I know ecarle has mentioned this in the past, but I just think Arbogast's scream as he's being knifed is such an effective part of that sequence. It's just such a hellishly ghastly sound that Balsam managed to make. Macy in the remake didn't even try to imitate it, but rather just kinda grunted.
shareI've indeed mentioned Arbogast's scream before -- I think it is a key element of how Hitchcock made the murder of Arbogast something far more violent in our minds than what is actually shown on the screen. There is a precision to every single teeny-tiny element of both murder scenes in Psycho that paid off in cinematic power, screams in the audience, and money in the box office till.
Simply put, Arbogast says nothing from the time his return to the Bates Motel to the time mother comes running out at him with the exception of one question ("Bates?") in the motel office. When he is slashed in the face at the top of the stairs, Arbogast opens his mouth wide , but does not scream -- the screaming violins rather "supplant" the scream he doesn't give us.
Then he falls to the floor of the foyer, Mother leaps upon him knife upraised and the knife goes down (with the Herrmann screeching violins changing to low, deep chords which suggest "the finality of death." Though shorter in duration, these low deep chords match up to the similar chords which accompanied Marion's slow slide to death along the shower wall.)
Arbogast is totally below the frame now, out of sight, as the killing knife plunges down below the frame to him.
And that's when we hear the scream -- a sudden "return to reality" that tells us Arbogast is getting stabbed to death AND that Arbogast is experiencing the ultimate in terror: realizing he is being stabbed by a human monster, and realizing(WE later realize) that its Norman in a wig. Balsams deep, guttural scream (almost an expressed word, "BLEAHHH!") communicates the detective's terror as well as his pain.
When William H. Macy reenacted Arbogast's death for Van Sant, he did a lot more "vocal acting." Standing at the top of the stairs and receiving more face slashes than Balsam did, Macy first reacts to those slashes("Uh...uh") and then, upon falling down the stairs, lets out a horrific but kinda-funny "yodel" to accompany the fall ("Ayeeeeeeeeeeeh!") When Arbogast falls to the foyer floor, and he is below the frame and mother's knife comes down, Van Sant is allowed in 1998 to show many more plunges of the knife and Macy's recorded vocals are no longer a guttural scream of terror, but rather the quite realistic grunts of a man receiving multiple stabs -- it sounds to me as if Macy is getting punched multiple times in the stomach("Uh...uh...uh")...but of course, he is getting stabbed. And it makes you FEEL that stabbing -- physically -- in a way that Balsam's 1960 scream did not.
Van Sant's Psycho stands as a "shot by shot recreation" of the original that nonetheless makes different choices, and nowhere are the differences greater than in Arbogast's murder. I rather like the Hitchcock version better because Balsam's scream is like a sudden, shocking "return to reality" as this cool cat of a detective is reduced to a screaming mass of terror. In the Van Sant version, Macy gets to do a lot more vocally -- yelling, yodeling, grunting -- but he comes off less as a terrified victim, than Balsam.
(Bonus grue: I find the sounds of the knife puncturing Macy at the end of his murder scene to be more "visceral" than in Hitchcock's original with Balsam -- the knife sounds like it is hitting bone en route to hitting heart.)
I've always kinda wondered whether or not Arbogast realized exactly who and why he was getting killed. I feel like he would have had a better look at his assailant than Marion did, but just imagine what was going through his mind. I mean, if he recognized the killer as the young man he had just been speaking to, no doubt he would have thought that it was strange that he was dressed as an old lady, and also he likely would have concluded in that brief period of time that this had something to do with the $40,000, even though it did not.
When William H. Macy reenacted Arbogast's death for Van Sant, he did a lot more "vocal acting." Standing at the top of the stairs and receiving more face slashes than Balsam did, Macy first reacts to those slashes("Uh...uh") and then, upon falling down the stairs, lets out a horrific but kinda-funny "yodel" to accompany the fall ("Ayeeeeeeeeeeeh!") When Arbogast falls to the foyer floor, and he is below the frame and mother's knife comes down, Van Sant is allowed in 1998 to show many more plunges of the knife and Macy's recorded vocals are no longer a guttural scream of terror, but rather the quite realistic grunts of a man receiving multiple stabs -- it sounds to me as if Macy is getting punched multiple times in the stomach("Uh...uh...uh")...but of course, he is getting stabbed. And it makes you FEEL that stabbing -- physically -- in a way that Balsam's 1960 scream did not.
