Queer strangers: Alfred Hitchcock's Fidelity to Patricia Highsmith

Abstract

In the growing interest of Alfred Hitchcock adaptations, this article discusses not necessarily why the director chose to adapt Patricia Highsmith's debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950, 1951), but how he adapted her. While this dualistically reveals much about the creative process of both the director and the novelist, it further begins to pay some due to the ways in which Hitchcock's film is indebted to Highsmith's structure, miasma and characters. Notwithstanding the acclaim to which Highsmith's novel is now held within the fields of crime writing and the writer's oeuvre, notable scholars writing on the film have been too quick to dismiss the novel as a rough plot for what Hitchcock developed to become the finished film. This article will go some way towards challenging this assertion.