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"Psycho" as the Climax of Hitchcock's Golden Era -- The Fifties

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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For some reason(though I think I know it, more later)...I post a fair amount on the Hitchcock pictures made AFTER Psycho, most of which have the reputation of "films of decline," and that even includes, in some circles, the best technical achievement of Hitchcock's career, The Birds.

But the post Birds films have middling to bad reputations, save one (Frenzy), which was a big comeback film on release in 1972, but not really a very big hit , and lacking any major stars. Marnie had been rehabilitated, but it has problems. The back to back Commie Cold War films Torn Curtain(with big stars) and Topaz(with no stars) are disliked, and Hitch's final film, Family Plot, is nifty IN plot, but weak on star power and decidedly the slow-ish work of an old man.

Still, I like all of those above, and mainly because they all seem INFORMED by Psycho, made by the maker OF Psycho.

Which isn't the case of the films before Psycho that Hitchcock made, is it?

The "Golden Age of Hitchcock" seems settled as The Fifties. Oh, he made his name in England in the 30's, and he had plenty o' hits in the forties, but it was only in The Fifties that Hitchcock seemed to come into his own as both a brand name and an artist. Hosting a Top Ten TV show didn't hurt on the "celebrity side" of his work; but he made a whole bunch of great, varied films in the fifties, too.

In the Fifties, Hitchcock made classics that were hits(Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, North by Northwest), hits that weren't classics(Dial M, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much) and classics that weren't hits(I Confess, The Trouble With Harry, The Wrong Man, Vertigo.)

Hitch cannily used hits as "banks" to make more artistic works. Strangers on a Train "bought him" the right to make I Confess. Rear Window and To Catch a Thief bought him the right to make The Trouble With Harry. The Man Who Knew Too Much "bought him" the right to make The Wrong Man.

Its a great bunch of movies , that fifties bunch.

Though his 1950 movie - Stage Fright -- isn't really part of that bunch.

It was Strangers on a Train in 1951 that re-booted the Hitchcock career, after a slump that ran from The Paradine Case to Rope(barely released) to Under Capricorn to Stage Fright. Those films are interesting, but they have a slowness and a fealty to "single take cinema" that rather killed Hitchcock's reputation for awhile. He was making those movies while Billy Wilder made Sunset Boulevard and Joe Mankiewicz was making All About Eve. (I've personally rehabilitated Rope not only as a great stunt, but as a Hays-Code pushing take on gay characters AND a profound look at superiority as the basis for killing others. Still, I don't think it was much of a hit.)

But something about the coming of the fifties rejuvenated Hitch. Strangers on a Train was, for its time, an lollapalooza of pace(if not action), with a great psycho performance anchoring it(Robert Walker's), a great action climax ending it(the berserk carousel) and a Hays Code-busting sense of sexual content(mainly in the character of the hero's slutty estranged wife, who is pregnant with another man's child while out with two guys and coming on to a third.)

With its charming boyish psycho villain and its strong sexual content, "Strangers on a Train" was actually pointing the way to Psycho -- but that book wouldn't even be written until 1959, so Hitch had to spend the decade telling other stories:

I Confess: Strangers bought this powerful premise: a priest hears the confession of a killer...and then is arrested for the killing himself. Will he tell all? He can't. Montgomery Clift lent his newfound star power and brooding personality to an interesting film of faith, sacrifice, and Catholicism. Evidently not a hit.

Dial M for Murder: More Hays-Code challenges: the heroine is cheating on her husband(but then the husband was cheating on her first.) 3-D in some markets. A central attempted murder sequence that played like a rape and ended with the killing of the killer. Grace Kelly debuts for Hitch and the whole thing plays like a Columbo episode, thus giving it "genre-starting" status. Evidently a hit.

Rear Window: Clearly a hit -- blockbuster time -- and a classic ("A masterpiece," Time Magazine called it, and Hitchcock didn't get that kind of praise much of the time.) A dazzling exercise in the cinema; an endlessly symbolic study of watching (films, TV, PEOPLE.) With a central murder and bathtub dismemberment that would surely point the way -- yet again -- to Psycho.

To Catch A Thief: Not very suspenseful. No real set-pieces(save a pretty good car chase.) But something about Cary Grant and Grace Kelly on the French Riviera for Hitchcock -- looking as great as they would ever look and surrounded by Oscar-winning Technicolor cinematography while saying great lines -- this was a classic of elegance, wit, and star power.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The Trouble With Harry: Hitchcock two big hits bought him this opportunity to make a twee British black comedy of errors(transported to gorgeous Vermont in fall) about a dead body who people keep burying, digging up, and burying again. Some years later, a critic reviewing Psycho would write: "Psycho is Hitchcock's most disagreeable movie since The Trouble With Harry...which was disagreeable in a different way." I suppose that way would be the practically blasphemous way in which a dead human being was treated as a comedy prop rather than being buried with reverence and care. So what. But this: some years later, Psycho would be more disturbing in giving us a corpse that we had also known as a human being(Marion Crane, as manhandled in burial by Norman Bates.) The Trouble With Harry also finally brought Bernard Herrmann on board for music, which he would handle for six more films and one "sound consulting job"(The Birds.) Eight total Herrmann scores for Hitchcock, including three of the greatest scores in movie history, one(Vertigo), two(North by Northwest), three(Psycho.)

