MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Psycho and December 20 (SPOILERS)

Psycho and December 20 (SPOILERS)

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
85 replies | jump to latest

(Posted on December 20, 2018.)

I'm falling down on the job or...drifting to other things.

December 11 -- the day on which Psycho starts -- was over a week ago. Oftimes in the past, I commemorated December 11 ON December 11. As Steve Martin used to say, this year "I....forgot."

On what day does Psycho end?

A bit of a trick question, but here's the days leading up to it:

Friday, December 11: Marion meets Sam in a Phoenix hotel room and her colleagues at a Phoenix real estate office, and meets $40,000 in her bedroom, and sees her boss on the street leaving town. Marion falls asleep 100s of miles away, by Highway 99 near Gorman California.

Saturday, December 12: A cop awakens Marion by the roadside("There are plenty of motels in the area, you should have...just to be safe.") Marion buys a new car. Marion drives day into dusk into dark as rain falls and the Bates Motel--Vacancy sign appears. Marion meets Norman. They talk in the parlor. Shower time. Death on a Saturday night. Norman buries the body in a car in a swamp in the wee small hours of the morning(Sunday?)

One week passes.

Saturday, December 19: Lila and Arbogast meet Sam at his hardware store. Arbogast investigates alone, gets everything from Norman there is to get, makes his fatal phone booth phone call, returns to the Bates Motel...meets mother and a process screen on the mansion stairs. "Saturday night has a lonely sound" says Sam. Norman buries Arbogast in the swamp; Sam and Lila talk to a skeptical sheriff and his polite wife; Norman hides Mother in the fruit cellar. (And how much of all THIS happens early Sunday morning?)

Sunday, December 20: Sam and Lila talk shop with the sheriff as church empties out(its Sunday, remember.) Off to the Bates Motel Sam and Lila go "in search of the truth." Sam bullies Norman in the office while Lila explores the Bates House, top to bottom. Accleration. Climax. Fruit cellar. Two moms. Off to Redding(county seat of Shasta County) on a Sunday night for the psychiatrist to tell all in a brilliant scene, just the right length. We leave Norman in hell in a cell as Mother on a Sunday night.

But is Sunday December 20 (the date is -- TODAY's -- as I post this, but it is Thursday) really the final day of Psycho?

Afraid not.

The last image in Psycho is a car emerging from the swamp. In daylight. December 21? December 22?

Still, let's honor December 20 and remember what happened ...today... Many, many, many years ago. 1960. Not 1998.

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Funny about the date, EC, and how it relates to Psycho. We should probably get a grip on ourselves here, though, or we'll be commenting on dates in movies left and right. That Psycho is going to turn sixty in less than two full years is more significant to me, as this makes it not just an old but a VERY old movie (by today's standards). But for me (us?), old is relative where classic movies are concerned.

When I was growing up just about all silents were ancient, to one degree or another, and from an era that at the time seemed even more "bygone" than the Depression, which we learned about in "talkies" and was spoken about by my parents and others who didn't seem all that old at the time. To think that in terms of actual years Psycho is now as old as the earliest of silent pictures (of Edison and Melies) , which were made at the turn of the 20th century and which now feel near prehistoric.

No matter. Just the passing of time, just pondering the issue of. in a broader sense, how, when one is young, history is something one learns about from books; from reading and studying. After a certain point, different for each of us, it gets transformed; as now history is something one has lived, and literally lived through. I'm very conscious of time when watching old movies and TV shows, and I note their dates of issue, and even the time of year. The year 1963 fascinates me, as it began on such a high note, ended in a national state of grief.

I've noted things like in what half of the year. even more so the next year, certain movies were released. Pictures like Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe and Seven Days In May have a transitional feel; could be Kennedy era (think of the similarity of mood and ambiance between these three films and The Manchurian Candidate). So much emphasis on personality in politics, what role it plays; and how the ways in which men differ determine the course of national events. Also, a kind of near Freudian emphasis on psychology and power.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Funny about the date, EC, and how it relates to Psycho.

---

Welcome telegonus!!

Merry Christmas...Happy Holidays...or whatever is appropriate....

---

We should probably get a grip on ourselves here, though, or we'll be commenting on dates in movies left and right.


---

Yes, but I think Psycho is a special case. Hitchcock here gives us a day and date certain ("Friday, December 11th") and then lays out a movie with cues as to the next dates of importance (Saturday, December 12 has to be Marion's death day; Sam is next seen writing a letter that says "Saturday" and , Sam says, right after Arbogast's death, "Saturday night has a lonely sound"; a scene is staged in front of a church to tell us it is Sunday, etc.)

There's a famous "wrong date" in Psycho: the calendar on the wall of the DAs office at the end of the movie says 17(its December 20)...but its a Sunday...somebody probably hasn't changed the calendar page in three days.

Hitchcock also gives us an opening day and date in Notorious -- April something, I think -- but the story cascades out for weeks.

And of course, December 11 through December 20 makes Psycho a "Christmas story"! Famously , background plates of the streets of Phoenix WERE shot at Christmas time -- there are telltale decorations on the streets -- and so Hitchcock slapped a Christmas timeline on a movie that from thenceforth never mentions Christmas at all(and why would it? That would really ruin the October-ish tone of the piece, even though the script specifies late summer for the story period.)





reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Minutae? Sure. But Psycho is a movie with tons of it, and has been studied now for indeed almost 60 years. Hitchcock made here a movie important enough to MERIT study...and obessession. And now, a certain sadness...it was the most terrifying movie ever made. In 1960. And probably up to about 1968(Night of the Living Dead may have trumped it.)

But for all of that, people who try to replicate what 1960 Psycho was, and the phenonomenon it was, have come up short, from Psychos II,III, and IV to Van Sant's Psycho to, (says I) the recent Bates Motel series.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

That Psycho is going to turn sixty in less than two full years is more significant to me, as this makes it not just an old but a VERY old movie (by today's standards). But for me (us?),

---

Us, telegonus. Us...

Indeed 60 years is pretty old by movie standards. I currently have a couple of teenagers in my immediate orbit and it does make me feel a bit old to realize that the movies of the NINETIES were made before they were born(well, most of the nineties.) To them, the 90's are some ways back, the 80's are way back, the 70's are hard to imagine, and the 60s? Well, uh...silent movies....

None of this makes me feel particularly old, though. It makes THEM feel particularly young. To me.

I recall a photograph of Hitchcock in the year he turned 80(which would end up being the year that he died.) The caption quoted somebody as saying "80 is an age for looking forward, not backward."

I can sense the danger of a backwards look when the look covers decades, but actually I find it rather comforting. A life starts to lay out behind me and I can gauge the good times and the bad times, but truly in my lifetime...movies were such a big and welcome part of it. And so different over the years.

But...looking forward....there are still some movies(and now longform TV series) to be seen.

---

---

old is relative where classic movies are concerned.

---

Yep. Consider this. In the Hitchcock career, the American period from Rebecca in 1940 to Psycho in 1960 was...20 years. For us right now (2018) 20 years ago was 1998...the year of VAN SANT's Psycho(which seems "modern"), and Saving Private Ryan, and Shakespeare in Love, and You've Got Mail(when Meg Ryan was a star) and...it doesn't seem that long ago at all. And yet, for Hitchcock, those 20 years were the "meat" of his American career. Everything he made after Psycho was considered, well...after Psycho. His "late period."

Time is most mysterious, most relative.



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Psycho for me is an oddity because I don't relate to it as " a memory of 1960." I was way too young to know of it then. For me, Psycho materialized out of thin air with its 1965 re-release(I remember thinking that this was an old movie that must have been around for decades -- I was shocked to learn it was only five years old then). And then Psycho became an object of obsession in 1966(the CBS cancellation) and 1967(the Los Angeles showings that were forbidden to me , save the first 30 minutes I cadged one of the two times it broadcast) and on into the 70's(when I finally saw it.)

But hey...1967 is pretty old now, too. Even the TV experience of Psycho is "way back there."

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

When I was growing up just about all silents were ancient, to one degree or another,

---

Well, in the 60's, the silents would be roughly forty years old -- and with the Depression, WWII and Korea in between -- of another time.

---

. To think that in terms of actual years Psycho is now as old as the earliest of silent pictures (of Edison and Melies) ,

---

Yes. Something sorta sad to me in recent years was watching as both North by Northwest and Psycho -- which I found very modern and forward-thinking in their time -- just up and suddenly looked like old movies one day. The women's clothing, I think. The cars. But also the film stock and the pace.

I fight hard in my mind to maintain North by Northwest as "the biggest action adventure movie I ever saw" and Psycho as "the scariest movie I ever saw," but time is fighting that. What I've done instead is to preserve them "in their time," when nothing really could or did beat them. They are still the best and the biggest as long as I block out what followed. (And because of their emphasis on well-written scripts and well-acted parts, they STILL beat a lot of the movies that followed them.)

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

No matter. Just the passing of time, just pondering the issue of. in a broader sense, how, when one is young, history is something one learns about from books; from reading and studying. After a certain point, different for each of us, it gets transformed; as now history is something one has lived, and literally lived through.

---

Absolutely. In my lifetime, JFK and LBJ and Nixon were current events. Now they are very much history -- and tumultuous history. Assassination. Vietnam. Watergate.

---

I'm very conscious of time when watching old movies and TV shows, and I note their dates of issue, and even the time of year.

---

Absolutely. Movies -- like radio songs used to be -- are nostalgia pieces that bring back one's own memories. At the same time, watching a movie is very much like getting into a time machine. You want to visit Phoenix in 1960? Watch Psycho -- most of those buildings are torn down now. The car lot is still there in North Hollywood -- but across the street is a parking garage, not a small night club called "Sirocco."

---
--- The year 1963 fascinates me, as it began on such a high note, ended in a national state of grief.

---

On a "year to year" basis, 1962 has been selected as "the last innocent year in America" and movies like American Graffiti and Animal House were set in that year to make just that point. The show Mad Men started its story in 1960 and we watched for two seasons waiting for the characters to "get hit by JFK's killing" -- it was like watching Arbogast before he reached the top of the stairs(and the JFK assassination WAS rather like the attack on Arbogast, right up to the death blow to the temple.)

But 1963 itself indeed, likely slid down from fun to doom...JFK died in November.




reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The movies were already contemplating Cold War issues in 1962(Manchuriand Candidate, Advise and Consent) and Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe went into production before JFK died. It as if the "times were a'changin" in a dark way and JFK was well aware of this before he was victimized by it.

I've read that -- at one time at least -- a poster for Psycho hung in the Dallas Book Depository museum. Psycho was NOT the Hitchcock movie of 1963 -- The Birds was -- but I suppose Psycho stands firm as the "movie that predicted the madness of the 60s." Unlike all the cold war films, Psycho isn't much political at all(oh, maybe the stuff about "moving away the highway" -- the reach of DC with interstates screwed over Norman's motel AND Sam's hardware story)....but it seems to FIT the decade ahead.

I'm reminded: JFK was a movie buff who dallied with a few actresses and invited Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh to the political convention of 1960. I expect JFK HAD to have seen Psycho, was likely impressed by its breakthrough savagery(like himself, it was a "shock to the Eisenhower era".) In 1961, JFK famously arrived at a public showing of Spartacus in a DC theater, and had the film re-wound(with an audience present) a half hour, so he could watch it from the beginning. Imagine: a President just walking into a public movie house and getting the film rewound a half hour. And yet the audience applauded.

I expect movie buff JFK saw The Birds. He missed the lesser Hitchcocks thereafter. And The Birds, like Psycho, postulated a world gone mad(with a symbolism about nuclear war.)

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I've noted things like in what half of the year. even more so the next year, certain movies were released. Pictures like Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe and Seven Days In May have a transitional feel; could be Kennedy era (think of the similarity of mood and ambiance between these three films and The Manchurian Candidate).

---

Well, JFK was personally involved in getting the studio to make The Manchurian Candidate(with its failed Presidential assassination -- Vice President, actually), and in allowing Seven Days in May to film in front of the White House. He was personally interested in Hollywood and in movies being made from these political thrillers that he read.

Fun anecdote: one day, President Kennedy, his AG brother Robert and some cronies made a call to Cary Grant. From the White House. Here was the conversation:

Grant: What would you like to talk to me about, Mr. President?
JFK: Nothing, Cary. We just wanted to hear your voice.

Cute. That's power for you.

---So much emphasis on personality in politics, what role it plays; and how the ways in which men differ determine the course of national events. Also, a kind of near Freudian emphasis on psychology and power.

