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"Psycho" and "Strait-Jacket" (1964) (SPOILERS FOR BOTH FILMS)

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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TCM showed Strait-Jacket the other night, and reminded me of the key role that Strait-Jacket plays in film history:

It shows you exactly how BAD a movie COULD have been made out of Robert Bloch's novel, Psycho.

A main reason: Robert Bloch himself penned the screenplay for Strait-Jacket. And -- as much as I DO admire his source novel Psycho for premise, setting, and set-pieces -- as a screenwriter, Bloch was sub-par.

Its his dialogue. Whereas Joe Stefano, in adapting Bloch's novel, could come up with sentences like "I'll replace that money with her fine, soft flesh," "If it doesn't jell, it isn't aspic," "Mother's not herself today," "I think we're all in our private traps" "We all go a little mad sometimes." --Bloch's dialogue in Strait-Jacket is banal, straightforward, almost always and only in service of plot exposition. Its as if Bloch couldn't go that extra distance to "embellish" a line so that characters said more than regular people do.

The director of Strait-Jacket was William Castle, who spent the late fifties making a name as a maker of cheap b/w horror movies(with a modern-day crime thriller feeling rather than a Dracula's Castle gothic tone) and selling them with gimmicks("Death insurance" sold in the lobby, a electric "tingle" jolt in the movie seats.) Hitchcock homaged William Castle in general, and Castles' House on Haunted Hill in particular , with Psycho, and he got a lot of the Castle atmosphere right: the horrors unfolding in or near small town America; the workaday lives of the characters, the isolation of rural America becoming a source of death and danger.

When William Castle saw Psycho, he picked up on Hitchcock's copycatting, and immediately launched a copycat movie OF Psycho: Homicidal, which came out in 1961(one year after Psycho) and which got a Time magazine reviewer (uncredited) who found "Homicidal" to be BETTER than "Psycho," if only for its better "pace."

That Time favoring of Homicidal over Psycho stands as one of the great movie critic mistakes of all time. For it revealed the unnamed reviewer as so bankrupt of even rudimentary knowledge of film as to render the job of film critic...worthless. A film critic who thought that Homicidal was better than Psycho....simply doesn't know the basics of his job. (I am speaking here of both the technical qualities of Psycho-- the shower scene uber alles -- and its superior dialogue and acting.)

After Homicidal, Castle copycatted, of all people, Walt Disney, but in exactly the right way: Castle saw Walt's b/w cheapie "The Absent Minded Professor"(a blockbuster) and saw it as "Psycho: the Walt Disney comedy", and so he made a similar b/w cheapie fantasy college campus comedy called "Zotz!" with Tom Poston in for Fred MacMurray. Again, an inferior film, but again, on target as FEELING like its model. As a kid, I thought "Zotz!" WAS a Walt Disney movie....

Anyway, came 1963 or so, Castle decided to go back to the "Psycho" well, but with an additive: Joan Crawford as his star. Joan had just hit big in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane," which was sold like Psycho(black and white, a crazy old woman in Bette Davis) but played more like camp melodrama.

The trio put together to sell "Strait-Jacket" were: William Castle(producer-director), Joan Crawford(Baby Jane star) and Robert Bloch(Psycho author...but not screenwriter). The three of them even acted in a rather stitled trailer where they discuss, as "horror giants", what they want to do with Strait-Jacket. Says Crawford to Bloch, "This is OUR movie, so we can give it as many murders as we want!"

With "Strait-Jacket," William Castle left his haunted house horror behind and went deeper into the realities of psychotic behavior, clearly seeing Psycho as his "more adult" guide. Alas, Bloch could not write, nor could Castle direct, a movie with the adult sensibility of Hitchocck's film. Strait-Jacket was a B, through and through.

The movie was sold as doing Psycho one better in the bladed death department: "WARNING" said the ads "Strait-Jacket vividly depicts AXE MURDERS." Whereas Psycho famously introduced death by big butcher knife as a scare tactic, its successors upped the ante. Here: an ax. In Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte: a meat cleaver. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- You Know What.

