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Wrong Guessers and Right Guessers

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I occasionally re-read -- or remember -- 1960 reviews of Psycho. Tracking down those reviews was rather a multi-decade project in my youth, driven by a mastery of library microfiche machines and bound issues of newspapers and magazines in the stacks. Though I used some of this research to write "official" papers on Psycho for grades, more often it was a relaxation. I'd award myself a half hour of Hitchcock research(on NXNW and others of his movies, too, but mainly on Psycho in the Hitchcock canon) after a hour or so of homework research.

The "fun" aspect of reading all those 1960 reviews was seeing what kind of spoilers were offered in them. Yes, all the way back in 1960, the issue of a spoiler WAS an issue...and particularly with Psycho, what with its two big surprises: the early shower murder and the twist ending.

As we've discussed, anybody trying to "hide" the fact of the early shower murder of star Janet Leigh in 1960 must not have seen that Hitchcock trailer that's all about(at the end): the SHOWER MURDER. But oh, well, print the legend...

And thus, many of the 1960 reviews hid news of the shower murder, but a few gave it away..with Time calling it "the messiest, most nauseating murder ever fllmed"(while not specifying the shower locale) and noting that it covered "every twitch, gurgle, hemmohrage and convulsion by which a living human being becomes a corpse."

Newsweek noted, "a scene that begins with a close-up of a shower nozzle overhead throws more scare into the movie than the haunted house on the hill."

Plot wise, the reviews seemed to simply have to note that the movie began with Janet Leigh but...soon characters were coming to investigate a disappearance.

There was a lot of avoidance of giving away the twist ending, but there was "dancing" around Perkins relationship with his mother, and a giveaway sentence in some reviews: "Murders apparently committed by the mother..."

Actually, I think the reviews MOST did not give away the Arbogast killing. I guess he just didn't matter. But this would help make his death the most scream-able in the movie. NOBODY saw it coming.

Back to the twist ending. Newsweek wrote(paraphrased from memory), the following:

"Psycho depends on a big, specific twist. Viewers will work hard to guess what the twist is. Right guessers will deal themselves out of the suspense early on. Wrong guessers will be enthralled throughout."

That's a "hook" that has always lingered in my reading of Psycho reviews. By lingering on the fact that there WAS a twist, Newsweek(the critic wasn't named) was setting up viewers to look for it; that may have hurt. If you don't KNOW a twist is coming, you just "go with the flow"(Mother is the killer.) But if you are looking for the twist, well, maybe in 1960 a few folks noticed that they never saw Mother's face, or that Norman and she were only once together in the same shot before the ending. (And indeed, one 1960 reviewer wrote "I saw through the whole thing shortly after Perkins makes his first appearance." OK...)

Me, personally, I never got the chance to experience Psycho with the twist unknown. I pretty much was told(by my MOTHER, heh), that Psycho was about a killer played by Tony Perkins who dressed up like his mother. Oh, well. (Oh, I think maybe I got three minutes or so where she told the story like Mother was the killer before "the big reveal." Three minutes or so. I do remember mother glossing over the detective's demise: "So he goes up to the house and...well, you never see HIM again.")

I believe this: if I HAD seen Psycho with no pre-knowledge of the twist, I surely would have fallen for it. I know this because I never saw coming the twist endings of: The Sting, The Sixth Sense, and The Crying Game. I'm just no good at it. (Actually, in The Crying Game, its a twist MIDDLE.)

But what of that Newsweek assessment, again: "Right guessers will deal themselves out of the suspense early."

Hmm. How so?

I've thought on this, and if an audience member guesses -- firmly -- that Norman is the real killer, they are only REALLY dealt out of the suspense when: Lila is exploring the house. Because Norman is down there with Sam the whole time. So that's what, about ten minutes of the movie? And when Norman knocks Sam out and runs up to the house..."right guessers" were probably pretty scared.

And yet: if you are SURE that Norman is the killer, Lila's slow walk up to Mrs. Bates in the cellar, I guess..."deals you out of the suspense." EXCEPT: you know Norman is in the house, somewhere, likely to come for Lila...and that is a DIFFERENT kind of suspense.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A question begged: even if you are a "right guesser"...you are only a GUESSER. Just how SURE could any 1960 audience member be that Norman was the killer? Clues are put out that he is, but just as many clues are put out that he isn't ("Then who's that woman buried in Greenlawn Cemetary?")

Critic Raymond Durgnat wrote that audiences at the fruit cellar were like this: "Many in the audience by now have probably figured out that Norman = Mother, but they can't be sure, and therefore since in the fruit cellar scene they cannot be sure if the danger is in front of Lila(Mother) or behind Lila(Norman)...they yield to a kind of helpless hysteria."

That's on point. Likely part of the reason audiences screamed their lungs out with the back-to-back fruit cellar reveals(Mother is DEAD! Norman is MOTHER!) is that conflicting "guesses" suddenly explode into explanation.

But back to the Newsweek statement: "Right guessers will deal themselves out of the suspense early."

Oh, yeah? Even if you are SURE that Norman is the killer, that shower scene is a whopper(and probably plays more creepy still if you KNOW that's Norman in that wig). The movie "moves Norman screen right" and out of the shot(to the dark corner of the motel) when Arbogast returns to the motel, but you can be sure that if you've pegged Norman as the killer...you're scared for the detective just as much when he climbs that hill and climbs those stairs.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Which reminds me. I once stumbled onto a re-run of the "fifties-set"(sixties-set?) TV show "Happy Days" and here was dialogue between the show's father figure(Tom Bosley) and a friend of Bosley's son Ron Howard("Ralph Malph")

Tom Bosley and his wife are putting on their coats to go out. Ralph Malph talks to them:

Ralph Malph: Where are you going?
Bosley: We're going out to see Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
Ralph Malph: Oh, I saw it! It's really scary! You find out at the end that it was Tony Perkins killing everybody, dressed like his mother!

Bosley and wife take off their coats in resignation, sit down on their couch and turn on the TV.

Aw, hell...they should have GONE! Psycho is still scary -- and cinematically brilliant, and unforgettably acted -- even if you know that Norman's the killer.