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock's only official remake of himself -- bringing two suspense genres together: The Kidnapping of a Child and Stop the Assassination! The Albert Hall concert sequence as one of the all-time best Hitchcock set-pieces(done again, this time with bigger stars and color.) Herrmann on screen conducting the orchestra. And a nicely staged murder of a good spy by a bad spy that makes the most of a knife plunged into a back -- another foreshadowing of Psycho to come: bladed death. But there's this about The Man: after the glamour of Rear Window and To Catch a Thief, this one seemed a bit bland and stodgy with James Stewart and Doris Day as a MARRIED couple within whom all the sexual spark seems dead even before their boy is kidnapped.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The Wrong Man: The four films from Rear Window through Man Who Knew Too Much were all Paramount films scripted by the witty John Michael Hayes. This would be a "contract deal" Warner Brothers film with a far less witty script(Hayes and Hitch broke up rather nastily after the unprecedented four in a row.) If Vertigo , NXNW and Psycho seem like an unbroken series of masterpieces, I would vote The Wrong Man as one before them, and The Birds as one after them. Put the five in a row and you've got one of the great statements of all time about the dangers, terrors, sadnesses, romantic obsessions, and excitements of life. The Wrong Man shares with Psycho being in black and white when Hitchcock worked otherwise in color, and a sense of the economic dangers of the workaday life and Too Many Bills to Pay. And THEN it turns into a tour de force of wrongful accusation and how "the system doesn't care" once it traps you. A masterpiece.

Vertigo. Another masterpiece. Or so they say. Bernard Herrmann's score and Saul Bass's credits launch it as such(as the same two men would do later with ONLY NXNW and Psycho.) James Stewart keeps it stodgy on the one hand while the highly sexed Kim Novak keeps it young on the other hand. They are a mismatched couple who make sense -- the damaged older man obsessing one last time on sexual youth. Its been analyzed almost as much as Psycho and yet it never matched Psycho in box office or popular affection. I've come to love Vertigo over the years, but it took a long time. What I draw away most from it is The Inability to Bring Back the Past. Former loves, dead parents, the good old days...you can't go home again. Scottie Ferguson tries...and fails miserably...at the cost of Kim Novak's life.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

North by Northwest. The Wrong Man and Vertigo were "too serious"(said Hitch) and didn't do much business. As with Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock turned in a razzle-dazzle lollapalooza action thriller to keep his clout, but THIS one turned to be The Big One, and the last time that Hitchcock really had the budget and production values to go "all the way" in presenting filmed entertainment to his audience. All the films from Psycho on would be constrained of budget and/or production value, only Psycho and, to a lesser extent, Frenzy, managed to overcome modesty with scary power.

It was quite a run, the films from 1951 to 1959. I dunno, though. Had I Confess or The Trouble With Harry or The Wrong Man been released AFTER Psycho, perhaps they, too, would be considered "films of decline." But they came before Psycho, and were surrounded by hits and made by a man clearly in his prime and very much respected as a hitmaker , if not(never) an Oscar magnet.

I find this interesting: evidently Hitchcock had such a full load of projects on deck to make that he knew he'd be making The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and NXNW a few years before he made them. But Psycho hit out of nowhere. The book came out in April of 1959, Hitchcock pounced on buying it , had it scripted in the summer of 1959, and had it before the cameras in November of 1959. Fittingly, the movie was made as 1959 became 1960(Marion's death was filmed in December 1959; Arbogast's in January 1960), and the movie as released seemed to straddle two decades and the revolution a brewing.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Hitchcock had no idea he'd be making Psycho through most of the fifties. But it sure seems as if he was anticipating the making of it: the boyish psycho in Strangers; the brooding Montgomery Clift in I Confess(sitting under wall hanging of Christ on the cross as Norman would sit under the stuffed owl); the violence of the attempted murder in Dial M; the bathtub dismemberment (and possible psychopathy of Lars Thorwald) in Rear Window, not to mention the voyeurism run rampant in that film; the body disposal problems of The Trouble With Harry; the back-stab killing in The Man Who Knew Too Much (done much quicker and funnier with a thrown knife in NXNW); the economic depression of The Wrong Man; the theme of "bringing the dead back to life" in Vertigo; the issues of identity in Vertigo and NXNW(neither Madeleine Elster nor George Kaplan REALLY exist, no more than Norma Bates.)