Macy's Arbogast could have pulled through if he'd had a bit more time.
shareI've always kinda wondered whether or not Arbogast realized exactly who and why he was getting killed.
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Oh, we kicked that around on a thread or two, and I think the results were surprising. Not to quote other folks, but it seemed the consensus that Arbogast clearly saw Norman -- coming at him at the top of the stairs, and from foyer floor as Norman swooped down on him. Possibly Arbogast could see Norman's face clearly as he fell down the stairs(he's looking into OUR eyes at first, before glazing over.)
There was a split as to whether or not Marion could see Norman's face. I contended "no" -- Hitchcock shows the face in shadow, so that's Marion's point of view. Others said no, Marion clearly could have seen Norman sometime. And I finally found a quote from Janet Leigh: she believed that Marion COULD see Norman's face, and therefore was doubly shocked that this nice young man could do this to her.
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I feel like he would have had a better look at his assailant than Marion did, but just imagine what was going through his mind. I mean, if he recognized the killer as the young man he had just been speaking to, no doubt he would have thought that it was strange that he was dressed as an old lady, and also he likely would have concluded in that brief period of time that this had something to do with the $40,000, even though it did not.
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Yes, I figure, as a detective in search of money, he figured he was being attacked OVER the money, though why Norman was in a dress? Neither he nor Marion could guess that one in their dying moments. The shrink had to explain it.
There's a line from Gregory Peck in a 1965 thriller called Mirage (which went out with Psycho on its double bill) in which, confronted by killers who have already killed two men, he says: "They never knew why they were being killed. At least I know why you're going to kill me."
One realizes that Marion and Arbogast were deprived of very important knowledge: why they were being killed. Though the reason was...psycho.
I just watched this version again and I thought it was surprisingly good,
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When it was announced that Van Sant would be making Psycho "shot by shot, but with a few stylistic changes," I think a lot of us showed up(among those few who DID show up) wondering..."what's he going to do with those murders now that he has the full hard R rating?)
I figured with Arbogast, that Van Sant would drop the camera down below the frame at the end and show us Arbogast getting finished off in full gory detail. But Van Sant didn't much mess with that; the detective is still below the frame and represented by his VOICE in final death.
No, where Van Sant amped up the volume was having Mother slash Arbo's face three times(forming an X around one eye), with Macy just having to stand there and take it.
That said, yes, its a different staircase murder in significant ways. Macy is much more vocal -- that yodel, particularly in Macy's high-pitched voice, is scary and funny and exhilarating, all at the same time. And whereas Martin Balsam himself took that fall to the foyer floor in the original, Macy was replaced by a stuntman who could "power out" the fall as a physical leap, almost flinging himself backward onto a throw rug that propelled him a foot or so before Mother reached him. Its a more "athletic" version of the staircase murder.
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however I did not like those random images Van Sant just stuck in there for God knows what reason.
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I expect I'll go to my grave wondering (a) why he did that and (b) what it meant. I have clues. The shot of the woman with the eye mask is a re-staged "lift" from a shot in a Nine Inch Nails video of a song called "Closer." Van Sant played that video on an MTV promotional half hour for his Psycho. The calf in the middle of the road(seen through a windshield, in the rain) well -- there were rumors that Van Sant had tried incorporating shots of a cattle slaughterhouse into Arbogast's murder...but, no go. The calf may be all that remains.
But I want ANSWERS, dammit. Those shots really messed up the shock of the scene for me (and who was that woman? Arbogast's best lay?)
Also, perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but I couldn't help but feel that Macy's tumble down the stairs seemed less…"severe" for lack of a better word than Balsam's. In fact, it almost appears that Macy's gonna just get up and be fine before Bates comes at him with the knife.
