70 Years Ago: Dial M For Murder (1954)

Director Alfred Hitchcock is up to his trademark diabolical tricks in Dial M For Murder (1954), a restless, yet highly-focused adaptation of Frederick Knott's hit stage play. The movie shares something in common with Rope (1948) in that the action is confined primarily to one claustrophobic location: an apartment suite in London.

As in Knott's original work, Hitchcock's film follows anti-hero Tony Wendice (Ray Milland) as he plots to murder his beautiful wife, Margot (Grace Kelly). Although the charming, erudite Wendice hardly seems perturbed -- let alone enraged -- with his wife over the moral trespass he discovered (an extra-marital affair), he nonetheless commissions (or rather, blackmails...) a shady college acquaintance, Swann (Anthony Dawson) into performing the terrible deed. The end game: Tony wants the money in Margot's will.

Wendice recruits Swann, I might add, by applying inescapable, Aristotelian logic. And his entire attitude with Swann is unswervingly dispassionate, but firm. He lets the facts speak for him, in other words. Wendice is thus revealed to be an exceedingly clever tactician, one with a clockwork mind and total understanding of all angles of the crime. He puts the screws of manipulation to Swann with a relentlessness - and charm - that is shocking, yet also strangely fun.

Watching the scene involving Wendice's manipulation of Swann, you will find yourself absolutely entranced by the writing, not to mention the performances. The scene misses nothing -- leaving no stone unturned -- and the dialogue and delivery are unerringly sharp. And when the film arrives at the specifics of the murder plot, Hitchcock cuts to and then remains with a high angle shot for an uncomfortably long duration. This selection of camera angles boasts two primary meanings. First, it distances us, in a sense, from the two men plotting evil. Secondly, the high angle (always a cinematic indicator of doom or entrapment), indicates that this plan will be the undoing for both men. Ultimately, that is indeed the case.

The lovely Margot, it turns out, was unfaithful to Tony with an American crime writer named Mark Halliday (Robert Cummings), and the real motive behind the murder, I suggest is not merely the money in the will, but the fact that Margot is -- literally -- a different woman with Mark than she is with Tony. And yes, I mean that in the Biblical sense. With Tony, Margot is demure, virginal, (and to establish this, Hitchcock has her dress primarily in white).

By contrast, In the clutches of passion with Mark, Margot is more overtly sexual and passionate, a personality change made clear by her decision to adorn a fiery red dress. I get the feeling that Tony is murderous not so much because his wife cheated, but because Mark brings out the lustful, sexual side of Margot. Tony is intellectual, cunning, but Mark is macho and hot blooded. He can't stand that Margot would gravitate to Tony.

On the night of the planned murder, Tony has arranged the perfect alibi. He's going to be with Mark (yes, Margot's lover!) at a stag party, while Swann -- using Margot's front door key -- sneaks into the apartment and strangles her with a stocking. Tony telephones at the very moment of Swann's ambush (hence the "dial M" aspect of the title), and hears the vicious scuffle. But Swann bungles the attack, and Margot manages to stab her attacker in the back with a very sharp pair of scissors. In a terrific (and macabre) moment, Swann lands on the floor, back first, and the scissors - pressured by the floor - push deeply into his back, all the way up to the hilt.

And I must say, this is the moment in which Dial M For Murder goes from being an involving thriller to an experience you can't take your eyes off of.

Realizing that his plan has gone horribly awry, Tony -- using that unnatural calm and icy intellect -- begins to adjust to the situation on the fly. When he realizes Swann has failed in murder, Tony switches strategy and sets up Margot as Swann's murderer. She is arrested by Inspector Hubbard (John Williams) and charged with murder. Margot goes on trial (in a frugal but expressionistic sequence), is found guilty, and is promptly slated for execution.

The final scenes of the film heap irony upon irony, and Dial M For Murder successfully balances one cunning mind (Tony's) against another (Inspector Hubbard). On the former front, there's a grin-inducing scene in which Mark goes to Tony and -- desperate to save Margot from execution -- begs him to confess to Swann's murder. Mark -- the crime writer -- has even concocted a crazy story about how and why Tony would have killed Swann. What's amusing is that Mark has creatively (and with no inside knowledge) guessed correctly about almost everything. It's like a game of chess, and you sit on the edge of your seat waiting to see how and when the worm will finally turn, and Tony will be exposed.

Oddly, and perhaps counterintuitively, Milland plays the character in Dial M For Murder that we most easily sympathize with. He's a murderer, a cold fish and a cad, and yet somehow we simultaneously want him to get caught and get away with the perfect crime. Milland is ideal in this part, his eyes constantly processing -- not unlike a computer -- every new development, assimilating it, and taking it in stride. Even when he is exposed at the end, Tony seems oddly jolly and charismatic.

I don't believe that Dial M For Murder evidences the moral depth and philosophical heft of a Hitchcock film like Rope. Nor does it shatter the rules of cinematic decorum like Psycho. Nor have I pinpointed a deep and meaningful sub-text here, as is most assuredly present in a film such as The Birds (which had the attacking birds carrying out the subconscious, murderous desires of a particular character). Considering this, Dial M For Murder feels a tad lighter than some Hitchcock efforts. 

Yet by the same token, Dial M may also play as more widely accessible. Make no mistake: this is a brilliantly-written, effectively shot, wonderfully performed effort. I just don't know that it's in the top tier of Hitchcock's canon. Yet even lower-rung Hitchcock efforts are unerringly brilliant (and better than about 95% of other thrillers). So Dial M For Murder could be exactly what the doctor ordered in the hot house days of summer: a finely-balanced ballet in which a murderous man dances his way out of being caught, while others pirouette around him, attempting to discern the truth.

