MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Arbogast's Hat

Arbogast's Hat

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Opening question:

What was the final Hitchcock film in which a male character wore a hat?

I ran the mental processes and came up with : Topaz. 1969. Three from the end.

John Forsythe. As a CIA man. And Roscoe Lee Browne. As a spy of indeterminate origin.

But there was a twist: The 1969 Topaz was set seven years earlier, in 1962, when hats were more prevelant on men. By 1969, they were on their way out.

I think long hair did it. Its hard to wear a hat on a bit fluffy flop of "dry look" male hair. Indeed, there were a number of 70s cop movies that gave off a weird character look: paunchy male cops with long hair and hats plopped on top of the big hair. It didn't look right.

Hitchcock made two seventies movies where the men had long hair: Frenzy and Family Plot.

No hats.

As for his other sixties films, I recall no hats on men in Torn Curtain. I recall a hat on Rod Taylor's head in the SF scene that opens The Birds. Joe Mantell wore a hat at the Tides diner, and some say he's the hatted guy who lights a cigar in gasoline and blows up outside the diner. Did Connery wear a hat in Marnie? Milton Seltzer as the guy who bothered Marnie at the race trick did.

Which brings us backward in time. To Psycho. Who wore a hat?

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Two men in Psycho wear a cowboy hat: Oilman Tom Cassidy and director Alfred Hitchcock, as befits the Phoenix Arizona Southwest locale of the film's opening scenes.

But the movie heads north by northwest to Northern California, and two young men who just don't seem like the hat wearing type: Sam Loomis(John Gavin) and Norman Bates(Tony Perkins.)

No, the only man wearing a "business hat" in Psycho, to go with his business suit and tie(in the Hitchcock style tradition), is Arbogast the private eye.

That hat proves most intriguing. It identifies Arbogast(I think) as "a supporting guy." Gavin and Perkins have variations on "the young leading man role." Arbogast is meant to be less important, from the character ranks. He wears a hat. On the stocky Martin Balsam, the hat gives Arbogast a rather natty look, and an "all business look." Arbogast means business. He's here to find things out.

But there's a trick to Arbogast's hat. Balsam wears the hat for most of his scenes in the movie; first with Gavin and Vera Miles, later(for quite some time) with Perkins.

It is only as Arbogast reaches the porch of the Bates Mansion, that he elects to take that hat off. Right as he opens the door.

And when Hitchcock cuts to the foyer inside the Bates mansion, Arbogast sans hat is -- an entirely different man. Why...he's bald.

Or nearly bald.

When the hat had been on in the earlier scenes, Arbogast seemed like a man who might have a full head of hair. Now we learn: nope.

There's character to Arbogast removing the hat here, as well: he's a courtly man, he's going to meet an old woman. He knows his manners.

And Hitchcock knows his set pieces. Hitchcock knows that Mrs. Bates will soon bring a knife down hard on Arbogast's forehead; a hat would only get in the way, block the blow -- make a "clean movie close-up messy." So off the hat goes.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

As Arbogast climbs the stairs to his doom, Martin Balsam's nearly bald -- and very round, and very big -- head dominates the scene in a way it did not -- and could not -- in Balsam's earlier scenes with Gavin, Miles, and Perkins. Hitchcock cast Martin Balsam for his Method acting prowess, and possibly for his physical build -- he's neither too strapping nor too spindly to be in-believable as a tough private eye whom an older woman could nonetheless overcome.

But I think Hitchcock also cast Balsam for that round bald head. It becomes the focal point of the murder when it is first slashed. And the bald head foreshadows that murder all the way up the stairs.

A last other bit about Arbogast's hat in the Hitchcock: it is in Arbogast's hand for the stair climb, and thus it gets in the way of fighting Mother off when she comes running out at Arbogast. He has to think about dropping the hat(which he does) before he can think about fending off the knife(which he doesn't.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Fast forward 38 big years: Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho.

William H. Macy has the Arbogast role -- likely cast more for his "heat"(coming off of Fargo) as the Number One Character Guy in Hollywood (at that time) than for his appropriateness for the part. And there will be no baldness for stylistic harmony.

In trying to recreate a 1960 movie as a 1998 story, director Van Sant had to keep deciding when to update, when to not.

