive near Pebble Beach. However, the lone tree they kiss next to was a prop brought specially to the location.

The domed building Scottie and Judy walk past is the Palace of Fine Arts.

Coit Tower appears in many background shots. Hitchcock once said that he included it as a phallic symbol. Also prominent in the background is the tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building.

The exterior of the sanatorium where Scottie is treated was a real sanatorium, St. Joseph's Hospital, located at 355 Buena Vista East, across from Buena Vista Park. The complex has been converted into condominiums and the building, built in 1928, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Gavin and Madeleine's apartment building is "The Brocklebank" at 1000 Mason Street on Nob Hill, which still looks essentially the same. It is across the street from the Fairmont Hotel, where Hitchcock usually stayed when he visited and where many of the cast and crew stayed during filming. Shots of the surrounding neighborhood feature the Flood Mansion and Grace Cathedral. Barely visible is the Mark Hopkins hotel, mentioned in an early scene in the movie.

The "McKittrick Hotel" was a privately owned Victorian mansion from the 1880s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 and is now an athletic practice field for Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School. The St. Paulus Lutheran Church, seen across from the mansion, was destroyed in a fire in 1995.

Podesta Baldocchi is the flower shop Madeleine visits as she is being followed by Scottie. The shop's location at the time of filming was 224 Grant Avenue. The Podesta Baldocchi flower shop now does business from a location at 410 Harriet Street.

The Empire Hotel is a real place, called the York Hotel, and now (as of January 2009) the Hotel Vertigo at 940 Sutter Street. Judy's room was created, but the green neon of the "Hotel Empire" sign outside is based on the actual hotel's sign (it was replaced when the hotel was renamed).

One short scene shows Union Square at dawn, with old-fashioned "semaphore" traffic lights. Pop Leibel's bookstore, the Argosy, was not a real location, but one recreated on the Paramount lot in imitation of the real-life Argonaut Book Store, which still exists near Sutter and Jones.

Elster's fictitious Dogpatch shipyard office. Filmed at the real (or simulated with mattes) Union Iron Works shipyard, by then the post-WW2 Bethlehem Steel shipyard. Elster's office has a MIssion telephone exchange (MI or 64) prefix, regarding which Scotty says "Why, that's Skid Row", probably because the city's southern MIssion exchange served all of the south-of-slot (SoMa today) and southern (Mission District) phones, and this shipyard area of course met the description of a Skid Row.

Subsequent studio shooting

Following 16 days of location shooting, the production moved to Paramount's studios in Hollywood for two months of filming. Hitchcock preferred to film in studios as he was able to control the environment. Once sufficient location footage had been obtained, interior sets were designed and constructed in the studio.

Hitchcock popularized the dolly zoom in this film, leading to the technique's sobriquet, amongst several others, "the Vertigo effect". This "dolly-out/zoom-in" method involves the camera physically moving away from a subject whilst simultaneously zooming in (a similar effect can be achieved in reverse), so that the subject retains its size in the frame, but the background's perspective changes. Hitchcock used the effect to look down the tower shaft to emphasise its height and Scottie's disorientation. Following difficulties filming the shot on a full-sized set, a model of the tower shaft was constructed, and the dolly zoom was filmed horizontally. The "special sequence" (Scottie's nightmare sequence) was designed by artist John Ferren, who also created the painting of Carlotta used in the film.

The rotating patterns in the title sequence were done by John Whitney, who used a mechanical computer called the M5 gun director, AKA the Kerrison Predictor, which was used during World War II to aim anti-aircraft cannons at moving targets. This made it possible to produce an animated version of shapes (known as Lissajous curves) based on graphs of parametric equations by mathematician Jules Lissajous. In March 1997, the cultural French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue titled Vertigo's about the film locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor, which lists and describes all actual locations.

Hitchcock and costume designer Edith Head used color to heighten emotion. Grey was chosen for Madeleine's suit because it is not usually a blonde's colour, so was psychologically jarring. In contrast, Novak's character wore a white coat when she visited Scottie's apartment, which Head and Hitchcock considered more natural for a blonde to wear.

A coda to the film was shot that showed Midge at her apartment, listening to a radio report (voiced by San Francisco TV reporter Dave McElhatton) describing the pursuit of Gavin Elster across Europe. Midge switches the radio off when Scottie enters the room. They then share a drink and look out of the window in silence. Contrary to reports that this scene was filmed to meet foreign censorship needs, this tag ending had originally been demanded by Geoffrey Shurlock of the U.S. Production Code Administration, who had noted: "It will, of course, be most important that the indication that Elster will be brought back for trial is sufficiently emphasized."

