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Ruminations on the Opening Shot Over Phoenix Arizona in Psycho

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Though Hitchcock was a master of the Great Movie Ending (see: Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, NXNW, Psycho, The Birds, Frenzy)...he was also a master, in many cases, of the Great Movie Opening -- something arresting to "get the audience into the mood" of the story almost immediately.

Consider Vertigo. The opening shot is a horizontal mass with a blurry background. We are disoriented for maybe five seconds before giant human hands grab that horizontal mass(it proves to be the metallic top of a steel rooftop ladder), the camera pulls back fast -- and we see a man leap onto the roof, to be pursused in order by a uniformed cop and a plain clothes cop(James Stewart) across the rooftops of San Francisco.

The opening chase and deadly cliffhanger starts Vertigo off with a bang -- but there is also that weird opening image with the horizontal mass and the blurry background. Steven Spielberg would use exactly this shot over 40 years later for the opening of "Munich"(2005)

The dazzling opening credits of North by Northwest find the horizontal/vertical lines of a map(the lines "angled") morphing into the side of an NYC glass skyscraper, in turn yielding to a group of separate shots of NYC at the end of a workday -- hundreds(thousands?) of workers crowding into the subway tunnels, boarding their trains, fighting over their cabs, running for their busses(Hitchcock misses his) -- the frenzy of a gigantic city and its worker ants in an end-of-the-day rush.

So: Vertigo opens with a "sweep" of the San Francisco skyline at night(with a chase across the rooftops.) North by Northwest opens with a montage of New York City masses.

Next came Psycho, with ITS opening sweep of a city.

"Phoenix, Arizona" the titles tell us. And things are gonna be different from either the San Francisco skyline in Vertigo or NYC mass frenzy in NXNW.

The first thing I'll say is the Bernard Herrmann's music for the "Psycho Phoenix Opening Shot" is inextricably connected to the visuals: the music creates a FEELING about this skyline shot that is decidedly against the action music of the Vertigo SF chase or the NXNW NYC opening frenzy.

Here, Herrmann's music is...bleak. As black and white as the grayish cinematography that captures the Phoenix skyline. The music has yearning(as Marion yearns for marriage and Sam yearns for financial freedom) and a kind of torpor -- its "Friday, December 11, Two Forty Three in the afternoon" -- the lazy final hours of the lazy final day of the week...with a blessed weekend just within reach.

Hitchcockians know three things about the opening shot:

ONE: Screenwriter Joe Stefano -- inspired to "beat" the opening camera movement of Welles' "Touch of Evil" -- wrote the opening shot of the Phoenix skyline as a dazzling helicopter shot that would "float and dive" over Phoenix, past too-specific things(specific neighborhoods, a stockyard) that really didn't exist in a city as little as Phoenix), until the camera went down, down down and into the hotel room window where Marion and Sam are finishing their tryst.

TWO: Hitchcock sent a second unit crew in a helicopter to try to capture this opening shot -- and they failed. Secure camera mounts hadn't been invented yet -- the footage was just too shaky("shaky cam" in 1960?) to capture the effect of smooth camera movement that was required by Hitchcock.

THREE: So Hitchcock sent a second unit crew to Phoenix AGAIN. They planted the camera on a Phoenix rooftop and gave us what we have today -- three(?) slow pans across the skyline -- left to right, dissolve, left to right, dissolve, left to right, dissolve -- until the camera could finally "make its descent" into the fatal hotel window.

About that "descent." Mainly the camera movement is "smooth" (left to right, left to right) and NOT downward..until it is time to descend. I think we end up with a combination of ONE descent done by the Phoenix second unit crew and then TWO descents into the hotel window...likely done on the Universal backlot and into a window of one of the "New York Street" buildings on the lot.

More about that "descent": the camera moves are invaluable, but Herrmann's music is a "full partner" here. The music is bleak, sad, yearning, depressing (and, wrote one critic, "of a certain beauty")...but it also is music that DESCENDS. With the camera, down, down, down, into that window.

One year earlier, in 1959, Herrmann's music for "Journey to the Center of the Earth" ALSO descended, but in very deep, deep DEEP bass notes that almost broke the soundtrack in bottom-of-the-chord charts basso profundo vibration.

Well, we're not going down to the center of the earth in Psycho(except, maybe down into the depths of human madness.) So THIS "descent" music is more normal than that for Journey to the Center of the Earth.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Between Herrmann's music and Hitchcock's "titles guidance" on where and when we are(Phoenix, Arizona, Friday December 11, Two Forty Three PM) we in the audience are FILLED with emotion about this opening shot.

