"We all...

...go a little mad sometimes."

Whooboy.  Another populist, incredibly familiar film popped up in the queue for the AFI Top 100 (10th Anniversary Edition) that I'm watching and writing about in this format.

I hope I can get this done relatively expeditiously.

By the way, I'm halfway through, and this film was deliberately chosen to represent the tipping point...because that's what it was, and that's how I do things.  I do confess that this being so close to Halloween is an accident, though.

Film 50

50.  "Psycho" (AFI Rank #14)

This one is going to be tough.  This film contains what is unarguably one of the single most famous sequences in film history.  The shower scene has been studied, and re-studied, and studied some more.  Don't believe me?  Try looking up "psycho shower scene" under Google Images.  At the top of the page of results is another tab which takes you to a whole other wing of Google - entitled "Frame by frame."  Yup.  You can access MANY MANY pages of frame by frame analysis of the shower scene.  I'll get to a bit about the scene later, but I'm setting a scene here about what I'm facing while trying to discuss this film.  Mostly, though, I'm whining.

I got to watch one of the greatest pieces of work in the art form known as film last night.  Directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, on a shoestring budget, and with a crew of technicians more familiar with television than film, "Psycho" is the kind of "anti-film" that becomes everything film should be.  Having grown dissatisfied with the splashy films he'd been making, replete with major stars, Hitchcock wanted to make a small film, in black and white, to show that a highly profitable film could be made that was also...great.  In lieu of his standard $250,000 salary, Hitch took a 60% share in "Psycho."  He netted $15 Million from the film, or approximately $150M in today's money.

I'm probably not giving away anything by talking about the story.  Marion Crane, a woman who has the temerity to sleep with a man before she's married, is in a relationship with a man who can't marry her because of his debts.  Given the opportunity to deposit $40,000 of a really obnoxious customer's cash in the bank for her employer, she steals the money and heads off to use the money to start a life with Sam, her man.  Along the way, she stops at an out of the way empty motel, run by a very odd young man named Norman Bates.  She hears Norman arguing with his mother, then, following a conversation with the surprisingly innocent/naive guy, she decides that she is going to return the money she stole.  She is then brutally murdered in the shower, stabbed to death with an enormous knife by a shadowy figure.  The balance of the film is spent on the search for what happened to her, by her sister Lila, Sam, and a private investigator named Arbogast.   That's it.

So what is it about this film that makes it so great?  Let's start with talking about all the conventions it defied.  It opens with a long establishing shot of Phoenix, Arizona, letting us know that it is 2:43 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, two weeks before Christmas.  Pssssst.  "Psycho" is a holiday movie.  Except there is NO reference to any Christmas stuff at all.  More to come on that.  When the shot resolves itself, we are escorted into a hotel room, where a couple, in post coital splendor, ON THE SAME BED, discusses the merits of meeting in a seedy hotel, and whether or not they should...GET MARRIED.  The woman is dressed in a white bra and a slip, and the man is shirtless, and decidedly sexy/sexual.  This was shocking material all by itself at the time.  The authority of the film "code" was starting to slip away, and "Psycho" was one of the first films to really exploit the new freedoms.  Showing the sexuality of a young woman in this way was highly uncommon, and showing her in the bed that she had just used...well.  Horrors.  Except the horrors have not even begun.  Later, we are shown, for the first time in film, the inside of a flushing toilet.  We are also shown a graphic killing (or two) with a chef's knife.  We are also shown a mummified female body, in one of the more shocking moments (and perhaps the more famous scream of those in this picture) in film.   Oh, and for good measure, our protagonist for the first portion of the film is killed a third of the way into the story.  This is risky stuff.  It's ballsy.  And it works, if by today's standards it seems a little tame.  And that is precisely the point.  We don't have today's standards without films like this one.

I've discussed the idea that I like to find more obscure still shots from films to use to illustrate these posts.  Try that with "Psycho," especially if you are looking for photos of Janet Leigh as Marion Crane.  Nearly every photo I find feels iconic, and feels like something you've seen a hundred times.  Credit for my lack of ability to find weird stills is because so much of this film is so brilliantly executed visually, that unless a character is in motion, it all feels like the camera has been set up to take an Ansel Adams type photograph.  Close-ups abound, whether the police officer knocking on Marion's window, or Marion's face as she drives from Phoenix to meet her lover, Sam Loomis, with her purloined $40,000.  Every shot feels familiar, and it feels grand.  Gone, for this film, is the Hitchcock soft focus.  Everything is stark, it is intense, it is intimate.  Look at the framing of the camera in the shower scene as "Mrs. Bates" enters the room.  Leigh, small and barely in the frame on our bottom right, the shadowy creature breaking the stark white background, then raising the clearly silhouetted knife, it's terrifying.  It's groundbreaking.

