MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Arbogast Has Very Public Legal Trouble.....

Arbogast Has Very Public Legal Trouble....

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

In the news: two famous TV actresses --Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman -- are facing federal charges related to college admissions bribes and test cheating. And the mother of a student who didn't get into key colleges is suing the actresses(and others) for keeping her son out by bribing their daughters in. $500 million lawsuit. Eh...doubtful.

I needn't go into the details, they are widely known.

But I have to say this "Psycho-skewed" mind of mine takes note that Huffman's famous actor husband, William H. Macy, is caught up in this, too.

He wasn't charged...and he's getting some bad press on that(he evidently met along with his wife with the cheating specialist, in their home -- why is the wife charged, and not the husband? Why the woman, and not the man?)

With Martin Balsam gone for 23 years now(he passed in 1996, and thus never saw the 1998 Van Sant), William H. Macy has been our "default Arbogast," if somewhat deficient(a silly hat that wasn't his fault, a sometimes wimpy voice that was his fault, and an overall feeling of a miscast actor with little commitment to his role.)

But I certainly didn't expect THIS from him. Mr. Macy will now be far more famous for a crime than for his career -- and will never win the Oscar that Mr. Balsam won(not for Psycho.)

I've noted that Macy seems to have rubbed some directors the wrong way. The Coens only worked with him once; Spielberg's people made him apologize for remarks about Jurassic Park III, he insulted Hitchcock as "kind of lame; I'm not a fan" while promoting Psycho, and he seems to have disappeared from steady character actor work in movies to settle for a cable series called...wait for it..."Shameless." (Given the crime in question...hoo boy.)

But evidently Shameless pays pretty well -- and Felicity Huffman made a killing off of Desperate Housewives. I pictured Macy as kind of has-been-ish, not nearly as wealthy as he turns out to be.

To the good, Macy dutifully showed up at the courthouse to support his wife during her arraignment.

They are about to get a whole new kind of celebrity.....

PS. I expect his Oscar-nominated turn in "Fargo" will be Macy's great claim to movie fame; rather ironic given its study of a crime gone way wrong....

[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Although I've always thought of Macy as a 'good' actor, I never liked him. He was excellent in 'Focus'.

But he always just bugged me. Even his looks bug me. Sometimes people just feel that way about an actor, with nothing really to back it up. And that rarely happens, with me.

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Well, Macy has pretty intense looks...he himself has said that he looks like "Howdy Doody." Others have noted that he looks like a ventriloquist's dummy(big head, little body and the face.)It made him too milquetoast an Arbogast in Psycho, though I must say he can sometimes lower his high-pitched voice and get a very clear, impressive tenor to it(and he DID, sometimes, as Arbogast...only to lose control of the voice and to go high-pitched on it.)

Actors roll the dice on "likeability," I think. Lucky for them, different folks like different actors because of personal preference.

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And how he approaches a role bugs me. In a movie like 'Focus' or 'Fargo', it seemed to come across as an 'important' enough role to him, he took the role seriously, putting his heart into it.

With 'Psycho', I always thought he took the job as a paycheck, it seemed as if he was just reciting his lines, all with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek because he didn't take it seriously at all.

And that was all before I read about his saying, 'There's no part to play here', or his dissing Hitchcock.

I guess I could sum it up by saying in the 'Behind the scenes' of filming Psycho '98, after filming the staircase murder in front of a green screen, he pretends to be a swimming fish. That's how I see him approaching the entire role.

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I think the bigger names on Psycho(Julianne Moore, Macy, Viggo Mortensen) were paid a LOT to do it; with newbies Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche not getting as much. Moore and Macy ended up, it seemed to me, giving "off" performances, indeed, paycheck performances. (Moore is highly acclaimed but I think she really lost the emotion of Vera Miles as Lila.)

[–] YvonneTVQueen (99) 6 years ago

He's fleeing the interview!

[–] MizhuB (165) 6 years ago

...Or anything else having to do with that movie.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

He's fleeing the interview!

...or anything else to do with that movie.

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Both nifty comments, and I'm reminded that when Macy's nebbish criminal car salesman in Fargo "flees the interview," he's really playing Norman Bates....Police Chief Marge Gunderson is Arbogast, and their banter has a little of that "exposing the lies banter" of Norman and Arbogast (with the additive "there's no reason to get snippy with me.")

A coupla years later, Macy would get the Arbogast part, and get to "switch sides." In a re-staging of what must may be the most famous interrogation in screen history(given how much Psycho is shown in high school and college film courses these days.) The opening interrogation in "Inglorious Basterds" is a recent doozy(ten years ago!) but overlong and self-indulgent, I think, against something as tense and compact as Norman/Arbogast.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As for Macy doing that swimming fish thing in the Making of Psycho DVD documentary -- not very helpful to our memories of Balsam's fall -- process it may have been, but intense the acting was. I know Macy was pretty good in his fall, too, but the "fish" bit, and others, show an actor who just isn't committed to the material. This time around.

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By the way, I've reviewed my comments above and I think there is a "disconnect." With Macy and Huffman in the news for their dark deeds, I can't really connect that to a sense of Macy as a "difficult actor"(which is what I have about him, given how the Coens never used him again, Spielberg had to have him corrected, and the Hitchcock fans stewed over his remarks.) I think the news made Macy important, I'm reminded he played Arbogast ( a fairly important role in screen history) and...there you go.