As it turned out, Strait-Jacket only sometimes vividly shows those ax murders. The movie opens in the early 40's, when a "young" Joan Crawford finds her hubby(Lee Majors) and a hussy in their the family bed. Crawford "goes a little mad" and chops off the heads of the sleeping couple, with the heads clearly falling in shadow.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Flashing forward 20 years to Crawford's release from the asylum, when the ax murders begin again, they are "vivid" only one time: George Kennedy's loutish, blackmailing farmhand get his head chopped off in a pig slaughterhouse (actually a George Kennedy DUMMY gets its hilarious head chopped off.) But two other victims(both male) simply react to a close-up of an axe coming down again and again at them(shades of the knife going down out of the frame at Arbogast in Psycho) -- we never see the murders, either in terms of a "clean be-heading" or multiple ax blows.

I'm assuming that late Hays Code 1964 censors told Castle: "You can chop three heads off...but not five."

Setting aside the opening slaughter of Crawford's husband and his lover, the murders in the present-day scenes of Strait-Jacket follow the Psycho template, Arbogast division: long slow build-ups of victims walking around and into dark places until the killer reveals herself and the chopping begins. Well, two of the murders happen this way. In the third, a rich landowner pads around his bedroom getting ready for bed and only meets his chopper when he enters his closet and bends down to pick up his slippers(the idea of a killer lurking in the clothes hanging in a closet IS a scary one: I've worried about that since a childhood with closets.)

Watching these "slow build up to sudden attack" scenes in Strait-Jacket I found that they had some of the same power of Arbogast climbing the stairs in Psycho, but were missing two key elements: (1) a compelling REASON for the character to go where he goes(the victim sort of wanders around aimlessly as if WANTING to get killed) and (2) a lack of cinematic power when the murders finally occur....Castle's directorial work is lazy, perfunctory.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The plot of Strait-Jacket is similar to an on-point movie of almost two decades later: 20 years after committing horrible murders and being put away in an asylum, killer Joan Crawford is declared sane released into the custody of her brother(Leif Erickson) and his wife, and returns to the brother's rural ranch. And then the axe killings start up again....

Hey, that's Psycho II: 22 years after committing horrible murders and being put away in an asylum, killer Norman Bates is declared sand and released into the custody of a psychiatrist(Robert Loggia) and returns to his rural home(the Bates House.) And then the knife murders start up again....

Well, there are only so many stories. I still find it amazing that authorities would release people who committed bloody slaughter-murders; I wonder if this EVER happens in real life(Although Joan's act was a mad act of jealousy and love -- like when Norman killed his mother and HER lover.) Oh, well.

Strait-Jacket compares OK to Psycho II -- they are both Bs with weak dialogue -- but no way it compares to Psycho. And(SPOILER ALERT) , at the end Strait-Jacket makes a total bow TO Psycho: the new axe murders, we learn, are being committed by Joan Crawford's adult daughter(Diane Baker) , wearing her mother's clothes and a wig(but a twist: the clothes and the wig create Joan Crawford with black hair, circa 1944, not an "old lady." Baker even wears a Joan Crawford MASK for her killings, which leads to a climax in which the REAL Joan Crawford fights a FAKE Joan Crawford..)

I believe that Robert Bloch wrote the Strait-Jacket screenplay as an original. He had written no book to base it on, so he was really making his own remake of Psycho, in a way.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And I'll say this: Strait-Jacket gets RIGHT something that Psycho got right, and that Hitchocck stole from William Castle: the rural setting for the horrors(this ranch is as distant from civilization as the Bates Motel), and the small town banality that surround the "gory psycho horror" of the murders in the story.