60 Years Ago: The Birds

Dig long and dig deep into the annals of horror cinema history, and you will likely excavate a dozen or more titles traceable directly back to Alfred Hitchcock's seminal "revenge of nature" movie, The Birds (1963). 

John Carpenter's The Fog (1980), about a small town overcome by a creeping mist appropriates the Marin County location; the "local color" of a small town in jeopardy, and the final siege set-piece. 

Or take, for example, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), another siege picture with desperate heroes barricading themselves (with hammers and nails...) inside an isolated farmhouse while the menace grows outside -- a concept nearly identical to the last act of The Birds. 

On and on, you can tally your catalogue. 

Films from Frogs (1972) to Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) to Day of the Animals (1977) to Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008) derive much of their energy, drive and central scenarios from The Birds.

This is so because the film compellingly depicts a crisis (a war with homicidal birds) but finds no empirical solution for the mystery, instead focusing the viewer's search for "answers" as it were, on the vicissitudes of human nature and the human heart. Thus, the technically accomplished film, a horror thriller of the first order, is both enticingly and alarmingly ambiguous at the same time, with no scientific or rational explanation for the birds' attack on mankind in scenic Bodega Bay. The lack of a scientific or rational explanation lends the film a powerful -- and undeniably sexual -- subtext; and that's the element of the piece to focus on. The bird attacks, one can detect upon close viewing, occur because of turbulent human emotions. 

Yep, it's all about the birds and the bees.

But first some reminders about the storyline. The Birds opens on a seemingly normal day in the early 1960’s with Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) happening into a bird shop in scenic San Francisco. As she enters the shop, a flock of birds are seen in the distance amongst the skyscrapers: circling and cawing, but otherwise nonthreatening. This is a foreshadowing of what is to come; a "simmering" before the inevitable boiling.

Once Melanie is in the store, however, things do heat up (as we anticipate). Melanie attempts to pull a prank on a handsome man, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) by pretending to be a bird shop employee. But Mitch -- who claims (critically) to be there to purchase two "love birds" -- is actually pulling a prank of his own, and soon gets the better of Melanie.

This game of cat and mouse spurs a veritable obsession in Melanie, and she soon tracks Mitch down to his home, sixty miles up the coast, in scenic Bodega Bay. a little hamlet described as a "a collection of shacks on a hillside." Her mission: to initiate a sexual relationship with Mitch, still more or less a stranger. Melanie does so under the guise of delivering him his love birds. Once in town, Melanie also meets the town's schoolteacher, Annie (Suzanne Pleshette), another woman who once shared an intimate relationship with the apparently promiscuous Mitch. There is a quick rivalry between Annie and Melanie, and some jealousy there too. Meanwhile, as Melanie grows closer to Mitch, she is looked upon with stern disapproval by Mitch's shrewish, controlling mother, Lydia (Jessica Tandy). Lydia is a cold, emotionally closed off woman, still despondent over the death of her husband years earlier.

And while all these tumultuous personal relationships shift and grow, the inexplicable suddenly occurs: birds of all varieties (sparrows, crows, gulls, etc.) launch a coordinated attack on Bodega Bay, ambushing the local school (killing Annie), dive-bombing the local diner, and laying merciless siege to Mitch's family farm house (reachable primarily by motor boat and therefore somewhat isolated).

In The Birds, now sixty years old, Alfred Hitchcock forges fascinating connections between the film's primary love relationship and these bird attacks. In fact, he seems to suggest that the relationship is indeed the very thing manifesting the homicidal rage among our fine feathered friends. Hitchcock's visual storytelling and connections suggest -- albeit in subtle terms -- that the Mitch/Melanie coupling, their perhaps "unnatural" or "inappropriate" relationship (at least in Lydia's eyes...) is the very factor that has caused the sudden and alarming up-ending of Mother Nature, and set off the murderous birds. I find this "stealth" explanation fascinating, because instead of locating an answer inside science (which would inevitably play like techno-babble), Hitchcock finds motivation in us; in the way we relate to another; in the things, even, we keep hidden and buried away from one another.

The film's first bird attack triggers this nearly subconscious connection in a most artful way. Early in the film, Melanie takes a skiff out to Mitch's isolated farmhouse. She parks the boat, sneaks into his home (through an unlocked door...), deposits the love birds and makes good her escape. Right under Mitch's nose: he's in the yard but doesn't see Melanie approaching. There is no music at all in this sequence (as there is no music, actually, in the film), but the suspense grows almost unbearable in the lingering silence as Hitchcock deploys quick cuts, and a series of point-of-view receding zooms to depict Melanie's hasty and illicit retreat from the private property. We then see Mitch discover the intrusion, grab a pair of binoculars, look through them and -- bam -- he sees her! She's been caught!

The two lovers are thus face-to-face (over some distance) for the first time with the revelation that something romantic (something sexual...) joins them. We're so obsessed with this flirtation, with this game of cat and mouse, that we are caught totally off guard when a (huge) gull swoops into the frame -- out of nowhere -- and literally takes a plug out of Melanie's scalp. The vicious and unexpected attack causes blood to run down her forehead, and Mitch tends to her wound, but the overall impression of this bird attack is that it serves as metaphor for being dumbstruck by love (or more accurately, desire). Lust bitch-slaps you when you least expect it.

Later that night, after Annie and Melanie have shared a long discussion about their mutual and sordid histories with Mitch, a bird attacks the boarding house's front door. The target again, not surprisingly, is Melanie. The next day, the birds attack once more: this time dive-bombing a group of children (including Veronica Cartwright, playing Mitch's sister Cathy). Importantly, the attack follows a very intense, very intimate conversation between Mitch and Melanie on the hillside beyond the party. Again, the timing is crucial, as if the birds are desperate -- insanely desperate -- to stop the relationship before it progresses any further.