---

You are speaking here of those early 60's movies? Though it goes a bit haywire in its gay subplot(dated today), I highly recommend Preminger's 1962 Advise and Consent for a great tour of how it felt "back then" in terms of the Presidency and Congress working the way they were supposed to. I just love that movie -- which includes The Farmer from North by Northwest getting lots of dialogue as a US Senator! Walter Pidgeon gets late stardom as the powerful Senator running the whole show; Charles Laughton(in his final role) goes all hammy as the Suthun' Senator opposed to Commie Henry Fonda being confirmed as Secretary of State. Peter Lawford(JFK's bro-in-law at the time) plays...well... SENATOR JFK. And Betty White is the sole female Senator.

reply
formatting help
[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

There's a famous "wrong date" in Psycho: the calendar on the wall of the DAs office at the end of the movie says 17(its December 20)...but its a Sunday...somebody probably hasn't changed the calendar page in three days.

========

You know, as meticulous as Hitch was about everything that showed up on film, I always thought of that as a 'goof' that threw the timeline off, not to be explained by an assumption that nobody bothered to rip the pages off.

========

Us, telegonus. Us...

========

I've reached that age, so... me, too.

I told this story once before, so I'll just give it a quick go now. About ten YEARS ago now, I was speaking to an intelligent, educated young woman about movies. I mentioned Hitchcock. I was astounded when she said, 'Who is Alfred Hitchcock?'

I figured even to young people, EVERYBODY knew who Hitchcock was. Wrong.

There were a few older people in that office and we all starting naming his movies. The Birds? Vertigo? North by Northwest?

She just sat there shaking her head at every title. I said, 'Psycho'?

She said, 'Oh! I saw Psycho! I thought it was crap.'

I asked her if she saw the original or the remake. She didn't know there even were two versions.

I said 'Was it in color or Black and White?'

She said, 'Color. I don't think I've ever seen a Black and White movie. I wouldn't be interested. They're so OLD, and without color, they're all unrealistic.'

Sigh...

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

There's a famous "wrong date" in Psycho: the calendar on the wall of the DAs office at the end of the movie says 17(its December 20)...but its a Sunday...somebody probably hasn't changed the calendar page in three days.

========

You know, as meticulous as Hitch was about everything that showed up on film, I always thought of that as a 'goof' that threw the timeline off, not to be explained by an assumption that nobody bothered to rip the pages off.

---

Well, as I recall, it was 17 -- without a month being noticeable -- and if it was the 20th, that would mean somebody neglected that calendar for quite some time.

So likely...a goof.

Its funny how everyone is watching for goofs ...or gaffes..imdb lists them on a separate page. It is the job of "continuity people"(script "girls" and the like) to try to keep gaffes to a minimum but....mistakes happen.

Heck, the day they shot the psychiatrist scene, somebody may have looked at that calendar and said "does the 17th fit?" and somebody may have said "I don't know and I don't have time to check."

More to the point: perhaps Hitchcock didn't affix "December 11" to the movie until AFTER filming was complete. Which would make sense. If the movie had not started with the "December 11" date, we'd have no way to date the story, and "17" wouldn't matter(its the only date listed other than December 11 on the film.) It would just be a story that took place over a couple of weekends -- we know that Marion dies on a Saturday(the day after Friday December 11.) Arbogast dies on a Saturday("Saturday night has a lonely sound") and Sam and Lila solve the crime on Sunday(the church scene.) But dates? Dates wouldn't matter...until Hitch slapped December 11 on there.

And WHY did he slap December 11 on there? So he didn't have to spend money(HIS) to send a camera crew back to Phoenix to film the streets without Xmas decorations. Hitchcock made a quick, money-based decision that actually threw his movie way off for sticklers: no other mention of Christmas, a 17 that doesn't fit.

========

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I like to note that three 1960 movies all have the Holidays in common, almost superimposed on each other:

Psycho: happens in December, ends a few days before Christmas.

The Apartment: Begins around Halloween, takes in Thanksgiving, but "lingers" on the week from Christmas(MacLaine's suicide attempt) and the happy ending(on New Year's Eve night).

Ocean's Eleven: Begins during the weeks before Christmas(Santa Claus in sunny Beverly Hills) and the big caper to rob five casinos happens among their five New Year's Eve ball drop celebrations.

So in "the fantasy world of 1960," three big stories were happening around the same time. Danny Ocean and his gang were robbing Vegas at the same time CC Baxter was confessing love to Fran Kublelich ("Shut up and deal".) And all this less than two weeks after Marion Crane died in that shower, having been advised by Cassidy "You should go to Vegas, the playground of the world!" Marion could have met Danny Ocean...

Also, assuming that modern movies take place in the immediate past, Ocean's Eleven and The Apartment were about the New Year's Eve shift from 1959 to 1960...a big change in decades that Psycho presaged.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Us, telegonus. Us...

========

I've reached that age, so... me, too.

---

Oh there are a few of us of a certain age around here. Who else even remembers who Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins and Martin Balsam WERE?

But the internet is a wide and wondrous place. All ages invited...

----


I told this story once before, so I'll just give it a quick go now.

---

No problem around here. We need "refreshers."

---

About ten YEARS ago now, I was speaking to an intelligent, educated young woman about movies. I mentioned Hitchcock. I was astounded when she said, 'Who is Alfred Hitchcock?'

I figured even to young people, EVERYBODY knew who Hitchcock was. Wrong.

There were a few older people in that office and we all starting naming his movies. The Birds? Vertigo? North by Northwest?

She just sat there shaking her head at every title. I said, 'Psycho'?

She said, 'Oh! I saw Psycho! I thought it was crap.'

I asked her if she saw the original or the remake. She didn't know there even were two versions.

I said 'Was it in color or Black and White?'

She said, 'Color. I don't think I've ever seen a Black and White movie. I wouldn't be interested. They're so OLD, and without color, they're all unrealistic.'

Sigh...

---

Its a sad tale and one that will repeat over time. As I've noted, I think Hitchcock is now relegated to high school and college film courses, kids will "get him" as they get Dickens and Mark Twain -- as a relic from the past who was famous at one time as an entertainer.

But as I've also noted, I myself -- a BIG Hitchcock fan in my youth -- barely re-watch his movies anymore myself. He's from my past, an important part, but his movies are fairly old now. I use Psycho here as a "linchpin" to all movies and all movie eras. I still love it but...Hitchcock's Heyday is over.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The issue of folks refusing to watch black and white films -- I don't get it, but I get it. If the absence of color as its own "thing" makes a movie unwatchable, I guess that's all folks...and thus are generations dealt out of the pleasure of Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot...Psycho. And The Last Picture Show and Manhattan and Ed Wood.

Recall that's one reason Universal greenlit Van Sant's Psycho -- they felt that a color version needed to exist for people who wouldn't watch b/w. Sad.

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

@MizhuB. I have a somewhat similar story to retail from just a few days ago. I was listening to a national public radio station the other day (from which one would normally expect relatively measured, thoughtful commentary). A 20-something guest was reporting to other members of a panel on year-endy cultural items of note. She brought up results of a local poll of 'Best Xmas Movies'. She was baffled that the poll was topped by It's A Wonderful Life (1947). She'd never seen the film and opined that most of the people who voted for it hadn't either!

She explained, and here I almost verbatim quote: 'As if even fusty old people are *really* watching black and white movies from the '40s rather than Elf or Love Actually. They're just virtue-signalling [sniggeringly laughs].' The older rest of the panel *had* seen IAWL but weren't invested enough to mock or chastise this cringeworthy display of patronizing ignorance. 'That's Jimmy Stewart isn't it?' was about all the push-back. I wished I could reach through my radio and strangle the lot of them. Merry Xmas!

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

@MizhuB. I have a somewhat similar story to retail from just a few days ago. I was listening to a national public radio station the other day (from which one would normally expect relatively measured, thoughtful commentary). A 20-something guest was reporting to other members of a panel on year-endy cultural items of note. She brought up results of a local poll of 'Best Xmas Movies'. She was baffled that the poll was topped by It's A Wonderful Life (1947). She'd never seen the film and opined that most of the people who voted for it hadn't either!

---

The arrogance of youth. Its always there, its required. I had it. The key thing is "She'd never seen the film and opined that most of the people who voted for it hadn't either." The world through her own eyes only.

Now, on the DVD of Van Sant's Psycho (from 20 years ago), they have a "Making of" documentary which makes the case for making the remake by interviewing a young man on the street who says: "Alfred Hitchcock? Never heard of the man!"

So...on the other hand...some folks indeed are not connected to the culture that came before them.

My years long choice of Psycho as a discussion point may well be indeed to "recapture my youth" and to recall what is was like to live as a part of a society that found Psycho to be "the most terrifying movie ever made" and something BEYOND a movie: it was not only an event("No one can enter the theater after Psycho begins"), it was a TABOO event(cancelled by CBS, banished to local channels late at night), and it was a continual event(theatrical re-releases in 1965 and then again in 1969 AFTER it had been on TV! -- then on to revival houses, VHS, and DVD.)



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Because of its still-there shock value(the shower scene IS still disturbing), Psycho lives on better than Wonderful Life, I think. More people know Psycho and watch it still(I'm guessing?)

But there can be no doubt that there's something about modern youth and modern technoclogy and culture that keeps discarding the entertainers and films of the generation before them. In the 60's I knew who Bogart and James Cagney were; it seems that in the 2010's, Steve McQueen is a movie director, not a movie star.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

She explained, and here I almost verbatim quote: 'As if even fusty old people are *really* watching black and white movies from the '40s rather than Elf or Love Actually. They're just virtue-signalling [sniggeringly laughs].'

---

Well I watch IAWL AND Love Actually at Christmas. Elf, not so much.

That said, IAWL is a very, very hard watch. It depends on plunging its protagonist into the depths of despair and threatened bankruptcy, and (using Hitchcock's suspense techniques) lets us know, but not George Bailey, that Potter took the money, which only makes everything worse. The happy ending arrives...but Potter is never punished(except on SNL, where he is beaten to death in a satisifying "lost ending.")

Funny memory of watching IAWL with my rather cynical father. When Potter sneered at George saying of his erstwhile friends, "They'll turn on you," my father piped in with, "He's right -- they WILL turn on you." High Noon was one of my father's favorite films, too(the town turns on Cooper). Cynical, I say. But of course, in IAWL, they DON'T turn on him.


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The older rest of the panel *had* seen IAWL but weren't invested enough to mock or chastise this cringeworthy display of patronizing ignorance. 'That's Jimmy Stewart isn't it?' was about all the push-back.

---

'All it takes for evil film fans to prevail is for good film fans to do nothing."

Me, I figure its the young woman's loss. If all you know are the movies of your time...you don't know movies. But I guess you don't want to.

Which means you never heard Steve Martin as a movie producer tell civilian friend Kevin Kline in Grand Canyon, "You should go to more movies. The secrets of all of life are in (the stories and dialogue) of movies."

---

I wished I could reach through my radio and strangle the lot of them. Merry Xmas

---

Xmas does bring out some "negatory" feelings given some of the things that are said then!

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Yes, and Bonnie & Clyde does feel rather "dated" now, with its Cahiers-inspired artsiness, in the violence especially, with all those "rude shocks" that make Psycho look nearly Victorian. Yet viewed today, to my eyes, Psycho doesn't play Victorian, does it? There's a freshness to it, a modernity that feels right even several decades later. It may have been the work of an old man (several years younger than I am now, though I don't feel old); and indeed, leaving aside his decade's worth of English "talkies", he was a veteran "player" in the Hollywood of the Fifties; and after Psycho and all those years on television he'd soon become a Grand Old Man. That's a bit over two decades in the States and already it's like he's a dinosaur of the Griffith-DeMille vintage. At least he had a sense of humor about it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he turned up one week as host of his TV show dressed up as a dinosaur, or maybe a woolly mammoth would be more fitting. He came close a few times. Earlier tonight he was dressed up in a Wild West costume hosting an episode set in the modern west (of 1958).

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yes, and Bonnie & Clyde does feel rather "dated" now, with its Cahiers-inspired artsiness,

---

I've always pegged Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch as the "landmark violence movies" of the decade, and Bonnie and Clyde always suffers a bit in comparison to the other two. It has "art on its mind," start to finish, and a certain mannered Method acting that separate it out from Psycho and The Wild Bunch. Those latter two are straightforward, "cool"(in the presentational way) and the characters are not poseurs(NYC actors doing Southerners -- even as Beatty and Dunaway were FROM the South, well, Beatty up in Virginia, Dunaway from Florida.)

---

in the violence especially, with all those "rude shocks" that make Psycho look nearly Victorian.