Hitchcock finally succeeded in fending off most of Shurlock's demands (which included toning down erotic allusions) and had the alternative ending dropped. The footage was discovered in Los Angeles in May 1993, and was added as an alternative ending on the LaserDisc release, and later on DVD and Blu-ray releases.

The score was written by Bernard Herrmann. It was conducted by Muir Mathieson and recorded in Europe because there was a musicians' strike in the U.S.

In a 2004 special issue of the British Film Institute's (BFI) magazine Sight & Sound, director Martin Scorsese described the qualities of Herrmann's famous score:

Hitchcock's film is about obsession, which means that it's about circling back to the same moment, again and again ... And the music is also built around spirals and circles, fulfilment and despair. Herrmann really understood what Hitchcock was going for - he wanted to penetrate to the heart of obsession.

Graphic designer Saul Bass used spiral motifs in both the title sequence and the movie poster, emphasizing what the documentary Obsessed with Vertigo calls, " Vertigo's psychological vortex".

Vertigo premiered in San Francisco on May 9, 1958, at the Stage Door Theater at Mason and Geary (now the August Hall nightclub). While Vertigo did break even upon its original release, earning $2.8 million in gross rental in the United States alone against its $2,479,000 cost, it earned significantly less than other Hitchcock productions.

In October 1983, Rear Window and Vertigo were the first two films re-released by Hitchcock's estate after his death. These two films and three others - The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and (1948) - had been kept out of distribution by Hitchcock since 1968. Cleaning and restoration were performed on each film when new 35 mm prints were struck.

In 1996, the film was given a lengthy and controversial restoration by Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz and re-released to theaters. The new print featured restored color and newly created audio, using modern sound effects mixed in DTS digital surround sound. In October 1996, the restored Vertigo premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with Kim Novak and Patricia Hitchcock in person. At this screening, the film was exhibited for the first time in DTS and 70mm, a format with a similar frame size to the VistaVision system in which it was originally shot. When restoring the sound, Harris and Katz wanted to stay as close as possible to the original, and had access to the original music recordings that had been stored in the vaults at Paramount. However, as the project demanded a new 6-channel DTS stereo soundtrack, it was necessary to re-record some sound effects using the Foley process. The soundtrack was remixed at the Alfred Hitchcock Theatre at Universal Studios. Aware that the film had a considerable following, the restoration team knew that they were under particular pressure to restore the film as accurately as possible. To achieve this, they used Hitchcock's original dubbing notes for guidance of how the director wanted the film to sound in 1958. Harris and Katz sometimes added extra sound effects to camouflage defects in the old soundtrack ("hisses, pops, and bangs"); in particular they added extra seagull cries and a foghorn to the scene at Cypress Point. The new mix has also been accused of putting too much emphasis on the score at the expense of the sound effects.

In 1996, director Harrison Engle produced a documentary about the making of Hitchcock's classic, Obsessed with Vertigo. Narrated by Roddy McDowell, the film played on American Movie Classics, and has since been included with DVD versions of Vertigo. Surviving members of the cast and crew participated, along with Martin Scorsese and Patricia Hitchcock. Engle first visited the Vertigo shooting locations in the summer of 1958, just months after completion of the film.

Vertigo was first released on DVD in March 1998. It was subsequently released on Blu-ray in October 2012 as part of Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection, in June 2013 as part of Alfred Hitchcock: The Essentials Collection, and finally in May 2014 as a stand-alone Blu-ray edition. Some of the home video releases also carry the original mono audio track.

The 2005 Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection DVD contains the original mono track as an option. Significant color correction was necessary because of the fading of original Technicolor negatives. In some cases a new negative was created from the silver separation masters, but in many instances this was impossible because of differential separation shrinkage, and because the 1958 separations were poorly made. Separations used three individual films: one for each of the primary colors. In the case of Vertigo, these had shrunk in different and erratic proportions, making re-alignment impossible. As such, significant amounts of computer assisted coloration were necessary. Although the results are not noticeable on viewing the film, some elements were as many as eight generations away from the original negative, in particular the entire "Judy's Apartment" sequence, which is perhaps the most pivotal sequence in the entire film. When such large portions of re-creation become necessary, then the danger of artistic license by the restorers becomes an issue, and the restorers received some criticism for their re-creation of colors that allegedly did not honor the director's and cinematographer's intentions. The restoration team argued that they did research on the colors used in the original locations, cars, wardrobe, and skin tones. One breakthrough moment came when the Ford Motor Company supplied a well-preserved green paint sample for a car used in the film. As the use of the color green in the film has artistic importance, matching a shade of green was a stroke of luck for restoration and provided a reference shade.