I'd like to figure that Huffman/Macy will quickly fade out of the news and all be forgetten and forgiven -- as with SOME of the sexual peccadillos out there.

But maybe not -- their crime(a variant of ANY rich folks getting ANY preference at a university) still shows them up as attacking ALL parents and their students who struggle to get in "the hard way." Lori Laughlin has been removed from some Hallmark Channel shows. "Shameless" is so "hard R" that maybe Macy can return to the show(isn't it about done, anyway?) But maybe he can't.

I've entirely lost track of what Felicity Huffman acts in these days. But I assume that Desperate Housewives made her(and Macy) bigtime rich forever.

As others have already pointed out, given current American TV culture, Laughlin and Huffman and their spouses can make money and get more famous doing some "TV contrition appearances," public apologies, donations for deserving kids, etc.

That's show biz. Today.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I expect his Oscar-nominated turn in "Fargo" will be Macy's great claim to movie fame

No, Macy's claim to fame will definitely be broader than that. He has key roles in both Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Together with his Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo these roles constitute a triptych of male ineffectiveness & failure. The type that Macy had so perfectly crystallized made it perverse to cast him as Arbogast (evidently that perversity was what van Sant wanted and got across the board, hence the hulking Norman, the boy-ish Marion, and so on).

Macy was well-cast for a lead in 2003 with The Cooler: he's the titular character, a guy who's such 'bad luck' that casinos employ him to 'cool off' customers' winning streaks just by sitting near them/talking to them. His luck begins to change (and his 'cooling powers'?), however, when he meets and falls in love with lovely Maria Bello. A great premise that really only Macy could have sold.... Hence, I reckon Macy has 4 films (and an associated very specific type) to compare with any great character actor's best from Lorre onwards.

I dare say that (i) being the face of a certain sort of agonizing male failure must take a bit of a toll on a guy, and (ii) it's a good bet that some of what enabled Macy to own these roles might not make him the easiest guy to get along with as an adult. That is, Macy radiates having probably been 'picked on' most days of his young life, giving him a talent for a certain sort of tortured role, but probably also making him a bit pricklish in real life.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I expect his Oscar-nominated turn in "Fargo" will be Macy's great claim to movie fame
No, Macy's claim to fame will definitely be broader than that. He has key roles in both Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Together with his Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo these roles constitute a triptych of male ineffectiveness & failure.

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Agreed, there, I guess...except maybe Fargo his "signature role"(the only one of those three for which he was Oscar-nommed.)

Funny thing -- both Boogie Nights and Magnolia co-star Macy with Julianne Moore and Philip Baker Hall. Those three are in Psycho(Arbogast, Lila, Sheriff Chambers.) I recall calling Van Sant's Psycho "Boogie Psycho" given that it came out about a year after "Boogie Nights.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

The type that Macy had so perfectly crystallized made it perverse to cast him as Arbogast (evidently that perversity was what van Sant wanted and got across the board, hence the hulking Norman, the boy-ish Marion, and so on).

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That's an interesting theory. If Van Sant's Psycho was indeed an experiment, why not experiment with contrarian casting across the board in the lead roles? Supporting that theory: Julianne Moore interviewed for Marion -- and she was much better suited to Janet Leigh's part, as a va-va-voom type with heart(coming off of Boogie Nights) than Heche. But Van Sant went with the boyish Heche.

That said, I think another reason Macy got cast as Arbogast is that, at the time, he was about the hottest character actor around. Had a few more years passed, I expect that both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti would have been under consideration.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Macy was well-cast for a lead in 2003 with The Cooler: he's the titular character, a guy who's such 'bad luck' that casinos employ him to 'cool off' customers' winning streaks just by sitting near them/talking to them. His luck begins to change (and his 'cooling powers'?), however, when he meets and falls in love with lovely Maria Bello. A great premise that really only Macy could have sold....

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The Cooler was a GREAT movie. With a sense of "fable" to it: Macy really CAN cool off winning streaks, and his power seems to maybe come in handy in a different way at the climax.

Also one of those movies to give beta males hope: some great sex scenes for Macy with the lovely Maria Bello.

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Hence, I reckon Macy has 4 films (and an associated very specific type) to compare with any great character actor's best from Lorre onwards.

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OK, I'm with you there. I do think he rather suddenly stopped being in a lot of major movies. "Something happened." But maybe its just that his wife got so rich off of Desperate Housewives that he didn't much need to work in anything other than indies for awhile. (I was surprised to read that he was in "Room" with Captain Marvel, there.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I dare say that (i) being the face of a certain sort of agonizing male failure must take a bit of a toll on a guy, and (ii) it's a good bet that some of what enabled Macy to own these roles might not make him the easiest guy to get along with as an adult. That is, Macy radiates having probably been 'picked on' most days of his young life, giving him a talent for a certain sort of tortured role, but probably also making him a bit pricklish in real life.

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That's an interesting analysis. Though Macy eventually won big (money, pretty and successful wife, sexy movie scenes), it was a long journey. One of his imdb quotes is "Nobody gets into acting because of a happy childhood." 'nuff said. But he IS prickly. I've read his interviews.

That said, he DID say this in promoting Psycho: "I think Arbogast is the best written role in Psycho." Maybe, maybe.

How about this for "line reading comparisons," though.

From the phone booth scene, and the moment that Arbogast reveals key information to an unseen Lila:

Balsam Arbogast: "Listen...Marion WAS up here."

Macy Arbogast: "Listen...MARION was up here."

Somehow, I think Balsam got it right.