Here, the update question was: should Arbogast even WEAR a hat in 1998? Did men EVER wear hats for business in 1998?

Van Sant decided: yes. But then he made a bad error: he couldn't find a really believable business hat for Macy to wear.

On the "Making of" DVD, you see William H. Macy being confronted with a big bin of really bad hats, and trying not to laugh. As Van Sant watches, Macy keeps putting on one bad hat after another(one is plastic, one is "smushed") and making a little fun. Macy tips on up on his head and says "Hot enough for ya?" Its actually rather demoralizing and a little outrageous to see Van Sant offering Macy such a sub-par crummy bunch of hats to choose from -- you would think they were making a student film, not a multi-million dollar studio film.

Macy wears the "least bad" had as Arbogast, but it is too big for his head and rather silly looking("Bizarre headgear," one critic called it.) And you can tell, as Macy interrogates Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, that Macy himself eventually gets fed up wearing it.

On the key dramatic moment when Arbogast challenges Norman on saying no one had stayed at the motel:

"And, and you see -- that's exactly my point -- and you said that no one had been here for a couple of weeks and here's a couple that stayed here a week ago.."

Macy TAKES OFF THE HAT. It becomes a gesture of anger, of "getting down to business."

And it becomes an opportunity for Macy to take off the hat and ACT without feeling(no doubt) as embarrassed as when he wears the hat. His hair (in Psycho, at least) is very thick and reddish-brown, distinctive in the bright lamp light that Van Sant photographs it. This gives "Van Sant's Psycho" its own "look" with Arbogast, entirely different from the Bald Balsam version.

Macy has to wear the hat again for his phone booth scene(Van Sant wouldn't allow Arbogast a cell phone) and for his meanderings around the Bates Motel office and parlor and up the hill to the house(in a subpar version of the greatest shot in Psycho.)

Upon entering the house, Macy takes off the hat for good, but there's no baldness or roundness affiliated with the character's "fit" into the set-piece this time. As it turns out, Macy's "facial close-up under attack" is more bloody than the Balsam version(three slashes to the face versus one), but not as "artful"(Balsam's round head, round eyes, round open mouth created a "human painting" -- Macy is just a guy getting slashed.)

---

The final verdict, it seems to me, should be this: Arbogast's hat is very important and relevant in the 1960 Psycho, but is terribly chosen , unimportant, and actually AGAINST the reality of the story in the 1998 Psycho.

Van Sant should have dropped the hat.

[–] telegonus (736) 7 years ago

Good question, EC. I'm not sure if Lowrey wore one in the car when Marion saw him at the stoplight. The highway cop, natch. California Charlie, nyet. Norman, never. Sam, no. I don't believe Al Chambers was wearing a hat outside the church, but maybe. In the police station, some men wore hats, others didn't, mostly police hats, though, not the fedora style hat.

Heck, even Arbogast wore a somewhat modern hat, which one saw a lot on men in movies and on television late Fifties to middle Sixties. Even Perry Mason wore one on occasion early on, though by 1960 the only headgear you were likely to see Perry wear would be a fisherman's cap, or one of those hunting caps men in lumberjack shirts wear (can't recall the name), maybe on ela fishing trip. But then I could be wrong. Lt. Tragg nearly always wore a hat when he was hot on Perry's trail and I don't believe that changed, right to his last appearance on the show. Paul Drake almost never wore a hat, especially on business. He was the breezy, sporty type, but for his age would have look right at home on 77 Sunset Strip.

The late Richard Anderson, Tragg's replacement, don't let's get cocky here. I think he might have worn one, super-contemporary, a la Paul Burke on Naked City, Ed Nelson on at least the early episodes of Peyton Place, Robert Reed on The Defenders. After that, hats on the small screen were for cowboys and old men. But as I discussed somewhere, maybe on the Psycho board some while back, hats were slowly going out of fashion even before JFK's not wearing one was like a landslide from which the men's hat business never recovered. Richard Nixon didn't seem fond of hats. Even Eisenhower, who could have got away with wearing a Davy Crockett hat if he wanted to, often went bareheaded when president, and he was bald! Maybe on the campaign trail in 1952,--that was early on--but later on, no.