There are angles on the ranch property in Strait-Jacket that show you the distant brushy hills and give you a sense of an "openness" that Psycho maybe could have benefitted from. Psycho was all close-ups on soundstages and the backlot; in Strait-Jacket, one gets a sense of the "wide open spaces" that surround the Ranch of Gory Death and underline the scary isolation of things. (For the final murder of the rich landowner, the scene shifts to his mansion, but it, TOO, is isolated from civilization -- he and his wife are all alone.)

In one scene in Strait Jacket, Joan Crawford and her daughter Diane Baker "drive into town" to go shopping and we get some nice 1964-era shots of the streets of a small California city, complete with 1964 cars -- and an opulent Gingerbread building on the main street. One line of dialogue in the movie tells us this is Riverside, California: a southern California enclave that once bespoke of orange groves and fresh air and now bespeaks of smog, gangs, and poverty. But it looks nostalgic in Stait-Jacket, and gives the movie a REAL "Fairvale, California" to contemplate as the backdrop to gory murder.

The locales and rural look of Strait-Jacket give it a direct link to Psycho and a strong sense of atmosphere, but alas the dialogue is banal, the murder scenes are botched, and the plotting is basic. Again, one watches Strait-Jacket with a kind of "survivor's remorse": had William Castle, and not Alfred Hitchcock, bought Robert Bloch's novel of Psycho, this is as good as the movie would have been. Not very good at all.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And yet Hitchcock benefitted from how much Psycho LOOKED and FELT like a William Castle movie,in the rural setting and the atmosphere. When he set The Birds in coastal rural California one film later(in Technicolor), Hitchcock just couldn't capture the dusty gray backwater isolation that Psycho AND Strait-Jacket capture so well. The locale is crucial to those films. I might add that DePalma's Psycho-copycat, Dressed to Kill(1980), is set in NYC and hence loses all of that Psycho/Strait-Jacket feel.

Some nifty things at the end of Strait-Jacket.

No psychiatrist scene. Just a good old "mystery explainer" where Joan Crawford explains to her brother, Leif Erickson, why Crawford's daughter, Diane Baker, committed the new murders:

Baker wanted to marry a rich young man. Knowing her mother was coming home from the asylum, Baker decided to ax murder the rich young man's rich parents and get Crawford blamed for the crimes. But when an asylum shrink showed up at the ranch and decided to re-commit Crawford anyway -- Baker killed him(in a chicken coop on the ranch). So Crawford gets to stay at the ranch and the murder plot against the rich parents could proceed. But when handyman George Kennedy found the shrinks' car and determined a murder had been committed -- Baker killed him(in a pig slaughterhouse on the ranch). At the climax, Baker succeeded in killing her rich suitor's father, but was stopped from killing the mother, by Joan Crawford.

Its a mystery solution to a mystery which, in certain ways, was as simple as the set-up in Psycho: one victim after another killed because circumstances demanded it. Crawford explains all of this to her brother Erickson with a rather laughable calm -- Hitchcock, even with his shrink scene, understood that these are HORRIBLE crimes and evidence of a deeply unsettled mind. Castle and Bloch present it all with a resigned sigh.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

But then comes a rather pleasant "twist": One reason daughter Baker became insane enough to kill people with an ax is because she witnessed her mother slaughter her father and his girlfriend, when she was a little girl. Crawford now understands this -- and tells her brother that she will go live at the asylum with her daughter, and try to give the daughter the help and understanding that she could never give while in an asylum herself.

Strait-Jacket is not a good movie. It edges towards being a bad movie. But this final revelation -- that Crawford will return to asylum life to be with her insane daughter -- is something new, compassionate, and different, on the "Psycho scene." (I love her brother's shocked statement, "But...but she's in a place like YOU were!") I can't even imagine how a "cured" mental patient could bring herself to live in an asylum and try to connect with an insane daughter. Its a little unique food for thought in an otherwise copycat film.

As Crawford hugs her brother to some cheesy "happy ending" strains, Strait-Jacket plays a final, funny-gruesome card: the Columbia Lady appears...with her head chopped off and seated neatly at her feet. For an 11-year old, this was creepy "I gotta tell my schoolmates" stuff. For an adult...it is witty. But this: the music selected to accompany this shot is something else -- sweeping, majestic, and creepy all at the same time. Unsettling.