As I watched this film, I watched every slasher film that I've ever seen, and every convention used in them is right here, presented for me, in an "innocent" film from 1960.  Woman sleeps with a man out of wedlock?  She dies, impaled by some blade.  See the character against a background where a door might open behind her without her knowledge?  That door opens.  Twist ending?  Check.  Leaving a body of one of your victims where someone can find it later?  Check.  Blood?  Check. 95% of all slasher films owe their inspiration to this film.  The other 5% are liars.  I'm getting off point.  Perhaps because of the television influence on the film, it just feels so damned...close.  Hollywood was about grandeur.  This is the antithesis.  Hell, check out "North By Northwest," a film whose final scene takes place on MOUNT FREAKING RUSHMORE.  Here, we're in one room of a small stone foundation basement for the big finish.  There's a "Hitchcock vertical shot" in "North...", but it is a huge shot of the United Nations building.  In "Psycho," it's used twice, but it's the top of the Bates' stairs.  "Vertigo" takes us all over San Francisco and portions of Northern California.  This confines us, for the most part, to interiors, except for some road shots, and the exterior of the small, sad little motel right by where the main highway used to go.  Again.  It's "anti-film."

Compelling, deep character work, combined with subtle details abound.  Let's go over a few.

1.  Marion is wearing a white bra and slip in the opening scene.  Later, she steals money.  We see her again in a bra and slip, this time, though, it's black.  She's no longer an innocent, and her racier lingerie certainly implies it.  It should also be noted that she switched from a white purse to a black one.
2.  Look at that smile on Marion's face in the car shot I posted above.  She doesn't regret stealing the money...not in the least.
3.  Right after the decision to return to Phoenix to face her crime, Marion steps into the shower.  Again, look at the joy on her face, as she washes herself clean.  She's chosen to confess, and the shower is washing away the dirt she has upon her.
4.  Norman Bates, despite saying that he was going to share a meal with Marion, never eats real food.  He munches on Kandy Korn throughout the film.  He's a child.  It's subtle, but it's there if you look.  Sure his mother is always with him, but she really isn't, and this detail makes me believe that Norman believes his mother is there, and he certainly bows to her wishes, especially about his sexual feelings...but he has enough grasp on reality to know that she isn't there, so...he gets to eat candy for dinner.
5.  Not so subtle, but rarely discussed, is the shot that I posted above of Norman's bed.  Again, Norman is a child.  It's terrifying, and it's one of the least memorable moments in the film.  It's now one of the more memorable moments for me.
6.  I was listening to the "Mother, blood, BLOOD!" bit after Marion is killed during the film last night.  It felt off.  It turns out that Hitchcock had manipulated the audio to remove all the bass from Anthony Perkins' voice.  So, Hitch, I caught that.
7.  The next thing that happens after Marion's body is disposed of...is a shot of the interior of the Loomis hardware store, and a woman talking about how when things die, it should be painless.  Nothing about Marion's death looked particularly painless.  Perhaps it's not all that subtle.  I liked it, though, even if it feels a touch melodramatic.
8.  The amazing visual shot of Norman staring at the swamp after Arbogast has been killed.  We know what happened to him, and his car.  And we see Norman sinking, too.
9.  For all the talk of not seeing the knife penetrate Marion's skin, there is one shot.  It's brief, but the knife is most assuredly "in" her.  It's here, on the right.
10.  How does the sheriff not go and investigate Norman, and why doesn't Sam Loomis remember the grisly murder/suicide that happened at the Bates Motel in this obviously small town?  I'm not sure this qualifies as a success of the film, but it is worth asking.  Missing woman.  Stopped at the Bates Motel, the site of the only murder/suicide in the town's history.  Missing private investigator.  A simple phone call is all we get?

