Strangers on a Golf Course

Another of the movies that I recently watched off of my DVR because it's avaialble on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Once You Kiss a Stranger....

After the opening credits, backed by a lousy late 1960s MOR song, we get a shot of Diana Granger (Carol Lynley) getting out of the ocean at her beach house out in Malibu, and harpooning a little girl's beach ball! Diana then goes into her beach house and threatens to kill her cat for drinking out of her glass of milk! Obviously something's wrong with Diana.

Diana goes to visit her aunt, who has been Diana's guardian since her parents died. Aunt Margaret has had Diana in and out of a series of institutions, and Diana's current psychiatrist, Dr. Haggis (Whit Bissell), wants Diana committed again because of her homicidal tendencies. Diana, obviously, doesn't want to go back into any asylum, but can't escape, because whatever money she gets is contingent upon seeing the shrinks recommended by Aunt Margaret.

Margaret's late husband sponsored a golf tournament, so Margaret is watching that on the TV, pissing Diana off. Diana, on some sort of whim, decides to go to the country club where the tournament is being held. It's a three-way race between Jerry Marshall (Paul Burke), who is in the lead but has a reputation for always finishing second; Pete Delaney (Peter Lind Hayes), who is doing well but looks like his best days are behind him; and Mike Wilson (Philip Carey), who is the current best golfer on tour. Sure enough, Jerry screws up on the 18th green, sending the tournament into a sudden death playoff which will happen the next morning.

Diana hangs out at the 19th hole like a groupie, eventually meeting Jerry and talking to him. Jerry has a wife Lee (Martha Hyer), but they're estranged and she's back home in Chicago with her mother. When Diana sees Jerry get into an argument with Mike, who wants everybody to have a couple of drinks, Diana gets her idea to set a terrible plan into motion.

Diana goes to Jerry's bungalow, and talks purely in hypotheticals about how Jerry sees Mike as an obstacle and it would be nice if Mike were out of the way. But of course there's really nothing Jerry could do about it, since he'd be the most obvious subject. Having his wife kneecap Mike wouldn't work either. But Diana has obviously seen Alfred Hitchock's Strangers on a Train and knows what would work: Jerry would be #1 if Mike weren't around, and Diana could flee for greener pastures if Dr. Haggis were out of the scene. So in theory Diana could knock off Mike and Mike could knock off Dr. Haggis, and nobody would be any the wiser.

Of course, it didn't work in Strangers on a Train, and it's not going to work here. Diana does predictably kill Mike, running him down with a golf cart and then bashing his head in with Jerry's putter. Mike doesn't show up for the playoff the next morning, but his body is discovered on the 7th hole. Jerry doesn't have an alibi -- well, he does but it would involve revealing to his wife that he's been unfaithful again.

Diana gets pissed at Jerry when he seems reluctant to go through with killing Dr. Haggis, and this is where the movie develops its serious problem. Diana starts blackmailing Jerry to the point that it should be obvious to him something is seriously wrong with Diana. So when he's supposed to be killing Dr. Haggis, he really should just tell Dr. Haggis he has reason to believe something is seriously wrong with one of Haggis' patients. Haggis would immediately recognize the patient in question from a description, and the police should be able to put two and two together. Instead, Jerry does nothing, waiting for Diana to find the next morning that Haggis is in fact very much alive.

I mentioned Strangers on a Train because both that and Once You Kiss a Stranger... are based on the same source material by Patricia Highsmith. But Strangers on a Train is much the better movie. There isn't as much of a plot hole in the Hitchcock movie as there is with the remake. We also get much better performances from Robert Walker and especially Farley Granger than we do with their counterparts in the remake. Carol Lynley steals the cigarette lighter, but that's not used for the sort of climax we get in the original. The climax we do get is a campy sort of catfight, not terrible but not as good as the original. There's a lot to like about the production design if you like looking at the way the 1960s looked at themselves.

Overall, however, I can't imagine why anybody would recommend Once You Kiss a Stranger... over Strangers on a Train. I believe both are available on DVD, so you can judge for yourself.