Thanksgiving weekend, as I wrote last week, is mostly about football. But it’s also about marathons—not the running kind; the lying-on-the-couch and watching kind. Holed up at the family home with few other entertainment options, flipping mindlessly through all 800 channels on your TV’s guide, you just have to hope you come across a good one. This past weekend, viewers in Central Pennsylvania were presented with two options: A selection of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous movies; or seven seasons of Boy Meets World. Talk about a tough choice. I finally flipped a coin and went with Hitch on TCM.
It happened that two of the movies the channel picked had tennis in their stories. While it’s hard to imagine Hitchcock actually hauling his body around a court, he seemed to have a thing for the game. It’s featured in four of his films, including an early silent one, and has a prominent role in Strangers on a Train and Dial M for Murder, both of which were shown on Friday. Taken together, they give you an idea of how tennis was viewed in England and the U.S. during the amateur era. They also left me wondering, not for the first time, why so few other good tennis movies exist.
In Dial M, which was adapted from a play by Frederick Knott and released in 1954, the main character, Tony Wendice, is an ex-tennis player who retires after his wealthy wife complains about his constant traveling. When he finds out she has had an affair, he devises an elaborate plot to kill her and get her money. Aside from giving Wendice a glamorous background that explains why a beautiful rich woman (played by Grace Kelly) would marry him, tennis doesn’t figure into the story. Wendice is played by Ray Milland as a sort of murderous Cliff Drysdale, circa 1965. He has a classic long and lean tennis build, a clubby accent, and a quick mind—when Tony’s first plot misfires, he improvises a new, equally elaborate one in a matter of minutes. He’s a killer, yes, but in this case that doesn’t reflect too badly on the sport. It seems in the U.K. of the 1950s, a tennis player was thought to be someone who, when he was confronted by a police detective and his wife about his plot to have her strangled, would smile suavely, pour her a drink, and say, “It looks as if you could use one.”
In Strangers on a Train, made three years earlier, Hitchcock wove tennis more deeply into the plot and theme. One of his best and most complex movies—he said it could be “studied forever"—it’s the story of, yes, two strangers who meet on a train from Washington D.C., to New York. One of them is a tennis star named Guy Haines, played by Farley Granger. As an actor he’s fairly wooden, but his thick black hair and clean-cut look might remind you of a young Pete Sampras—Granger’s strokes, little more than long, flat hacks, certainly won’t. In the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith, Haines is an architect; Hitchcock, or one of his screenwriters, turned him into a tennis player.
The other stranger is Bruno Anthony, played by Robert Walker. He’s the real star of the movie, an effeminate, flamboyantly dressed loner with an Oedipal complex who tries to strike a sinister deal with Haines: He’ll murder the tennis player’s wife, Miriam, who is pregnant with another man’s baby but won’t grant him a divorce, if Haines will murder Bruno's father in return. A “criss cross,” as Bruno puts it.
The theme of Strangers on a Train, if I remember correctly from my film studies class in college, is deviance and punishment in post-war America. The creepy Bruno and Haines’s wild-child wife are the deviants, while Guy and the wealthy family of his new girlfriend, Anne Morton (played by Ruth Roman), are the upstanding, if snobby, forces of social order. Tennis, which Guy is seen playing at Forest Hills by day, is contrasted with a small-town carnival that his wife goes to at night. The sport is orderly, symmetrical, straight-lined, civilized; Hitchcock even echoes the “criss cross” theme by showing crosscourt rallies. The carnival is loud, unruly, and possibly dangerous—in this British director’s eyes, quintessentially American. The rigid right angles of the tennis court are contrasted with the whirling, circular orbits of the merry-go-round and ferris wheel.
Guy, as many of the top amateurs of the time did, uses tennis as his ticket out of the carnival town and into the country club. (In this movie and in Dial M for Murder, playing the sport is, if nothing else, a way to get a wife who would otherwise be way out of your league.) The crowd scenes were filmed at Forest Hills, while the matches mix close-ups of Granger swinging and sweating with more distant shots of body doubles who can actually play tennis. Hitchcock brings real tension to one of these scenes, in which Guy has to finish a match as quickly as possible. And he creates a classic, chilling moment by having the player look into the stands and see Bruno staring straight at him, while the surrounding audience members move their heads back and forth with the ball (see the clip at bottom).
Most interesting to me is Guy’s answer to the question, “Are you going to turn pro?” He says no, he’s got better things to do now that his girlfriend’s family has set him up in politics. Before the Open era, tennis was a means to an end, not the end itself. The term “turning pro” has a ring of distaste to Guy. In those days, it meant barnstorming around the country to play in gymnasiums for whatever money you could drum up. That was a far cry from Forest Hills.
In his posh murderer and square-jawed social climber, Hitchcock made vivid, effective us of tennis’s class connotations. The sport, and the big screen, are still waiting for a sequel.