---

Well, now the blood would be in color, and a lot of deaths would occur (and even more in The Wild Bunch, by the SCORES.) Psycho with its two measly murders(however monumental) couldn't quite compete on quantity -- but competed in QUALITY(the shower murder is the most famous of them all.) Also, the violence in B a C and The Wild Bunch is largely gun violence, with a "battle" background(cops vs robbers vs armies.) The knife violence in Psycho is more intimate and savage -- and seemingly committed by an old woman, which creates a sick feeling in the viewer.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One shocker that B and C has which carries over from Psycho: a middle aged bank clerk jumps on the back of B and C's getaway car and is shot right through the face through the back window. Its a variation on Arbogast's slashed face, but more unexpected and real. Also, it caps a "comedy bit" in which B and C's goofy driver has parallel parked and can't get out of the space for awhile(which allows the victim to jump on the back.)

In 1968, Esquire ran a two-page spread on violence in the movies. They put in a photo of that bank clerk's shot face -- next to one of Mrs. Bates with knife raised outside the shower. THAT was my first long look at any part of the shower scene, and the photo riveted me. I recall being most taken by the flowered wallpaper visible behind Mother -- it reminded me of wallpaper at my grandmother's house. Creepy. (BTW, still forbidden to see Psycho in 1968, I HAD been allowed to see Bonnie and Clyde, and I must admit, that bank clerk face shooting shocked me, stayed with me.)

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yet viewed today, to my eyes, Psycho doesn't play Victorian, does it?

---

Nope. The house, yes -- but it is wonderfully juxtaposed with the modernity of the motel -- and of modern folks like Arbogast heading up to the house in crisp suit and hat.

---

There's a freshness to it, a modernity that feels right even several decades later.

---

Yes. I somewhat attribute this to the clarity of the sound recording of the dialogue. The movie SOUNDS modern. Also, the dialogue is crisp and staccato and deadpan a lot of the time. "Modern noir." And the delivery between Balsam and Perkins in their scene seems incredibly "ahead of its time." The realistic timing.

And that's just "the guy talk stuff." The movie opens with just enough suggestion of "real sex"(how men and women steal it, value it, NEED it)...to play very modern. (Comparatively, the weird angry banter between Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor one film later plays ...Victorian.)

---

It may have been the work of an old man (several years younger than I am now, though I don't feel old);

---

Two things here: how Hitchcock's age usually for a few months matched the year his movie came out(he made Vertigo for 1958 AT age 58, NXNW for '59 AT '59, and Psycho for '60 AT 60) and...yes...I feel the same way. I've watched Hitchcock from being much older than me when he made Psycho, to being my age to, now, yes...being younger than I am now. But like you, I don't feel that old, and I feel that 60 in 1960 was a lot older(health-wise) than it is today. Especially for Hitchcock. My role model right now is Clint Eastwood at 88 in The Mule, paying for hot women...just kidding.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Meanwhile, back at Hitch. His making Psycho at 60 was almost like a sudden "re-birth to youth" for him. I think Spielberg made Jaws in his 20s, and for many directors their early movies, made when in their 20s and 30's usually include the biggest blockbusters they ever get. I am thinking of Frankenheimer with The Manchurian Candidate, Bogdanovich with The Last Picture Show, Coppola with The Godfather...Welles with Citizen Kane.

Hitchcock saved his best for 60.

And in his case, his 60s and 70's(in the 60's and 70s) do seem to have sapped his energy and health. I feel young, but I sure don't feel the energy of my younger days. Its happening...but to the good, Scorsese and Spielberg have worked healthily into their 70's. Eastwood into his 80's as a director. Those will be my role models.



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and indeed, leaving aside his decade's worth of English "talkies", he was a veteran "player" in the Hollywood of the Fifties; and after Psycho and all those years on television he'd soon become a Grand Old Man.

---

Yes, it was an irony for him. Psycho and The Birds, wrote one critic "were a private teenage preserve, nobody's parents approved." And so Hitchcock picked up a "youth cult" and got mentioned in some Esquire article that grouped him with The Beatles and Dylan as a youth hero. But the man was now more than double the age of most of the young tyro directors out there.

Hitch earnestly ramped up the violence from Psycho on, and he made sure to put some sex in the movies from Marnie through Family Plot. He used young actors to sell sex to a young audience...but his movies betrayed the old man making them.

And still he was cool. I certainly thought he was cool. And though Spielberg felt it was a disgrace, Hitchcock in the 70's between his two movies did Universal Studios commercials and kept the legend alive(I didn't think it was a disgrace; it was the only way to see Hitchcock in those years, usually. He got paid one million dollars by Lew Wasserman to do it. Well, one commercial was a near-disgrace, where Hitchcock lay flat with his arms out and pretended to fly via process screen. But he was the KING of process work, so why not?)

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

That's a bit over two decades in the States and already it's like he's a dinosaur of the Griffith-DeMille vintage.

---

Movie directing became a young man's game in the 60's. A lot of older directors without Hitchcock's clout(as a star; as a thriller maker, as Lew Wasserman's friend) got swept out and couldn't get work. But Hitchcock got to stay.

---

At least he had a sense of humor about it. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he turned up one week as host of his TV show dressed up as a dinosaur, or maybe a woolly mammoth would be more fitting. He came close a few times. Earlier tonight he was dressed up in a Wild West costume hosting an episode set in the modern west (of 1958).

---

Ha. One of the reasons(it has been suggested) that Hitchcock never won the Best Director Oscar is that he goofed around too much on his TV show to project "Oscar prestige." Meh. No. He was great. Great comic timing, for one thing.

One thing that was clear in the 70's when Hitchcock came out of seclusion to make Frenzy and Family Plot: he was photographed MERCILESSLY. Photos of Hitchcock by himself pretty much were all we saw of Frenzy til the movie came out. It was as if in the 70's, the imagemakers of Time, Newsweek and the like finally saw Hitchcock as the great artist and icon he always had been. And an old one. The photographs of Hitchcock were a last hurrah for an age of film almost gone. There was a melancholy air to the photos: "Look. Its Alfred Hitchcock, He's so OLD. We won't have him much longer." And we lost him, as if on schedule, at age 80 in 1980. Let the Lucas-Spielberg crowd take over!

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Truly, EC, one can only wonder where Hitchcock got the inspiration to make Psycho. He was an established and well regarded film-maker with thirty years of moviemaking behind him by then. There was nothing he needed to prove; and besides, he hosted and produced a hit TV show in the bargain, and yet he wanted to beat WILLIAM CASTLE (of all people!) at his own game (Castle's, not Hitchcock's). Castle's movies were cheap and aimed at a much younger and less sophisticated demographic than Hitchcock's, whose films and TV episodes seemed aimed to attracted at least moderately educated people; and as some of his recent films had felt a bit like travelogues some of the time.

But then maybe gifted artists, film-makers especially, like to cut against their own grain as they grow older. Of directors, I think of Irish "nationalist" John Ford making a movie praising a man known as Gideon Of Scotland Yard (!). So Jack Ford becomes a late in life Anglophile. For one movie anyway. I've never seen Seven Women, but I know about it; and it sounds like an atypical project for Ford to have taken on at seventy (now let's try to imagine Hitchcock trying his hand at a spaghetti western some time between Topaz and Frenzy). Postwar, Howard Hawks moves from making such films as To Have And Have Not and The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart, to a "cattle drive western" with John Wayne. And as things turned out, Red River may be Hawks' best film ever; or up there anyway. After that, depending on accounts of its filming, comes the sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World. This from the man who directed such films as Bringing Up Baby. His Girl Friday and Sergeant York!

As to Clint Eastwood, one can ponder how far along he's come since his early days (as a director, I mean), to now. To go way way back, to Charlie Chaplin, he too had come a long way, from his early silent short subjects,--for the Common Man (or child) and all that--to such sophisticated fare as Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Truly, EC, one can only wonder where Hitchcock got the inspiration to make Psycho. He was an established and well regarded film-maker with thirty years of moviemaking behind him by then. There was nothing he needed to prove; and besides, he hosted and produced a hit TV show in the bargain, and yet he wanted to beat WILLIAM CASTLE (of all people!) at his own game (Castle's, not Hitchcock's). Castle's movies were cheap and aimed at a much younger and less sophisticated demographic than Hitchcock's, whose films and TV episodes seemed aimed to attracted at least moderately educated people; and as some of his recent films had felt a bit like travelogues some of the time.

-

All agreed, Telegonus, and well-stated. The record seems to show that the French b/w thriller "Diabolique" is what started Hitchcock in the direction of a shocker. He bought the next novel from the "Diabolique" team immediately -- but found he had to make a gorgeous Technicolor tragic love story out of it.

But in the years after Diabolique(and ALSO inspired by it), William Castle got his thing going -- Macabre, The Tingler, and -- shortly before Hitchcock found Psycho the novel -- House on Haunted Hill. It seems that Diabolique and House on Haunted Hill were the two driving forces behind Psycho. Sure, Touch of Evil inspired it too(Janet Leigh, a motel, a weird motel keeper, a dazzling opening shot)...but Hitch wanted to shock folks, not impress them.

Castle was sort of copycatting Hitchcock by hosting his own movie trailers, but it was only with the Psycho movie trailer that Hitchcock went "full Castle." That and Hitchcock's highbrow gimmick, presented in slightly carnival terms: "No One -- but NO ONE - -can enter the theater after Psycho begins." From this one policy, Hitchcock launched all sorts of promotional ads and radio spots. My favorite line: "After you've seen Psycho, please don't give away the ending. Its the only one we have."


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In short, I think Hitchcock saw William Castle as the man to be -- but only in that specific 50/60s cusp. Soon Castle would be passe -- and Hitchcock moved on (to Cold War films when THEY were hot.)

And by making a really GOOD William Castle movie -- Psycho -- Hitchcock managed to make big dollars in the youth market AND deliver a work of art for adults.

I"ve suggested that Hitchcock -- in the fifties and sixties particularly -- adapted his movies to match other popular genres of the time. The Wrong Man is Marty(Marty and Manny have the same mother!) To Catch a Thief is Three Coins in the Fountain. Vertigo is "Le French Film" moved to SF. NXNW is The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? And indeed, from To Catch A Thief through NXNW(less The Wrong Man), Hitchcock fought TV(his OTHER home) with colorful travelogues across Europe, Morocco, and photogenic America (SF, Vermont, Mount Rushmore...) Later, The Birds is Godzilla Meets the Twilight Zone, Marnie is(maybe) Tennesee Wiliams meets Douglas Sirk, and Torn Curtain and Topaz are The Spy Who Came in From the Cold meets Dr Strangelove.


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But then maybe gifted artists, film-makers especially, like to cut against their own grain as they grow older. Of directors, I think of Irish "nationalist" John Ford making a movie praising a man known as Gideon Of Scotland Yard (!). So Jack Ford becomes a late in life Anglophile. For one movie anyway.

---

I never thought of that. Though I'm not as up on Ford as on Hitchcock.

---

I've never seen Seven Women, but I know about it; and it sounds like an atypical project for Ford to have taken on at seventy

---

I've never seen it either, don't know why he made it. Though I believe it had a sexual component that he felt was necessary then.

Which reminds me: Frank Capra rebelled against all of that(he hated movies LIKE Psycho, I'm sure he hated Psycho)...and lost work and his career.

---

(now let's try to imagine Hitchcock trying his hand at a spaghetti western some time between Topaz and Frenzy).

--

A Hitchcock Western is something I think a lot of us dreamed of. He was asked if he'd do one, and gave an unequivocal "no." But surely he could have moved the Psycho house to the lone prarie(ala Giant) and come up with a niftily Westernized thriller(the 1968 potboiler Five Card Stud -- about a mysterious killer taking out all the members of a poker game lynch mob -- feels a bit like Hitchcock.)

But ..a spaghetti Western? That seems out there.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

What Hitchcock DID develop, after Family Plot, was a novel by Elmore Leonard that he intended to pitch to Eastwood, Reynolds, or McQueen. Yes, Hitchcock was trying to make a Don Siegel tough guy movie in the Dirty Harry/Charley Varrick tradition. A younger Hitch might had been able to do that. A lot of people thought Psycho was way out of his wheelhouse, too.

---

Postwar, Howard Hawks moves from making such films as To Have And Have Not and The Big Sleep, with Humphrey Bogart, to a "cattle drive western" with John Wayne. And as things turned out, Red River may be Hawks' best film ever; or up there anyway. After that, depending on accounts of its filming, comes the sci-fi classic The Thing From Another World. This from the man who directed such films as Bringing Up Baby. His Girl Friday and Sergeant York!

