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The Two Cellars In Psycho

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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The "fruit cellar scene" in the movie of Psycho is one of its most famous, classic, elements, yes?

Indeed, Martin Scorsese once reeled off in his superfast motormouth way, that the three famous scenes in Psycho were "theshowerscenemartinbalsamgettingkilledtheclimaxinthefruitcellar" and yeah, that's where the big screams are.

Interestingly: the screams in the shower scene and the staircase scene are from watching people die bloody deaths, but there is no murder in the fruit cellar scene, no blood, no gore. Just the release screams of seeing a "near miss" bloody murder(of Lila) and the successive revelations of two shocking sights to see: (1) Mother's skull face and (2) Norman, in Mother's drag, revealed as the killer, big knife raised high, a sickening blood-thirsty open mouth smile on his face. (I daresay Norman's face generates the biggest screams in the scene.)

So, the fruit cellar scene in Psycho. Pretty historic. A historic twist ending reveal. Historic screams. Historic images(Mother's "laughing skull face" in the light of the swinging bulb; Norman in drag.)

But did you ever notice: there are TWO cellars in the Psycho fruit cellar scene?

The scene begins for me with a classic Hitchcock composition matched by precision Hitchcock timing: Norman runs through the front door of his house and into the foyer at the exact instant Lila manages to run under the stairs to hide from him -- all in one big long shot with the staircase diagonally bi-secting the screen, Lila to the left, Norman to the right. And notice this: now, perhaps for the first time in the movie -- even if you believe that Mother is the killer -- Norman by himself is MENACING. The audience is terrified by the quick shot of Norman(from Lila's POV, through the window) running up the hill to the house, and MORE terrified when he comes through the door. He may not be the killer, but he SUPPORTS the killer(Mom.)

Norman heads up the stairs and Lila has her chance to escape to the outside. But she sees "one more door" -- a door underneath the stairs. And she is a good , caring sister -- here is one more place where Marion could be. (Alive, as a prisoner? Dead, as a hidden body? Lila WILL confront it.) So Lila gives up a chance at escape to go down for one last try at finding Marion.

And the audience starts screaming their heads off. I've read that Psycho had people screaming actual WORDS two times in the movie; to Arbogast: "Don't go UP there!!" to Lila: "Don't go DOWN there!" (Notice, as so often in Hitchcock, the poetic rhyming of the motifs.)

But Lila does go down there. Now , with a screaming crowd, you can't really hear the soundtrack, but in the privacy of your home, you can: as Lila moves towards the fruit cellar, Herrmann's music "goes low and deep" with her: down, down, down, deep bass chords..and then, when she enters the fruit cellar proper, the music shifts to the higher-pitched, light violin tones necessary to "match" the build-up to Mother's Face(and the SCRECHING violins.) Its all pretty perfect. Classic, you might say. Image. Music. Acting. Narrative.

And my buried lede: to get to the FRUIT cellar, Lila must go through....ANOTHER cellar?

Its funny how I think Psycho viewers just take this for granted. I personally don't know how old multi-story houses were designed(and note: THIS house isn't in the snowy Midwest, its in sometimes-rainy, sometimes-dry northern California.) But honestly: TWO cellars? A FIRST cellar and then a SECOND cellar BEYOND (through another door) and BENEATH(down some stairs) that first cellar?

Yes. And not only "yes" but Hitchcock -- famously cheap in the making of Psycho(we never see the living room to the left of the staircase hall) -- had that first cellar BUILT for Vera Miles to walk through en route to the fruit cellar. Honestly, Vera is "in that set" (the first cellar) for what? Forty seconds, maybe?

So it was important for Hitchcock to have that first cellar built and in the movie.

Why?

Well, first of all: to "prove his twist." In other words, to provide enough time for Norman to get dressed up as Mother (while Lila moves towards the fruit cellar) and back down the stairs and into the cellar(Lila's screams at seeing Mother draw him all the way in.)