In October 2014, a new 4K restoration was presented at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. This version gives credit to Harris and Katz at the end of the film, and thanks them for providing some previously unknown stereo soundtracks. This version, however, removes some of the "excessive" Foley sound that was added in the 1996 restoration.

The initial reception expressed in film reviews for Vertigo was mixed. wrote the film showed Hitchcock's "mastery", but was too long and slow for "what is basically only a psychological murder mystery". Similarly, the Los Angeles Times admired the scenery, but found the plot "too long" and felt it "bogs down" in "a maze of detail"; scholar Dan Auiler says that this review "sounded the tone that most popular critics would take with the film". However, the Los Angeles Examiner loved it, admiring the "excitement, action, romance, glamor and [the] crazy, off-beat love story". New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther also gave Vertigo a positive review by explaining that "[the] secret [of the film] is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched." Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post praised the film as a "wonderful weirdie," writing that "Hitchcock has even more fun than usual with trick angles, floor shots and striking use of color. More than once he gives us critical scenes in long shots establishing how he's going to get away with a couple of story tricks." John McCarten of The New Yorker wrote Hitchcock "has never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense."

Contemporaneous response in England was summarized by Charles Barr in his monograph on Vertigo stating: "In England, the reception was if anything rather less friendly. Of the 28 newspaper and magazine reviews that I have looked at, six are, with reservations, favourable, nine are very mixed, and 13 almost wholly negative. Common to all of these reviews is a lack of sympathy with the basic structure and drive of the picture. Even the friendlier ones single out for praise elements that seem, from today's perspective, to be marginal virtues and incidental pleasures - the 'vitality' of the supporting performances (Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times), the slickness with which the car sequences are put together (Isobel Quibley in The Spectator)".

Additional reasons for the mixed response initially were that Hitchcock fans were not pleased with his departure from the romantic-thriller territory of earlier films, and that the mystery was solved with one-third of the film left to go. Orson Welles disliked the film, telling his friend, director Henry Jaglom, that the movie was "worse" than Rear Window, another film that Welles disliked. In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock stated that Vertigo was one of his favourite films, with some reservations. Hitchcock blamed the film's failure on the 49-year-old Stewart looking too old to play a convincing love interest for the 24-year-old Kim Novak.

Hitchcock and Stewart received awards at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, including a Silver Seashell for Best Director (tied with Mario Monicelli for Big Deal on Madonna Street (aka Persons Unknown) and Best Actor (also tied, with Kirk Douglas in The Vikings). The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, in the technical categories Best Art Direction - Black-and-White or Color ( Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead, Samuel M. Comer, Frank McKelvy) and Best Sound ( George Dutton).

Over time the film has been re-evaluated by film critics and has moved higher in esteem in most critics' opinions. Every ten years since 1952, the British Film Institute's film magazine, Sight & Sound, has asked the world's leading film critics to compile a list of the 10 greatest films of all time. In the 2002 Sight & Sound poll of international critics Vertigo was ranked second just behind Citizen Kane (1941) as the best film ever made. Ten years later, the 2012 edition of the same poll resulted in Vertigo being voted into first place by critics as the best film ever made, displacing Orson Welles' Citizen Kane from the position it had occupied since 1962. In the 1962 and 1972 polls, Vertigo was not among the top 10 films in voting. Only in 1982 did Vertigo enter the list, and then in 7th place. By 1992 it had advanced to 4th place, by 2002 to 2nd, and in 2012 to 1st place in both the crime genre, and overall, ahead of Citizen Kane in 2nd place.

Commenting upon the 2012 results, the magazine's editor Nick James said that Vertigo was "the ultimate critics' film. It is a dream-like film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul-mate." In recent years, critics have noted that the casting of James Stewart as a character who becomes disturbed and obsessive ultimately enhances the film's unconventionality and effectiveness as suspense, since Stewart had previously been known as an actor of warmhearted roles.

Already in the 1960s, the French Cahiers du cinéma critics began re-evaluating Hitchcock as a serious artist, rather than just a populist showman. However, even François Truffaut's important 1962 book of interviews with Hitchcock (not published in English until 1967) devotes only a few pages to Vertigo. Dan Auiler has suggested that the real beginning of Vertigo's rise in adulation was the British-Canadian scholar Robin Wood's Hitchcock's Films (1968), which calls the film "Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us".

