The Murder that Changed the Movies
by Dick Polman
AUGUST 24, 2010 TAGS:
Fifty years ago, death on the silver screen was typically quite decorous. Women swooned and expired in their beds, surrounded by sobbing intimates and backed by angelic musical chords. Men often died more violently, clutching their hearts on the battlefield yet spilling nary a drop of blood. And anyone who was murdered – gangsters and “bad” girls, for instance – generally got what they deserved, as decreed by Hollywood and the censors who routinely policed its business.
Then came the murder that broke all the rules and changed American movies forever. And with respect to cinematic violence – particularly the targeting of women – we’re still debating whether that change was for the better.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, shot in four weeks for $800,000 and released nationwide 50 years ago this month, earned few plaudits at the time. One reviewer called it “a blot on an honorable career,” while others veritably retched onto the page. Time magazine lamented “one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion, and hemorrhage…. The nausea never disappears.” And Bosley Crowther of the New York Times did not intend praise when he warned, “You had better have a pretty strong stomach.”
As it turned out, millions did; they paid no attention to the bad reviews. They were probably lured less by Hitchcock’s artistry than by their desire to defy cultural norms and experience something new and naughty. Nobody had ever died on screen the way Janet Leigh’s character did. Granted, Marion Crane was a tad on the bad side – having stolen $40,000 from a lecherous oilman and fleeing town with her secret – but she was really just a nice girl desperate to get married. And once Marion owned up to her larceny, she resolved to return home and put things right (“I stepped into a private trap back there”).
But first she had to take a shower, to cleanse her sins. As Leigh later recalled, “It was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters…. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace.”
This occurred 47 minutes into the movie, plenty of time for the usual third-act redemption. What happened next is no mystery today, but nobody in 1960 had a clue what was coming. The film project had been wreathed in secrecy – even on the set, the clapboard carried a fake title, Wimpy – and the actors did no publicity because Hitchcock feared they’d reveal the plot.
Among the clueless was Peter Bogdanovich. The film scholar-director was a young guy at the time, and he wangled a pass to a Psycho screening. He recently told a London newspaper: “Everyone thought that it was a movie about a woman who stole some money. And then came the shower scene. I’ve never heard such screaming – sustained screaming – from an audience. You couldn’t hear the soundtrack. It was unprecedented, and it really was the first time that going to the movies was not a safe experience. I came out of the theatre … feeling as though I’d been raped.”
A nice girl wasn’t safe in her own shower. A filmgoer wasn’t safe in his seat, the rules of narrative having been shattered. In his shower scene – which required more than 70 camera setups, a full week of filming, chocolate sauce in lieu of blood, the illusion of a knife piercing flesh, and composer Bernard Hermann’s shrieking strings – Hitchcock breached the accepted Hollywood catechisms by killing off the ostensibly main character, and daring the audience to shift its allegiance to Norman Bates, a twitchy amateur taxidermist with serious mother issues.
And what followed the murder was more subversive yet. Norman cleaned up for his “mother” in full view of a toilet (Psycho was the first film to show a flushing toilet), after which he loaded the body into a car and dumped it in a swamp. But, for a long moment, the car wouldn’t sink. Norman, looking alarmed, stopped munching his candy corn … and then a weird thing happened. The audience, then and now, rooted for the car to sink, for Norman to bury his secret. We became complicit – as Hitchcock had intended. The car finally sank, and we were strangely relieved.
Hitchcock had always been obsessed with sin. As a Catholic schoolboy in Britain, he came to believe that most people were trapped by their immoral temptations. One biographer unearthed a sermon that Hitchcock heard at age 11. The key passage: “Even men and women who are well instructed do not always succeed in exercising a true dread of sin…. So long as we take the [worldly] view of vice, we imperil our own souls.”
Similarly, in Psycho, Norman tells Marion: “We’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out…. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”
That line was really aimed at the audience. Starting with scene one, Psycho invited us to commit the sin of voyeurism; the camera peeks through a hotel window and finds an illicit post-coital couple. Later, Norman removes a wall painting, puts his eye to the hole, and together we watch Marion disrobe in the next room. As film scholar David Thomson has written, Hitchcock was successfully coaxing us to be naughty: “You feel for Marion, but you want to possess her, too. You want to do something to her.”
Of course, in the half-century since Psycho, such sadistic cinematic thrills have become commonplace. Film directors inspired by Hitchcock’s audacity have sought to top him, or steal from him, ever since. But the legacy is mixed.
Scholars have argued that Hitchcock in the late ’50s was angry at women – having been professionally spurned by Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Vera Miles – and that the shower scene, though lifted from a novel, was his purest expression of that anger.
He succeeded so well – reaping more than $20 million from the movie – that cinematic violence against women became a template for minting money. Psycho begat the frequent murders of nubile coeds in today’s slasher flicks. In Thomson’s words, “In terms of the cruelties we no longer notice, we are a different species.”
But let’s give “Hitch” the last word. Around the time he was filming the death that changed cinema, he confessed to a screenwriter that his sole purpose and joy was to be the maestro of emotions. After a few martinis, he said: “The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. We play this note on them and get that reaction, and then we play that chord, and they react that way. And some day we won’t even have to make a movie – there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we’ll just press different buttons, and we’ll frighten them and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?”