I left one film out from that period as "anticipating" Psycho: To Catch A Thief. That's because I feel To Catch a Thief is pretty much the opposite number of Psycho: glamourous , non-violent(save that one crook's wrench killing) and romantic where Psycho is none of those things, and about rich people when Psycho is about hardscrabble lives. To Catch A Thief is at total odds with Psycho -- and thus seems oddly linked to it.

Screenwriter William Goldman saw Hitchcock's Golden Era films as an incredible run that were then betrayed by the films from Marnie through Family Plot -- "awful, awful films" he wrote(Frenzy included). He blamed the auteur theory for filling Hitchcock's head with delusions of too-serious grandeur. Well, maybe, but age, health, drinking, changing times, and working at Universal had a lot to do with it, too.

Me, I like most of those late films(save Marnie) and I don't find them all THAT worse from the fifties output. Still, as a matter of being relevant and revered, for Hitchcock (as for Sinatra and Bugs Bunny)...the fifties were IT.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Being released in 1960, Psycho is sometimes linked to the sixties Hitchcock films after it: The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz. But it really fits better with the fifties films before it, yes?

The Paramount trailer for Don't Look Now(1973) tried to make that case, linking three Paramount thrillers together: "In the fifties , it was Psycho. In the sixties, it was Rosemary's Baby. In the seventies, its Don't Look Now."

Well, maybe. Psycho isn't entirely OF the fifties. It is basically set in the fifties and making the case for just how different the sixties would be.

It has been said that, the more complete "Golden Era" would end with The Birds, not Psycho. I'll take that argument -- except The Birds made less than half what Psycho made, wasn't considered as scary as Psycho, and seemed to have script and dialogue problems that Psycho did not have. Still, The Birds was a technical achievement of the highest order, scary enough...and profound enough, that I think perhaps it IS the film that ends the Golden Era.

But Psycho ends the Golden Era with more perfection...

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

It was Strangers on a Train in 1951 that re-booted the Hitchcock career, after a slump that ran from The Paradine Case to Rope(barely released) to Under Capricorn to Stage Fright. Those films are interesting, but they have a slowness and a fealty to "single take cinema" that rather killed Hitchcock's reputation for awhile.

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Relevance to Psycho? Well, a while ago, on discovering Dead of Night (1945) and realizing that a career making DoN-like stuff at Ealing was a great road not taken for Hitchcock, I wrote the following:

Hitchcock was already an anthologized mystery-story publisher in the '40s but effectively his Hollywood career was all tied up then with working with slightly more elevated materials for big stars like Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, and Cary Grant. The more disreputable but exciting stuff that they were doing back at Ealing Studios in England was right up Hitch's alley but frustratingly he couldn't really do that stuff at the big Hollywood studios.....until TV came knocking and then he could do that sort of macabre but humorous stuff every week. Psycho from this perspective is just the moment when finally the world of Hitch's star-driven Hollywood entertainments and the world of his publishing, TV, Ealing-influenced side came together.

I need to rethink this in the light of Bordwell's essay... but the idea that Psycho was this great criss-cross moment in Hitchcock's life and film and tv career (a decade after getting himself back on track in Hollywood with a movie about criss-crosses) seems more well-founded than ever.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Hitchcock's career development is incredibly fascinating. One of the most illuminating treatments of H's late '40s swoon and then righting the ship with Strangers on A Train treats that episode as a consequence of Hitch having suspense almost to himself up until 1944 and then being suddenly swamped with imitators and competitors. *That* story is then told as itself the final act of the fast development of mystery fiction throughout the '30s.

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Intriguing. I have been giving thought to why I'm not so enamored of Hitchcock's forties work as the later stuff, and I feel that it takes all the way to the three-in-a-row of NXNW, Psycho and The Birds for Hitchcock to match up with "where the thriller would be going"(to Bond, to shock, to the fantastic) and THAT is still with us today. Rebecca, Suspicion, and Spellbound are fine films -- but they were made to deal with less dynamic blockbuster type demands than the 50's/60s stuff. And yet, they WERE blockbusters(or at least famous hits) in the forties.

How and why Hitchcock got stuck in what has been called "his male menopause period"(The Paradine Case through Stage Fright, with only Rope feeling like much of a thriller among the group) is hard to figure out. Under Capricorn in particular was a weird choice -- a period costume drama? set in Australia?.

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That larger story is told here:

---I will read that!