Adding to its mystique was the fact that Vertigo was one of five Hitchcock-owned films removed from circulation in 1973. When Vertigo was re-released in theaters in October 1983, and then on home video in October 1984, it achieved an impressive commercial success and laudatory reviews. Similarly adulatory reviews were written for the October 1996 showing of a restored print in 70mm and DTS sound at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.

A small minority of critics have expressed dissenting opinions. In his 2004 book Blockbuster, British film critic Tom Shone suggested that Vertigo's critical re-evaluation has led to excessive praise, and argued for a more measured response. Faulting Sight & Sound for "perennially" putting the film on the list of best-ever films, he wrote, "Hitchcock is a director who delights in getting his plot mechanisms buffed up to a nice humming shine, and so the Sight and Sound team praise the one film of his in which this is not the case - it's all loose ends and lopsided angles, its plumbing out on display for the critic to pick over at his leisure." In 2007, poet and critic Dan Schneider criticized the ending of Vertigo as melodramatic and argued that a close examination of the film's plot reveals numerous implausibilities, such as Elster allowing someone who knew his murder plot to remain living and thus possibly reveal the plan, or the police officers at the crime scene not inspecting the tower for evidence.

In 1989, Vertigo was recognized as a "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" film by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in the first year of the registry's voting.

In 2005, Vertigo came in second (to Goodfellas) in British magazine 's book 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. In 2008, an poll of readers, actors, and critics named it the 40th greatest movie ever made.

The most recent edition of the American Film Institute's top 100 films of all-time, released in 2007, placed Vertigo at #9 up 52 positions from its placement at #61 in the original 1998 listing.

American Film Institute recognition

The San Francisco locations have become celebrated amongst the film's fans, with organised tours across the area. In March 1997, the cultural French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue about Vertigo's locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor, which lists and describes all actual locations. In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself.

Director Martin Scorsese has listed Vertigo as one of his favorite films of all time.

Along with the renewed public appreciation of the movie, academic work has picked up. The Annual International Vertigo conference has become something of a venue for recent scholarship. The 2018 conference was held at Trinity College Dublin.

Critical works on Vertigo

Robin Wood's chapter on "Vertigo" in Hitchcock's Films

Molly Haskell's essay, "With Paintbrush and Mirror: 'Vertigo' & 'As You Desire Me'" in The Village Voice

Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, popularizing the concept of the male gaze.

Roger Ebert's 1996 Review

Nerdwriter1's video essay on How Alfred Hitchcock Blocks A Scene

One on Top of the Other, a 1969 film directed by Lucio Fulci, is heavily influenced by Vertigo.

, a 1976 film by Brian De Palma, is heavily influenced by Vertigo, while his 1984 thriller Body Double combines the plot elements of both Vertigo and Rear Window.

High Anxiety, a 1977 film by Mel Brooks, is a parody of suspense films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, but leans on Vertigo in particular.

Chris Marker's 1983 video-essay Sans Soleil makes reference to the movie, declaring it the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory" over footage of Vertigo's shooting locations and stills from the film.

Harvey Danger's song "Carlotta Valdez," from the 1997 album Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, summarizes the plot of the film.

Joseph Kahn's 1997 music video for Faith No More's "Last Cup of Sorrow" is a parody of Vertigo with singer Mike Patton in the Scottie Ferguson role and Jennifer Jason Leigh in the Madeleine/Judy role.

The Testament of Judith Barton, a 2012 novel by Wendy Powers and Robin McLeod, tells the back-story of Kim Novak's character.

1. ^ White, Susan (1999). "Vertigo and Problems of Knowledge in Feminist Film Theory". In Allen, Richard; Ishii-Gonzales, Sam (eds.). Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. London: BFI. p. 279. ISBN 978-0-85170-735-8. cited in Barr, Charles (2002). Vertigo. London: BFI. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-85170-918-5.

2. ^ "Obsessed with Vertigo", directed by Harrison Engle, documentary included on many DVD releases

3. ^ Cunningham, Douglas A (2012). The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration. ISBN 978-0-8108-8122-8.

4. Some sources say that ^ Vertigo uses dolly-in/zoom-out. The Obsessed with Vertigo DVD documentary says that the shot was achieved by "zooming forward and tracking backward simultaneously".

5. ^ Cunningham, Douglas A. (2012). The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-8122-8.