---

Hawks has/had a reputation for great variety of work. Though a lot of it shared the "men in groups" theme(Only Angels Have Wings, Red River, The Thing, Rio Bravo, Hatari, El Dorado)

Can't say Hawks diverted too much at the end. Three of his final films were Westerns: Rio Bravo, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo...and the second two recycled the first.
And Hatari played like a modern Western without guns. (In 1962, I had a Hatari movie tie-in comic book, btw -- no Marvel for me back then.)


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As to Clint Eastwood, one can ponder how far along he's come since his early days (as a director, I mean), to now. To go way way back, to Charlie Chaplin, he too had come a long way, from his early silent short subjects,--for the Common Man (or child) and all that--to such sophisticated fare as Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight.

---
Clint Eastwood's directorial career is interesting. In the beginning, he seems to have done it because of "control freak" tendencies. He wanted to control his image and his character. He was occasionally, and only occasionally in the beginning, willing to direct other people without him in the movie(Bill Holden in Breezy, which has an "Eastwood cameo" in the Hitchcock tradition), but he often directed rather slight movies.

Ironic: around the time that Eastwood's career seemed to be over, he let Wolfgang Peterson direct him in the crackerjack thriller "In the Line of Fire" -- but Unforgiven won the Oscars and soon Eastwood was back on the direction beat.

And Eastwood as a director didn't deliver work as crisp and polished as "In the Line of Fire." Eastwood as a director has always seemed perfunctory to me -- even with bigger budgets and bigger stars, one senses a man looking at his schedule and the clock. The Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby" looked ridiculous in the skimpy prize fight scenes -- supposedly in the biggest venues in Vegas.

Eastwood -- like Woody Allen -- made a lot of movies recently that nobody saw, despite stars like Leo and Matt and Morgan and Angelina in them(I can't even remember the titles) And then -- outta nowhere -- he makes American Sniper and gets a megahit. And then he makes "Sully"(with superstar Tom Hanks) and somebody's effects work on that one was great. And in this, the year of "The Mule," Eastwood directed that one about the American military guys taking on a terrorist and -- I hear it wasn't very good except at the climax.


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In short, Clint Eastwood soldiers on, directing movies of little relevance -- except when they are(Sniper, Sully.)

As an actor, he's breaking records: over the title at 88 in The Mule. Its great he survived, but sad to think we lost somewhat more interesting actors like McQueen, Newman, and Reynolds along the way.

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

...and btw, before this year is formally over, I wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year; and I hope your Christmas went well. Christmas eve, with my cousins, up in the Merrimack Valley (where we were all born,--my sister included--and now probably best known as "Kerouac country", as Jack hailed from Lowell, where my family is from). Lots of old Psycho-like houses in the area; and the streets were loaded with them back when I was growing up, with most of those houses more musty, abandoned and neglected looking even when old people were living in them when I and my same generation relatives were kids. Those grand old house, some much bigger than the Bates house on the hill, and a few smaller, narrower, on side streets few people walked on back fifty or more years ago. When I think of my childhood, the nasty stuff aside (and which we all, I suppose, must contend with) was a visual-spatial (and historical) embarrassment of riches; and I knew it. Come Labor Day, the new school year, and soon the autumn moon, it's like every night felt like Halloween.

It's probably a good and healthy thing for us to keep these thoughts in mind,--those of us who have such memories--as a "corrective" to our love of horror and dark and stormy nights type movies (and books, too), so as to let younger people than ourselves into this old movie netherworld, which is more thrilling, the way an amusement park ride is, than morbid, the way horror movies are today. What those gore fests represent (what,--an operating room? Charnel house?) is totally different from the oftentimes good clean (even if downright scary) fun we had when reading those Hitchcock short story anthologies; or going to the William Castle horrors; and then all those TV shows of the Thriller-One Step-Beyond-Outer Limits kind. I just don't get what passes for horror today. For us (or so I think), horror was more like the Boo Radley house in To Kill A Mockingbird; spooky as hell, and yet we loved those old places.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

...and btw, before this year is formally over, I wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year; and I hope your Christmas went well.

---

Thank you, telegonus! It went well. A good mix of family and long-time friends. Drinks and reminiscing in the latter case.

---

Christmas eve, with my cousins, up in the Merrimack Valley (where we were all born,--my sister included--and now probably best known as "Kerouac country", as Jack hailed from Lowell, where my family is from).

---

Interesting!

---

Lots of old Psycho-like houses in the area; and the streets were loaded with them back when I was growing up,

---

Well Hitchcock told Truffaut that he felt Psycho-type houses were VERY prevalent -- they were the tract homes of the 1890's, I guess -- I suppose the brilliance of Psycho was putting one of those houses all alone up on that hill, with a motel down the hill. And then making sure that "dire, horrible events"(said Hitchcock in the trailer) happened in both structures.

---

with most of those houses more musty, abandoned and neglected looking even when old people were living in them when I and my same generation relatives were kids.

---

Such houses were hard to keep up.

My parental family and I lived in one of those, once. Not very long. I recall how musty it was. We soon transferred to a suburban ranch style.

--

Those grand old house, some much bigger than the Bates house on the hill,

---

Yes, the Bates house seems built for a family of three of four, tops.

---

and a few smaller, narrower, on side streets few people walked on back fifty or more years ago. When I think of my childhood, the nasty stuff aside (and which we all, I suppose, must contend with)

---

Yes, though the good memories prevail and WERE more in abundance than the bad

---



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

was a visual-spatial (and historical) embarrassment of riches; and I knew it. Come Labor Day, the new school year, and soon the autumn moon, it's like every night felt like Halloween.

---

A great feeling, to go through seasonal change "through the eyes of childhood."

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It's probably a good and healthy thing for us to keep these thoughts in mind,--those of us who have such memories--as a "corrective" to our love of horror and dark and stormy nights type movies (and books, too), so as to let younger people than ourselves into this old movie netherworld, which is more thrilling, the way an amusement park ride is, than morbid, the way horror movies are today.

---

It was a different time. We are roughly of the same age enough to remember that black-and-white period when TV ran a bunch of spooky TV shows -- AHP, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits...even one called "Way Out" -- at the same time that major prime time slots(for pre-teens in the main) were given over locally to b/w William Castle movies, American-International Sci Films, and old time Universal horror. "Quaint horror," it was -- and Psycho was in some ways the biggest of them all, because it had REAL shocks, and REAL terror between those shocks. And yet, it looked like one of those TV shows, or an old Universal horror movie.

---

What those gore fests represent (what,--an operating room? Charnel house?)

---

Great analogies

---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

is totally different from the oftentimes good clean (even if downright scary) fun we had when reading those Hitchcock short story anthologies;

--

The blood on the shower floor or on Arbogast's face was scary enough for me; the brief blood gouts of Jaws just about right too(and the final gory munching of Quint.) SOME blood is necessary on screen to signal terror and real death. But honestly, that's about it. I am a Psycho fan who has little or no use for the intestine-ripping gorefests from about 1968 on(starting with Night of the Living Dead, which was a brilliant, seminal concept, but a pretty amateur watch, acting/dialogue wise, and gross in the innards-eating scenes.) Its like "I don't belong."

(I actually had a male roommate who liked to watch that stuff and always joked with me, "You're not watching this, right -- it has intestines." He boiled that down to just the word "intestines" to warn me to stay away from the TV while he was watching It was kind of funny.)

The recently-late writer Harlan Ellison wrote of going to some juvenile hall in LA to talk about writing , and the talk steering to gory movies, and the boys there all suddenly going WILD with pleasure recounting all the great dismemberment and slasher scenes they loved in movies. Ellison found it sick. And demoralizing about the future of the boys...

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

is totally different from the oftentimes good clean (even if downright scary) fun we had when reading those Hitchcock short story anthologies;

---

I had some of those books -- both the collections for pre-teens("Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful") and for adults("Alfred Hitchcock's Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on Television")


I loved a story in one of the adult books, called "Don't Look Behind You," which opens with the words "Don't look behind you. I'm following you, and I'm going to kill you," and ended with the serial killer writer saying how he put special pages in JUST THIS ONE COPY of the book to tell his victim(the reader, ME) he was coming for ME. Yikes!

---

or going to the William Castle horrors;

---

One thing about Castle: his horrors BEFORE Psycho were kind of lightweight(in Macabre, The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, and 13 Ghosts). His horrors AFTER Psycho were gorier -- Homicida(knife murders)l and Strait-Jacket(axe murders).

I recall an elementary school friend in awe of his parents (in 1965) because they took in a double bill of Psycho AND Strait-Jacket. To my friend and I , that was like a night trapped in a theater of horror -- who could stand it?

Indeed, I will admit that the Psycho/Homicidal/Strait Jacket movies were held up as "taboo horror" in my school circles, considered much worse and more horrifiying than our TV stuff.

--

---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and then all those TV shows of the Thriller-One Step-Beyond-Outer Limits kind. I just don't get what passes for horror today.

--

Nor I. Its rather like, with every passing year, the same old blood and gore just wasn't enough. The fix kept getting upped to a higher dosage. I saw Hostel on cable and one scene near the end about lost my lunch....

---

For us (or so I think), horror was more like the Boo Radley house in To Kill A Mockingbird; spooky as hell, and yet we loved those old places.

---

Well, my several childhood towns each had a house designated "the haunted house" by neighborhood kids. Its a rite of passage I guess.

As for Boo and To Kill a Mockingbird: my parents took the kids to see that at the drive-in in 1962, and I found the experience terrifying. How that mean ugly man slams his face against the car window to threaten the kids -- and then stalks them(to kill) in the late night woods. Boo kills him, but to my unformed child's mind, the pale-white cadaverous Boo Radley lurking behind the door was scary, not moving. (When I saw this scene as an adult...with the tender music...terror turned to tears.)

Still...in 1962..what were my parents THINKING? Taking us to that. At least we didn't understand the rape case...

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A Happy 2019 to you, telegonus!

And to all...

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Thanks, EC, and let's hope the whole country has a good New Year. We need one. This one wasn't horrible, but it was, with all the Trumpian (sic) Fright Night business like the coming attractions of our childhood. Fortunately, for us, the movies themselves weren't half so frightening as the previews "promised". We can only hope the same shall hold true for the real life year just around the corner.

To Kill A Mockingbird really did "play" like a horror, didn't it? A horror with comedy elements, some serious stuff geared to people much older than we were at the time, and some fun and games with the kids. The lovely, wistful and now, to my ears, sadly dated sounding music (Too Much, Too Much). It was my Movie Of The Year, replacing The Guns Of Navarone as a picture I followed around from one theater to the next. Not too shabby for a ten soon to be eleven year old.

Yes, those "designated" haunted houses were something else. What would our childhoods have been without them? They weren't always big, though Victorians dominated where I grew up. One was small, and the stocky, rather youngish fellow who lived there with his (presumably) elderly parents, whom no one ever saw, was, we guessed, an axe murderer, or had been, having just been released from the hospital for the criminally insane (LOL!). That wasn't much of a "stretch" for the neighborhood kids, as he used to walk around with an axe or sledge hammer of some kind slung over his shoulder on warm sunny days!

Funny about all these horror "musings": such stuff as we're reminiscing about was really quite the "boy thing" where I grew up; the entire community, I mean, not just the neighborhood. Not for girls at all. Guys loved stuff like that, and their (our, really) imaginations went into overdrive over the prospect of something haunted or "cursed" for some reason. It could be anything from an abandoned elementary school, a ramshackle church with no parishioners or, most "grandly", a recently closed down amusement park.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Thanks, EC, and let's hope the whole country has a good New Year. We need one. This one wasn't horrible, but it was, with all the Trumpian (sic) Fright Night business like the coming attractions of our childhood.

===

Well, it was... a year. Anymore, in the US, I figure a year without another 9/11 in it is pretty good nationally. And in our personal lives? In my circle there was a fair amount of contentment and two sad health-based endings. In these later years, as the saying goes, "things stop being given to us, and start being taken away from us."

---




Fortunately, for us, the movies themselves weren't half so frightening as the previews "promised".

---

Exhibit A: The Psycho trailer.

Hitchcock in the bathroom of Cabin A: "All cleaned up now. You should have SEEN the blood." He conjured up mental images of a bathroom and shower slathered in wall-to-wall blood, whereas the movie itself -- very little in there. Thus did Hitchcock use his trailer to conjure up in the minds of his audience horrors beyond what was really there. He directed the audience before they even showed up!

---

We can only hope the same shall hold true for the real life year just around the corner.

---

Here's hoping. Another year above ground...

---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

To Kill A Mockingbird really did "play" like a horror, didn't it?

---

Certainly to a kid seeing the movie AS a kid, as I did.