Later, in Lydia's presence, the birds attack once more, flying into Mitch's living room through a chimney. And it is here that the full Oedipal nature of the film exposes itself most fully. Lydia is a possessive old woman, a "clinging, possessive mother" who disapproves of Melanie and her son's lascivious interest in her. For example, Lydia complains to Mitch how Melanie was featured in the gossip columns the previous year for jumping naked into a fountain in Rome. This brazenly sexual act doesn't seem to bother the stimulated Mitch, but it certainly bothers the fearful and closed-off Lydia, a widower who fears "abandonment." So, the question becomes: is Lydia subconsciously orchestrating the bird attacks on Melanie? The first bird attack (near the cottage) could have been a general warning of "stay away." The second attack (at Annie's house) was a strike against two of Mitch's women, and the attack in the living room may have been a result of Lydia's uncontrollable rage at seeing the two lovers circle each other with such blatant and brazen sexual intent.

A later attack also supports this thesis. Lydia is sick in bed mid-way through the film (after witnessing the aftermath of a bird attack on a neighbor), and she pointedly asks Melanie to go to Annie's school to check on her daughter. Not coincidentally, when Melanie gets there, the birds launch an attack on the school. Not before she arrives. Not after her arrival. While she is there. So, was this a trap for Melanie created by Lydia's "id?" And when Melanie managed to escape it, remember, it was Annie (the secondary threat for Mitch's affections), who got offed by the birds. If you'll forgive the expression, Lydia may have been killing two birds with one stone, by sending Melanie to the school, where Annie also happened to be.

As film aficionados, we recognize that Hitchcock has toiled in overt Oedipal themes before, notably with Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). In that film, a mother's love reached from beyond the grave, in a sense, to twist her adult son into a psychotic. In The Birds, Lydia's desperate desire not to be abandoned, not to see Mitch go off with another woman, somehow precipitates the bird attacks, and lashes out at those she perceives as threats or dangers to her own emotional safety. This idea tracks throughout the film, particularly in the climax.

The film's final act finds Mitch, Lydia, Cathy (the sister) and Melanie sequestered in the boarded-up farmhouse as the birds attack in waves. Melanie, hearing a noise, separates herself from the group, and goes into an upstairs bedroom. There, in a sequence that evokes the cutting-style of the notorious Janet Leigh shower scene in Psycho, the birds relentlessly -- endlessly -- peck at Melanie. Rending and tearing her flesh and clothes. Ripping her apart. Ultimately, she is saved in the nick of time, but is badly wounded and bloodied. This sequence, the film's piece-de-resistance in terms of shock editing, essentially eliminates Melanie as a threat to Lydia, does it not? She falls into catatonia and shock for the remainder of the film (right through the end credits) and is therefore no longer a danger to Lydia's supremacy as the woman in Mitch's life. This sexually carnivorous woman has been, essentially, de-clawed and de-fanged. Or more aptly, her wings have been clipped. 

The last shots of the film thus depict Lydia accepting and nurturing Melanie (in the car), as the group attempts to escape; caring for as she would for a helpless child. With Melanie's sexuality all-but eliminated, there is no reason Lydia cannot "love" Melanie as she would a child. In some senses, this is actually a win-win because the film has defined Melanie as a person who lacked the love of a mother (the motivation, we are led to believe, for her acts of reckless sexuality). Now Lydia can play that role with her. 

Another clue about the underlying (and human-spawned) motivation for the bird attacks comes in a throwaway line of dialogue. A character comments that in the night sky, the moon is full. In mythology, the moon is often linked with a person's emotional gestalt, and here's the kicker: to their unconscious emotions. More trenchantly, in mythology the moon is closely associated with the mother, with -- according to Wikipedia -- "maternal instincts or the urge to nurture, the home, and the past." Understanding this, one might detect the hidden importance Lydia plays in this Hitchcockian narrative. Her unconscious desire to protect Mitch from a sexually carnivorous woman, to live in the past (when she was protected by an alpha male, not unlike Mitch) is cloaked just beneath the surface in the film; and one might argue, the reason why the birds go nuts.

Late in the film, a hysterical woman in a diner looks at Melanie with utter hatred and notes that she is the cause of the unnatural bird behavior. "They said when you got here, the whole thing started," she accuses Melanie. Well, she's right. Melanie's presence is the reason for the attacks, but Melanie is not causing the attacks herself. Lydia has detected her as a threat and managed to rally the birds against her. What we have in The Birds is an example of an overbearing Mother Human subconsciously directing Mother Nature to do her bidding.

Of course, this is all just a theory that happens to track with a close reading of the film, but The Birds is so admirable for the very reason that it leaves itself open to interpretation. No answers are given. Nothing is spoon-fed (unlike the newscast ending of The Happening; or even the talky coda of Psycho, for that matter). The film is littered with clues about the birds and the reasons for their attack, but as an audience, we are asked to interpret; to speculate; to add our own intellect to that of a master filmmaker. There are many reasons why The Birds is a horror classic, from the beautiful choreography of the bird attacks (including one utterly amazing bird's eye view of Bodega Bay as a coordinated assault is launched from the sky) to the surprising wit of the screenplay. But as with all great horror cinema, the real (and lasting) value of this film rests in what it has to say about us; about humanity and human nature.

An old Asian proverb goes: "a bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song." 

The angry, maddening song of the feathered ones in The Birds is written by the insecure id of frightened Lydia; but perhaps more importantly, it is one composed beautifully and artistically by that horror maestro for the ages, Mr. Hitchcock.