6. ^ Brooks, Richard, "Arts: Final reel of a long suspense story - Our reporter sees two Hitchcock propaganda films from World War II, which made the Foreign Office too nervous to release them for 50 years". The Observer, June 20, 1993

7. Scorsese, Martin (September 2004). "The Best Music in Film: Martin Scorsese". Sight & Sound. Archived from the original on July 11, 2010.

8. ^ Crowther, Bosley (May 29, 1958). "Movie Review - Vertigo - Vertigo,' Hitchcock's Latest; Melodrama Arrives at the Capitol". The New York Times. The New York Times Company.

9. ^ Sterritt, David (June 13, 2008). "At 50, Hitchcock's Timeless 'Vertigo' Still Offers a Dizzying Array of Gifts". The Chronicle of Higher Education.

10. ^ Jaglom, Henry (2013). Biskind, Peter (ed.). My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles. Metropolitan Books.

11. ^ "Hitchcock's America Lifelong Learning Institute-Fall 2001: Hitchcock Filming Sites and Points of Interest in the US". FilmFrog. Sonoma State University. Archived from the original on June 15, 2002.

12. "Audiences didn't like seeing Jimmy Stewart in such a strange and often unsympathetic role, craving the same sense of being on his side that ^ Rear Window (1954) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) had given them."

13. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of ^ Chris Marker's documentary montage Sans Soleil.

14. ^ "Scorsese's 12 favorite films". Miramax.com. Archived from the original on 26 December 2013.

15. Haskell, Molly. "With Paintbrush and Mirror: 'Vertigo' & 'As You Desire Me'". ^ The Village Voice. June 10, 1971. pp. 69-71, 73. Retrieved May 10, 2019.

Auiler, Dan (1999). Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. London: Titan Books.

Canning, Bob (2010). Block, Alex Ben; Wilson, Lucy Autrey (eds.). George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-By-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-177889-6.

Klein, Richard B. (2005). Coles, Felice Anne (ed.). In memory of Richard B. Klein: essays in contemporary philology. Romance Monographs, University of Mississippi.

Eliot, Marc (2006). Jimmy Stewart: a biography. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-5221-9.

Jones, Dan (2002). The Dime Novel and the Master of Suspense: The Adaptation of D'Entre Les Morts Into Vertigo. Saint Paul, Minn.: University of St. Thomas.

McGilligan, Patrick (2003). Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. ReganBooks.

Shone, Tom (2004). Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-6838-7.

Truffaut, François; Hitchcock, Alfred (1985). Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster. OCLC 273102.

Restoration

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vertigo is a 1958 American film noir psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock. The story was based on the 1954 novel D'entre les morts ( From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac. The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Fallen Idol (also known as The Lost Illusion) is a 1948 British film directed by Carol Reed and based on the 1936 short story "The Basement Room", by Graham Greene. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director (Carol Reed) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Graham Greene), and won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.

The film is told through the naive eyes of a diplomat's young son, Philippe, who idolises his father's butler, Baines. Baines has invented a heroic persona to keep the boy entertained, and often tells him stories of his exotic and daring adventures in Africa and elsewhere, stories such as putting down a native uprising single-handedly, killing a man in self-defence, shooting lions and so on.

In reality, the butler has never been to Africa and is stuck in a loveless marriage, while dreaming of happiness with a younger woman (who he tells Philippe is his niece after the boy finds them together). After Baines has an argument with his betrayed wife, she accidentally falls from a landing to her death. However, Philippe believes that he has seen Baines murder her. The boy desperately and clumsily attempts to protect his hero when the police investigate, but his efforts only lead Baines deeper into trouble.

The cameras began turning on the film on the bright, sunny morning of Wednesday, 17 September 1947, with the first location scene to be filmed being that of Bobby Henrey running across Belgrave Square in London.

The Fallen Idol marks the first notable film Carol Reed made at Grosvenor Crescent, Belgravia, in London as a filming location - the other being Reed's acclaimed movie , filmed 20 years later at the same site. Coincidentally, it was a film featuring a similar seven-year-old precocious boy.

The Monthly Film Bulletin called the film "outstanding."

It was one of the most popular movies at the British box office in 1948.

The Fallen Idol was included at number 48 on magazine's list of the "100 best British films", which polled critics and members of the film industry. It was described as "one of the finest British films about children, about the ways they can be manipulated and betrayed, their loyalties misplaced and their emotions toyed with."