Like Hitchcock, William Castle knew how your final frames play and sound is very important to a thriller.

[–] Otter (24464) 6 years ago

I LOVE "Strait Jacket"! It's a camp masterpiece! One of Joan Crawford's most memorable and enjoyable films!

And IMHO it has a place in film history that nobody seems to appreciate but me: I swear to God that Divine based much of her persona on Joan Crawford in this film. Yes, the drag-queen star of "Pink Flamingoes" and "Female Trouble" has copied her feminine body language and mannerisms from Joan Crawford in "Strait Jacket"!

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I LOVE "Strait Jacket"! It's a camp masterpiece! One of Joan Crawford's most memorable and enjoyable films!

--

Well, that's great! I must admit that while I come at Strait Jacket from the "Psycho" angle, and from the William Castle angle -- it is quite clearly a Joan Crawford film and in certain ways no doubt feeds the culture that developed around her. The way in which her character is a gray-haired older woman who "dresses up" in a younger woman's black wig, a younger woman's dress, and a younger woman's clanking bracelets offers up a vision of Joan Crawford herself playing the part somewhat "drag." Hence, the camp angle. And there's that great moment when she lights a cigarette off of a spinning record.

---

And IMHO it has a place in film history that nobody seems to appreciate but me: I swear to God that Divine based much of her persona on Joan Crawford in this film. Yes, the drag-queen star of "Pink Flamingoes" and "Female Trouble" has copied her feminine body language and mannerisms from Joan Crawford in "Strait Jacket"!

==

Well, I've never seen those Divine films, but given the nature of how Crawford acts and moves in Strait-Jacket(the older woman trying to enact a younger woman gives off a slightly "mannish" effect)....well, yeah.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I would here also like to note that for a William Castle movie, Strait Jacket has a pretty classy cast. Crawford leading it. Diane Baker -- the same year she appeared in Marnie -- in the young female lead(she's Norman Bates-like in her girl-next-door quality; it makes her revelation as the killer somewhat Perkins-esque). George Kennedy -- a few years before he would win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar -- going way over the top, with a horrible long-haired comeover, drool-soaked voice, and general greasy manner, as the ranchhand(who in their right mind would hire HIM and let him hang around their home?) Big Leif Erickson -- a burly stalwart of 50s/60s films, as Crawford's sympathetic rancher brother. And as the psychiatrist who comes to question Crawford and ends up hacked to death for his trouble, some Pepsi Cola company executive plays the part(Crawford's husband at the time was a Pepsi Cola boss). Funny: this "slumming" soda pop executive is just fine in his part. Acting isn't THAT hard.

A bit o' trivia: one year after Strait-Jacket came out, the Gregory Peck thriller "Mirage" sported three members of the Strait-Jacket cast in it: Diane Baker(in the female LEAD for once), Kennedy(as a menacing hitman) , and Big Leif Erickson(as the main villain.) Its rather like a "Strait Jacket" reunion.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And this: when Psycho got its re-release in 1965, it was sent out with various co-features: Strait-Jacket was one, and Mirage was another. I know about the latter: the first time I saw the Alfred Hitchcock trailer for Psycho(his guided tour) was in a theater showing the Mirage trailer, and Psycho was the "exciting co-feature." I literally ran into the lobby as the Psycho trailer unfurled(I'd heard horrifying things about the movie, I wasn't about to watch a woman get bloodily stabbed to death, at my age.).

As for Psycho going out with Strait-Jacket in '65, one of my childhood friends told me that his parents saw that double bill and as far as he was concerned, his parents were the bravest people in the world!

[–] Otter (24464) 6 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

"when Psycho got its re-release in 1965, it was sent out with various co-features: Strait-Jacket was one"

Really!

