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Norman's Smiles

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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A smile is a powerful thing.

It can be used to make other people happy -- happy to see you, happy to be smiled at , inclined to smile in return.

A good full-tooth smile -- the better the teeth, the better -- is a classic means of imparting better looks than you might otherwise have. I think of craggy actor Richard Boone, who had a pockmarked ugly face in repose...but a million dollar white-tooth smile to light up his face.

A beautiful woman can use a smile to blind and destroy all she meets. A less than beautiful woman can use a smile to become beautiful.

A smile that doesn't show teeth is in some ways suspect -- what are you hiding? -- and if done wrong, can become a smirk. Bruce Willis took a lot of heat for his smirk, answering in an interview: "I can't help it, that's how I smile." There can be intelligence and nuance in a close mouth smiled, but grip it too tight -- you've got a grimace. Grin a close-mouthed smile too "wide" - you look kinda goofy.

In Psycho, I've sometimes wondered what kind of detailed direction -- Hitchcock gave to Anthony Perkins about two particular smiles:

In the fruit cellar: We've wondered for the whole movie what Mrs. Bates face looks like , and what, in particular, Arbogast saw when he looked in the face of the killer running at him. Now comes our answer, in two parts: (1) A rotted skull face. Can THIS be the killer? (2) No...Norman Bates himself, suddenly rushing into the fruit cellar, pausing, posing, raising his knife high to threaten Lila about 10 yards away and...

Smiling. A blood-thirsty, horrible, self-satisfied, mouth open, teeth-bared, sadistic, HAPPY smile...we learn in this instant, that Norman ENJOYS killing -- well, "Mrs. Bates" does -- but she's Norman at heart. Her pleasure is his pleasure.

I believe, in this instant, that we "superimpose" over the two murders, Norman's leering blood-thirsty smile here -- and they become that much more horrible in memory. Imagine looking at THAT face as you are being stabbed to death. (Janet Leigh contended that she believed Marion COULD recognize Norman in the shower.)

The one "big" time I saw Psycho with a "screaming" audience, the fruit cellar scene managed to elict bigger and bigger and BIGGER screams as it went along. Screams when Lila saw the door to the fruit cellar and decided to go down there. Screams as she advanced on Mrs Bates and the old lady came into view. A HUGE scream when Mother's face was revealed(for a millisecond, the belief that this face IS the face of the killer) and then a BIGGER scream when Norman rushes in and poses.

And I swear the scream soared up a couple of notches as the audience took in Norman's face -- that sick smile confirmed him as a monster, not a human(and not for the last time, either.)

I can only expect that Hitchcock and Perkins sat down somewhere for at least awhile to discuss how Norman's face should look as he enters. Mean? Grim and determined? "In a trance" as if under another's power? No...smiling, teeth bared, with sadistic pleasure and bloodlust. And remember: both the shower murder and the attempted murder of Lila begin with Norman STOPPING and POSING, knife upraised. He wants to assert power over his victim, he wants to terrify his victim in advance of killing them, and to be "beheld." (Arbogast doesn't get the pose, he just gets jumped on -- too risky to pose.)

We have again the unfortunate comparison of the Van Sant Psycho to see that Vince Vaughn had no real sense what to do with his face as he entered the fruit cellar -- walking, slower than Perkins, held in a different moving camera shot. Simply not as good as the original.

But if Hitchcock(maybe) and Perkins(definitely) gave us one smile to give us nightmares in the fruit cellar, the same collaborators topped it with Norman's final smile in the cell.

This one comes famously at the end of a tracking shot towards Norman's face (he is Mother now) in which all manner of emotion passes over it. At first, the face is clouded, troubled -- it looks like multiple emotions and personalities are all churning within Norman at once. Then the face calms, as Norman's eyes dart around the room to consider the people "probably watching me."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The cue to the fly on Norman's hand(quick close up of both) allows Perkins to lower his head, and that's what Hitchocck and Perkins take as their cue when the camera cuts back from the fly:

"Why, she wouldn't harm a fly," says Mother as Norman, head tilted down, eye sockets lit for darkness(like mother's skull eyes), brows furrowed..shifts from cold anger, to a SMALL smile, a light smile, with no teeth shown. Norman never shows his teeth in this final smile. Rather the grisly grimace starts to fill his face and to project out at us(he's looking right out at us): pure evil. The monster. The REAL Norman Bates. And as the cell scene dissolves to our final visit to the swamp, we DO see teeth in Norman's smile -- mother's rotted teeth, superimposed on his tight lips so as to GIVE him a toothy smile(the rest of Mother's skull-like visage fills up Norman's face, BTW, its not just her teeth we can see.)

The End. Go home to your house(in 1960), turn out the lights go to bed. Well, try.

Anthony Perkins famously wasn't even nominated for an Oscar in 1960. A shame in general, but I think his smiles in the fruit cellar and then in the cell ALONE were enough to merit a nomination and a win. These are smiles -- and faces -- that 1960 audiences would never forget, and that would haunt 5 decades and counting of filmgoers.

---

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Norman's "monster smiles" are at the end of the film, but he has a few interesting smiles before then.

Take Norman's face when he kicks Arbogast off the property and watches the man drive away(no car in the shot, just the illumination of the headlights on Normans face.) Norman's face "opens" in cold anger -- this man has upset him, demanded to see Mother, required being thrown off the property -- Norman is mad. But he starts instead to brood, his emotions visibly roiling within him as Arbogast's headlights retreat. And once Arbogast is safely out of distance, Norman's brooding, mean face transforms -- in a great acting surprise -- a light smile forms on Norman's face, and incredibly, he starts GIGGLING. Giggling. What an outta nowhere acting choice. The giggles subside and the smile on his face grows and grows.

What does this mean?

