Psycho (1960)

From the moment those discordant strings roared around the auditorium I knew I was in for something special. To mark the 50th anniversary of Hitchcock’s proto slasher the NFT is screening a sparkling new print of Psycho in an extended run accompanied by a season of films that have been influenced by the macabre maestro’s most memorable masterpiece (heh), one of the most efficacious and dissected films of all time. Yes, there will be spoilers but considering the films half century vintage I think you can bear with me….

 Phoenix, Arizona. Friday, December The Eleventh. Two Forty-Three PM, an accuracy of space and time begins. In an oft imitated opening sequence a parade of penetrating establishing shots incrementally moves into a bedroom scene where  two lovers are sharing an illicit tryst during their lunch hour. Sam Loomis (John Gavin) discusses his financial woes with his partner Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), both are bemoaning the fact that neither of them have the funds to make a new life for themselves in another state. Returning to her bank cashier job Marion is presented with the opportunity to seize $40,000 deposited by a faintly seedy local businessman, our heroine seizes the moment and she flees Phoenix to a potential new life of happiness and financial security. After exchanging cars following a tense encounter with a suspicious police officer a day later Marion finds herself checking into the secluded Bates Motel during an ominous thunderstorm…

Just to be obvious on the big screen experiences such as this are a revelation, even when you know every story beat and scene that will materialise. The film is so compact, unfurling over a short few day diagetic period which builds an incredible texture, there is evidence of a master formalist at work with defined visual geometries embroidered into the film. From its opening titles with those tangent blocks bisecting the screen, a design aggregated by the score with its overwhelming violin strokes, through the lighting schemes in the opening hotel room scene that also replicate a cascade of order and constriction, from the squat Bates motel juxtaposed with the looming house hovering over the guests murder sites – the film is textured with a horizontal composition colliding with the vertical, the sane with the insane, the criminal with the lawful, all of which are ellipsed with the final fluttering light bulb and orbicular revelation of Norma’s statis. These techniques were partially coaxed out of Hitchcock by Truffaut in his celebrated study – here is the audio, all 25 parts which is possibly the best piece of research I’ve found since starting this blog. Outstanding.  

What more is there to say about one of the most admired and analysed sequences in cinema history? How the jagged editing mirrors the violent death strokes of the pendulous strikes of the deranged killer? How that visual arrangement is complemented by Bernard Herrman’s asperous score? How the sequence was shot in in seventy set-ups, in seven days, out of the entire films scheduled thirty-day shoot with his TV ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ crew? How chocolate sauce was used as the blood surrogate? How the debate rages fifty years later as to whether you see the blade penetrate the body? Yeah, film nerds can get a bit creepy about stuff like that sometimes…

The sense of dread engulfing the viewer when the bathroom door silently glides open and the silhouetted figure lurches toward the shower curtain is truly remarkable – you can see why people freaked out in 1960 as it retains a horrific magnetism and remains one of the best and most unexpected twists of cinema lore. So now our heroine has been brutally slain so what happens now? What about the $40,000 money McGuffin? Where can this picture go next? Understanding the contours of the film experiences Hitch slows the film down and crafts one of his most memorable sequences, the slow track from Marion lifeless eye to the Bates motel which again tells you everything that is happening and signals a change of perspective, the transmutation of protagonist from Marion to Norman, two uncoincidentally similar names… 

The celebrated sequence was the crux of why Hitch wanted to make the picture, to disrupt storytelling tropes and make the audience shift their uncertain sympathies and identifications from Marion to the nervously acquiescent Norman, enabling Hitch to manipulate the audience and as the man said ‘I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ’. The decision to make a film due to one scene seems a little unusual today but you have to remember that this was a different era and the attraction of working in an admittedly deteriorating production system enabled Hitch to continue his experiments, as he did with Rope, with Lifeboat, with Dial M For Murder and with The Wrong Man (his first film shot on real locations in the US urban landscape), to coquet with the technical paraphernalia at his command. I’d forgotten the prevalence of black comedy in the film, it is funnier than I remember with a lot of subtle wordplay – ‘mother’s not feeling herself  today’, ‘She’s as harmless as one of those stuffed birds’, ‘She just goes a little mad sometimes.’  The bird motif is quite interesting and of course it has prompted academics to make links to the avian apocalypse that was unleashed three years later, lines such as ‘You-you eat like a bird’ delivered by Norman in the motel pantry that houses a flock of stuffed birds of prey that loom over Marion before her imminent demise prompting some curious affiliations. The way that the film shifts its tone, the manner in which it displaces its protagonist – the final 40 minutes is populated by Marion’s sister whom we’ve never seen before – the way it shifts gear and constantly surprises is bewildering and almost unique, and on those terms it’s a masterpiece that irradiates most of current film-making, pure and simple.  

I read Mark Cousins ‘The Story Of Film‘ recently which was superb, in one memorable section Cousins admires Hitchcock for his ‘erotic precision’ and admires the ‘systems of desire and anxiety that permeate his films’, that’s just about the best clutch of phrase I’ve read which encapsulates our greatest film-makers astonishing canon. In this golden age of his career which can roughly be parsed between Rear Window in 1954 to Marnie in 1963 you consistently see Hitch as the practitioner of what he phrased ‘pure cinema’, that is the story being told by the camera and music, not through extraneous, redundant, clumsy dialogue which  harkens back to Hitchcock’s silent film pedigree.Personally my favourite moments are the groggy montage as Marion drives through the night before arriving at the Bates Motel, to me that fully signals the noirish plunge into this nightmare world, the aforementioned track from the murder to the house,  then there is the staircase terror with its unusual, jarring construction and of course the final scene with that look to the camera. I did go and see Van Sant’s remake reimagining pointless revisit, I still fail to see any purpose in that redundant exercise although I’ll confess to admiring the chutzpah of such a ridiculous exercise.

There is a wealth of material floating around about the film at the moment, the Guardian in particular seems to be excelling in its coverage of the movies fifty year pedigree, I also stumbled across this superb photo shoot whilst researching this entry. Next weekend I shall be going to see Halloween at the NFT1 as part of the context season which should be a blast, fingers crossed I should also get tickets to see Strangers On A Train in May and most thrillingly a screening of The Birds with none other than Tippi Hedren in Q&A mode, I may also try and slot in a screening of this which sounds fascinating.