Well, that was nice to put "SJ" on the double bill, after seeing "Psycho", the audiences could have used a good laugh...

---

Now, that's a funny idea, based on the reality of pairing those two films back to back for discriminating viewers. One really good(great, best) version of a 60's b/w psycho slasher film, and one fairly boneheaded one(all due respect to the star power of Joan Crawford and the presence of Big George Kennedy for "real movie" bona fides.)

But of course, when I go back to that childhood bout with these movies, the idea (to me, to my friend) was that a pair of parents who could handle the knife murders of Psycho AND the axe murders of Strait Jacket in one sitting made them...superhuman in some way. Horror, horror, and more horror...and they watched it?

Indeed, it is clear to me that Psycho is a seminal childhood event which - thanks to the quality of the film itself -- was allowed to mutate into a valued adult experience over decades. Make me 20 years old when Psycho came out in 1960, or on TV in 1967, and I would have had an entirely different emotional take on the film. Instead, I was "too young" for it (as the re-release ads took in), and it haunted me -- scared me -- like nothing else.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

There also remains something "special" about how Psycho plays out as a 1960 film -- tight(even if long in the beginning), fantastic(in the murder scenes), atmospheric(the house, the motel) -- that plays better than some of the more flat and middle-brow films of the sixties to come. For some reason I am thinking of Planet of the Apes -- somewhat thrilling, but very staid and backlot-driven and "boringly extended out" at the end(very little of consequence or action happens in the 15 minutes before Chuck Heston finds Lady Liberty.) Psycho -- a big gripping scream of a movie. Planet of the Apes -- OK and somewhat dull pretigious adult take on thriller material.

At the expense of Planet of the Apes, that goes for North by Northwest too -- the former is a fantastical experience that builds to a big climax(also involving a national monument) -- Planet of the Apes sort of peters out.

The weirdest thought connections course through my mind...from Psycho to Strait Jacket to Planet of the Apes? With an NXNW chaser? Amazing.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Back to Strait Jacket...

...in my not-strong-enough defense of John Gavin in Psycho, I can come to John's aid one more time in noting that Strait Jacket sports a REAL "stiff" in the handsome young leading man (sort of ) cast in the picture.

His name was/is John Anthony Hayes and his features are so pretty and perfect as to be kind of scary...with a deep tan, too. I'll admit he isn't given very good lines to say, but he says them stiffly.

For plot purposes, Hayes plays a rich and handsome young scion of a local dairy family. Psycho Crawford's "other side of the tracks" daughter -- quite pretty herself(Diane Baker) -- has probably landed this guy because they are the cutest young people in the isolated rural community where they live, and it was "pre-ordained."

Except the young man's parents don't approve(especially the tough rich mother) and those parents end up being targeted for axe murder.

Meanwhile: in a truly bizarre and unmotivated scene, we get Joan Crawford, drag-like in black wig, bushy eyebrows, hotsy-totsy dress and make-up, "coming on sexually" to the young rich boy, in front of her daughter. Joan may not be the modern-day killer in Strait Jacket, but something IS still wrong for her. Her decision to return to the asylum with her killer daughter at the end, but she is still nutty enough to deserve to make the trip.

You kind of feel for this young guy John Anthony Hayes in Strait Jacket. At least John Gavin had a big hit behind him(Imitation of Life) and a great script in front of him(Psycho) for his role as Sam Loomis. This fellow Hayes looks out of his league doing love scenes with Diane Baker and trying to act with Joan Crawford.

Anyway, "young hunk male ingénue" roles are always pretty thankless, but Gavin's in Psycho is much better in the writing and playing than John Anthony Hayes in Strait Jacket.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

PS. Stuff like this always amuses me: the Adonis-like John Anthony Hayes doesn't look in any way like his father could be the dumpy and tired-looking fellow played by Howard St. John in Strait Jacket. Its a visual mismatch. The elegant mother looks more like it (she would appear 12 years later as jeweler William Devane's unknowing assistant in Family Plot.)