What's interesting to me is that the film used the "exaggerated" way in which kids scare themselves(conjuring haunted houses to talk about, seeing monsters in the shadows of the woods)...and linked those "imagination of kids" terrors into REAL terror. That perverted mean bigot wanted to terrorize those kids AND to physically harm them -- kill them(he had a knife) in his final attack. And Boo Radley had to kill the man in return, with his own knife. That's horror. Though we get sweetness at the end, as the town sheriff, defying Peck's lawyerly sense of what the law must do, says "I know who I am. I am the sheriff of Macon County...and Bob Ewell fell on his knife."

----

A horror with comedy elements, some serious stuff geared to people much older than we were at the time, and some fun and games with the kids.

---

As with many of the good to great movies (Psycho included), many types of story and tonal elements co-exist in To Kill a Mockingbird, making it all the richer.

---

The lovely, wistful and now, to my ears, sadly dated sounding music (Too Much, Too Much).

---

Oh, I love that stuff. Elmer Bernstein. His Mag 7 score, Mockingbird, and his score for True Grit -- all have been accused as being "too much" or "syrupy" and yet -- man, they made my youth. One way in which the Coen's "better made" True Grit remake of 2010 fell down for me(even though it was my favorite of that year) was when Rooster faces down four outlaws for a joust. I sorely missed John Wayne cocking his rifle with one hand -- as Elmer Bernstein's music slapped an exciting burst of music on the movement: the joust is about to begin! Nothing like this happens with Jeff Bridges.

One of the better unsung scores by Bernstein is for "The World of Henry Orient." Very elegant and wistful and sad....scored to NYC in 1964, very nostalgic.


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It was my Movie Of The Year, replacing The Guns Of Navarone as a picture I followed around from one theater to the next. Not too shabby for a ten soon to be eleven year old.

---

I expect we all have regard for the movies of our youth. And though The Guns of Navarone was a 1961 release, it hung around into 1962 -- the year that some of us on this board of a certain age have pinpointed as the year "we really started being able to remember movies we saw." 1960 and 1961 have more intermittent memories for me, but I can remember 1962, and its movies, pretty clearly.

In the days before VHS/DVD etc, we DID follow movies around didn't we? I followed Hitchcock's rule with favorite movies -- I saw them three times. Once to get the initial feeling(as some critic wrote, "you only see a movie once" - thereafter, you know it and are re-seeing it); once to see how it works; and then a third time to "say farewell." And in those old days, you could follow the movie down to theaters with cheaper tickets.

That said, I followed a few movies wherever they took me. One reason I linger so long on Frenzy is that...I saw it a LOT of times. It kept turning up after its 1972 release. Affixed by Universal to other movies in 1972(Ulzanas Raid) and 1973(Breezy). On campus at college. Affixed to Sleuth(also written by Anthony Shaffer) in 1975 (as a double-bill everywhere, and they were from different studios.) Affixed, after Family Plot's first run, as a double bill to that film, in 1976. Frenzy turned up -- I'd go see it. I kept celebrating how it saved Hitchcock's career so late in the game.

"Modernly" (over 20 years ago), it was LA Confidential that I followed everywhere. With a companion. We BOTH loved it, so it became rather a game to follow that movie around, see it again, see it with other people -- and slowly pick apart its intricate plot.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yes, those "designated" haunted houses were something else. What would our childhoods have been without them?

---

I guess it goes to show you that imagination is a strong part of childhood -- and wanting to be SCARED , wanting your neighborhood to be more EXCITING, is part of that. It must be hard -wired into our systems. Like what became the movies is hard wired.

Sometimes I stop and think about what "the movies" mean. They are an outgrowth of the theatrical plays of many centuries, yes, but they are something more: drug-like dreamscapes that come to "a theater or drive-in near you" and, in our younger years particularly, invade our minds forever. (Psycho, yes -- but Star Wars, too.) And yet they are fake, make believe, actors reading lines.

---

They weren't always big, though Victorians dominated where I grew up.

---

Victorians always got the nod, but if those weren't around, I think houses that were in-kempt(dead lawn, tall weeds) and set back far from the street were candidates. Particularly when no one came out of the house much. Though it was key that somebody DID sometimes emerge -- otherwise you'd think the house was just abandoned or up for sale. No, somebody had to live there.
Like the fellow you mention below:
--

( One was small, and the stocky, rather youngish fellow who lived there with his (presumably) elderly parents, whom no one ever saw, was, we guessed, an axe murderer, or had been, having just been released from the hospital for the criminally insane (LOL!).

---

Yes, vampires and zombies are hard to visualize in real life -- but people who have been in the hospital for the criminally insane -- that's the ticket. Punched by Psycho.

In my teen years , sometimes the "gang" would go out to an old cemetary at night, "just to scare the girls." I added my bit by noting that the cemetary was near a hospital for the criminally insane "and sometimes they escape." Cue the girls getting closer...

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Funny about all these horror "musings": such stuff as we're reminiscing about was really quite the "boy thing" where I grew up; the entire community, I mean, not just the neighborhood. Not for girls at all.

--

I carefully -- but sometimes ruefully -- watch the blurring of sex roles and gender these days. But, it remains a part of something that I would again suggest is hard wired that boys like certain things and girls like certain things. And everybody in between likes..different things I guess.

reply
formatting help
[–] ProductionNow (1072) 6 years ago

Still...in 1962..what were my parents THINKING? Taking us to that. At least we didn't understand the rape case...
---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Cant' tell if you're being facetious or not, since your parents perhaps didn't' know the plot either before seeing it.

Some funny stuff on that: my blue-collar Korean-vet stepfather who was into war films, combat, etc. went to the drive in --when I was very young to boot-- to see:
Midnight Cowboy-=likely thinking it was about cowboys
The Fox=thinking it was about animals
They Shoot Horses Don't They=again, thinking it was about horses and horseman.
What he got were character studies dealing with packed-emotion. I pretty well sensed he did not know the plots of these films until he parked his car.

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

is totally different from the oftentimes good clean (even if downright scary) fun we had when reading those Hitchcock short story anthologies;
--
The blood on the shower floor or on Arbogast's face was scary enough for me; the brief blood gouts of Jaws just about right too
It's worth mentioning I think that the heavy gore of horrors post-Se7en and increasing through the '00s *did* kind of play itself out, and that the biggest trends in horror over the last decade have been towards various sorts of atmosphere and uncanniness (and even at the height of torture porn & New French Extremity, some of the biggest horror hits were atmospheric Japanese-infuenced (often remade) stuff like The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water).

What we might call hipster or artsy horror has got most of the attention in recent years: The Witch, Babadook, It Follows, Get Out, Hereditary, Under The Skin, Raw, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Black Mirror, etc.. A lot of this stuff is *very* influenced by Lynch & Hitch & Polanski & Night of The Hunter w/ pitstops at The Wicker Man and Halloween and The Twilight Zone.

And most of the lower-brow horror successes over this period - Conjuring, Insidious, Mama, Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Stranger Things, It - aren't much interested in gore either.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see large generational gaps opening up in horror, and still less do I see a trajectory of ever-more-jaded palates, and steepening decline into mayhem occurring. There was a phase of boundary-pushing extremity in the '00s but that's all.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It's worth mentioning I think that the heavy gore of horrors post-Se7en and increasing through the '00s *did* kind of play itself out, and that the biggest trends in horror over the last decade have been towards various sorts of atmosphere and uncanniness (and even at the height of torture porn & New French Extremity, some of the biggest horror hits were atmospheric Japanese-infuenced (often remade) stuff like The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water).

---

As usual, swanstep, you bring to the table your near-encyclopedic knowledge of the movies that are being made NOW and can testify to trends that I am simply unaware of.

I've read about most of the titles in your post, but seen only two, I believe: The Ring(remake) and Get Out. Neither of them particulary scared me, but I appreciated the "new wave nuance" of each.

And yes, I'd tend to agree that ultra-gore has rather flamed out. Back when they came out, I did see Hostel and I did see Saw(on urging of a female companion.) The former grossed me out and the latter depressed me.

I think that personally over time, I always like thrillers more than horror. Thrillers have kind of faded away -- the dialogue, action and "light violence" of most Hitchcock movies, and Charade and Arabesque, and The Manchurian Candidate, and Wait Until Dark....there just isn't really a market for that, and not really the star casts to play in them. (I think Marathon Man rather killed off the thriller -- big budget, GREAT cast, but no fun at all -- grim and gory and theater-clearing during the dental scene.)

That's one reason I like Psycho -- much of it plays like a thriller, not horror. This is why I like the Arbogast sequence. This "private eye" plays and acts and talks like a thriller character -- but his end is pure horror. I like the mix.




reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

What we might call hipster or artsy horror has got most of the attention in recent years: The Witch, Babadook, It Follows, Get Out, Hereditary, Under The Skin, Raw, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Black Mirror, etc.. A lot of this stuff is *very* influenced by Lynch & Hitch & Polanski & Night of The Hunter w/ pitstops at The Wicker Man and Halloween and The Twilight Zone.

---

I've only seen Get Out amongst those. I have a few I want to see...hopefully will. And the title "A Girl Walks Home at Night" ...sounds like "generic terror" with the danger of calling her a "girl." Instead of a woman. Isn't that terrible?

---

And most of the lower-brow horror successes over this period - Conjuring, Insidious, Mama, Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Stranger Things, It - aren't much interested in gore either.

---
Mainstream Man has seen more of these -- Conjuring and Paramormal Activity -- the first one, with its nifty "found footage" idea of a camera being left on all night while a couple sleeps -- and something suddenly comes in to the bedroom and leaves. That one actually made me jump.

I read the book "It," and I saw the mini-series. I tried watching the new movie on HBO a few weeks ago and -- couldn't make it. Just not interested in the kids. I will probably prefer the adult part of the story -- with Jessica Chastain(a favorite, one reason Molly's Game was my fave last year) in one of the leads.

That said, I think that "It" -- Part One -- was a big enough hit to remind us that horror can still sell. Mainstream.

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

So true about thrillers, EC, whether light or heavy. Or do the Ludlum adaptations count? One might think that the rise of terrorism in the new millennium might have caused a spike. Surely, 9/11 ought to have been sufficiently horrifying to have spawned dozens of thrillers. I think the gruesome nature of the attack itself is too horrifying to want to even contemplate much less show on screen. Besides, and I mean no disrespect in this, we all saw that one on television. Who would want to watch it again?

Nor could 9/11 and all the "terrorism business" that followed, including the homegrown school shootings and random killings that have abounded in the early years of the millennium, be presented as entertainment. Even Jaws inspired its share of follow-ups, with grizzlies and sea creatures doing nasty stuff. But Jaws wasn't based on a real life event. There have been shark attacks over the years, but no Jaws, not as we know it anyway.

More broadly, thrillers are nearly always either "products of their time" (the rise of fascism in Europe and elsewhere, the Cold War), or period pieces. I can't imagine a genteel thriller set during the years surrounding the First World War working well today, if only because,--sad to say--most moviegoers are too ignorant of the events of another time, as in "who's Rasputin?" or "where's Gallipoli?". References to the Ottoman Empire and Constantinople would confuse most younger (and many middle aged) viewers these days.

Also working against contemporary thrillers based on current events is the pc nature of Hollywood and the mass media generally. In an era when you can't do a cereal commercial without it featuring multi-ethnic families and biracial kids grooving on Cheerios or whatever the product happens to be I can't picture big money anywhere in America daring to make the bad guys primarily foreign (as in "of other races than white") on a regular basis, even allowing for a major Malkovich-like bad guy in the mix.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

So true about thrillers, EC, whether light or heavy. Or do the Ludlum adaptations count?

---

You know, telegonus, you're right about the Ludlums. They are big hits, and they are thrillers. Though I found them all pretty mediocre...and I was shocked to see them take off as blockbusters. Today, the first three seem to have merged into one indistinguishable mass of shaky-cam car chases and renegade CIA bosses trying, but failing, to stop Bourne. The mano-y-mano fights to the death are pretty real and nifty though.

But: my Matt Damon problem. (The old Anthony Lane quote: "Matt Damon! In the old days, Cary Grant would have handed off his keys to park his car to him.") He does make sense as a young military spy -- they ARE young. But I remember in the first one, where Clive Owen did a cameo as a villain, I thought: why haven't these two guys SWITCHED ROLES?

Oh, well. Three big hits. Franchise stardom for Damon(suddenly, he was the biggest star in the Oceans Eleven movies.) They took Bourne out two too many times, once with a different lead and once with Damon no longer "hot" -- now its a burnt-out franchise, but yeah, those are modern thrillers.

And of course, Bond is still with us -- he's the guy who cheapened the thriller by turning into episodic TV on the big screen but....we're used to him by now.