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

But Hitch seems to have decided he had to change. The novel Strangers on a Train gave him the criss-cross premise, but he turned it into a much bigger, wilder deal. Part of my suspicion about Strangers on a Train is that Hitchcock had a wee bit of contempt for its wilder aspects -- like the berserk carousel climax. He was more of an art film maker than he let on, more interested in human drama but -- to get that comeback -- he climaxed Strangers with a fist fight/wrestling match to the death between hero and villain, on a spinning merry-go-round as if to say "Here! You want big action? I'll GIVE you big action!" Big action that had a touch of satire to it -- overkill.

And then he went and made I Confess. Back to art film austerity.

I would here like to again mention that I think the "criss-cross" premise of Strangers is actually a pretty bad way to plan a murder -- IF, as with Guy Haines, you have no alibi for the night the other guy does your murder for you. Because the murder of Guy's estranged wife points straight to HIM as the main suspect, and with no alibi, he's cooked. Its almost as if Bruno KNEW that would happen, eh? Not so perfect a murder plan? Its a perfect plan for trapping Guy.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Hitchcock's career development is incredibly fascinating. One of the most illuminating treatments of H's late '40s swoon and then righting the ship with Strangers on A Train treats that episode as a consequence of Hitch having suspense almost to himself up until 1944 and then being suddenly swamped with imitators and competitors.

---

That's intriguing. Me, I always felt it took all the way out to the sixties for Hitch to get swamped with competitors:
And I think it took the back to back box office of North by Northwest and Psycho to create the completion.

Suddenly we had: Bond. And Homicidal. And Strait Jacket. And Cape Fear. And The Manchurian Candidate. And The Prize. And Charade. And Mirage. And Arabesque. And Wait Until Dark. And, arguably, even Bullitt.

But I guess a different TYPE of thriller besieged Hitchcock in the forties. Lang's Cloak and Dagger with Gary Cooper(the Hitchcock Star Hitchcock never got to work with) and Ministry of Fear with Ray Milland(he accepts a birthday cake with spy stuff in it and becomes Richard Hannay.) Or the private eye noirs of Raymond Chandler(Bogie, Montgomery) and Alan Ladd. The Big Clock. The Uninvited. The Spiral Staircase.

Meanwhile the Big Guy was floundering.

Once Strangers on a Train righted the ship, while Hitchcock pursued passion projects(I Confess, Harry, The Wrong Man) he sure made sure to find commercial properties too. And then in 1955 -- the TV show. Stardom and the ability to reach millions more people.

Certainly, the fifties into sixties had none of the "male menopause" qualities of the forties into the fifties. Backed by a great studio(Paramount) with loan-outs to Warners(Wrong Man) and MGM(NXNW), Hitchocck "could do no wrong" and he got the stars and the budgets to do his best.

[–] movieghoul (213) 7 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

ecarle, great point about the flaw in the crisscross premise. THe point is that Bruno needs to tell GUy exactly when and where he plans to kill Miriam so Guy can establish an ironclad alibi by appearing in public somewhere far away.

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Thank you for reading and responding to this point, movieghoul. I think it took years and many re-viewings of Strangers to CATCH it.

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But of course, Bruno is crazy and doesn't follow through on this key point in the plot.

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Very possible. There is also the possibility that Bruno figured by killing Miriam and putting Guy on the spot, he could FORCE him to commit the other murder. But that's weak. there's also the possibility that Bruno wanted to frame Guy all along, maybe within his subconscious.

But crazy is probably better.

Put another way, "Bruno just didn't think this plan all the way through."

Ha.

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

In part because of reading Bordwell's essay, and in part because of seeing Phantom Thread, I've been revisiting and gap-filling lots of '40s thrillers/psychological dramas. The two real keepers so far are:

Queen of Spades (1949) dir. by Thorold Dickinson
Hangover Square (1945) dir. by John Brahm

Both are easy 8/10-type films overall and both contain bravura sequences that mark them as essential viewing for film buffs notwithstanding their occasional weak points. I like them both more than either Gaslight (1940) (also by Dickinson) or Gaslight (1944).

One to avoid: Dark Waters (1944) dir. by Andre De Toth. An ultra-convoluted but also strangely half-hearted gaslighting saga that makes little sense. One proviso: I had to watch a pretty crumby, blurry old copy of DW. Blu-ray quality might lift the Bayou scenes especially a lot I suppose.

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

The Lodger (1944) dir. by John Brahm. Pretty jolly good! In some respects like a dress rehearsal for Brahm's Hangover Square the following year with Lionel Cregar again as a deranged big/heavy Psycho strongly anticipating Raymond Burr/Rod Steiger/Victor Buono in Baby Jane, maybe Welles in Touch of Evil and a few others I can't quite bring to mind right now. Cregar is sensational in both these films. He died young a few years later after complications from crazy weight loss procedures/dieting with amphetamines, and the like etc.. A sad story and a huge loss. Reading around, Cregar was an out-to-people-in-the-industry gay man who did the 'show dates with starlets' thing to reassure studios... but in both TL and HS Brahms builds Cregar's character around sexual turmoil so that Cregar's real-life struggles and audiences' sixth sense for oddity do the rest. Something that Hitchcock was also good at casting for and exploiting of course.

