by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Alfred Hitchcock was shrewd when it came to gobbling up filmable book properties. His famed adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Psycho pales in intelligence only next to his interpretations of the work of Daphne Du Maurier in The Birds, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn (although Nicholas Roeg deserves full points for leaping upon arguably her best tale, the short story that spawned his film of the same name, Don’t Look Now).
Legend has it that Hitchcock went to some lengths to hide his identity from the young British writer Patricia Highsmith in the pursuit of the rights to her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. Paying less than $10,000 for it, it was filmed and released by the next year and would go on to become one of Hitchcock’s most enduring (and endearing) titles. Understandably, Highsmith was less than thrilled when she discovered such a cashed-up name was behind the relatively meagre offerings she accepted for the rights to her story, an experience she may (or may not) have learned from when it come to the selling of latter titles to other eager filmmakers.
Highsmith’s novel and Hitchcock’s film are for the most part quite similar. Architect Guy (a tennis player in the film) wishes to ditch his slaggish wife to wed the far more genteel (and upwardly mobile) Anne. On a train journey, he chances upon Charles Anthony Bruno (Bruno Anthony). Bruno’s proposition is simple: Guy will murder Bruno’s father, and in return Bruno will, motive-free and arguably undetectably, kill Guy’s slapper wife. Writing him off uneasily as a kook, Guy’s wife is soon murdered and Bruno demands he repay his part of the bargain, or face the consequences of being turned in to the police.
In the book, Guy does kill Bruno’s father. A further mishap on a boat trip causes Bruno’s sudden death, and riddled with guilt and all-purpose angst, Guy tries to rescue him but fails. Although Bruno is dead, Guy finally confesses to one of his murdered wife’s regular shags. In a dual-punch, the man to whom guy confesses takes the “fair enough, your wife was a bit of a ho who slept around so she deserved it” route. But almost immediately, the detective who overhears the confession is announced to think differently, and Guy is arrested.
In its final act, the Hitchcock version paints a very different picture of both Guy himself and his relationship with Bruno. Here on the surface, Guy commits no real crime outside of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for the most part the film plays out as hurtling the audience towards the inevitable “jig is up” moment when Bruno’s villainous plan is exposed. Guy, stranded between his new life of political power and squeaky-clean domesticity and his background with his far more seedy wife, is forced into war on this moral terrain as a battle of wits ensues between himself and Bruno.
Farley Granger takes on the role of Guy only three years after he appeared as one of the leads in Hitchcock’s most formally and conceptually daring film, Rope. While the characters may not be as overtly gay in Strangers on a Train as they are in this earlier effort, both the casting of the homosexual Granger himself and the less ambiguously queer elements of Highsmith’s novel ramp up the sexual tension between Bruno and Guy in the film.
These two Hitchcock films are arguably Granger’s most immediately recognizable titles to a general cinema-going audience, but his work outside of the American industry provides a fascinating flip side to this career, particularly the films he made in Italy. Most notable of these is Visconti’s Senso (1954), but in the 1970s he also appeared in a handful of spaghetti westerns and, more immediately relevant to this article, some giallo. Granger had the small but significant role of Mr Polvesi, the neglectful father of the first murdered teenage girl in Massimo Dallamano’s seminal 1974 film La Polizia Chiede Aiuto (What have They Done To Your Daughters?), and the lead in the lesser known but substantially more ballsy genre entry, Renzo Russo’s 1971 filmLa Rossa Dalla Pelle Che Scotta (The Red Headed Corpse).
It would perhaps have been too obvious – although not that that ever stopped other giallo filmmakers – to cast Granger in Maurizio Lucidi’s adaptation of the Highsmith novel and the latter Hitchcock film,La Vittima Designata (The Designated Victim, or Murder By Design). Maybe Lucidi knew that his film did not need a big Hollywood name, or alternatively, maybe the casting of Tomas Milian (himself an established star with a slew of his own spaghetti westerns under his holster, most notably Leone’s 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars) was all the star power the film needed.