Remember that Hitchcock made sure to "put enough time for Norman to get dressed" before the shower murder(Marion writes down her calculations at the desk and enters the bathroom and shower); and before the staircase murder(after we see Norman disappear into the corner of the motel -- heading up the hill don't you know? -- we see Arbogast canvass the motel office and parlor for awhile before heading up the hill. Gives Norman time to dress, in both cases. Same here with the extra cellar and Lila moving through it first.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But maybe, as well: did old houses have two cellars? How about this? The first room is the BASEMENT( a general lower level storage area), with a fruit cellar(deeper, COLDER) behind and behind the basement.

I decided to "go to the source" on this sequence. The Robert Bloch novel. The logistics are different in the novel: its late afternoon, there's a storm raging, the house interiors are so dark that Lila can't see unless and until she hits light switches.

She goes into the KITCHEN in the dark, turns on a light switch, then goes down into...yep, a basement. And the basement has a furnace in it. Bloch builds up a lot of terror on Lila's thoughts that (a) Marion's bones may be burned in there and that (b) when she opens the furnace door, flames will pour out. But no, its un-used, the ashes are cold.

And then Lila sees an "Indian blanket" on the wall -- which covers "another door." The door to "an old-fashioned fruit cellar." And thus we go to the climax, with one other difference: before Lila enters the fruit cellar to find mom, she hears someone lock the cellar door behind her (she finds the fruit cellar door while trying to hide under the basement stairs.)

So, "the same but different" from book to film. A basement and a fruit cellar in both . A furnace -- only in the book?(But, ah, the original script of Psycho has Norman burning Mother's clothes in the furnance and Psycho II ends up with the stabbed and dead Lila Crane Loomis...in the furnace CHARCOAL!

So I suppose that Hitchcock...in trying to be faithful to his source novel(and he was VERY faithful to his source novel, chapter by chapter, scene by scene once Marion gets to the motel)...made sure that a small basement set was built to lead to the fruit cellar set. Technical question: were the basement and fruit cellar sets CONNECTED? Or filmed separately? We'll never know.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I will note this: in the Bloch novel, the basement AS a basement is much more detailed than in the Hitchcock film: the furnace in one corner, laundry table, a table with all of Norman's taxidermy materials(KNIVES, many of them; "blobs" of gooey material; string and wire.)

I guess you could say, in some ways, the "detail" of Robert Bloch's basement and fruit cellar in his Psycho actually presaged the complex basement and cellars of the psycho killer Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs(based in part, as was Norman Bates, on the Real Ed Gein.)

Comparing the basement/fruit cellar sequence in the Bloch novel to the basement/fruit cellar in the Hitchcock film is somewhat revelatory: same story, same basic climax...much different in the atmosphere and the telling. And Bloch "gets points" for his differences. Bloch created different effects for his Psycho climax, if perhaps too cliché: a raging thunderstorm outside the motel and house(Norman knocks Sam out with a whiskey bottle in the darkness of the office during the storm.) Even different "plot points": in the Bloch, Norman knows about the forty thousand dollars, so is more suspicious of Sam and tells Sam that he KNOWS Lila is up at the house: "She will be meeting Mother soon," Norman says before knocking Sam out.

Yes, book to movie: the climax is the same, but different. And I LIKE how the book plays, too. The way the shower murder opens with Mother's head popping through the curtain "as if in midair" and how Mary(ion) is beheaded. Arbogast's murder in the book isn't the spectacle it is in the movie, but it is terrifying in an entirely different way, with Arbogast entering the foyer to be greeted by Mrs. Bates "I"'m coming now! I'll be right there!") and by her straight razor to his throat in the foyer.

And a "same but different" fruit cellar climax.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A couple of last points:

Audio recordings(but not the book transcript) of the Truffaut/Hitchcock interview find Truffaut raging about Bloch's novel Psycho: "Its a horrible book. its not really even a book...it never should have been written."

Never should have been WRITTEN? And then we would have lost the Greatest Story Hitchcock Ever Got to Tell: the house, the motel, the shower, the twist ending, the detective. Mr. Truffaut demonstrated a rather childish lack of understanding of how great(in its pulpy way) Bloch's Psycho was.

Moreover: I have just read a few pages of Bloch's Psycho to make my comparison on the fruit cellar scene and I was impressed at how suspenseful and detailed and creepy the lead-up to the fruit cellar sequence IS in Bloch's telling. He wasn't Melville or Dickens or perhaps even Faulkner or Steinbeck...but he knew his horror trade, Bloch did.