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Interesting point. A couple of possible reasons. Its a young fit stuntman "flying through the air" onto the foyer floor and it takes Mother longer to reach him that in the Hitchcock version(where mother seemed to fly through the air WITH Balsam, landing right beside him to kill.)
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It's like, Balsam would have been screwed either way, but I almost feel like Macy's Arbogast could have pulled through if he'd had a bit more time.
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Well, possibly. The issue was always whether a tough man like Arbogast (well, Macy's not so tough, that's an interesting change) could fight back against Mother at any time in the process -- on the landing? On the foyer floor? Likely not.
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A few more comments on the Van Sant version:
Key change: as Arbogast falls backwards down the stairs, Van Sant inserts a shot from Arbogast's POV not in Hitchocck's original -- Mother pursuing, totally in shadow as in the shower. It seems extraneous to me, Hitchcock wasn't shooting the shower scene twice. And it begs the question: so Arbogast COULDN'T see Norman's face?
"Missing Hitchocck's precision": At least three places -- (1) Mismatched cuts from Macy climbing the stairs to reaching the landing (a real edit no no); (2) The door opening is not a "precision on the frame cut to when the shadow disappears on the floor." (3) in Hitchcock's original, when Mother drops down to stab Arbo on the foyer floor, Hitchcock captures her entire body in the frame -- including her buttocks obscenely poised in the air and her old shoes. Van Sant fills the whole frame only with Mother's dress.
The lack of precision in these shots demonstrates how Van Sant -- even armed with an on-set DVD with all the scenes and shots to work from - simply couldn't match what Hitchcock did. One reason why: Hitchcock had some doubles rehearse the Arbogast murder from all angles on days when he was filming other parts of the movie. He KNEW this would be a hard scene to shoot(harder, said crew members, than the shower murder), he had it all rehearsed and camera rehearsed and ready to shoot.
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A thought: this thread lingers with a certain precision of its own on how two filmmakers -- Hitchcock and Van Sant -- approached the task of filming a man being slaughtered by a psychopathic killer. Icky subject matter and yet -- its what Psycho was really ABOUT. The shower scene more than the staircase scene(that's why theres 58/72) but definitely the staircase murder as well, which, in its four-shot simplicity, gave Van Sant more of a challenge to change and more for the audience to SEE changed. (Harder with the Anne Heche shower scene -- a gash down her back, a bird's eye view of her dead buttocks, etc.)
Hitchcock took on the censors on matters of sexuality, some nudity and outright sick content with Psycho, but at the end of the day his challenge was to get those two murders past the censors and to the screen intact. (That was the ad-line of the second Psycho re-release in '69: "See the version of Psycho TV did not dare show! Uncut! Intact!)
Marion's murder was hidden in a flurry of fast cuts, but Arbogast's killing made sure to include both the grisly(the slash to his face; his scream at the end) and the stylized(the overhead attack shot; the process staircase fall) so as to at once beat the censors and terrify audiences and they had never been terrified before.
I once counted NINE different versions of the Arbogast murder -- from the killing in Bloch's novel, through various script drafts, storyboardings and re-shoots by Hitchcock. What he finally filmed and released had been put through the wringer to reach the screen. (Most interesting thrown out idea, from Saul Bass: Arbogast's hand grabs at and snaps all the rails on the staircase balustrade as he falls, in Hitchcockian quick cuts. I don't see it as physical reality , myself.)
To that extent, Van Sant was really a Johnny come lately to Hitchcock's hard work. (And yet, modern youth don't buy the process shot of the fall at all. Well, it worked then.)
And of course, not to forget: Bernard Herrman and his murder music. The screeching strings are slower and last longer in the shower murder; they explode more loudly and quickly in the shorter-screen time staircase murder -- and it makes thematic sense: Mother can take her time killing Marion; she must rush to kill the tough Arbogast before he can fight back.
The look on his face is what gets me every time. He is so totally stunned.
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