Tom Cruise's Mission:Impossibles are thrillers...but really action machines now.

Back to Bourne: I think somebody, somewhere, traced the Bourne movies back to North by Northwest and I thought: no -- I can't rememember a single memorable dialogue scene, romance is near-nonexistant, and the pleasures of a James Mason-level villain or a Mount Rushmore fantasy landscape are nowhere to be found.


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Surely, 9/11 ought to have been sufficiently horrifying to have spawned dozens of thrillers. I think the gruesome nature of the attack itself is too horrifying to want to even contemplate much less show on screen. Besides, and I mean no disrespect in this, we all saw that one on television. Who would want to watch it again?

---

Well, it was surreal, and reminiscent of movies and it shook me personally for weeks. Whatever else it meant, it meant that Americans as "innocent non-combatants" were no longer safe on US soil. The safety afforded us by two big oceans and a certain cockiness failed.

And I always felt that 9/11 was like a macabre collection of "horrible ways to die." Take your pick: throat slashed by box cutters; a terror ride into death on a hijacked jet plane with maniacs at the controls, the choice,as a skyscraper worker bee, of death by fire or a plummet of thousands of feet to the ground; buried alive in a mass of concrete and steel.

Versus death in bed, or a quick bullet to the head...these were horrible fates. 9/11 is the Frenzy of real-life thrillers, not the North by Northwest.

---

Nor could 9/11 and all the "terrorism business" that followed, including the homegrown school shootings and random killings that have abounded in the early years of the millennium, be presented as entertainment.

---

The thrillers of yesteryear "happened to other people" and often ended happily -- the bad guys lose and mainly die in NXNW. Real life became...psycho.

---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Even Jaws inspired its share of follow-ups, with grizzlies and sea creatures doing nasty stuff. But Jaws wasn't based on a real life event. There have been shark attacks over the years, but no Jaws, not as we know it anyway.

---

Well that's one -- like The Birds -- in which a couple of real life situations -- shark sightings, generalized non-lethal bird attacks -- were blown up brilliantly into "what if?" scenarios.

What I always felt "worked" about Jaws is that they took the concept of a shark attack -- usually shown in South Seas adventure movies with a native getting eaten by a shark off Bora Bora or something -- and moved it to "Your Town, USA." In the US, everybody on three coasts(East, West, South) goes to the beach. Just like everybody takes a shower. Suddenly, we had a new template for terror (and three really interesting guys to take the shark on -- we can't forget about THEM.)

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

More broadly, thrillers are nearly always either "products of their time" (the rise of fascism in Europe and elsewhere, the Cold War),

---

It was an interesting aspect of when Hitchcock was active that, during the thirties(a little bit) and forties(a lot), he was a "World War II director." The Nazis or their forbears or their offshoots were the villains in The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat, and Notorious. And in the French war shorts Hitch made. And Nazi-LIKE supremacist psycho villains populated Shadow of a Doubt and Rope. The Nazis practically gave Hitchcock his forties career. And for much of it...they were villains who just might win in the end(which would have been bad for Hitch and other propagandists.) Later, Hitchcock was given concentration camp discovery footage to assemble. So he was linked to the Nazis for a long, long time.

With Communism the threat in the fifties -- and Hollywood torn to pieces over it -- Hitchcock "laid low" on naming the Commies AS his villains. The villains in The Man Who Knew Too Much '56 and North by Northwest are Communists, but never called such; the Cold War is alluded to("Maybe you should learn how to LOSE a few Cold Wars") but not lingered upon.








reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Came the sixties, calling the Communists Communists and villainizing them(even if in a "nuanced way') cleared the way for Hitchcock to make Torn Curtain and Topaz. But to his chagrin, a lot of critics were now left-leaning and sympathetic to the Soviets and the Cubans. Torn Curtain and Topaz were not good movies, but their politics really got them in hot water with some critics.

For his part, Hitchcock abandoned geopolitics in Frenzy and Family Plot -- though he intended to return to a spy movie with The Short Night. It seemed way too old-fashioned when Hitchcock wanted to make that one. But - -he was a spy movie maker at heart. No gangsters, few psychos....

Hitchcock's problems with naming the geopolitical villains became ALL filmmakers problems once movies hit the international marketplace. Which is why, I think, many of our political thrillers of today posit "renegade American CIA agents" as the villains.

Though we've had a few Middle Eastern terrorists as villains over the decades -- Black Sunday, True Lies. (Hitchcock turned down Black Sunday because he felt the Middle Eastern conflict would never allow for elements of humor.)

I guess as we discuss this, telegonus, we can see that "the thriller" has continued on in different forms. The action movie, mainly, and I consider QT's non-Western films to be thrillers(or "crime pictures.") Even the Western The Hateful Eight is staged more like an Agatha Christie closed-room Ten Little Indians deal.

But still, you know what I mean...the "fun" thriller, with Cary Grant suavely kissing the blonde of the moment(or Audrey Hepburn) between non-bloody bouts with the bad guys -- gone.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

More broadly, thrillers are nearly always either "products of their time" (the rise of fascism in Europe and elsewhere, the Cold War), or period pieces. I can't imagine a genteel thriller set during the years surrounding the First World War working well today, if only because,--sad to say--most moviegoers are too ignorant of the events of another time, as in "who's Rasputin?" or "where's Gallipoli?". References to the Ottoman Empire and Constantinople would confuse most younger (and many middle aged) viewers these days.

---

Here, I think there might be hope for an enterprising filmmaker and writer to concoct a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" type action film intended to educate new audiences about old conflicts(and villains.) Maybe. Otherwise...nobody knows. Nobody cares.

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Indeed, the blurring of the issue of "who's the good guy, who's the bad guy" has wreaked havoc in the international thriller genre, such as it can be called. It was huge throughout the postwar era, began to fade some time in the Seventies a bit, although there were some biggies they were overall getting sexier or more partisan or simply becoming exciting "downers" (Marathon Man) rather than truly thrilling, although that one was excellent film-making by any standards, and it was sexy at times.

Prior to that there was the Sixties, divided (in unequal parts) between Bond and his influence and the more dour, cerebral thrillers-dramas, whether of The Manchurian Candidate kind or The Spy Who Came In From The Cold variety. The Deadly Affair,--I think that's the right title--with James Mason as a "wounded" good guy, was outstanding, I thought, and it's held up. On the other hand, there were the "flops", as in "too many", such as the William Holden starrer The Counterfeit Traitor. It seems that every veteran star had at least one like that. Best intuitive guess: the Kennedy influence, even after the assassination, glamorized politics and ;politicians, to a degree anyway, and made the modern thriller prosaic, almost like a police procedural; downbeat of necessity.

The JFK influence largely spawned the James Bond cycle, as it hit shortly after he was killed. It likely would have made it anyway, as Dr. No (1962) had already kicked it off, but the end of the Kennedy era meant that Camelot would now have to be transferred to the big screen, then the little screen (The Man From UNCLE, I Spy, the Kennedyesque actors-- Chamblerlain, Franciiscus and even,lest we forget, Ryan O'Neal's teen heartthrob on Peyton Place). Then came the ("JFK would have loved them") Beatles, followed by the so-called British Invasion and all that followed, as Rock & Roll became, broadly speaking, the New Camelot. The old one's absence was too depressing to contemplate for most teens back then.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Indeed, the blurring of the issue of "who's the good guy, who's the bad guy" has wreaked havoc in the international thriller genre, such as it can be called. It was huge throughout the postwar era, began to fade some time in the Seventies a bit, although there were some biggies they were overall getting sexier or more partisan or simply becoming exciting "downers" (Marathon Man) rather than truly thrilling, although that one was excellent film-making by any standards, and it was sexy at times.

===

I recall the Paramount films Three Days of the Condor(Redford and all-star cast) and Marathon Man(Hoffman and all-star cast) opening about a year apart at the same flagship theater in Westwood Village(the Village, it was called) near UCLA. Both were "fall films"(1975 for Condor; 1976 for MM) both were spy thrillers, and both posited "a renegade CIA within the CIA," called "the Division" in Marathon Man, and totally rogue in Condor.

These films inaugurated the US thrillers in which US spies were the ENEMY to US heroes. Other than "borrowing" Laurence Oliver as the guaranteed all-purpose villain(an aged, unrepentant Nazi), the two films saw the enemy(in the US) as us -- or at least a part of us.

But whereas Condor was mainly cerebral, with one action fight to the death(not very gory) as its highlight, Marathon Man went all out on gore and pain, good a film as it was otherwise. MM felt to me like "North by Northwest Meets Psycho," and maybe that was how thrillers would be from now on.


reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But wait: in 1976, Hitchcock did his best to give us a "non-gory, non-violent" thriller(his first after Frenzy, and, as it would turn out, his last) in the semi-comic light thriller Family Plot. It was a final lesson from Hitchcock: you can thrill the audience in a non-violent, light-hearted way (the villains weren't the CIA; they were a in-it-for-the-money and the thrills kidnapping couple.) It was a very nice try by a very talented old man...but audiences didn't go for it in a big way.

And wait: in 1977, writer-director Peter Hyams tried to follow the Family Plot lead(complete with runaway tampered car sequence) with Capricorn One, which kept gore to an absolute minimum and postulated NASA(!) or a part of it, as the murderous villains...out to fake a Mars landing and ready to kill the astronauts forced to enact it if they give things away. I liked Capricorn One, which has that runaway car scene(hero reporter Elliott Gould at the wheel) and a bang-up crop duster versus helicopter climax(that LAUNCHES in great excitemen, as a lone surviving astronaut runs at top speed to jump on the rescue plane's wing for the ride..) But few took the non-violent thrills of Capricorn One very seriously.

I remember taking note how non-violent Family Plot and Capricorn One were -- how they were like a "last gasp" of NXNW style chase thrills.

The thriller moved on, mutated, got more violent still.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Prior to that there was the Sixties, divided (in unequal parts) between Bond and his influence and the more dour, cerebral thrillers-dramas, whether of The Manchurian Candidate kind or The Spy Who Came In From The Cold variety.

---

The Bond films had a weird effect. The British original -- however fantasy-based at heart -- took Bond's missions and violence seriously. But the American knock-offs --- lazy Dino as Matt Helm and grinning James Coburn as Our Man Flint -- treated the whole James Bond thing as a joke to be spoofed. An "American Bond" really didn't materialize -- and weakly at that -- until Indy Jones came along(he seemed less the sexist sadist of the Bond films.)

But yes, there was that whole other Le Carre based side of "serious films" in which spying was kept low-key, bureaucratic and murky. These films, of which I saw a few, kept surprising at the end as people ended up dying for what seemed like fairly petty bureaucratic work.

Torn Curtain, Hitchcock's first of two Cold Waar entries, was called a "hybrid" in some quarters --- fanciful in the cinematic style(more NXNW than Bond) but realistic in the mission(LeCarre-ish.) Critics found the movie neither fish nor fowl, and dismissed it accordingly.

Topaz was something else entirely. NXNW/Bond style action was tossed away in favor of Preminger-esqe wide canvas human spy drama. But without a Preminger all-star cast; Hitch cast little-known international stars and again ended up with something that fell short of either Le Carre sophistication or NXNW/Bond fun. Hitchcock's visual gimmicks rather overran any serious narrative.

---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

he Deadly Affair,--I think that's the right title--with James Mason as a "wounded" good guy, was outstanding, I thought, and it held up.

----

Funny how within only a few years after NXNW, James Mason had lost the cold elegant virility of his Vandamm character and started playing tweedy, broken-down older men, whether in spy movies or elsewhere. Simply put, he aged fast. As I recall, Mason had a bad heart attack not too long after NXNW; it evidently weakened and aged him.

I recall The Deadly Affair -- Sidney Lumet directed it, I think, and it, too, had one of those surprisingly deadly endings after a movie full of general bureaucratic dullness. Something about a boat , a dock, and Max Schell, as I recall.

---

On the other hand, there were the "flops", as in "too many", such as the William Holden starrer The Counterfeit Traitor. It seems that every veteran star had at least one like that.

---

I remember seeing The Counterfeit Traitor as a kid. It bored me, over my head, I shouldn't have been there(but my parents took me anyway.) I tried to watch it on cable last year -- to see what I missed -- but I couldn't get past the first half hour. Here was an already distressingly puffy and stolid William Holden faking like a Nazi-loving industrialist to get info, and being hated for it. Nice premise, dull execution.

Veteran stars(and new, young stars) ended up in these stolid movies because they were a trend. Torn Curtain and Topaz rather fit right in.

