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An Internet Movie Site that covers Psycho AND "The Late Hitchcocks"(After Psycho)

posted 8 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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In my browsing the web for articles on Psycho and other movies to talk about, I found a page called:

"Not Playing Near a Theater Near You." Its movie webpage with an emphasis on "older movies"(starting in the 20's and hitting each decade to the early 00's) and an organizational chart that allows for some groupings not only by director(everyone from QT to Russ Meyer) but by subsets ON a director.

Thus, Hitchcock gets a section called "Late Hitchcock" which contains reviews of The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, Frenzy, and Family Plot.

Fair enough...except this website does NOT have reviews of Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, Rebecca, and some other Hitchcock hits. They are very picky.

As for Psycho, it is one of a handful of films(that I could see) which gets TWO reviews, by different authors. (The Birds does, too.)

I found the readings on these Hitchcock films to be interesting. Most interesting: these reviews are by young people who first encountered Hitchcock films -- AND films like Bullitt AND Chinatown AND Silence of the Lambs -- as young teenagers, usually on VHS or DVD. Folks like me who can actually recall going the theater to SEE Bullitt, Chinatown, and even Silence of the Lambs are...getting more rare all the time. I guess.

One of the Psycho essays is cool in noting how "That Scene" drove the reviewer's knowledge of Psycho for years. All he had seen was The Shower Scene in TV clips, to finally see it in the context of the entire movie and the story of Psycho was...a revelation.

I believe another reviewer says he first saw Psycho at the age of ...8. So much for "adult entertainment."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

As for "The Late Hitchcocks":

I'm on record as saying I like those films better than the far more highly regarded and competently made Hitchcocks of the 30s and 40s. As the old phrase goes, "I don't know what I like...I like what I know." And, I know Sean Connery and Paul Newman and Julie Andrews and more to the point, I still strongly believe that because Hitchocck made his late Hitchoccks AFTER he made Vertigo, NXNW, and Psycho...the later films were made with a greater depth to Hitchcock's vision. He was in a new place. Only age and health really slowed down the continuation of the vision that Hitchcock had peaked with in the late fifties/early sixties.

"Not Coming To a Theater Near You" begins its Late Hitchcocks with The Birds, and that's appropriate even as The Birds seems to belong more to the big successes that came before it rather than the misfires that came after it. It IS the first film after Psycho, it reflects a filmmaker now fighting with his greatest success and...its "late.

The reviewer of Torn Curtain notes that he likes it better than Topaz or Frenzy. Fair enough. I"ve sometimes tried to figure out why Frenzy was THAT much better than Torn Curtain or Topaz -- they are all rather "peas in a pod" of being late works, violent works, rather formalistic works. Something about the psycho, I guess. Or the Covent Garden setting. Or the fact that the Frenzy story hangs tight and MOVES.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

A reviewer who rather panned Frenzy in 1972 (Gary Arnold of the Washington Post)did so by mocking all the raves for it. He was a "last critic in after the others" and could take comfort in not having to express his opinion right after a screening with no comparisons. And so he said: those raves are wrong. He wrote: "Frenzy is somewhat better than the Hitchcocks of recent years, but it is not significantly better or even notably better." So there.

Well, I kind of agree with Gary Arnold..but in the other direction. I think that Torn Curtain and Topaz(except for its misfired multiple endings, none of which work)...ARE as good as Frenzy. I like them all rather equally and I think that the critics of the time had to revisit the earlier films once Frenzy proved a good film, and a hit. If Hitchcock wasn't senile in 1972, how could he have been in 1964-1972.

I'm ignoring Marnie here. I think I always rather ignore Marnie, though it has its fervent fans who think it is really "the final great Hitchcock film" and greater than the later Frenzy. After all, Marnie is the last time we have Bernard Herrmann, Robert Burks, and George Tomasini on a Hitchcock film; its the last one that looks and sounds like the late fifties greats.

[–] ecarle (14979) 8 years ago

I have two beefs with Marnie: (1) The script is repetitious and fatally dull as Connery questions Hedren in scene after scene after scene(back to back); (2) the "air" of the piece is rather hand-me-down Tennessee Williams; there is a definite Southern feeling to the film(even as it sounds in Baltimore, Virginia and even Pennsylvania) that isn't my cup of tea(its Marnie's Mother, with her heavy Southern accent, and phrase "sugar pop," that I think does it for me.)

That said, what another "envelope-pusher" for Hitchocck, in some ways more perverse than Psycho. Its about --among other things -- a frigid woman who a twisted man blackmails into marriage...all so he can assert "husbandly rights" and rape his frigid wife on their forced honeymoon! That's perverse.

Less perverse and more "sexually understandable" is how Connery's Mark Rutland --sought after by all women, especially his sister-in-law Liz(Diane Baker) -- finds an immovable object in Marnie. WHY doesn't this woman go for him? He's got to find out. He's got to conquer her.

That the lust (and eventual rape) are tied into Marnie's criminal career adds a thriller element that never really matters in Marnie. Consider this: "Marnie" is a film with no villain. That's a real problem, given that Hitchcock said that "the stronger the villain, the stronger the film." Indeed, there's not a really strong villain in late Hitchcock except for Bob Rusk(Frenzy.)

And this, of course, to freak out all the prudes in '64: We learn that Marnie, as a little girl, was moved by her mother from the small bed where she sleeps so that Marnie's mother could sleep with sailors as a prostitute. And one of those sailors try to molest Marnie. And murder ensues.

Its weird about Marnie. All that prurient, ground-breaking material and the movie just never really feels like Hitchcock has control of it, or even full interest in it.