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Psycho and The International Film Market

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

Psycho...interesting as cinema, as blockbuster, as story, and as marketing history. And as distribution history.

For a movie with a "big twist ending"(and maybe a big twist about Janet Leigh's fate, I'm not so sure) this movie sure was "rolled out" slow from market to market(how'd those secrets stay safe?):

June: America, the East Coast. NYC(two theaters, lines round the block all the time) and Eastern Seaboard cities like Philadelphia and Boston at the same time(back then, the East Coast was evidently the center of America; the West was still underpopulated and untamed.)

August: America, The West Coast. My research shows that Psycho opened on a Friday in August in LA, SF, and Seattle. It managed to rise to #2 movie in America that weekend, right behind the newly opened Rat Pack opus Ocean's 11(which I kind of find fitting -- Hitchcock and the Rat Pack both peaked in that 50's/60's cusp -- though Dino would peak with his TV show starting in 1965.) I don't know how Psycho did in limited release back in June.

Summer in general: People have reminiscenced about seeing Psycho in New Jersey and Chicago and DC. I assume it got to Phoenix, Arizona. The East Coast June/West Coast August roll-outs had to be "papered over" everywhere else in the US.

October: "All Over the World." Hitchcock, knowing he had not only the biggest hit of his career on his hands, but a phenonmenon in America(then the center of the movie world), elected to accompany Psycho all around the world: England, France, Italy...Japan, Australia. There are photos showing him promoting Psycho in some of those countries(Hitch holding a Koala Bear in Australia), simply accounts of others.

I can only imagine the pride Hitchcock felt to be the ambassador of such a weird movie event. Psycho wasn't a "happy maker" as The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins would soon be. Nor an action franchise as Early Bond would be(peaking with Goldfinger and Thunderball). It was "the blockbuster that nobody really should be seeing"....forbidden fruit for a young generation, disreputable and tacky for an older one. But it had SOMETHING. The fear factor maybe. NO movie had turned audiences into emotional scream machines like Psycho did. And as Peter Bogdanovich, said "Psycho was the first movie to make it dangerous to go into a movie theater." (In terms of what the movie could do your nerves and your lingering memory of terror.)

What intrigues me in looking back on "Hitchcock's international Psycho tour of fall 1960" is how much the movie distribution patterns have changed over almost 60 years.

For in 1960, America is where the movies made 80% of their money. The rest of the world was an "aftermarket" to go pick up some loose change and add another 20% in earnings. I expect Hitchcock did better than that, what with his bringing both his personal celebrity to these other nations AND a movie that "everybody wanted to see, even if they shouldn't."

Of course, American art houses were already IMPORTING foreign films in 1960 and earlier; cadres of intellectual film critics and audiences thought they were a lot better, more "real" than American studio product (even as Hitchocck's American studio product always seemed more weird and arty THAN American studio product.)

And slowly, things began to merge.

As the sixties went on, we saw American studios often buying ENTERTAINMENT product FROM other nations. Spaghetti Westerns. Caper films(like one called Grand Slam, with Janet Leigh.) Thrillers(like one called Five Miles to Midnight, with Anthony Perkins.) Bond knock-offs. (And Bond himself was a British product, imported to America as a blockbuster franchise.) And sexual films like Barbarella.

Hitchcock himself went "Internationale" in the 60's and early 70's. After completing the All-American "Marnie" in 1964(set on the East Coast, but largely filmed on the Universal backlot in Hollywood), suddenly we got movies set in Europe like Torn Curtain and Topaz(which featured some sequences in DC and NYC to go with scenes in Copenhagen and Paris), and Frenzy(an entire British film, filmed entirely with British actors, entirely in Britain.)

I'm generalizing, but it would seem that the 70's brought more of an Asian Invasion to America. We got a lot of kung fu movies, and the American-produced "Enter the Dragon" was somewhere between a cult film and a blockbuster.

But the real change -- as we all know now -- is that suddenly, American studio films did a lot better in international markets than in America. Oh, it still mattered to have a "good US gross," but once nations around the world built theaters by the millions, and billions of international customers arrived, it was almost as if there were no foreign films anymore. It was one big marketplace now.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And hence, NOW, Marvel Movies rather routinely earn a billion. Which has rather devalued what the movies WERE -- a blockbuster was rare to achieve in America, using American dollars only as a measure. As movies like The Sound of Music, The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Jaws hit a hallowed $100 million gross....they came to MEAN something. People CAME OUT to see these movies. They were special.

A billion dollar Marvel movie -- not so much. Though when affixed to the recent African-American Marvel movie(Black Panther) and female-led Marvel movie(Captain Marvel) these billions DO mean something, and aren't taken for granted. (And Ant Man and the Wasp did not, I think, make a billion.)