It's not clear to me how much Brahms could count on people having seen or remembered Hitchcock's silent original, but insofar as he did do that to that extent it uses the 1927 film to feint an unsatisfying twist that satisfyingly never comes! Here and in HS Cregar *is* our Psycho and we run with it. Brahms is much sharper I think than Hitchcock about what we might call the 'cultural production of sexual psychosis and brutal misogyny'. Cregar's Slade literally cuts up women, but Brahm depicts 1880s London as a conveyor belt of young dance-hall beauties to early graves and squalor and disgrace on the streets - a kind of slow motion carving up. There's a lot to think about in TL, and then HS kind of tells the same story only ratcheted up and more operatic with Cregar *more* sympathetic, the main woman victim much *less* sympathetic, and everything driven over the top by a monster score from Herrmann.

Next up: Brahm's werewolf movie, The Undying Monster (1942), a crumby version of which is on youtube.

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

The Undying Monster (1942). Ugh, avoid. A decidedly inferior werewolf flick that never decides whether it's a supernatural tale or The Hound of The Baskervilles. Only 63 minutes long, TUM *feels* longer, draggy, padded with irrelevancies. Climax is anti-climactic and marred by shabby technicals. The best part of TUM is its opening: some good creepy shots (esp. of some huge dogs that may have influenced Hitch's huge dog in Stranger on a Train) with one especially nice extended shot ingeniously synched in its changes of camera direction and focus with a striking clock. The opening 'kill' is also relatively well-staged.*** Poor dialogue and plotting and pacing sink the film soon after that, but TUM's first ten minutes are probably worth a look (at least on youtube) sometime.

Oh well, Brahms will always have the near-triumphs of HS and TL. Brahms went on to television-directing success including 10+ AHPs and almost as many AHHs. He also directed 10+ Twi Zone eps, including for his first the ultra-classic, 'Time Enough At Last'. So that's a career with at least 3 real high points... and according to IMDb he got to retire in Malibu.

*** More technical flubs tho', e.g., a supposedly outdoor shot is obviously on a soundstage - fine - but the backdrop sky a running figure passes by has the numbers 11...12...13... across it half way up!
https://tinyurl.com/y9x3nmdh
I didn't notice this the first time through since my focus was naturally on the figure in the foreground. But rewatching the opening - the best part of the film - as one does, the error was glaring. I imagine that Fox execs weren't amused.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

The Lodger (1944) dir. by John Brahm. Pretty jolly good!

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I saw the 1944 Lodger on TV in the 60's I think, in the pre-teen days when I was realizing that I had not only a "Hitchcock jones" aborning, but a decided taste for thrillers. That thriller-love seems to have been born in me, not made. We just like to be scared, I guess, or to enjoy plots where the good guys are in life and death struggles with the bad guys...and murders sometimes occur. Charade, Mirage, Cape Fear, The Manchurian Candidate -- I was hooked early on(I either saw these films with my family, "through my fingers", or heard about them, getting older I saw them with understanding). AND Hitchcock.

A British film called "Jack the Ripper" made the local TV rounds in the '60s. I wasn't allowed to see it, but a friend was, and he gave me the lowdown on Bloody Jack. Then -- in one of those Hitchcock short story books for kids, I read that Robert Bloch short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"(truly a companion piece to Psycho in my 60s youth -- this Robert Bloch guy suddenly ended up with Hitchcock and William Castle to as a "brand name horror guy".)

So I was drawn to the Lodger as a "Jack the Ripper" story and I recall liking Laird Cregar as the hulking villain and George Sanders as the suave hero and was Merle Oberon the babe in distress?

Some years later, I read about Hitchcock's "The Lodger" and the short story that inspired both films. And I was surprised, some years LATER, when I SAW Hitchcock's Lodger, to find that Hitchcock's film(and evidently the short story) weren't really all that much about the Ripper(he's not even CALLED the Ripper.)

So in certain ways, its ONLY the 1944 "Lodger" that feels like a Jack the Ripper movie to me. That said..can't remember a thing about it except Cregar leaping into the Thames at the end. Dies? Or just...disappears?

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Lionel Cregar again as a deranged big/heavy Psycho strongly anticipating Raymond Burr/Rod Steiger/Victor Buono in Baby Jane, maybe Welles in Touch of Evil and a few others I can't quite bring to mind right now.

