![]() ![]() While Chandler’s books did not enjoy the sales that their author believed they merited, his name had currency. In a testament to Raymond Chandler’s “star” value, Warner Brothers insisted on leaving the crime writer’s name in the credits when Strangers on a Train premiered in 1951, even though little or nothing from his original script survived on film. “Our collaboration was not very happy,” Hitchcock later admitted, with impressive, indeed astounding, self-restraint. In his first meeting with Chandler’s replacement, Hitch ostentatiously pinched his nose and dropped the hard-boiled author’s script into a wastebasket. (Intriguingly Hitchcock’s team had first approached Dashiell Hammett for the job.) Chandler, who loathed having story conferences with the famed director-“god-awful jabber sessions,” he derisively termed them-went so far as to sneer, as Hitchcock struggled to emerge from his limousine when paying a visit on Chandler at his home in La Jolla: “Look at that fat bastard trying to get out of his car!” (Hitch was within earshot at the time.) Fed up with Chandler’s arrogant attitude and primo dono antics, Hitchcock fired him from the project and found another, more amenable and amiable screenwriter. Yet even the mutual antagonism of Chandler and Wilder paled compared with the enmity that developed between Chandler and Alfred Hitchcock when Chandler was working on the screenplay for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train in 1950. “There was a lot of Hitler in Chandler,” Wilder, recalling the ordeal, commented years later, not entirely facetiously. Here is Wilder’s bemused recollection of his colleague’s parade of horribles: “I was rude I was drinking I was fucking I was on the phone with four broads, with one I was on the phone-he clocked me-for twelve and a half minutes I had asked him to pull down the Venetian blinds-the sun was streaming into the office-without saying please.” Against all odds, the two men somehow managed to abide each other for long enough-ten whole weeks-to finish the script. At one point Chandler submitted a list to the film’s producer explaining why he could no longer work with Wilder. Raymond Chandler’s sensitivities drove to distraction Billy Wilder, with whom Chandler collaborated on the Double Indemnity script. ![]() “I’m a man who takes very little lightly,” he once informed a correspondent, and it would seem that truer words had never been spoken. However, the prickly, temperamental crime writer was a notoriously difficult collaborator. Then in 1950 Chandler toiled on scripts for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense flick Strangers on a Train, based on Patricia Highsmith’s recent debut thriller. Cain crime novel, and The Blue Dahlia, for both of which he received Academy Award nominations. During that lengthy intermission between novels, Chandler had gone to work in Hollywood, writing scripts for two classic American crime films: Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, based on the James M. In the United States in the year 1949-when the country, having survived the ravages of a second world war, was hurtling and hustling its American way toward the middle of a bloody century-it had been six long years since Raymond Chandler, successor to Dashiell Hammett as the Crime Boss of the hard-boiled boys, had published his last detective novel, The Lady in the Lake (kind of a highfaluting title, that). ![]()
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