Cult-Movie Review: Psycho (1960)

Based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) remains a turning point in the horror cinema for a number of significant reasons, but first and foremost because it knowingly and brazenly flouts the decorum of its age. 

Psycho features not only nudity, extreme violence, and the early death of a beloved protagonist played by Janet Leigh, it also happens to feature, on-screen, views of…a toilet.  

Today, all that -- especially the bit about a toilet -- doesn’t seem like much to get worked up about. 

But when the film premiered, Psycho unsettled audiences because its explicit failure to conform to conventional, Hollywood standards meant that all bets were off, and that, likewise, audiences could see and experience anything. 

Accordingly, Psycho’s audiences felt endangered. The narrow parameters of Hollywood decorum and standards of acceptability had sheltered them in previous movie-going experiences, and by deliberately treading outside of those parameters, Psycho suddenly possessed the capacity to shock on a new, previously unplumbed level.

Every now and then on Amazon.com or some horror site, you’ll read a review by someone very young who goes back to watch Psycho and just doesn’t get why it is important, or so revered. This viewpoint arises because Psycho, like all films, must be considered and examined in its historical context.  And some folks forget that fact.

Before Psycho, no one had seen anything like it.  

Since, Psycho, filmmakers have been using the same playbook for over fifty years.  

Some films and filmmakers have surpassed it, too, to be certain (Tobe Hooper and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974], Brian De Palma and Sisters [1973], perhaps), but in its day Psycho shattered formula and blazed a new path. 

Yet the mere fact that other filmmakers have so often imitated the film's approach to its material doesn’t take anything away from what Psycho accomplished in the first place.

What makes Psycho truly great, even today is the manner in which Hitchcock meaningfully connects the film’s form and content. The narrative is shocking and unconventional, the imagery is shocking and unconventional, and, in fact, Psycho’s very structure is unconventional too. 

Virtually every decision Hitchcock makes as a filmmaker here -- save for the very last one (to restore order) -- thus creates and nurtures anxiety in viewers.

With its blunt looks at an unmarried couple having a sexual liaison, a brutal murder, and even a flushing toilet, Hitchcock -- frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot -- makes audiences feel that they crossing threshold after threshold. 

As the taboos fall away, so does any sense of confidence or certainty about what the filmmaker may show us. Psycho continues to impress today because of Hitchcock's virtuoso technique, but also because it moves with a kind of diabolical, elegant purpose.

And that purpose is, simply, to shoot down your defenses one at a time and, in the final revelation of Mrs. Bates' secret, leave you breathless and shocked.

“We’re all in our private traps.”

In Psycho, beautiful Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) wants very much to marry her boyfriend, divorcee Sam Loomis (John Gavin), but monetary concerns keeps him from committing to her. 

One day, at work, Marion is tasked with taking $40,000 dollars to the bank, but in a moment of desperation, she decides to steal the cash and flee town.

Marion escapes from Phoenix, AZ and even switches cars to avoid detection, looking forward to surprising Sam in his home-town, Fairvale. 

After a long drive, however, Marion decides to call it a day. She spends the night at the Bates Motel, a small, out-of-the-way establishment that stands in the shadow of a giant, dilapidated Gothic mansion.  

The motel is run by young, lanky Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a lonely man who apparently lives with his old, invalid mother.

When Marion shares a meal with Norman, she learns about his mother’s brutal treatment of him, and realizes how Norman has become trapped at the motel, and in an unhappy life. Marion vows not to trap herself, and decides to go home, return the stolen money, and face the consequences of her actions.

Resolved to set her life right, Marion decides to take a hot shower…

“This is the first place that looks like it’s trying to hide from the world.”

There’s a feeling, watching Psycho (1960), of viewing the world outside typical Hollywood parameters. 

Hitchcock fosters this feeling from the film’s earliest shots. After a pan across the city of Phoenix, and arriving, finally, at a cracked hotel window, Hitchcock’s camera sneaks in through that narrow portal, exploiting the opening to reveal two attractive – unmarried -- young people (Marion and Sam) after an afternoon of love-making.  

It’s as though, from the very start, Hitchcock not only pries open a literal window, but the metaphorical window of Hollywood standards and practices.

Hitchcock's other choices in vetting this adaption of Bloch’s novel are just as startling. First, he unsettles the audience by fracturing the role of the protagonist.The audience's focal point of identification in most Hollywood thrillers is one person: a man or woman who follows the predictable arc of increased learning and ascending knowledge as the three acts progress satisfyingly to a conclusion. 

The arc of "learning" on the part of the movie audience, presented through the experiences of the lead character, is usually a straight line traveling up and up, until, by the movie's denouement, the character and the viewer reach an apex, or zenith.  Apotheosis has occurred. Audiences have learned everything they need to know to understand the film's narrative, theme, and message.

But in Psycho, the protagonist role is unconventionally splintered into three or even four characters: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Arbogast (Martin Balsam), Lila Crane (Vera Miles) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin). 

Learning still occurs over the course of the film’s plot, and the audience still attains that final plateau of knowledge through a psychologist's detailed and clinical "explanation" of Norman Bates' psychosis. 

Yet importantly, the process of learning is fractured and jumbled by the three acts and the changing point of audience identification. Each protagonist dominates center stage, very roughly, in one particular act.  

Marion does so in the first. 

Arbogast assumes that role in the second. 

And finally Lila and Sam become the point of identification and the hub of learning in the final act. We especially fear for Lila and Sam’s safety because we have seen, in gory detail, what has become of Marion and Arbogast, our two earlier leads.

Since Psycho revolves around schizophrenia -- around a splintering of a single mind into more than one individual -- the film's very structure actually reflects this state of existence not only in its villain, Norman/Mother, but in the variety and differentiation of its protagonists.  