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I don't recall Hitchcock going for it in the movies other than with Raymond Burr(and he COULD have, with Norman Bates), but there is something to be said for the terror imposed by a hulking, overweight psycho -- his ability to overcome both female and male victims by sheer size.

Hitchcock's TV SHOW gave us such a killer -- with a twist -- the lady-fellah nurse who is revealed as the psycho at the end of "An Unlocked Window."

--

Cregar is sensational in both these films.

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The Lodger, I have seen. Hangover Square, I have not. And THAT one has a Herrmann score, yes?( Note in passing: rather like Hitchcock, I don't think Herrmann's music really "blossomed" until the fifties.)

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He died young a few years later after complications from crazy weight loss procedures/dieting with amphetamines, and the like etc.. A sad story and a huge loss.

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Yes, I have read this. Overweight actors/actresses trying to deal with sudden weight loss has a few such tragic tales. Though there were a few success stories, too. At least for awhile. Raymond Burr looks pretty huge as Thorwald; but he went through a rapid weight loss regimen to land Perry Mason...and kept it off for a decade or so.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Reading around, Cregar was an out-to-people-in-the-industry gay man who did the 'show dates with starlets' thing to reassure studios...

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The most sly photo I have seen of this nature is one of Anthony Perkins and Tab Hunter on a "double date" at the theater. Pretty starlets are on either side of them -- but the two men are sitting next to each other and smiling into each other's eyes. Its really their date. And funnier: behind them, smiling is Hollywood arch-conservative Ward Bond.

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but in both TL and HS Brahms builds Cregar's character around sexual turmoil so that Cregar's real-life struggles and audiences' sixth sense for oddity do the rest. Something that Hitchcock was also good at casting for and exploiting of course.

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Yes, I suppose all of this was "anticipatory" to the blurred gender roles we here so much about today. We've discussed it a bit about Norman Bates...from the overweight man in Bloch's book to the open-secret gay actor playing him in the movie. Heterosexual? Homosexual? Something in between? Lustful after women or repelled by them? I think this tension sounds in Uncle Charlie and Bob Rusk, too. Though with Bruno Anthony and the Rope killers, I think they are meant to be gay.

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

but there is something to be said for the terror imposed by a hulking, overweight psycho -- his ability to overcome both female and male victims by sheer size.

I was reminded of this quote by a passage in the following, interesting article profiling former tv/movie exec, Barry Diller:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/style/barry-diller-iac.html
Money quote:
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Mr. Diller recalls that once in Cannes, when he was the chief executive of Universal, Stacey Snider, the head of the movie division, told him that “Harvey [Weinstein] had treated her terribly and made her cry. So the next day I saw Harvey on the terrace at Hotel du Cap and I said, ‘Harvey, don’t ever treat an executive at my company that way. Don’t you ever talk to anyone in that manner.’

“And Harvey, about six feet away, said, ‘I’m going to throw you off the terrace.’ And this gorilla, because he looks like a gorilla, starts walking towards me, right? And truly, I was scared. I thought, how, without cutting and running like a chicken, do I stop him? And somehow a bear came into my mind.” He says he pulled himself up into a menacing stance, as you’re supposed to do if you have to confront a bear.

“And it so surprised him that he stopped and I got out with a small amount of honor,” he says.
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This is a reminder that (a) Harvey W absolutely had/has the hulking Psycho thing going on, and (b) the sex angle of Harvey W.'s willingness to abuse and terrorize people is in many ways the least of it. What would HW have become if he'd been completely unsuccessful?

[–] Otter (24464) 7 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

You know, a thank the popular conception that the 1950's were Hitchcock's "Golden Age" is wrong. That was when he had the big budgets and the color film stock and the reputation as the Master of Suspense, but IMHO he actually made that reputation in the 1940s.

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It would seem that Hitchcock had a "solid record of achievement" in three disparate decades -- the 30's(as the Boy Wonder of England), the 40's(under Selznick's wing at first, but branching out quickly to other studios) and the 50's(starting at Warners and with the opulent backing of Paramount for much of the decade.)

"The 60's" is problematic. It starts perfectly with Psycho and then trouble (and controversy begins.) Debates as to whether or not The Birds and even Marnie are "great enough" to have capped the Golden Era. Trouble definitely begins in 1966 with Torn Curtain(ironically starring pretty much the biggest male and female star OF 1966, but still trouble.) Then more trouble with the starless Topaz and the decade is over.

Anyway, I think the beauty of Hitchcock's long, long career is that he seems to have fans who think he was at his best in ANY ONE of those first three decades, and that's their prerogative. The 30's British films have a cult(they find the films shorter, quicker, tighter than the overblown Hollywood product). The 40s films have plenty of classic work.