Bibliography

The Great British Films, pp 125-127, Jerry Vermilye, 1978, Citadel Press, ISBN 0-8065-0661-X

A Film Star in Belgrave Square, a book about the making of the film by Mrs. Robert Henrey, mother of Bobby Henrey.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Fallen Idol (also known as The Lost Illusion) is a 1948 British film directed by Carol Reed and based on the 1936 short story "The Basement Room", by Graham Greene. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director (Carol Reed) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Graham Greene), and won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir directed and scripted by John Huston in his directorial debut, based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his femme fatale client. Gladys George, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet co-star, with the latter appearing in his film debut. The story follows a San Francisco private detective and his dealings with three unscrupulous adventurers, all of whom are competing to obtain a jewel-encrusted falcon statuette.

The film premiered in New York City on October 3, 1941, and was nominated for three Academy Awards. In 1989, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is a part of Roger Ebert's series The Great Movies and was cited by Panorama du Film Noir Américain as the first major film noir.

- Introductory text appearing after the film's opening credits

In San Francisco in 1941, private investigators Sam Spade and Miles Archer meet prospective client Ruth Wonderly. She claims to be looking for her missing sister, who is involved with a man named Floyd Thursby. Archer agrees to follow her that night and help get her sister back.

Spade is awakened by a phone call early in the morning and the police inform him that Archer has been killed. He meets his friend, Police Detective Tom Polhaus at the murder scene and then tries calling his client at her hotel, but she has checked out. Back at his apartment, he is grilled by Polhaus and Lieutenant Dundy, who tell him that Thursby was also murdered the same evening. Dundy suggests that Spade had the opportunity and motive to kill Thursby, who likely killed Archer. Archer's widow Iva later visits him in his office, believing that Spade shot his partner so he could have her.

Later that morning, Spade meets his client, now calling herself Brigid O'Shaughnessy. She explains that Thursby was her partner and probably killed Archer, but claims to have no idea who killed Thursby. Spade distrusts her, but agrees to investigate the murders.

At his office, Spade meets Joel Cairo , who first offers him $5,000 to find a "black figure of a bird", then pulls a gun on him in order to search the room for it. Spade knocks Cairo out and goes through his belongings. When Cairo comes round, he hires Spade. Later that evening, Spade tells O'Shaughnessy about Cairo. When Cairo shows up, it becomes clear that Spade's acquaintances know each other. Cairo becomes agitated when O'Shaughnessy reveals that the "Fat Man" is in San Francisco.

In the morning, Spade goes to Cairo's hotel, where he spots Wilmer, a young man who had been following him earlier, and gives Wilmer a message for his boss, Kasper Gutman. When Spade goes to meet Gutman, alias the "Fat Man", in his hotel suite, Gutman will only talk about the Black Falcon evasively, so Spade pretends to throw a temper tantrum and storms out. Later, Wilmer takes Spade at gunpoint to see Gutman. Spade overpowers him, but meets Gutman anyway. Gutman relates the history of the Maltese Falcon, then offers Spade $25,000 for the bird and a quarter of the proceeds from its sale. After Spade passes out because his drink is spiked, Wilmer and Cairo come in from another room and leave with Gutman.

On coming round, Spade searches the suite and finds a newspaper with the arrival time of the freighter La Paloma circled. He goes to the dock, only to find the ship on fire. Later, the ship's captain, Jacobi, shot several times, staggers into Spade's office before dying. The bundle he was clutching contains the Maltese Falcon.

O'Shaughnessy calls the office, gives an address, then screams before the line goes dead. Spade stashes the package at the bus terminal, then goes to the address, which turns out to be an empty lot. Spade returns home and finds O'Shaughnessy hiding in a doorway. He takes her inside and finds Gutman, Cairo, and Wilmer waiting for him, guns drawn. Gutman gives Spade $10,000 for the Falcon, but Spade tells them that part of his price is someone he can turn over to the police for the murders of Thursby and Captain Jacobi, suggesting Wilmer. After some intense negotiation, Gutman and Cairo agree and Wilmer is knocked out and disarmed.

Just after dawn, Spade calls his secretary, Effie Perine, to bring him the bundle. However, when Gutman inspects the statuette, he finds it is a fake and Wilmer escapes during the tumult. Recovering his composure, Gutman invites Cairo to return with him to Istanbul to continue their quest. After they leave, Spade calls the police and tells them where to pick up the pair. Spade then angrily confronts O'Shaughnessy, telling her he knows she killed Archer to implicate Thursby, her unwanted accomplice. She confesses, but begs Spade not to turn her over to the police. Despite his feelings for her, Spade gives O'Shaughnessy up.

Hammett once worked as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco, and he used his birth name "Samuel" for the story's protagonist. He wrote of the book's main character in 1934:

Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached.