And this passage demonstrates exactly what was in that book in Norman's room that Lila read and -- in the Bloch -- what horrible thoughts the book gave her(as she began her search into the basement):

"(Maybe Norman) had kept (Marion) here all week. maybe he'd tortured her, maybe he had done to her what that man was doing in that filthy book, he'd tortured her until he found out about the money and -- she had to find the cellar."

Pretty gruesome, graphic sexual stuff for a 1959 novel, huh? Hitchcock couldn't film any of it, but it shows you where Bloch's mind was.

Down in the fruit cellar.

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

The idea that there are *two* levels of basement is important: it makes Lila's hiding downstairs feel both genuinely exploratory and on a primal level, ever-more-dangerous. She's always going down to some place more infernal & confining. Hitch does a much better job of this than Bloch: Bloch has Lila arrive at the lowest level and instantly find dead mother laid out on a table/slab of some kind whereas Hitch sends Lila to the darkest corer of that lowest level to uncover mother.

All this reminds me to say a little about a movie I only just got around to seeing, Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946). The film's a real hodge-podge of melodrama & whodunnit but within its 80+ minutes there are about 5 minutes of strong horror that feel like they come from a much better movie that won't exist until things like Psycho & Peeping Tom & Repulsion. TSS has a bunch of nifty shots and design ideas that kind of ring bells for us about later films that really ran with these ideas. Here's TSS's first shot/title sequence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upq1vgTyKII
The titular spiral staircase leads through a kind of two-level basement, one damsel will die down there, and our main damsel will inevitably have to explore what's up at the bottom of those stairs. But of course that initial overhead shot reminds us of Psycho's two top of the stairs overhead shots. From our perspective Siodmak has got both visual & thematic/story ideas here that Hitchcock's going to pull part and reassemble & improve.

Other sequences feature ultra-close-ups on madman/serial killer eyes and then distorted, serial killer POV shots with mirrors that erase women's mouths. It's weird to be in these trippy sequences a couple of times only to be wrenched immediately back to melodrama.

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

The story for TSS comes from a short story by E L Stine who also wrote a story in the '40s called 'An Unlocked Window' that Hitch would adapt for the scariest, most Psycho-adjacent Alfred Hitch Hour. TSS also has an invalid in a big old house, a serial killer of young women on the loose, a window that keeps getting mysteriously unlocked, a very severe female nurse who's noted as being very man-like, a bunch of attractive nurse-like young women who are presumed to be in jeopardy. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, TSS doesn't know how to put together all its promising ingredients. Hitch & others would do much much better.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The idea that there are *two* levels of basement is important: it makes Lila's hiding downstairs feel both genuinely exploratory and on a primal level, ever-more-dangerous. She's always going down to some place more infernal & confining.

---

Yes, that's true. As I've noted in the past, Psycho to me is almost "effortlessly symbolic." Maybe not at the level of the most sophisticated of artists or novelists (though reaching likely many more people) but simply THERE. Like the mirrors elsewhere in the film. Or the toilet imagery(real toilet; swamp.)

And here, the "levels of Norman's mind" and where "the deepest of secrets are kept." Not to mention, indeed, the danger of Lila's very brave exploration of that house -- a sister's love expressed to the max(and not always there among siblings.)

Arbogast initiated a search of that house, but sure didn't get very far(after all, his goal was to talk with Mother -- or perhaps find Marion in hiding.) But Lila goes EVERYWHERE: Mother's room(which Arbogast couldn't breach), Norman's room....the basement. The fruit cellar.

Critic Robin Wood wrote that Psycho had a "downward movement," starting with its opening descent over Phoenix and then continuing a general downward descent into the secrets and terrors of Norman's mind, and the grasp of past over present, and ultimately, the disappearance of the present entirely(in that jail cell.)

I kinda/sorta see the "descent" theme, but the film also makes a great deal out of AScents. Various characters up the hill to the house. Arbogast up the stairs to his doom. Lila up the stairs to revelations.