Dick Polman, a frequent contributor to Obit, is writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. His commentary on national politics appears at www.whyy.org/nationalinterest.
Then came the murder that broke all the rules and changed American movies forever. And with respect to cinematic violence – particularly the targeting of women – we’re still debating whether that change was for the better.Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, shot in four weeks for $800,000 and released nationwide 50 years ago this month, earned few plaudits at the time. One reviewer called it “a blot on an honorable career,” while others veritably retched onto the page. Time magazine lamented “one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion, and hemorrhage…. The nausea never disappears.” And Bosley Crowther of the New York Times did not intend praise when he warned, “You had better have a pretty strong stomach.”
As it turned out, millions did; they paid no attention to the bad reviews. They were probably lured less by Hitchcock’s artistry than by their desire to defy cultural norms and experience something new and naughty. Nobody had ever died on screen the way Janet Leigh’s character did. Granted, Marion Crane was a tad on the bad side – having stolen $40,000 from a lecherous oilman and fleeing town with her secret – but she was really just a nice girl desperate to get married. And once Marion owned up to her larceny, she resolved to return home and put things right (“I stepped into a private trap back there”).
But first she had to take a shower, to cleanse her sins. As Leigh later recalled, “It was as if she were stepping into the baptismal waters…. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at peace.”
This occurred 47 minutes into the movie, plenty of time for the usual third-act redemption. What happened next is no mystery today, but nobody in 1960 had a clue what was coming. The film project had been wreathed in secrecy – even on the set, the clapboard carried a fake title, Wimpy – and the actors did no publicity because Hitchcock feared they’d reveal the plot.
Among the clueless was Peter Bogdanovich. The film scholar-director was a young guy at the time, and he wangled a pass to a Psycho screening. He recently told a London newspaper: “Everyone thought that it was a movie about a woman who stole some money. And then came the shower scene. I’ve never heard such screaming – sustained screaming – from an audience. You couldn’t hear the soundtrack. It was unprecedented, and it really was the first time that going to the movies was not a safe experience. I came out of the theatre … feeling as though I’d been raped.”
A nice girl wasn’t safe in her own shower. A filmgoer wasn’t safe in his seat, the rules of narrative having been shattered. In his shower scene – which required more than 70 camera setups, a full week of filming, chocolate sauce in lieu of blood, the illusion of a knife piercing flesh, and composer Bernard Hermann’s shrieking strings – Hitchcock breached the accepted Hollywood catechisms by killing off the ostensibly main character, and daring the audience to shift its allegiance to Norman Bates, a twitchy amateur taxidermist with serious mother issues.And what followed the murder was more subversive yet. Norman cleaned up for his “mother” in full view of a toilet (Psycho was the first film to show a flushing toilet), after which he loaded the body into a car and dumped it in a swamp. But, for a long moment, the car wouldn’t sink. Norman, looking alarmed, stopped munching his candy corn … and then a weird thing happened. The audience, then and now, rooted for the car to sink, for Norman to bury his secret. We became complicit – as Hitchcock had intended. The car finally sank, and we were strangely relieved.
Hitchcock had always been obsessed with sin. As a Catholic schoolboy in Britain, he came to believe that most people were trapped by their immoral temptations. One biographer unearthed a sermon that Hitchcock heard at age 11. The key passage: “Even men and women who are well instructed do not always succeed in exercising a true dread of sin…. So long as we take the [worldly] view of vice, we imperil our own souls.”
Similarly, in Psycho, Norman tells Marion: “We’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. And none of us can ever get out…. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”
That line was really aimed at the audience. Starting with scene one, Psycho invited us to commit the sin of voyeurism; the camera peeks through a hotel window and finds an illicit post-coital couple. Later, Norman removes a wall painting, puts his eye to the hole, and together we watch Marion disrobe in the next room. As film scholar David Thomson has written, Hitchcock was successfully coaxing us to be naughty: “You feel for Marion, but you want to possess her, too. You want to do something to her.”
Of course, in the half-century since Psycho, such sadistic cinematic thrills have become commonplace. Film directors inspired by Hitchcock’s audacity have sought to top him, or steal from him, ever since. But the legacy is mixed.
Scholars have argued that Hitchcock in the late ’50s was angry at women – having been professionally spurned by Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Vera Miles – and that the shower scene, though lifted from a novel, was his purest expression of that anger.
He succeeded so well – reaping more than $20 million from the movie – that cinematic violence against women became a template for minting money. Psycho begat the frequent murders of nubile coeds in today’s slasher flicks. In Thomson’s words, “In terms of the cruelties we no longer notice, we are a different species.”But let’s give “Hitch” the last word. Around the time he was filming the death that changed cinema, he confessed to a screenwriter that his sole purpose and joy was to be the maestro of emotions. After a few martinis, he said: “The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. We play this note on them and get that reaction, and then we play that chord, and they react that way. And some day we won’t even have to make a movie – there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we’ll just press different buttons, and we’ll frighten them and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?”
Dick Polman, a frequent contributor to Obit, is writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania. His commentary on national politics appears at www.whyy.org/nationalinterest.
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