Despite the obviously differing cultural and production contexts, La Vittima Designata is in many ways even more dedicated to Highsmith’s original tale, despite the change of name and the removal of the train element of the story altogether. In the Lucidi version, protagonist Stefano Argenti just happens to bump into the Bruno figure, Count Matteo Tiepolo, around town. Set in Venice, they meet when there eyes are drawn to the same pendant at a street market (hardly an orthodox shared point of masculine interest), and later happen to share a gondola after a night out with their respective disposable ladyfriends.
What Lucidi’s version adds to the story that is all but absent from the Hitchcock adaptation is a striking sense of romantic tragedy. As the final curtain falls in La Vittima Designata, the surface narrative tensions created by Hitchcock’s cat-and-mouse story are obliterated completely, returning to but then transcending even further beyond the guilt-ridden torment of the murderous Guy of Highsmith’s novel.
Despite the chemistry between Granger and Robert Walker’s Bruno in the Hitchcock adaptation, it is no match for the genuinely suffocating sexual tension between Stefano and Matteo. Tomas Milani’s Stefano is superficially less sympathetic than Granger’s Guy: he is clearly corrupt, intent on using his loathed wife Luisa (Marisa Bartoli) for money to support himself and his new lover, the model Fabienne (Katia Christine), despite the fact that he cheats on both of them by scruffing a German hippy hitchhiker. On further analysis, however, it is impossible to not feel real solidarity with Stefano and his plight. It is no coincidence that Luisa and Fabienne are strikingly similar physically – there is no reason for Lucidi to cast almost identical looking redheads in his two female lead roles apart from the fact that he wants these women to appear indistinct, to fade into the background as one amorphous womanly blur.
The justification for this is simple: despite the absence of explicitly ‘out’ male characters, these female characters do not register in comparison to the explosive chemistry (and narrative dominance) of the relationship between the two men. Hypertheatrical, somewhat camp yet uncompromisingly dedicated to Stefano, the construction of Matteo depends solely upon the performance of Pierre Clémenti (most familiar to contemporary audiences for his role as Santoni in Gilles MacKinnon’s Kate Winslet vehicle, Hideous Kinky (1998).
While sharing the stalker-like creepiness of Bruno in both the Highsmith and Hitchcock versions in the early stages of the film, in La Vittima Designata this gives way to what develops between the Stefano and Matteo as a something far stronger, albeit sinister (although this time on the part of both parties). In one scene, staying late in his office so as to forge his wife signature with the purpose of stealing her money so he can escape to South America with Red Head v.2, Matteo, wounded, stumbles in seeking Stefano’s assistance. Despite the macabre motives of them both, this simple gesture continues an increasing physicality – both sensual and strangely compassionate – between the two men.
The films’ climax brings this up-until-now implied romantic element to the fore. Like Guy in the novel, Stefano finds no way to escape Matteo’s blackmail scheme and finally submits. He decides to commit the murder of Matteo’s brother as requested. He takes the rifle he was given to the top of a tall building near Matteo’s house and, as planned, shoots through the designated window (hence ‘the designated victim’), the positioning previously established by Matteo to take out his brother sniper-style. The final shot of the film, however, exposes Matteo’s true intent: it is not his brother he wanted Stefano to kill, but Matteo himself. As the corpse of Matteo, destroyed by Stefano’s bullet, sits unmovingly in his chair, unrequited love is granted its ultimate moment of penetrative victory.
The final moment of La Vittima Designata strips away any lingering doubt that this film was about anything but the doomed yet beautiful relationship between Stefano and Matteo. The army of forgettable red-headed women, the wacky German hitchhiker, the mythic brother who supposedly torments Matteo – they are gone. What remains is Matteo: still, peaceful, and joined forever with Stefano through real, feeling, human flesh. The unsatisfying (and ambiguous) heterosexual victory of Strangers on a Train, and the genre-friendly detective-oriented irony of Highsmith’s novel do not begin to share the affect of the conclusion of Lucidi’s film. Instead of examining flawed criminals and the moral predicament of those lured into their world, La Vittima Designata demonstrates with beauty and compassion a heartwrenching romantic tragedy.