I suppose you could say that Psycho is truly a film of "ups and downs." Oh, brother.(is that a 40's phrase? Hah.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Hitch does a much better job of this than Bloch: Bloch has Lila arrive at the lowest level and instantly find dead mother laid out on a table/slab of some kind whereas Hitch sends Lila to the darkest corer of that lowest level to uncover mother.

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Hitchcock surely put more "elements" into the reveal -- Mother in a chair with her back turned to Lila(and us); the close-up as the chair spins around; the light bulb casting dark and light.

In the Bloch, it doesn't read like Mother is on a table when Lila finds her -- indeed it happens quickly, Lila just opens a door and Mother is there -- maybe she's just lying on the floor? I've got the Bloch with me, here's the passage, with some preliminary suspense about "somebody coming":

"The door. The blanket had concealed it completely, but there must be another room here, probably an old-fashioned fruit cellar. That would be the ideal place to hide and wait.

"And she wouldn't have to wait much longer. Because now she could hear the faint, faraway footsteps coming down the hall again, moving into the kitchen.

"Lila opened the door to the fruit cellar. It was then that she screamed. She screamed when she saw the old woman lying there, the gaunt gray-haired old woman whose brown, wrinkled face grinned up at her in an obscene greeting."

"Mrs. Bates!"

"Yes."

"But the voice wasn't coming from those sunken, leathery jaws. It came from behind her, at the top of the cellar stairs, where the figure stood."

END

Indeed, Bloch's rendering was a bit less layered and with flourish than the Hitchcock version. Though I do like the additive of Lila hearing footsteps coming...after knowing that the door has been locked to keep her in.

I suppose it is a matter of the basic material(Bloch) playing his way, and Hitchcock getting a "second chance" to fix it HIS way, for the movies.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure that I don't think Bloch's scenes were BETTER than the Hitchcock scenes. And a beheading of Marion Crane in the shower was impossible in 1960 and, if filmed, say in "possible" R-rated 1970 -- such a scene would have eliminated such a big worldwide audience as the film got. (The shot of Mother's face hanging in mid-air through the shower curtain is pretty scary, but could not have been done without giving away Perkins.)

I stick by my belief that Robert Bloch furnished Hitchcock was a spectacular horror tale that merged setting/atmosphere(house/motel/swamp) with great structure(Marion dies, detective dies, fruit cellar reveal.)

But one can really picture Hitchcock and Stefano in Hitchcock's office getting down to the details of changing things around:

"So, we're going to have Lila enter the basement and fruit cellar from the kitchen?"
"No, I don't think so. I don't want to build an entire kitchen or move her to the back of the house -- let's create a doorway under the stairwell on the main set we're building."

"So, we're going to have Arbogast wait impatiently in the office for Norman to return, so he calls Sam and Lila with his information?"
"No, that will eat up too much time. Let's have him drive off the premises, relate the information from the phone booth."

"So, we're going to have Mrs. Bates come down the stairs and greet Arbogast in the foyer with the strait razor to his throat?"
"No, I can't film a straight razor to the throat. We'll have to do a stylized knife stabbing, as in the shower scene. And I'm not sure the foyer is where to stage this. After all, we've got a nice long steep staircase in the setting, you know..."

...and so forth and so on, until we got the perfect piece of suspense filmmaking we have in the movie we have.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But I'll always salute Bloch for providing this great story. And in the venue of a novel on the page(where Norman's face as Mother doesn't have to be hidden), Bloch's murder scenes have their own grotty, grisly power -- quite different than what Hitchcock did on screen, but very scary, too.

---

Rhetorical question: Hey, how come Psycho the book never got the launch that The Exorcist and Jaws novels got in the 70s? I guess by the 70's, bestselling HORROR novels got a bigger "mainstream book store push." Though I have read that Bloch's Psycho was the talk of the book publishing company's corridors(all the employees read it) and it DID sell well, even outside of the copies ostensibly bought by Hitchcock to keep the book out of circulation for awhile.

And this: Psycho the book had nothing on the cover but "the greatest logo in book history." Hitchcock figured that out fast, and bought it for the movie posters. He bought the logo for the same price he bought the NOVEL: $9000. And it became "the greatest logo in movie history."