---

---

Best intuitive guess: the Kennedy influence, even after the assassination, glamorized politics and ;politicians, to a degree anyway, and made the modern thriller prosaic, almost like a police procedural; downbeat of necessity.

---

Its possible. I remember the movies, but I also remember the paperbacks strewn about the house that BECAME the movies: Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, and one called "Night at Camp David," about a President who goes mad, that was shut down as a movie, I believe, by LBJ.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And aside from the political thrillers, we had the political dramas. Advise and Consent and The Best Man(from a play) got into the nuts and bolts of political horsetrading back when it worked, and of political conventions back when they mattered. Again, these books were strewn all around my childhood home. I assumed a certain interest in politics that drained away over the decades as it became low down and petty in a public way.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The JFK influence largely spawned the James Bond cycle, as it hit shortly after he was killed. It likely would have made it anyway, as Dr. No (1962) had already kicked it off,

---

JFK had listed the book From Russia With Love as one of his favorites, which helped publicize the Bond movies. I know he lived long enough to see Dr. No, I THINK he lived long enough to see From Russia with Love...but that was it. Goldfinger came out the year after JFK died.

---

but the end of the Kennedy era meant that Camelot would now have to be transferred to the big screen, then the little screen (The Man From UNCLE, I Spy, the Kennedyesque actors-- Chamblerlain, Franciiscus and even,lest we forget, Ryan O'Neal's teen heartthrob on Peyton Place). Then came the ("JFK would have loved them") Beatles, followed by the so-called British Invasion and all that followed, as Rock & Roll became, broadly speaking, the New Camelot. The old one's absence was too depressing to contemplate for most teens back then.

---

I guess it is true that the Kennedy-esque mystique transferred on after JFK's death. Robert Vaughn, The Man from UNCLE , was friends with BOBBY Kennedy, and the whole UNCLE concept(an American and a Russian as co-agents and pals) had that UN Kumbaya thing going.

LBJ famously had his good points and his bad, but he didn't look like JFK. America was returned from youthful leadership to middle-aged leadership. It was kinda sad. Noted at the time: LBJ rather looked like the middle-aged John Wayne, who was riding high as a star in LBJ's America.

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

9/11 was damn near beyond what any mere movie, or even the movies, could achieve. It was like (again, with all due respect for those who suffered) a mini-series that lasted several days which America couldn't turn off. In this it was the Ultimate Nightmare. It was beyond even anything that Marshall McLuhan predicted: like a gruesome movie than wormed its way into our minds and would haunt of for the rest of our lives. No spy thriller could embrace it. Besides, I can't think of any director,--even Steven Spielberg--who could have "matched it" on screen. But then anyone who'd want to do such a thing would be mad.

For all the trauma the event unleashed it also created its own backlash. A local Indian (Hindu, not Muslim) shopkeeper I knew had his store window smashed by some townies shortly thereafter. Yet those incidents faded sooner than one might have expected, and in less than a decade we'd have a half-"one of them" (well, close enough, as many saw it) in the White House. Within a remarkably short period of time the "pc police" would be talkin' diversity training again and be speaking openly about making America safe for Muslims. I'm not suggesting that it shouldn't be, just musing. Between them, cable news and the Internet have altered the speed by which things change to a frightening degree.

Then Trump gets elected. While I think he represents many things about America, I find his xenophobia, while not agreeable, strangely apposite. Like a one man army he gave the red states a voice, became a man of HIS people, and is a divisive figure to say the least; and the most controversial president since LBJ presided over the war in Vietnam. But now I'm moving too beyond the movies into real life; and yet even real life is something that we experience, weirdly and paradoxically, I admit, as something that happens on television. Trump is a TV star, was even before he got elected POTUS. Thirty years? At least.

Okay, time to return to the vastly less controversial topics.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

9/11 was damn near beyond what any mere movie, or even the movies, could achieve. It was like (again, with all due respect for those who suffered) a mini-series that lasted several days which America couldn't turn off. In this it was the Ultimate Nightmare.

---

It sure was. I'm old enough to know where I was for the JFK and RFK assassinations, and I can't say that either of them really HIT me -- I simply didn't understand what they meant.

But 9/11 hit and hit hard. It took weeks to shake it and what it meant. As I think I've noted before, whereas the assasinations were of public figures who "knew the job was dangerous when they took it" -- 9/11 and other terrorist acts targeted ANYBODY -- you, me, parents, kids -- indiscriminately. Not to be too glib, but it is like we all really live in Hitchcock's World now: we could get killed on any given day, for no particular reason.

----

It was beyond even anything that Marshall McLuhan predicted: like a gruesome movie than wormed its way into our minds and would haunt of for the rest of our lives.

---

A stroll to YouTube and looking at footage from that day brings it all back.

On the other hand, everybody was pretty damn resilient. Steps were taken(long lines at airports) which have worked for 17 years.

---

No spy thriller could embrace it. Besides, I can't think of any director,--even Steven Spielberg--who could have "matched it" on screen. But then anyone who'd want to do such a thing would be mad.

---

A few movies were made about the day. The one that stayed mainly in the air, Flight 93, captured that particular terror, and how officials on the ground slowly came to understand what was happening -- in disbelieving terror. (Again, not to be glib, bu the Hitchcock corollary is The Birds, as people slowly realized what was happening with the birds...)

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock starred in one meant to convey the human cost(Tom goes to work in the Twin Towers and never comes home.) But that seed got lost in an overall murky movie about other things.

And then there was Love Actually, which opens with footage of people saying hello and saying goodbye at Heathrow Airport as Hugh Grant intoned how the people on the 9/11 airliners sent "messages of love" via cell phones in their last minutes, not messages of hate. It was a stunning, emotional beginning to a love movie, and it helpe establish Love Actually as something just a little bit profound. (The connection of the deep human emotion expressed at airport arrivals and departure gates was linked to the horror of ATTACKING that emotion as was done on 9/11.)

But yeah, there's a great big CGI spectacle that could put 9/11 on the screen...and I don't think any filmmaker wants to exploit that day, that way.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Within a remarkably short period of time the "pc police" would be talkin' diversity training again and be speaking openly about making America safe for Muslims. I'm not suggesting that it shouldn't be, just musing. Between them, cable news and the Internet have altered the speed by which things change to a frightening degree.

---

We have a huge capacity to forget, and to forgive...and to deny. But mainly to forgive. Life goes on. We came to believe that that was a "radical fringe."

And after all, the actual perps died in the planes.

But if it happens again, well....we'll forget, and forgive. And probably kill some of their leaders again...

----

Then Trump gets elected. ....

---

ZING. Third rail. Hey, what he proved to me was that ballyhooed "complex election strategies" (precinct captains, local party chairs, GOTV by computer) run by supposed experts could be routed by a guy who knew PR and sales. And of course, he proved that celebrities can roust "mere politicians." (As Arnold did in California.) Of course, Oprah or Tom Hanks could win. But I don't think they would want the follow up: eternal hatred from one quarter or the other. Politics is now a very,very ugly business.

Young people used to take district office or capitol bureaucratic political jobs just to learn how government works(or to pay for law school and moving on.) Party affiliation was almost an afterthought; just get the job and move up. Now such jobs are targets for 24/7 hatred and danger. I think that government jobs should be declared "decline to state party preference" jobs, to avoid such troubles.

---

I admit, as something that happens on television. Trump is a TV star, was even before he got elected POTUS. Thirty years? At least.

---

The next President will be very boring after this.

---

Okay, time to return to the vastly less controversial topics.

---

OK by me.

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Interesting reading all these thoughts about what we might call the decline of the thriller. Two other sources of such decline are a little closer to home when it comes to Psycho: (i) writers used to feel *completely* comfortable using sexual underworlds and outsiders of various sorts as sources of danger and intrigue. Things still get written with that as a component but such exercises are now fraught with possibilities of offense and blowback (and also jadedess since widespread free porn on-line has exposed the average person to sexual imagery whose existence they'd only have guessed at pre-2000). (ii) mental illness - *psychological* underworlds and outsiders - and even physical damage such as scars and deformities were similarly rich sources of danger and intrigue for decades. Now such demonizing/other-ing of people with problems can seem very clumsy and unhelpfully stigmatizing. In sum, the greater understanding and inclusiveness that modern societies pride themselves on *has* deligitimated a lot of traditional sources of danger and intrigue.

reply
formatting help
[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

What legitimate sources of danger and intrigue are left to modern writers? Well, once 'others' of all sorts are rendered implausible or otherwise 'out of bounds', what's left is *ourselves*.

In 'international thrillers' this means the battle is always really *between* various parts of the govt or intelligence agencies. Bourne/Bond/Ethan Hunt are always 2 or 3 betrayals deep (the last MI film was so convoluted on this front that, like most people, I just gave up trying to understand the plot and watched the last hour at least as pure action sensation).

In what we might call 'domestic thrillers' the battle is always with what's hidden in plain sight as patriarchal power structures. Every suburb can be Stepford, ever small city a Lumberton, every small town a Twin Peaks, every family a Sopranos.

In both cases we have met the enemy and he is us, hence legitimate contemporary thrillers tend to have diagnostic, debunking, downer qualities. Audrey and Cary dodging villains with hook hands in Paris they're not!

A temporary solution: lots of AI villains who'll be part of us and trained on us and reflect the worst of us - they're the others inside our minds and bodies completing our sentences and also inside our infrastructure and institutions. Upgrade (2018) and Black Mirror's White Bear (w. Jon Hamm) and Fallout (w. Bryce Dallas Howard) eps may be the prototype modern thrillers. Until A.I. and robot rights and inclusiveness and destigmatization kick in.

Get Out!

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Interesting reading all these thoughts about what we might call the decline of the thriller.

---


Its a little "pet topic" of mine, because I know, growing up, that thrillers always moved up to the top of my "must see" list(even as a kid) and that I'm actually more of a thriller fan than a movie fan.

That said, its not like the movie schedule was overloaded with thrillers back then. Hitchcock noted that he rather had the field to himself in the 40s and 50s. I think once he had the back-to-back hits of NXNW and Psycho, those two movies became the template for everything thriller wise in the 60s and the floodgates opened:

Homicidal, Cape Fear, The Manchurian Candidate, Baby Jane, The Prize, Charade, Strait Jacket, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Mirage, Arabesque, Wait Until Dark..and a host of horror pictures like The Nanny and Die Die My Darling. This entire group was split between A list and B...or less...list.

Plus: Mr. Bond(inspired by To Catch a Thief and NXNW as much as the books) and all his American and British offshoots.

And Hitchcock worked into the sixties as well we know, but not successfully after The Birds("his competitors were now legion" wrote one critic.) Though with Connery, Newman and Andrews in his movies, Hitch was "star competitive" with other movies in the 60s. And he got a "second wind" in the 70's, with the star-free Frenzy and Family Plot -- movies in which Hitchcock was the star and the stories didn't seem like anyone else would have made them.

By the seventies, I suppose the thriller started to mutate. For one thing, Brian DePalma was simply making Hitchcock retreads a lot of the time. In 1973, The Sting and The Exorcist were mega-hits...and both had thriller roots(with a caper movie flavor to the first and a Satanic horror movie flavor to the second.)

Chinatown was a private eye movie with some thriller moves...but it was also "important" and prestigious, and political and...perverse.



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Chinatown was produced by Paramount studio chief Robert Evans, as were Marathon Man and Black Sunday. Evans seemed to have a taste for producing big budget thrillers(of different sorts) with big stars.

I rather see Marathon Man as the last full-on Hitchcockian thriller. (Black Sunday had disaster movie elements). But it had "issues." One was the gore, the other was Dustin Hoffman, not Cary Grant in the lead. Hoffman whined, sniffled, and yelled through the lead, giving us a vision of a man in total terror as the bad guys came after him(realistic, but hard to watch.) Hoffman got tough at the end, but not tough enough. The actor himself vetoed the ending from the book, and refused to shoot Olivier. The substitute ending was lame.

I'm sure that someone can counter me with thrillers in the 80's and 90's -- the 90s had a re-birth with Silence of the Lambs, the Cape Fear remake, and Se7en, but they were a different kind of thriller than what we had in the 60s -- heavy on the gore, downbeat at the end(Se7en). And in the 90's, we got that Psycho remake. Arbogast's face was slashed three times, not one.

I'm not so sure we've done well by the thriller in the 2000s and 2010s, though...

...or am I just "all wrong." Hah.