We feel the descent. We feel the torpor. We feel the sadness. We feel the yearning. And we "feel" the mood of a Friday at 2:43 pm....it is the end of everything (and as Hitchcock noted to Truffaut, "this extended lunch hour is the only time this poor girl has to spend with her lover.") We also feel the short days, dark sunlight end of the year bleakness of December(which is also the Christmas month, which is barely shown here, via an "accidental" second unit shot of Xmas decorations that compelled Hitchcock's "December" title.)

Whenever I put Psycho into the DVD player, whether for a full viewing(rare; about once a year), or to "check something"(several times a year, for this board and other uses), I make sure to experience the emotion of the opening shot over Phoenix, and Herrmann's music for it. The dark adventure of Psycho is being expressed here both in terms of "background"(the desperation of Sam and Marion; the workaday business of a Southwestern desert city) and "foreground"(once you've seen Psycho even once, you know this shot is going to launch Marion Crane on a high-tension adventure of flight that ends in high-gruesome horror.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Truffaut reminded Hitchcock that the opening Psycho shot was a gimmick he used often "from the biggest to the smallest, from the highest to the lowest) and by 1960, there were a few examples of that: Foreign Correspondent, Notorious, Rope, Vertigo, NXNW.

But none of those predecessors "sold" the concept of "highest to the lowest" as well as the Psycho opening shot.

Until 1972, when Hitchcock finally had the helicopter camera mounts to "do it right" and open Frenzy with a long sweeping helicopter ride down the Thames River, under the Tower Bridge, and then down to a riverside crowd listening to a politician's speech about water pollution.

I love Frenzy, and I love that opening shot(especially the "City of London" insignia over the skyscape)...but not as much as the opening shot of Psycho. The music is INTENTIONALLY different than Psycho -- with an emphasis on "Homecoming Return to London" and fake ceremonial pomp. The "mood" statement is "counterpunctural" in Frenzy: all this grand scale royal gaity for a movie about sex murders in private rooms.... (and the rejected Henry Mancini version of this royal music --smooth, modern, sinister around the edges -- is much better than what Ron Goodwin put in the final version.)

No, the Herrmann music over Phoenix creates an entirely DIFFERENT mood for a "highest to lowest" opening...a mix of bleak emotion on the one hand and a "clue to the coming horrors" on another.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

This: watching the 1960 Phoenix opening to Psycho now, I'm amazed at how many of those buildings are GONE. I travelled to Phoenix in 2009 and spent time on a parking garage rooftop looking over the skyline and I found THREE 1960 buildings(to my eye) still standing -- including the building in which Sam and Marion have their tryst. So "Psycho" ends up a monument to a City Long Vanished: 1960 Phoenix. Indeed, much of that 1960 Phoenix skyline was gone when Van Sant restaged the shot(complete with helicopter POV, and not necessarily an improvement) in 1998.

This is pretty true of the Frenzy London skyline too -- nowadays, opening shots over the London skyline always reveal that huge "Ferris Wheel" type thing dominating the skyline that was nowhere in evidence when the Frenzy London shot was made in 1971.

And this: when Psycho was broadcast late at night in February 1968(I got to watch about the first 30 minutes), the local channel KABC-TV did two things: (1) They clipped off the opening credit sequence and moved it to the end of the movie, after The End(SOP for ALL KABC TV movie showings, they felt opening credits were extraneous) and (2) they superimposed words and names OVER Hitchcock's opening shot: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho....starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh. I remember to this day how BAD that all looked. But we took our movies on TV as we got them in those days.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The opening shot over Phoenix in Psycho has its "behind the scenes tales" (Stefano's grandiose version in the script -- the failed second unit helicopter shot attempt) but ultimately it is best to luxuriate in the shot as we have it, and the movie that we have it.

I always find myself incredibly moved as that shot, with its lonely music, makes its lonely moves across and down, into a lonely city. I think about the buildings that have been torn down. I take note of the camera moving across the side of a movie theater -- you can tell by the building's shape -- and I wonder: was Psycho shown in that theater? (You could thus see the theater you were in , seeing Psycho, while WATCHING Psycho.)

And this: there's this one car that stops at an intersection and drives on. The camera lingers on it and you can't help but be amused: that anonymous driver had no idea that he or she was to be immortalized in "Psycho."

OF NOTE: The "down, down, down descent music" Herrmann wrote for the camera move over Phoenix...COMES BACK later in the movie, almost arbitrarily, as Marion interacts with Norman (I think it is there when he appears to her on the porch with his sandwiches and milk). Herrmann, evidently with Hitchcock's consent, elected to use the theme of sadness and descent from the opening shot over Phoenix...to describe Marion's ongoing descent(to the Bates Motel and its horrors) and lonlieness.

Its all very great.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

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