In some sense, it's as though Hitchock is trying to impress this schizophrenic state upon us, the audience. We are asked to meet, accept, follow, root and then grieve for one protagonist after the other.

In simple terms, then, Hitchcock punishes the audience -- and ruthlessly unsettles it -- for emotionally investing in the characters. 

First, Hitchcock makes the audience fall in love with adorable and sexy Marion Crane through her ongoing interior monologue during an extended road trip. This soliloquy of sorts regards the theft of 40,000 dollars, and what the acquisition of the money and the perpetrating of a crime could mean for her life personally, professionally, and legally. Marion berates herself and mocks herself in these passages, like we all do when we talk to ourselves.

The device of the interior monologue, in conjunction with the preponderance of gorgeous close-ups during these moments in the car, actually accentuates the feeling of connection to the character and her plight. 

And of course, that forging of a close emotional connection is intentional. Hitchcock wants audiences heavily invested in Marion's imagination, her potential, her crime; the very things that make her human and therefore sympathetic. In other words, the director sucks us in with a likable character and her crisis.

And then, Hitchcock rips Marion, the star of the movie, away from the audience in the notorious shower scene. 

We watch helplessly as all our expectations and hopes for Marion -- namely that she will return the money, seek a life with Sam, and escape her personal purgatory or trap -- run down the tub drain with her spilled blood.  

Suddenly, everything the audience has taken for granted as "important" in Psycho, including Marion's dilemma regarding stolen cash is now rendered, categorically, unimportant. 

The result? The audience is rudderless.  Vulnerable.  

The only thing left to cling to, again, is that stolen cash, and the hope that another human being, perhaps sweet, harmless Norman, will find it and use it to escape from his trap, from his Mother.

The movie goes on, and the audience still feels lost without Marion. Thus it soon seizes on laconic, world-weary Arbogast as the focal point of identification. 

Yeah, he's the guy who's going to get Norman's Mother and set things right, for the memory of Marion.  He's got the chops.  He's got the professional background.  No one's going to pull the wool over his eyes.

And then Hitchcock violates traditional narrative structure and decorum again.  He pulls the exact same trick a second time.  

He kills Arbogast before our eyes in another visually dazzling murder scene, set this time upon a staircase. And for a second time, the audience loses the focal point of identification.

Finally, identification transfers to Sam and Lila, but by this point -- on a first viewing of Psycho, anyway -- the audience is surely thinking "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," and therefore reluctant to embrace this couple, not out of loyalty to the dead; but out of the fear that, for a third time, Evil will triumph.  

Is there another reason it is difficult to warm to Lila and Sam?  Absolutely. 

They begin to seriously question and threaten Norman Bates, but at this point in the proceedings, the audience is still invested in him and his escape from the motel, and from his twisted, overbearing Mom. Viewers don't want to see Norman railroaded for what they believe his mother did.  They think Sam and Lila are barking up the wrong tree.

The unconventional presentation of the protagonists and antagonists in Psycho is all part of Hitchcock's masterful manipulation, his gleeful manner of misdirecting attention and subverting expectations. Yet he doesn't merely subvert by way of conveying story points; he does it via the actual narrative structure; by exploding movie conventions. 

The "Janet Leigh" trick as I sometimes call it, isn't the only trail-blazing, convention-shattering aspect of Psycho.  It's harder to appreciate this second factor given the direction of our culture since Psycho, but Hitchcock further shatters Hollywood decorum by revealing to the audience shocking imagery it had not often, if ever, seen depicted before. Things like an afternoon, pre-marital assignation in a cheap hotel room between Sam and Marion, or, simply, a toilet being flushed.

And then there’s the notorious shower scene.

Arriving in 1960, Psycho broke a critical rule/taboo in film history. It showed a vulnerable person virtually nude in the bathroom and then depicted that character brutally murdered in nothing less than a murderous frenzy.   

Many film critics and Hitchcock scholars have written expertly and at length about the staging and cutting of the Psycho shower scene, but the important thing to remember is how it plays. 

It is a visualization of frenzy, rage, and madness at close-up range. The helter-skelter pace of the shock editing and the very closeness -- intimacy? -- of many shots transmits the inescapable impression of a trapped animal being murdered in a blinding, fury-filled rage.  

Before Psycho, no one had ever seen anything like this. Violence, close-up, with adroit film technique embodying psychosis and powerful anger. And we weren't seeing a bad guy or some random character being killed.  Rather, a woman whom we had, as viewers, fallen in love with. To dispatch Marion when she is vulnerable, when she has so many reasons to live, and to do it in such indecorous, nay un-chivalrous, fashion, is...bracing to say the least.  It's a literal shock to the system.

The presentation of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) represents another shattering of tradition too.  Hollywood often lives by the edict that what is beautiful must also be good. And young Anthony Perkins, like Janet Leigh, is certainly beautiful. He is innocent, boyish, graceful, handsome and charming.  Simultaneously, he is a brutal murderer when "possessed" by Mother Bates. The film asks us to countenance competing visions of Norman, that he can be both innocent and guilty; a good boy and a very naughty boy at the same time. 

In large part, Hitchcock was able to get away with this complexity involving the characters, and particularly with Norman, because of the burgeoning popularity of pop psychology in the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Horror films such as The Bad Seed (1956) began to ask very pointed questions about human "monsters," thereby exploring the eternal nature vs. nurture debate. To a very large extent, that's the terrain as well of Psycho.  Norman is a good boy, perhaps, by nature. But a very bad boy via nurture, by his mother's parenting. Nurture is stamped over nature, in his case, and the result is psychosis.

This focus on human psychology represents an important turning point in horror history: a period wherein supernatural and fantasy can be subtracted from the genre formula and the human being can take his -- rightful? – role as the pre-eminent "Monster" in the cinema, thus paving the way for a slew of slashers and serial killers. 