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

All this reminds me to say a little about a movie I only just got around to seeing, Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946).

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This example opens up a topic I muse with from time to time: were there many(any?) shockers on the scale of Psycho made in Hollywood in the years prior to Psycho?

In the home I grew up in, my mother(quite the movie buff if not a film buff) would sometimes offer The Spiral Staircase as the scariest movie she saw as a teen in the 40's. I got around to seeing it(ABC showed it as part of a Selznick package along with the Hitchcock/Selznick films), but that was decades ago. I recall the killer reveal and that's about it.

The 30's and 40's were pretty tough, Hays Code wise. I really can't think of a movie with the violence of Psycho...it was an era big on "the power of suggestion"(like Cat People) and serial killers whose crimes were barely shown(maybe the first "grab" of a victim, that's it.)

That said, my parents both told me that Dracula and Frankenstein were off limits to them as kids. I guess maybe they were seen as shocker for adults more fun for kids. And I"ve read of the requisite faintings and ambulance arrivals at screenings of Dracula and Frankenstein -- stunts? Or were these movies THAT frightening, the Psychos of their decade?

Let's add King Kong in there. Cuts were made for violence and sexual stuff, but they were put back in and yeah -- pretty violent stuff(close up on Kong biting down on one native in his huge mouth; close up on Kong's huge foot crushing another native -- Kong stripping some of Fay Wray's clothes off with his finger..)

I'm willing to accept Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong and some of the more creepy Universal horror movies(like The Black Cat, which suggests the skinning of a character) as the Psychos of their time...but Psycho still took everything up a level. The screeching violins perhaps...so violent on the ears and psyche. The gore of the murders. The secrets about Stuffed Mom.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

All this reminds me to say a little about a movie I only just got around to seeing, Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946). The film's a real hodge-podge of melodrama & whodunnit but within its 80+ minutes there are about 5 minutes of strong horror that feel like they come from a much better movie that won't exist until things like Psycho & Peeping Tom & Repulsion.

---

RE: The Spiral Staircase. As I noted above, I heard this title offered by my mother as a real shocker of her teens, so I'll give this film THAT credit. (A mother's best friend is her son....uh oh.) But it does sound like the strong horror just wasn't strong enough. THAT said, I suppose close-ups of crazy eyes and intimations of a psycho out there in the hosue somewhere were powerful enough in the 40's to give folks some sleepless nights.

---

TSS has a bunch of nifty shots and design ideas that kind of ring bells for us about later films that really ran with these ideas. Here's TSS's first shot/title sequence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upq1vgTyKII
The titular spiral staircase leads through a kind of two-level basement, one damsel will die down there, and our main damsel will inevitably have to explore what's up at the bottom of those stairs. But of course that initial overhead shot reminds us of Psycho's two top of the stairs overhead shots. From our perspective Siodmak has got both visual & thematic/story ideas here that Hitchcock's going to pull part and reassemble & improve.

---

Hitchcock also likely "borrowed" a swinging light bulb in the dark effect from "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" for the fruit cellar scene. Hitch wasn't so much stealing ideas, I don't think, rather incorporating them in new(and sometimes better) ways. Hitch also made sure to "reflect current trends" by borrowing.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Other sequences feature ultra-close-ups on madman/serial killer eyes

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We got this motif a LOT later on -- Dirty Harry's Scorpio for one, and a little-known movie I watched on TCM called "The Sadist," which is from the 60's and not as graphic as its title would suggest, but really quite horrifying in a very real way: a psychotic hillbilly idiot holds a gun on three schoolteachers -- two men and a woman -- and practically the entire movie is about the fact that nobody can move with that gun on them, and then he shoots one of them so the terrifyingly simple issue becomes: should somebody try to rush this guy? And maybe die trying? . High tension stuff..primal and basic(the psycho is also dumb and so he HATES schoolteachers) set out in the middle of nowhere for extra terror. All in daylight, too.

But yeah, the disembodied shot of the eyes is in The Sadist.

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distorted, serial killer POV shots with mirrors that erase women's mouths.

--

mirrors that erase women's mouths? Hard to picture. Interesting effect?