Hard to say. A key thought: is this Norman smiling...or Mother smiling? Perhaps both of them. Because they have driven this detective off(for now...and I'll bet they are ready for his return.) Because that private eye has NO IDEA what really went down, where Marion Crane is now(he never mentioned the money, Norman doesn't know about that yet.) And perhaps Norman/Mother is smiling because Arbogast by his very existence(a private eye) and his information to Norman, has confirmed Marion as "running away from something," in trouble, perhaps worthy of dying.

But who knows? Its only a smile. I think it is in the script. And Vince Vaughn doesn't do it in the remake.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Two more smiles:

I can't pinpoint exactly when Norman smiles in this one , but it comes in the parlor, shortly after Norman has finished his long, ice-cold, and mean tirade at Marion("People cluck their thick tongues and suggest oh so very delicately"). Marion has reason to be scared of Norman, now. And so does the audience. But Norman calms down, composes himself, and eventually ...smiles. He's a polite cutie again. I think the smile comes on his corrective: "Thank you, NORMAN."

Its a deft bit of acting business that has to pull off something very difficult: it has to convince Marion to STAY further at the motel, and not drive away. (And it has to convince the audience that good ol' Anthony Perkins isn't going to hurt anybody.) I think with the smiles and politeness as Marion's last memory of Norman, she decides to stay, he's not that bad a guy, just lives alone with his mother and is bottled up (one key element of the horror of Psycho is that Marion and Arbogast , as Hitchcock says in the trailer "had no idea of the people they were dealing with" in Psycho -- they make their assessments only that Norman is a bit odd and tempermental -- not a killer.)

The other smile:

This is the most minor of the bunch, but perhaps representative of how Perkins uses his smiles and politeness through his scenes in Psycho to disarm all who cross his path.

Its with Arbogast, on this exchange:

Arbogast: When did she leave?
Norman: The...the...the..the...next day. Sunday.
Arbogast: And she didn't come back?
Norman: (Chuckles, flashes smile) No...why WOULD she?

I think Arbogast even chuckles back.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Anyway, I'll give almost all the praise to Perkins(with maybe a little help from Hitch) for his smiles in Psycho...particularly the smiles in the fruit cellar and the jail cell that are the stuff of movie history and nightmares, but also his little array of them as orchestrated throughout the movie. The smiles and the "niceness" of Perkins as Norman for a lot of the movie help make the horror of the revelations at the end all the more horrible.

A smile can be a horrible thing, done a certain way...

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Before Norman Bates... smiling villains were already a kind of norm in gangster films, e.g., Cagney smiles a *lot* in many of his most iconic roles Public Enemy through Roaring Twenties to White Heat. The only genuinely frightening smiling gangster villain, however, is Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947). This youtube clip has the key scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTFtzUaNN7c
Udo's relish for ultra-violence is verbally and facially established way *before* Udo's big violence set-piece arrives and way *beyond* what could ever be shown in 1947. We film a Goodfellas bloodbath *in our heads* thanks to Widmark's smiles.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A great villain.

It always intrigued me how creepy and rodentoid Widmark was as Tommy Udo and yet...give him a few years and not too much more meat on the bones...and he spent the fifties and early sixties as a macho man's man of a hero. But none of that manly gravitas is in Udo.

I suppose the modern smiling villain is all manner of the Jokers -- who was based, after all, on The Man Who Laughs.

With our usual penchant for surmise, we can guess maybe that Hitchcock himself remembered all these smiling killers and instructed Perkins to smile in his terrifying final scenes. But the differences BETWEEN those smiles are staggering, too. The smile in the fruit cellar is like a blood-thirsty beast, excited by its own killing abilities -- the smile in the cell is the beast captured, plotting, and acknowledging himself quietly to us.

With a few of the great facial expressions in Psycho , I wonder, did Hitchcock coach the actors? Did they perhaps practice at home, in a mirror(I've read that Jim Carrey did so with a lot of his expressions, over and over and over.) Examples of brilliant faces include:

The cop in the car window.

Marion's face pressed against the bathroom floor.

Arbogast's face, slashed, mouth open, eyes bugged out.

...and Norman's smiles....

PS. Meanwhile, back at Hitchcock directing expressions.

The tale has been told that on a first take of Inspector Oxford saying to Rusk, "Mr. Rusk...you're not wearing your tie" at the end of Frenzy, Barry Foster(Rusk) hung his head down in shame and Alec McCowen(Oxford), barked out his line. Hitchcock "gently" convinced McCowen to offer his great line quietly and calmly, and Foster to keep his head up and just sputter til the cutaway shot to a falling shipping trunk. I expect Hitchcock might have given similar facial/acting direction to Perkins and Leigh and Balsam on Psycho.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Smiling villains again...Norman's smile.

Halloween season is underway as I post this, and on my block, there are a few plastic jackolanterns and fake ghouls on peoples porches that....laugh sadistically and maniacally as you walk by and trigger them.

Which reminded me: aside from a killer's smile, horror movies have made a lot of hay on the sadistic and maniacal laughter of the undead and unseen. William Castle's House on Haunted Hill-- a direct inspiration for Psycho -- opens in darkness with screams of terror AND sadistic male laughs, and quite frankly, even opening as cheesy a movie as "House on Haunted Hill," that laughter IS scary. Down to the bone, if the lights are off.

If one imagines that as being Norman's laugh when he bares his teeth in pleasure at Lila...hoo boy, Psycho just gets scarier (in its 1960 context.)

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

A whole host of creepy smiles in Hereditary (2018)... If you manage to see the film without spoilers then you don't recognize the creepiness of the early smiles first time through, rather you just elide them to the kind of forced smiling and faking good cheer that a lot of social interactions require. Good film (even better on subsequent viewings).