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Two other sources of such decline are a little closer to home when it comes to Psycho: (i) writers used to feel *completely* comfortable using sexual underworlds and outsiders of various sorts as sources of danger and intrigue. Things still get written with that as a component but such exercises are now fraught with possibilities of offense and blowback

---

PC is happening on an accelerating basis and I'm one who is relatively willing to fold in its wake. Honestly, I personally don't want to offend anybody, so I'm not too supportive of those who do. One exception is QT, who seems on a one-man mission to make sure that his movies are "uncomfortable" and reminiscent of 70s offensiveness. I wouldn't write or make the scenes he does, but I watch them in some awe.

You know what PC really killed off in American movies? "Foreign Accent Comedy." Blake Edwards had a lot of this in the 60s. Mickey Rooney's famously awful Japanese man in Breakfast at Tiffany's...but also "Kato" the Asian servant in the Pink Panther films, and Peter Sellers as a Hindu Indian in "The Party"(he did this character in a few other movies.) Now Sellers was most famous doing his French mash-up as Clouseau("You must have a li-SAWNCE for the MINK-ey!) and he did a German accent as Dr. Strangelove. I'm hard-pressed to determine, which, if any, accents are now deemed acceptable. Anglo accents? Russian accents? German accents? But not Asian accents or "Frito Bandito" Hispanic accents(unless they are the "real deal," see: Cheech Marin.)

Its interesting to me. American comedy used to get a lot of mileage out of making us laugh at accents. No more. Oh, Southern accents maybe.



reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Things still get written with that as a component but such exercises are now fraught with possibilities of offense and blowback (and also jadedess since widespread free porn on-line has exposed the average person to sexual imagery whose existence they'd only have guessed at pre-2000).

---

I'm not sure that the world could predict how porn went mainstream and available and...acceptable?(By men AND by women.) That killed off the ability of R-rated mainstream movies to compete in terms of graphicness; we really don't have too many movies ABOUT sex anymore, they can't compete. (Examples: Carnal Knowledge,:Last Tango; Basic Instinct, Postman Rings Twice Remake, that one with Rourke and Basinger, ) Oh, I guess the 50 Shades movies, but they aren't very good.

---

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

(ii) mental illness - *psychological* underworlds and outsiders - and even physical damage such as scars and deformities were similarly rich sources of danger and intrigue for decades. Now such demonizing/other-ing of people with problems can seem very clumsy and unhelpfully stigmatizing.

---

Psycho in 1960 landed a review of this nature, from Robert Hatch in The Nation. He was "offended and disgusted" that mental illness was used to power a horror movie(he was not offended and disgusted by the murders and mother stuffing plot, evidently.)

I dunno. You can say that Norman Bates is sick, but it is an evil kind of sickness. Bob Rusk, too. We see in great detail what Rusk likes to do as a rape-killer, and HIS "mental illness" is on the evil side of the street: sadistic, violent towards women. I think the evil trumps the illness. In real life, I think such killers should not be set free. In movies, I think they CAN be shown as villains.

----

In sum, the greater understanding and inclusiveness that modern societies pride themselves on *has* deligitimated a lot of traditional sources of danger and intrigue.

---

Well, in an international marketplace, it has taken away "foreign" villains. And I guess a man with a genetically ugly mug like Rondo Hatten wouldn't be cast as a villain.

Everything is flattening out --- our movie history is filled with things that wouldn't be made today(articles are appearing about having to destroy these films), and the idea of film and comedy as "radical, challenging" mediums is collapsing as we linger on the fantasy of comic book heroes with superpowers.

Indeed, the superhero movie is also where "the thriller has gone." These movies are filled with chases and cliffhangers(Guardians of the Galaxy II has an homage to the crop duster scene in NXNW)...but, I dunno....I know a thriller when I see a thriller, and commix movies aren't REALLY thrillers.

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Wise thoughts and observations, EC. We are pretty much, thanks to pc, going to have to live with thrillers and movies in general in which foreigners (who uses THAT word these days?) can no longer be demonized as foreigners qua foreigners, which used to mean primarily European or Levantine, more broadly Asians, whether "east" or "south" and the somewhat less exotic (due to their being closer to home) Hispanics.

Nor can, as you noted, these groups be made fun of, with maybe a few exceptions, such as Carol Burnett's (apparently) Central European boss as played by Tim Conway ("Miss Whiggins!"), which I can't imagine even a Czech or Hungarian objecting to today. Also, Arte Johnson's German parody on Laugh-In ("very interesting!").

On the other hand, for comedy for comedy's sake it's common to see various hyphenate-Americans (sic?) of other races to do their own thing in their own way with only others of the same background kicking in. Lots of East Asians doing this; even a Muslim guy; various Middle Eastern groups; obviously, Hispanics. The "set-up" seems nearly always geared to "Middle Americans", as in REAL white people from the Heartland, with the New Americans applying for membership (as it were) in the new diversity friendly U.S. in not the old school Life With Luigi manner, with exaggerated stereotyped accents and mannerisms but as "equals", often college grads, talkin' just like everyone else, using heavy doses of irony as their "ticket to ride" into the mainstream.

None of the above is about the thriller, Hitchcock, mysteries, tales of intrigue and such but rather is a commentary on just how much the world has changed. Most of the old tropes are unusable today. Any sort of bad guy with anything that can be identified even remotely as a disability or, worse, a specifically psych one, is verboten. Evil dudes with wooden legs, prosthetic arms or hands; stutterers; and anyone bad who dresses funny, especially with an LGBT vibe, is also "out". I think of the master villain played by Godfrey Tearle in The 39 Steps, with his half-severed finger. A striking image, that; and it must have caused shudders among moviegoers back then. No more.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

We are pretty much, thanks to pc, going to have to live with thrillers and movies in general in which foreigners (who uses THAT word these days?)

---

Ha. Well, the American Oscars have always had the Best Foreign Film category; I expect that's where I got the idea, white American that I am.

And jeez, now that has to be raised as an identifier. WITHIN America, the discussion is so much about race that one tries to remember when it wasn't. It can and will be difficult to reconcile races in America, if 'an equal outcome is sought for all".

And yet, it is. Get off the internet and throw the paper away, and I lot of us interact and work with people of all races. And get along doing it.

I'll "bury this lead" for anyone familiar with my "My Psycho is not your Psycho" memories of not getting to see the local ABC TV broadcast in 1967.

i talked with a young male friend who got to see it:

Me: So my parents wouldn't let me watch Psycho. Did you get to see it?
Him: Yes. And I wish I DIDN'T. It was so scary, I got nightmares.

Well, that boy's last name was Garcia.

And the woman who made the sign of the cross when I asked about Psycho and said "You must NEVER watch that movie. It is evil. It is about BAD people." Mexican immigrant.

Yep I grew up in Los Angeles in a very Hispanic community with a white population of slightly lesser number, and those days were fine, great, I had friends of all types. But there were also mean, dangerous kids of all types, and certain Hispanic gang members. One learned to stick with one's friends and avoid the bad guys.

So in some ways, I am ready for the changes that are here. I lived that life 50 years ago.

----





reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

There can no longer be demonized as foreigners qua foreigners, which used to mean primarily European or Levantine, more broadly Asians, whether "east" or "south" and the somewhat less exotic (due to their being closer to home) Hispanics.

---

Well, if one grows up as an American watching American movies, those foreigners are...foreign. I assume foreigners fed a steady diet of Doris Day and John Wayne films found those All-American icons...foreign.

One remake in which the racial mix was flipped was the recent "Magnificent Seven." I was rather disappointed to see the South of the Border conflict of the original(American gunslingers help oppressed Mexican peasants fight Mexican bandits), thrown out in favor of an almost all-white villain force(less one "turncoat Native American.") Eli Wallach had been such a robust villain as the bandit(and he was not a Mexican, back then you could cast all types as all types.) He was replaced with a weird faced white guy playing one "Bartholomew Bogue." Catchy nice, loss of the international flavor of the original.

But then of course, whereas the original 7 were 6 white guys and one rebellious young Mexican, the 2016 Mag 7 were led by black Denzel Washington and populated with a Hispanic, and Asian, and an Native American. (Plus three white guys.) SPOILER: All the white guys get killed. A commentary?

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Nor can, as you noted, these groups be made fun of, with maybe a few exceptions, such as Carol Burnett's (apparently) Central European boss as played by Tim Conway ("Miss Whiggins!"), which I can't imagine even a Czech or Hungarian objecting to today.

---

I always thought the "Miss Whiggins" accent was meant to be Swedish or Norwegian -- "Miss-sus A-Wiggins!" Which is allowed, yes?

---

Also, Arte Johnson's German parody on Laugh-In ("very interesting!").

---

Well, I don't think Nazi accents will ever be off limits. Which really allows for mocking the German dialect, which isn't very nice...but sure can be funny.

I always liked this line from Peter Sellers' Dr. Strangelove about a post nuclear world and how survivors would survive:

"Animals vill be bred....UND SLAUGHTERED!"

And of course, Madeline Kahn did a great Marlene Dietrich in "Blazing Saddles":

"My...a wed wose!

The sad part here is that these voices -- and who knows why -- were FUNNY, made us laugh, made us want to say the same catch phrases("Verr-y interesting.") And now...kinda gone with the wind. LIKE Gone with the Wind. (Black dialect: on Laugh-In, Sammy Davis could get away with saying "Do the name Ruby Begonia ring a bell?" in a heavy Suth'in accent.)

But one can almost automatically determine which dialects are in and which are out nowadays.

Note: I've been listening to old Frank Sinatra concerts on Sirrius radio, and he OFTEN fell into a deep "Amos n Andy" black comedy voice between songs. Its just the way it was.




reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

On the other hand, for comedy for comedy's sake it's common to see various hyphenate-Americans (sic?) of other races to do their own thing in their own way with only others of the same background kicking in. Lots of East Asians doing this; even a Muslim guy; various Middle Eastern groups; obviously, Hispanics.

---

If I understand you correctly(and I worry I don't), if Cheech Marin can get away with a "funny" overdone Hispanic vocal pattern...its because he's Hispanic himself. And on through the other Ethnic/racial groups.

Which reminds me: we had a rich vein of Jewish comics who set their line reading tempo to Yiddish/New York idioms...isn't there a current streaming hit about a female Jewish comic based on Joan Rivers?

---

The "set-up" seems nearly always geared to "Middle Americans", as in REAL white people from the Heartland,

--

Numerically, there are STILL a lot of those people to whom entertainment is geared, whether "white comic to white audience" or "bringing together the cultures."

---

with the New Americans applying for membership (as it were) in the new diversity friendly U.S. in not the old school Life With Luigi manner, with exaggerated stereotyped accents and mannerisms but as "equals", often college grads, talkin' just like everyone else, using heavy doses of irony as their "ticket to ride" into the mainstream.

---

I remain positive rather than negative about race relations in America. I believe that there is an obscenity now in both the politics and cable news structures of race, but those people are paid to divide; the rest of us have to live with each other. And do.

---



===

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A little bit of HItchocck on the side here: his was mainly a "white world" but Topaz has a great black character(Roscoe Lee Browne) in a sequence set in a famous black community(Harlem), and then heads on down to Cuba for some Hispanic interactions(bad Cubans, good Cubans.) Hitchcock did dip his toe into race. A little bit. Sometimes. (See also the black man in the very tight quarters of "Lifeboat.")

reply
formatting help
[–] telegonus (736) 6 years ago

Yes, EC, and also that strange hour TV long show of Hitchcock's very strange entry, Where The Woodbine Twineth, which if that's not a racial subtext in it I don't know what a subtext is. On the other hand it doesn't deal specifically with race; and yet it's set in the contemporary Deep South, and black characters abound. I take it as an allegory told like a fairy tale; and it has the good taste (good art, too) of not showing its hand. I don't think it quite comes off, however it's lyrical and it plays well. A better director might have helped.

reply
formatting help
[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

You are losing your faculties old man. You forgot to headline: "SPOILERS" for the 3 people who have never seen this classic.

reply
formatting help
[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Psycho?

It is true, though. It is a movie that is so old now that entire new generations will be finally see the movie without knowing the twist, the staircase murder and even the famous shower scene.

Still...its not like it hasn't been in the culture a long time.

Yes, the faculties start to go when one gets older. But that's cause for sadness, not glee....

reply
formatting help
About | Contact | Privacy | Terms | Standards | Contribute
Top Movie Discussions
Gladiator II Discussion | Wicked Discussion | The Substance Discussion | Red One Discussion | Heretic Discussion | Smile 2 Discussion | Anora Discussion | Emilia Pérez Discussion | Venom: The Last Dance Discussion | Terrifier 3 Discussion | The Wild Robot Discussion | Conclave Discussion | Blitz Discussion | Moana 2 Discussion | We Live in Time Discussion
Copyright © 2017 - 2024 MovieChat LLC

MovieChat is not affiliated with IMDb, IMDb Message Boards, or Reddit