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And "Psycho" was undoubtedly his last great film. I have issues with "The Birds" which I have ranted about at great length on the "The Birds" board.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Three of my top five favorite Hitchcock films were made in the 1940s ("Rebecca", "Spellbound", and "Shadow of a Doubt"), while only one was made in the1950s ("Vertigo"), and one in the 1960s ("Psycho", duh). The rest of his 1950s films are slick but to me uninvolving, even they started Cary Grant.

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Fair enough, but agreeing to disagree. I have more favorites in the fifties than Vertigo -- Strangers, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Wrong Man and NXNW for starters.

But that's just me.

There are some fascinating reviews of Vertigo, NXNW, and Psycho by a few critics of the time who believed that all three films "betrayed" the Great Hitchcock of...the THIRTIES. These men felt that in 1958-1960, and I suppose it is like people feeling that neither Scorsese nor Spielberg are so great today as in their youth.

Of the forties group, I go with Notorious and Shadow of a Doubt as my favorites -- one a spy movie about beautiful people in an exotic land, the other a domestic tale of Your Town, USA(well, Santa Rosa.)

For sheer excitement, I like Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur, "propaganda" movies with big action.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And "Psycho" was undoubtedly his last great film.

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"Undoubtedly" is a tough one. It sure seems like a perfect film and it was Hitchcock's biggest hit, and financially at least, he never topped it and never drew such large audiences to one film again.

But The Birds is -- to my mind -- Hitchcock's greatest technical achievement, almost a miracle. He decided to make a movie with birds attacking at his direction...and he did it.

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I have issues with "The Birds" which I have ranted about at great length on the "The Birds" board.

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I guess I can join in there, but the big problem to me is that the film is really an original screenplay, and so screenwriter Evan Hunter had to come up with Melanie Daniels and the Brenners "from scratch" and they simply aren't the most compelling of characters. The folks in Psycho -- ALL of them -- are simply more interesting people.

And yet: more set-pieces than any Hitchcock film. Possibly the greatest final shot in Hitchcock(neck and neck with the final shot of Psycho.)

Everything from Marnie on doesn't feel great, but recall all those raves about Frenzy in 1972:

Newsweek: "One of Hitchcock's very best."

Some British magazine: "Psycho" and "The Birds" would have been senseless studies in sadism without Hitchcock's embellishments. Frenzy is the first great Hitchcock film since North by Northwest. (Word...and critic Arthur Knight said that too...Frenzy best since NXNW. I think the reviewers in question had problems with Tippi Hedren in two films and JOhn Gavin in one.)

But there was a certain "frenzy" of overcompensation for Hitchcock in 1972 that may have pushed the rather small and stolid Frenzy beyond its level of accomplishment. I love the film, but I love MORE all the glowing comeback reviews that made Hitchcock so happy near the end of his career. They made me happy, too.

[–] movieghoul (213) 7 years ago

Some Hitchcock scholars, notably Spoto, consider the culmination of his career as a trilogy consisting of Psycho/THe Birds/Marnie.

The female protagonists have very similar names and also connect in an interesting way.

Marion is a thief
Melanie is frigid
and finally, Marnie is a frigid thief

I agree that in theory this makes sense, but sadly, the execution from Psycho to THe Birds to Marnie does go downhill.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Some Hitchcock scholars, notably Spoto, consider the culmination of his career as a trilogy consisting of Psycho/THe Birds/Marnie.

The female protagonists have very similar names

Indeed...it has been said that "Marnie" is a mash-up of Marion and Melanie. But of course the book was CALLED Marnie and Hitchcock changed Marion's name from Mary in Bloch's novel of Psycho. "Sometimes coincidences are not pre-planned.

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and also connect in an interesting way.

Marion is a thief
Melanie is frigid
and finally, Marnie is a frigid thief

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You've kinda hit the spot on "the trouble with Tippi" -- coming after the lustful ladies played by Janet Leigh and Eva Marie Saint(and Kim Novak, somewhat) -- Tippi just didn't seem like a lady who likes it.

I would add this: I've opined that Hitchcock's films after Psycho were all INFORMED by Psycho in some way. Something about the material from the novels he selected, something about the way he fashioned the original screenplays:

The Birds: Mother dominates son and hassles female competition.

Marnie: Mother dominates DAUGHTER and hassles male competition.

Torn Curtain: Gory spy murder -- the fun of NXNW is gone. And Gromek is like Arbogast -- pushy, he has to be killed when he finds out too much.

Topaz: DuBois is an Arbogast who enters a lair of death (the Hotel Theresa) and survives in a scene that plays like the staircase murder with a happy ending. (DuBois' jump out the window.)

Frenzy: Well...you know.