Other characters in The Maltese Falcon were based on people whom he met or worked with during that time. The novel was serialized in five parts in during 1929 and 1930 before being published in book form in 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was first filmed the next year and for a second time as Satan Met a Lady in 1936 but rewritten as a light comedy with many elements of the story changed.

Bogart was not the first choice to play Sam Spade. Producer Hal B. Wallis initially offered the role to George Raft, who rejected it because he did not want to work with an inexperienced director, choosing instead to make with director Raoul Walsh and co-starring Edward G. Robinson and Marlene Dietrich. This was one of several roles Raft turned down in movies which ended up being classics.

Huston was grateful that Bogart had quickly accepted the role, and the film helped to consolidate their lifelong friendship and set the stage for collaboration on other films. Bogart's convincing interpretation became the archetype for a private detective in the film noir genre, providing him acclaim and solidifying his onscreen persona. Ingrid Bergman watched Maltese Falcon over and over again while preparing for Casablanca in order to learn how to interact and act with Bogart.

The character of sinister "Fat Man" Kasper Gutman was based on Maundy Gregory, an overweight British detective-entrepreneur who was involved in many sophisticated endeavors and capers, including a search for a long-lost treasure like the jeweled Falcon. However, the character was not easily cast, and it took some time before producer Hal Wallis suggested that Huston screen test Sydney Greenstreet, a veteran stage actor who had never appeared in film before. Greenstreet was 61 years old and weighed between 280 and 350 pounds, and he impressed Huston with his sheer size, distinctive abrasive laugh, bulbous eyes, and manner of speaking. The character of Joel Cairo was based on a criminal whom Hammett arrested for forgery in Pasco, Washington in 1920.

During his preparation for The Maltese Falcon, his directorial debut, John Huston planned each second of the film to the very last detail, tailoring the screenplay with instructions to himself for a shot-for-shot setup, with sketches for every scene, so filming could proceed fluently and professionally. Huston was adamant that the film keep to schedule and that everything be methodically planned to the fullest to ensure that the film never went over budget. The film was shot quickly, and finished completely for less than $400,000. By providing the cast with a highly detailed script, Huston was able to let them rehearse their scenes with very little intervention.[citation needed ]

Such was the extent and efficacy of his preparation of the script that almost no line of dialogue was eliminated in the final edit of the film. Except for some exterior night shots, Huston shot the entire film in sequence, which greatly helped his actors. The shooting went so smoothly that there was actually extra time for the cast to enjoy themselves; Huston brought Bogart, Astor, Bond, Lorre and others to the Lakeside Golf Club near the Warner lot to relax in the pool, dine, drink and talk until midnight about anything other than the film they were working on.

Huston used much of the dialogue from the original novel. The only major section of the novel which wasn't used at all in the film is the story of a man named "Flitcraft", which Spade tells to Brigid while waiting in his apartment for Cairo to arrive. Huston removed all references to sex that the Hays Office had deemed to be unacceptable. Huston was also warned not to show excessive drinking. The director fought the latter, on the grounds that Spade was a man who put away a half bottle of hard liquor a day and showing him completely abstaining from alcohol would mean seriously falsifying his character.

Director of Photography Arthur Edeson used low-key lighting and arresting angles to emphasize the nature of the characters and their actions, such as the scene where Gutman explains the history of the Falcon to Spade, drawing out his story so that the knockout drops in Spade's drink will take effect. Roger Ebert describes this scene as "an astonishing unbroken seven-minute take", and script supervisor Meta Wilde remarked of this scene:

It was an incredible camera setup. We rehearsed two days. The camera followed Greenstreet and Bogart from one room into another, then down a long hallway and finally into a living room; there the camera moved up and down in what is referred to as a boom-up and boom-down shot, then panned from left to right and back to Bogart's drunken face; the next pan shot was to Greenstreet's massive stomach from Bogart's point of view.... One miss and we had to begin all over again.

Fred Sexton (June 3, 1907 - September 11, 1995) was an American artist and sculptor of the Maltese Falcon statuette prop for the film. He also taught art and headed the Art Students League in Los Angeles between 1949 and 1953.

The "Maltese Falcon" itself was based on the "Kniphausen Hawk", a ceremonial pouring vessel made in 1697 for Georg Wilhelm von Kniphausen, Count of the Holy Roman Empire. It is modeled after a hawk perched on a rock and is encrusted with red garnets, amethysts, emeralds, and sapphires. It is currently owned by the Cavendish family and is part of the collection at Chatsworth House.