Indeed, this is the point in horror history where many "monster" horror movie fans cut bait: preferring their monsters as more fantastical creations like vampires, Gill Men, or the Mummy.

Here, in Psycho, Dracula’s castle still lurks large in the frame, in the form of the Gothic Bates House, but the monster lurking inside is purely of man’s nature, not of the supernatural

Despite its brilliance and trailblazing, Psycho end with nod to decorum and tradition. Hitchcock closes the film with a restoration of the sense of order.

Norman is captured, processed, categorized, diagnosed and understood. A psychiatrist, played by Simon Oakland, explains everything. In this way, an audience might leave a showing of the film knowing that it need not be afraid in real life. The good guys still come out on top; the dangerous bad guy is punished, or at least apprehended. 

In the years following Psycho, directors like Tobe Hooper and Brian De Palma would go even further than Psycho to break established movie decorum. Hooper denied the audience (and Chainsaw's characters) the act of learning in toto; and in Sisters, De Palma did not bother to re-establish order, instead leaving the film's heroine a confused amnesiac.

But those bold, innovative steps in the genre could not have been broached had Hitchcock not re-written the rules of the game first, with Psycho.   

If you ask yourself why the 1998 remake of Psycho failed, the answer rests not just with re-casting.  It is not only because of color photography. It is not, even, because of Hitchcock's absence in the director's chair. These are all factors, of course. But that notable failure occurred because that remake failed to re-structure its narrative and format in a pioneering fashion; in a way that would have actually honored Hitchcock and the spirit of the original film. 

Thirty years after Hitchcock fooled everyone, nobody was going to be taken in by exactly the same bag of tricks  Chainsaw and Sisters are more valid remakes of Psycho, in the sense that they pursue the same aims, the shattering of standing conventions and decorum.

Despite over a half-century of imitators, Psycho is still a standard-bearer for the genre because of its historical context.  Also, on a recent re-watch, I felt too that the film had something very valuable to share with audiences about human nature. It’s sometime easy not to look at the film’s actual story, because Psycho’s form is so exemplary.

Yet pay close attention, and one starts to see how Psycho is the story of how the things we do to achieve happiness don’t actually bring us happiness. 

In Psycho, we see that people will steal, fuck, and commit murder in attempts to find happiness.  Instead, invariably, they find “traps” of their own making, not freedom, or satisfaction.  Marion created a shit-storm for herself by stealing forty-thousand dollars. But she did it because she wanted to be with Sam…and he needed money. 

And Norman is so desperate to feel happy again that he has resurrected his “mother” as a hectoring, violent shrew. He has re-imagined her as a jealous lunatic, and now once he has her back, he can’t get rid of her. She has taken over a part of his very mind.

Again, there seems to a corollary visual to go with this idea.  Marion finds a point of clarity on the road. She drives through the rain, through a storm, and comes out the other side. After the deluge, she should be cleansed, free. 

But the place she ends up is the Bates Motel: a location not where she will turn her life around, but die violently. The message seems to be that the plans we make are the very thing that lead us to destruction. 

Or, to put it in proverbial terms, Man proposes and God disposes.

Today, we all know the stylistic twists and turns that make Psycho such a classic horror film, but one need re-watch again it to remember clearly the feelings it engenders. We feel real loss when Marion is killed and Norman, despite his insanity, is a little boy lost who holds our sympathy. Their “private traps” are terrifying ones, but also ones that, surprisingly, still affect us on an emotional level fifty years later.

All this week, I'll be looking at the sequels to Psycho. They may not match the surprise, decorum-shattering genius of Hitchcock's original, but they do capture, in very poignant terms, the tragedy of Norman Bates. 

Cinema and Television Verities #37:

“You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next.  So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts.  The more we go into the detail’s of the girl’s journey, the more the audience becomes absorbed by her flight.  That’s why so much is made of the motorcycle cop and the change of cars.  When Anthony Perkins tells the girl of his life in the motel, and they exchange views, you still play upon the girl’s problem…”

- Alfred Hitchcock discusses Psycho's "Janet Leigh trick" with Francois Truffaut, in Hitchcock, (Touchstone Books, 1983, Page 269.)

"I must have one of those faces you can't help believing," Memories of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

Tonight at 10:00 pm on Movie Geeks United, "Halloween Week," -- Horror 101 --  kicks off with a discussion and retrospective of one of the horror genre's most celebrated and distinguished game-changers, director Alfred Hitchcock's oft-imitated Psycho (1960). 

Over my writing career, I've frequently discussed the way in which a horror film might cross the hurdle from being merely good (an effective and entertaining roller coaster ride) to being great (and an undisputed classic).   Something very specific must occur regarding the film's structure itself; in the very way the movie presents its narrative or message.  

Subject matter alone can't make that leap for a film; rather the achievement of greatness rests in the film's style of presentation; in the film's application of established film grammar in unexpected, new or experimental ways.

Since the goal of a horror movie is to transgress and discomfort, what this algebraic equation usually comes down to, ultimately, is some trail-blazing shattering of pre-existing expectations; the intentional blowing-up of movie traditions and even accepted Hollywood decorum so that audience actually feels unsafe in the auditorium.  It is therefore entirely susceptible to directorial manipulation.

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Psycho is indeed a perfect and relatively early example of this nerve-jangling approach (one also evidenced in the other horror films Movie Geeks United is discussing this week: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974] and The Blair Witch Project [1999]).

Rightly, you might ask how Alfred Hitchcock managed to defy the studio system he toiled in, and shatter existing movie decorum and tradition so thoroughly.  In broad strokes, the answer arises in the mode of Psycho's production and the director's relative freedom from interference. 