A joke to/on myself. So The Avengers/Endgame has already OPENED (worldwide) at a billion plus. And yet: I haven't seen it yet. My dollars aren't in those billion. Just goes to show you: there is still an untapped audience, worldwide. Maybe a billion dollar gross isn't much of anything when a TWENTY billion gross is "possible." (And I'll see Endgame; I'll "join the crowd" -- three hours at a theater isn't the sacrifice to me that trying to commit to multiple seasons of Game of Thrones would be.)

This international marketplace has gotten a major dissing in some critical circles. I recall one critic saying that all commercial films are now geared to "the world's lowest common denominator mouth breathers." Oh, maybe. But maybe not. Meanwhile The Rock is the biggest star in the world right now because even low performing movies (in the US) like Skyscraper and Rampage(neither of which is a GOOD movie, like, say, Die Hard with its skyscraper plot) do fine outside of the US.

It is what it is. And the world grows closer together.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Which makes Hitchcock's little bitty"tour of the world" to promote Psycho in 1960(probably in about 1,000 theaters, tops) all the more quaint and historic to contemplate, even as it shows us that Hitchcock himself likely saw the power of the world marketplace way back when. Psycho's run in America made him much richer than before, but the international coin made him that much richer STILL.

And Hitchcock -- a European of sorts by birth and youth -- certainly embraced international film by making Torn Curtain, Topaz, and Frenzy in a row. Its almost as if - having made the "greatest All-American thrillers" North by Northwest(which is practically a tour OF America, right up to Mount Rushmore, and a salute TO America versus Communism) and Psycho(whose horror stems in part from its small town, rural American backwater setting) , Hitchcock was content to leave America(after The Birds and Marnie) and go join "his people" in Europe. (Or, in the case of Torn Curtain, to import the entire supporting cast FROM Europe and have them act in Universal soundstages in Hollywood.)

And it was weird when he "came back" to America for his final film, Family Plot. Hitch refused to set the movie in an identifiable real city in America. Instead, he shot parts in LA and parts in SF and merged them into an unnamed city with a fictional town nearby("Barlow Creek.") I've always wondered: what was up with that? Partially I don't think he wanted to compete with Vertigo as a "San Francisco movie"(Family Plot would lose), and he didn't like LA as named location. But who knows?

In any event, I think it can be noted in this post that Hitchcock foresaw the value of foreign markets even when they weren't so big. Hence the long tour with Psycho, and movies later made in Europe with European actors.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And this: (finally, arbitrarily) -- my understanding is that the first place Universal made a big killing with TV series syndication was in Japan...when Alfred Hitchcock Presents/Hour episodes that evidently were huge ratings hits in Japan. Who knows, maybe they really dug all those stories of spouses killing each other.

Just like America did.

[–] VictorVictoria (40) 6 years ago

You sure know your Psycho. Do you think it was influenced by Touch of Evil?

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Oh, a few of us here know our Psycho. Welcome!

Yes, I do think it was influenced by Touch of Evil. In fact, as Psycho went into production in 1959, Hitchcock allowed a press report that "Psycho will begin with the longest continuous opening shot since Touch of Evil." As it turned out, while such a shot was contemplated in the screenplay, it required helicopter camera work that was impossible to do in 1959(camera shakes too much.) So instead, the still-impressive opening shot is from a stable camera, panning(with dissolves) across and into Phoenix Arizona.

But there are other things, of course. In Touch of Evil, Janet Leigh is menaced at an isolated (Mexican) motel, managed by a weird jittery American night man(Dennis Weaver, playing things WAY over the top, not as a psycho, but as a nervous nincompoop.) The menace is from a Mexican criminal gang but still -- isolated motel, weird manager, Janet Leigh in her underwear...

And other than Leigh, Touch of Evil stars an actor named Mort Mills -- an American DA here, the highway cop in Psycho.

Plus: though Psycho bore the Paramount logo on first release, it was made entirely at Universal, with Universal sets and sound-effects -- just like Touch of Evil.

Critic-director Peter Bogdanovich, a friend of Orson Welles, said that Welles was always angry that Hitchcock "stole from Touch of Evil" to make Psycho. And yet...Psycho was from a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch, with an entirely different story and setting than Touch of Evil. And: Touch of Evil, while more focused and coherent than most Welles films, still had an "art film" feeling. Psycho had a strong plot, clear, big shock sequences, and a great twist at the end. In short, Psycho was always destined to be a much bigger hit than Touch of Evil, because Hitchcock chose a novel and approach that made it so.

IMHO.