Several 11.5-inch (29 cm) tall falcon props were made for the film. Studio chief Jack L. Warner gave a metal falcon to William Conrad; it was auctioned in December 1994 for $398,500, the highest price paid for a film prop at that time. A 45-pound metal prop that appeared in the film was sold at auction on November 25, 2013 for over $4 million.

Following a preview in September 1941, Variety called it "one of the best examples of actionful and suspenseful melodramatic story telling in cinematic form":

Unfolding a most intriguing and entertaining murder mystery, picture displays outstanding excellence in writing, direction, acting and editing-combining in overall as a prize package of entertainment for widest audience appeal. Due for hefty grosses in all runs, it's textured with ingredients presaging numerous holdovers in the keys-and strong word-of-mouth will make the b.o. wickets spin.

Upon its release, Bosley Crowther described it as "the best mystery thriller of the year", saying "young Mr. Huston gives promise of becoming one of the smartest directors in the field"; according to Crowther, "the trick which Mr. Huston has pulled is a combination of American ruggedness with the suavity of the English crime school-a blend of mind and muscle-plus a slight touch of pathos". The widely read trade paper The Film Daily agreed with Crowther's assessment of the film and focused special attention as well on Huston's directorial debut. In its 1941 review of the "beautifully made" production, the paper asserted: "John Huston's direction of his own screenplay is as brilliant as any of the jewels which are alleged to encrust the falcon whose possession is the crux of the story".

As a measure of modern or more current reactions to the film, the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives The Maltese Falcon a 100% approval rating by professional critics, based on 55 reviews, with an average score of 9.06/10. The site's consensus states: "Suspenseful, labyrinthine, and brilliantly cast, The Maltese Falcon is one of the most influential noirs-as well as a showcase for Humphrey Bogart at his finest."

According to Warner Bros.' records the film earned $967,000 domestically and $805,000 foreign.

The film received three nominations at the 14th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Sydney Greenstreet for Best Supporting Actor, and John Huston for Best Adapted Screenplay.

As a result of the film's success, Warner Bros. immediately made plans to produce a sequel entitled The Further Adventures of the Maltese Falcon, which Huston was to direct in early 1942. However, due to Huston's high demand as a director and unavailability of the major cast members, the sequel was never made.

In 1989, The Maltese Falcon was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", going in the first year of voting. Roger Ebert added it to his " Great Movies" list.

American Film Institute recognition

Adolph Deutsch wrote the score for the film.

01."Main Title" - 2:07
02."Street Scene" - 1:38
03."Door Slam" - 0:28
04."The Deal" - 2:47
05."The Plot" - 3:02
06."Gutman" - 2:08
07."End Title" - 0:54
08."End Cast" - 0:43
09."Main Title - 1:22
10."Arrival at House - 2:06
11."Uncle Arrives" - 0:59

12."The Phone" - 1:48
13."The Letter - Wheelbarrow" - 2:39
14."Locust - End Title" - 2:24
15."Main Title - Deadman" - 2:22
16."Dimitrios Selects a Victim" - 1:43
17."Contract" - 0:35
18."Dirty Spy" - 2:07
19."The Traitor" - 0:43
20."Peter Writes a Letter" - 1:42
21."The Escape" - 1:28

22."Blackmail Letter" - 1:26
23."The Black Hat" - 0:26
24."Struggle for the Gun" - 0:56
25."Revenge" - 0:40
26."Death of Dimitrios - Finale" - 2:01
27."Main Title" - 0:50
28."The Pardon" - 2:57
29."Velma's Plight" - 3:52
30."The Giveaway" - 3:11
31."Apprehended" - 2:26

32."Main Title" - 1:47
33."Nazi Sub - Customs - Train" - 3:29
34."Consultation" - 1:46
35."Planning the Escape" - 1:58
36."Escape" - 1:08
37."Preparation" - 2:04
38."Eavesdropping" - 0:47
39."Gun Battle" - 2:43
40."The Big Battle" - 4:47
41."End Title - What Am I Saying?" - 0:42

Perhaps the earliest radio adaptation of The Maltese Falcon was on the Silver Theater broadcast on the CBS radio network on February 1, 1942, with Bogart as star. Philip Morris Playhouse staged an adaptation August 14, 1942, with Edward Arnold starring. CBS later created a 30-minute adaptation for The Screen Guild Theater with Bogart, Astor, Greenstreet and Lorre all reprising their roles. This radio segment was originally released on September 20, 1943, and was played again on July 3, 1946.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir directed and scripted by John Huston in his directorial debut, based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade and Mary Astor as his femme fatale client.