When Universal expressed unhappiness with the unsavory elements of the film's narrative (adapted from Robert Bloch's novel), Hitchcock essentially went around the studio.  He basically financed the film himself, and took a 25% pay cut or thereabouts to get the film made.  Furthermore, Hitchcock kept the film's budget low by shooting in black-and-white, when all the rage at the time was to create films in color.

Most significantly, perhaps, Hitchcock brought in the technical crew from his popular TV anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Make no mistake, this act represents an early vote of confidence for TV as an art form from no-less-than a cinematic legend.  But this TV crew was accustomed to working fast, working effectively, and working cheap.  And those were the qualities that helped Psycho get made, and made in the style and fashion Hitchcock desired.

So, Psycho evaded some hierarchical scrutiny just by the manner in which Hitchcock approached the project.  That approach opened the doorway to a horror film that, on retrospect, shatters expectations and breaks cleanly with established Hollywood history.  

How?  Well, these breaks are numerous, and important, and I hope to enumerate some of them here.

First, Hitchcock unsettles the audience by fracturing the role of the good guy, the protagonist.  

The audience's focal point of identification in most Hollywood thrillers is one hero; a man or woman who follows a path of increased learning and ascending knowledge as the three acts progress satisfyingly to a conclusion. 

The arc of "learning" on the part of the audience -- and presented through the experiences of the lead character -- is usually a straight line traveling up and up, until, by the movie's denouement, we have reached the apex, the plateau.  We have learned everything we need to know to understand the film's narrative and message.  

If the movie is a mystery, we follow the clues one-by-one to resolve that mystery.  If it's a Western, the hero braces a challenge, faces that challenge and defeats that challenge.  Again, the trajectory is like an arrow on ascent, a straight trajectory pointing towards full audience comprehension (and, hopefully, approval.)

In Psycho, the role of the protagonist is unconventionally splintered into three or four characters: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), Arbogast (Martin Balsam), Lila Crane (Vera Miles) and Sam Loomis (John Gavin).  Learning still occurs and the audience attains that final plateau of knowledge through a psychologist's detailed and clinical "explanation" of Norman Bates' psychosis.  But importantly, the process of learning is fractured by the three acts.   Each protagonist dominates center stage -- very roughly -- in one particular act (Marion in the first; Arbogast in the second; Lila and Sam in the third). 

Since Psycho revolves around schizophrenia -- about a splintering of a single mind into more than one individual -- the film's structure actually reflects this state of existence not only in its villain -- Norman/Mother -- but in the variety and differentiation of its protagonists.  Thus form reflects content.  Hitchcock splinters our point of identification as much as he splinters Norman's mind.

Why so radically re-shape the thriller's protagonist in this fashion? 

In simple terms, Hitchcock punishes the audience --and ruthlessly unsettles it -- for  emotionally investing in the characters. 

First, Hitchcock makes us fall in love with adorable Marion Crane through her ongoing interior monologue during a road trip.  This soliloquy of sorts regards the theft of 40,000 dollars and what the acquisition of the money and the perpetrating of a crime could mean for her life personally, professionally and legally.   Marion berates herself and mocks herself in these passages, like we all do when we talk to ourselves.

The device of the interior monologue -- in conjunction with the preponderance of gorgeous close-ups during these moments in the car -- actually accentuates the feeling of connection to the character and her plight.

And of course, that's intentional.  Hitchcock wants us heavily invested in Marion's imagination, her potential, her crime; the very things that make her human and therefore sympathetic.  In other words, the director sucks us in with a likable character and her crisis.

And then, Hitchcock rips Marion -- the movie's ostensible lead character -- away from the audience in the notorious shower scene.   We watch helplessly as all our expectations and hopes for Marion (namely that she will return the money, seek a life with Sam, and escape her personal purgatory or trap) run down the tub drain with her spilled blood. 

Suddenly, everything the audience has taken for granted as "important" in Psycho (namely Marion's dilemma regarding stolen cash and her future with Sam) is now rendered unimportant.  The audience is rudderless.  Vulnerable. 

The only thing left to cling to is that stolen cash, and the hope that another human being -- sweet, harmless Norman -- will find it and use it to escape from his trap, from his Mother.

The movie goes on, and the audience still feels lost without Marion.  Thus it soon seizes on laconic, world-weary Arbogast as the focal point of identification.  Yeah, he's the guy who's going to get Norman's Mother, and set things right, for the memory of Marion.  He's got the chops.  He's got the background.  No one's going to pull the wool over his eyes.

And then Hitchcock violates narrative rules again.  He pulls the exact same trick a second time.  He kills Arbogast before our eyes (in another visually dazzling murder scene, set this time upon a staircase) and for a second time, the audience loses the focal point of identification.

Finally, identification transfers to Sam and Lila, but by this point -- on a first viewing of Psycho, anyway -- you're thinking "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," and entirely reluctant to embrace this couple, not out of loyalty to the dead; but out of the fear that, for a third time, Evil will triumph. 

Is there another reason it is difficult to warm to Lila and Sam?  Absolutely. They begin to seriously question and threaten Norman Bates, and at this point in the proceedings, the audience is still invested in him and his escape from the Motel and from his twisted Mom.  They don't want to see him railroaded for what they believe his mother did.

It should be noted that the unconventional presentation of the protagonists (and antagonist, actually) in Psycho are all part of Hitchcock's masterful manipulation, his gleeful way of mis-directing our attention and subverting our expectations.  But he doesn't just subvert by way of story points, either; he does it by actual structure; by exploding movie conventions.