Acting in this film is great.  Great.  I'm just going to touch on one moment for one actor, as I feel that everyone was spot on, and I'd be talking for hours if I went into all the things I see them do.  First, I'll mention the other actors, and you just think "great job" after I mention them.  Martin Balsam.  Vera Miles.  John Gavin.  Even Simon Oakland, saddled with an exposition speech that might have been unfair, is great.  No, the moment I want to talk about comes after an exquisitely shot sequence.  After Marion's murder, we see the dutiful Norman clean up the room, in graphic and long detail.  We see his shock and horror at the crime, and we see him so carefully dispose of all traces of Marion.  There's no background music, and the cuts are short, and frantic, but there is a deliberateness to them...that makes us wonder why we need to see so much of it...but makes us love seeing so much of it.  I'm getting off track.  Finished with the room, we see Norman pushing the car containing Marion's body in the trunk into the swamp on the Bates property.  As it begins to sink, we see Norman, nervously gnawing on his thumbnail (sucking his thumb?), while occasionally grinning.  Then, the car stops sinking.  The moment I want to talk about is Perkins right then.  We see Norman suddenly put the most wonderfully subtle "Well, what do I do now?" look of panic across his face.  It makes us laugh out loud, and NO PART of us should want to do that.  It's a masterstroke of acting brilliance, and I wish, for everything I've ever done, that I could get just one moment that was one tenth as good as that.

Of course, none of this is nearly as compelling without Bernard Hermann's score.  Devoid of any instruments except strings, this is a score that is so intrinsic to the film, so necessary, that Hitchcock doubled Hermann's salary when he heard the score.  He felt the film would not be what it was without that music.  Hitchcock was right.  That's what's so freaking great about film.  We view it as a visual medium usually, but picture the opening of "Jaws" without that music, or even "Raiders of the Lost Ark" without its triumphant horns blazing.  No, film is an art combining a whole lot of disciplines, and Hermann nailed his portion of this film.

I mentioned Christmas before.  I find it interesting, and believe it to be a deliberate choice, that Christmas is not referenced at any point in this.  The final action of the film takes place on Sunday, December 20th, and in an early shot from that morning, we see Lila and Sam approach the sheriff at a church.  No holly, no boughs, no bows, no nothing on the church. We see the sheriff's house the night before.  No tree, no nothing.  We see the police station after Norman is arrested, and there's no decorations up.  Not a one.  I'm sorry.  I don't believe that's oversight.  I believe that was a choice.  I'm not sure, exactly, why Hitchcock made that choice, but he did.

One other thing I want to touch on.  Simon Oakland's final wrap up speech, in which he sums up a lifetime of mental illness in a long, almost unbelievable monologue.  It's sloppy writing, for sure, but I found it infinitely more forgivable last night for some reason.  It's not nearly as ham-handed as I remembered it, and I think perhaps it gets knocked because so much before it is so masterful.  I thought about what might have been done to fix it.  I think some shots of Norman in his cell might have helped.  But...it wouldn't have.  Because what gets us in the end is that shot of Norman, left alone in a room with his mother.  It's haunting the way it was shot.  So.  I'm going to forgive Hitchcock on this one.  It's not that great, but it's functional.  He chose not to show us Norman until he was ready to show us nothing but Norman.  It's a chilling ending.  I could lose the skull superimposed over Norman's face in the last frame, though.  I'll say that might have been a miscue.

"Psycho" is a huge film, in terms of what it means to film history.  It could be argued that it represents the birth of the films of the 70s, and while it was followed by fits and starts for the next decade (1968's Best Picture Oscar went to "Oliver!"), you cannot help but see gritty Hollywood in it.  It's a game changer.

Watch it again.  It's Halloween.  Go for it.  Try and watch it for the "first" time, without the knowledge of everything that's going to happen.

Julie had some laughs with me last night about my enthusiasm for finding Roger Ebert and myself on the same page.  She finds a great deal of...approval seeking...in it.  Perhaps justification for my thoughts.  Whatever.  She may be right.  I read this after all the rest of this was written.  I submit it here for you.  Roger Ebert on "Psycho."

EDIT:  Dammit.  Something I wanted to discuss, and something I am watching out for the next time I watch this film.  I'm going to look and see if I can see Marion's and Arbogast's reaction to seeing Norman with the knife.  There would be a moment of recognition in that, and I have to see if I can see it.  I'm guessing we don't, but I want to check it out.