Family Plot: The search for someone in one story(Marion Crane, Eddie Shoebridge) leads to someone very dangerous in a second story(Mrs. Bates, Arthur Adamson.) And Madame Blanche is like Arbogast -- she even gets a montage of looking from place to place for "Arthur Adamson."

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I agree that in theory this makes sense, but sadly, the execution from Psycho to THe Birds to Marnie does go downhill.

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Its a tough reality that links to "what was Hitchcock's last great film?" Psycho is the odds-on favorite. The Birds comes so very close -- it is SO famous, so great in its set-pieces and technical acheivements. It really boils down to how one feels about the script.

I may have been biased early on. Judith Crist wrote "capsule reviews" of movies on TV in the 60s and 70s(lifted from her magazine reviews in earlier years when the films came out.)

I recall this Crist sentence about the birds for its January 1968 debut on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies:

"The Birds is a dull and plotless tale beyond the birds and beaks, but once Hitchcock's fine feathered fiends take the stage by the thousands to attack humanity, you're in for a treat."

Yeah, kinda.

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One of the more fascinating things I've read about Marnie is that Hitchcock never should have started work on it so soon after The Birds -- because The Birds really physically exhausted him (so much, he told an interviewer, "that I shall never make a movie called The Birds again.")

Hitchcock showed up for work on Marnie very tired and sick and worried that he would have to turn over the direction to his assistant and Norman Lloyd. He pushed on through regardless. The "Tippi incident" may have been borne from that exhaustion along with everything else.

But in its own way, The Birds had weighed very heavily on Hitchocck. His daughter put it best, the question was "How do you top Psycho?" And he DID in number of set-pieces and technical prowess. But movies are very mysterious -- with Psycho, practically EVERYTHING is right -- dialogue, length of scenes, suspense, overarching terror. (The only thing wrong, say many, is that shrink scene, but....)

Hitchcock came damn close to Psycho with The Birds, but not close enough.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And so the "trilogy" however well-linked from film to film to film (M names, Mother, thieves and frigidity) still rose and fell on elements of execution : Universal production, Hitchcock's health, script, production...

[–] telegonus (736) 7 years ago

Only a slight and, I admit, rather trivial, even priggish disagreement about Hitchcock's Fifties career, EC. While it's true that Strangers On A Train "saved" Hitchcock from his postwar rut it doesn't feel particularly Fifties to me. It's so early in the decade, clearly of the feds and government as big brothers for us all era are true to its year of release, 1951, there's not even a hint of the Eisenhower years to come. One CAN'T see Lucy and Your Show Of Shows in the film's period; nor are there aerodynamically designed Chevys (that began in '53). Hudsons, Packards and Studebakers were still common sights on American streets. The suburbs were just kicking off (as it were) as the places Americans wanted to live the most. The film's envelope pushing as to its gay subtext (or is gayness a central focus in the movie?) makes it feel rather 1951, but what else? I'd say as to ambiance Hitchcock's first really Big Year was the year of Grace Kelly, 1954, with Dial M and Rear Window. Stage Fright and Strangers On A Train could have been Forties picture, as could I Confess, but not the ones with Grace. My take. Agree wholeheartedly as to the lingering Fifties-ishness (sic) of Psycho.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

My take. Agree wholeheartedly as to the lingering Fifties-ishness (sic) of Psycho.

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Which, I suppose, would speak to the lingering Forties-ishness of "Strangers on a Train."

Its been said that it takes a few years for a decade to REALLY begin. The classic case in point is the 60's. Conventional wisdom: it was the fifties til JFK was killed in November 1963 and the Beatles came to America in February 1964. Those twin events of death and "birth" launched the decade."

The countercultural sixties seemed to hang on to about 1974(Nixon resigns) and 1975(Vietnam formally ends) but...that was rather too deep into the seventies to work that way.

So...though I wasn't around to "sense" how Strangers on a Train played in 1951, perhaps it indeed took a few more years for Hitchcock to truly "feel the fifties" in his films.

I've noted that Hitchcock seemed to see the coming of each new decade as a "time to change":

1940's(1940): move to America, make Rebecca.

1950s(1951): Move away from the slow-moving melodramatic stuff to the hepcat psycho beat of Bruno Anthony and a screenful of action. Make Strangers on a Train.

1960(1951): Confront the Hays Code with things like flushing toilets, premarital possible sex, and the scariest , bloodiest knife murders seen to date. Make Psycho.

1970's(1972): Make the most of the new R-rating: rape, nudity, cussing, ultra-violence. Frenzy.

I've often thought if Hitchcock had lived into the 80's, around 1980 he would have embraced the return to the matte work he always loved(Lucas/Spielberg having brought it back) and given us something fantastical in the Mount Rushmore/Bird Attacks traditions.

But he didn't make it that far.