The "Janet Leigh" trick as I sometimes call it, isn't the only trail-blazing, convention-shattering aspect of Psycho.  It's harder to appreciate this second factor given the direction of our culture since Psycho, but Hitchcock further shattered Hollywood decorum by revealing to the audience shocking imagery it had not often, if ever, seen before.  Things like an afternoon, pre-marital assignation in a cheap hotel room between Sam and Marion. 

Or, of course, like the famous shower sequence.

In interpreting horror films, I often return to the plain truth that those things which scare us the most are the the very things that we see in our everyday experience.  Universal ideas.  Getting lost in the woods, like Hansel and Gretel (or the kids in The Blair Witch Project).  Getting eaten by an animal (in the case of Jaws).  Or, involving Psycho, the simple and common act of showering. 

When we bathe, we are truly at our most vulnerable (with the exception, perhaps, of slumber...a key fear exploited by generations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers).  We are naked, without clothing.  Only a thin drape -- a shower curtain -- protects us from an unseen larger world.  The space in a shower stall is also limited and therefore mobility is hampered.  You can't exactly run anywhere. The standard shower stall is not that different in dimensions from an upright coffin, if you think about it.

So -- arriving in 1960 -- Psycho broke a critical rule/taboo in film history.  It showed a vulnerable person virtually nude in the bathroom (heck, how often had we even seen toilets in films before Psycho?) and then depicted that character brutally murdered in nothing less than a frenzy.  

Many film critics and Hitchcock scholars have written expertly and at length about the staging and cutting of the Psycho shower scene, but the important thing to remmeber is how it plays. It is a visualization of frenzy, rage, and madness. 

The helter-skelter pace of the shock editing and the very closeness of many shots give the inescapable impression of a trapped animal being murdered in a blinding, fury-filled rage.  No one had ever seen anything like this before Psycho.  Violence, close-up, with adroit film technique embodying psychosis and powerful anger.

A sequence featuring this graphic murder in an unconventional locale would have broken taboo alone; but remember, the person killed is a beautiful woman and the movie's heroine; a person we have invested in emotionally.  To dispatch Marion when she is vulnerable, when she has so many reasons to live, and to do it in such indecorous, nay unchivalrous, fashion, is...bracing.  To say the least.  It's literally a shock to the system.

The presentation of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) represents another shattering of tradition too.  Hollywood often lives by the edict that what is beautiful must also be good.  And young Anthony Perkins, like Janet Leigh, is certainly beautiful.  He is innocent, boyish, graceful, handsome and charming.  Simultaneously, he is a brutal murderer when "possessed" by Mother Bates.  The film asks us to countenance competing visions of Norman -- that he can be both innocent and guilty; a good boy and a very naughty boy -- at the same time. 

In large part, Hitchcock was able to get away with this complexity because of the burgeoning popularity of Psychology, and Pop Psychology, in 1950s and 1960s American culture.  Horror films such as The Bad Seed (1956) began to ask very pointed questions about human "monsters," thereby exploring the eternal nature vs. nurture debate. To a very large extent, that's the milieu as well of Psycho.  Norman is a good boy, perhaps, by nature.  But a very bad boy via nurture, by his mother's behavior.  Nurture is stamped over nature, in his case, and the result is psychosis.

An earlier generation of horror movie (say, in the 1930s or 1940s) may have had to hide Norman.  It may have had to "code" him in terms of being both a man and a literal monster (think the Wolfman, or Dr. Jekyll  and Mr. Hyde.)  But Psycho does not have to play with metaphor in that particular fashion. 

This is an important turning point in horror history: a period wherein supernatural and fantasy can be subtracted from the genre formula and the human being can take his (rightful?) place as the pre-eminent "Monster" in the cinema, thus paving the way for a slew of slashers, serial killers, and 1990s Interlopers.  Indeed, this is the point in horror history where many "monster" horror movie fans cut bait: preferring their monsters as more fantastical creations like vampires, Gill Men, or the Mummy.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, either.

In terms of breaking taboos, Psycho spreads the act of "heroic" learning across three sets of protagonists, and delves into uncomfortable imagery not commonly depicted on the silver screen of the 1950s. 

Still, Hitchcock ends Psycho by restoring a sense of order.  Norman  is captured, diagnosed and understood.  In this way, an audience might leave a showing of the film knowing that it need not be afraid in real life.  The good guys still come out on top; the dangerous bad guy is punished...or at least apprehended.

In the years after Psycho, directors like Tobe Hooper (TCM) and Brian De Palma would go even further than Psycho to break established movie decorum.  Hooper denied the audience (and Chainsaw's characters) the act of learning in toto; and in Sisters, De Palma did not bother to  re-establish order, instead leaving the film's heroine a confused amnesiac.

But those bold, innovative steps in the genre, perhaps, could not have been broached had Hitchcock not re-written the rules of the game first, with Psycho.   

If you ask yourself why the 1998 remake of Psycho failed, it is not because of re-casting.  It is not because of color photography.  It is not, even, because of Hitchcock's absence in the director's chair.  

Rather, the failure occurred because that remake failed to re-structure its narrative and format in a pioneering fashion; in a way that would have actually honored Hitchcock and the spirit of the original film. 

Had Gus Van Sant found a new, taboo-busting method of telling Psycho's tale -- one that violated the movie decorum of the 1990s and shattered all of our pre-existing conditioning about what movies can and should do -- then he would have really been on to something vital.  Instead, the shot-for-shot remake approach suggests only that film structure has been "locked" -- hermetically-sealed -- since Psycho, and that's simply not the case.  Film is growing, living, thriving thing, and horror films continue to push the envelope of acceptable Hollywood decorum.  The 1998 remake should have honored this fact.

You can learn more about Psycho tonight on Movie Geeks United. Don't miss the show!