---

It's weird to be in these trippy sequences a couple of times only to be wrenched immediately back to melodrama.

---

I think one particular drawback of the Hays Code was to allow a LITTLE true terror or weirdness in...and then to pull back to melodrama so as to defuse the power of the real stuff. I think.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

The story for TSS comes from a short story by E L Stine who also wrote a story in the '40s called 'An Unlocked Window' that Hitch would adapt for the scariest, most Psycho-adjacent Alfred Hitch Hour.

--

Oh, yeah -- "An Unlocked Window" IS the Psycho of the Hitchcock Hour. I would expect that Hitchcock personally approved the use of the Psycho house(it was used a lot on Boris Karloff's Thriller, but not Hitch's show) because he had something here that was about as scary as 60's US TV was allowed to be.

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TSS also has an invalid in a big old house, a serial killer of young women on the loose, a window that keeps getting mysteriously unlocked, a very severe female nurse who's noted as being very man-like, a bunch of attractive nurse-like young women who are presumed to be in jeopardy. Sound familiar?

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Yep. I'm reminded that the bloody murders in Psycho WERE what kept it a "movie" while An Unlocked Window had to keep its killings non-bloody(they are stranglings) and either offscreen or brief or "wrong"(the final strangling sees the hands more on the victims shoulder than her throat.)

But there's plenty of terror in "An Unlocked Window" if you are of a certain age, or timidity. I had a relative who watched it as a young girl and was too scared to cross the room to the TV to turn it off! (As if the killer might run out of the TV and grab her?)

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

SPOLER with Sexual Politics Commentary for An Unlocked Window:

The reveal of the killer in An Unlocked Window actually goes Psycho one better in terms of sexualized creepiness. Norman Bates seen in drag is pretty much a man wearing an old lady wig and a dress over his male street clothes. But the killer in An Unlocked Window proves to be more of a "cross- sexualized" man in a nurse's outfit, complete with female voice for most of the episode. The horrifying final shot of "An Unlocked Window" has a female victim(a young pretty nurse, a "good person") being strangled by the OTHER nurse in the house, an overweight woman who is revealed as an overweight man (with a man's voice) as "her" nurse's blouse opens up to reveal -- a hairy man's chest. It was the stuff of 1965 sexual shock on TV.

And I expect it couldn't be filmed today. The clue comes from the showrunners of Bates Motel having Norman perform a shower killing NOT in female dress -- because, the producers believed -- that would be "anti trans." What was meant to be creepy psychological material in one era is verboten in another. I feel like pushing back somewhat -- isn't art supposed to be allowed to look at the dark side of complex sexual issues? ("An Unlocked Window" isn't anti-trans; its anti-PSYCHO.)

But off that subject, of interest: Again, "An Unlocked Window" ends with the very sympathetic HEROINE(lovely Dana Wynter) being strangled by the killer. Hitchcock had to come on after and promise that the killer was eventually caught(when he tried to strangle a COP who was in decoy drag) but the fact remains: in the story "An Unlocked Window," -- the heroine dies.

Just like Marion Crane.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Unfortunately, TSS doesn't know how to put together all its promising ingredients. Hitch & others would do much much better.

---

As Hitchcock pointed out to Truffaut, he seemed to have a monopoly on thrillers for a lot of years. Other people weren't much making the kind of movies he made, and when they did, they seemed to fumble the ball.

Things caught up with Hitchcock by the 60's -- as one critic noted, by then "Hitchcock's competitors were legion" and he ended up facing the James Bond series(which, I contend, REALLY sank Hitchcock with its wall to wall action and bikini babes); Charade, Mirage, Arabesque, Baby Jane, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Wait Until Dark, Rosemary's Baby.

But back in the forties? Not so much competish.

That said, I recall watching on TV some pretty good Fritz Lang spy thrillers from the forties. Ministry of Fear had a very Hitchcockian-premise; somebody gives Ray Milland a cake and everybody wants to kill him over it(its got spy papers in it or something.) And Cloak and Dagger with Gary Cooper has a pretty brutal fight to the death scene for the forties.

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

Of the Siodmak thrillers I've seen The Killers (1946) is superior - it's the only one that feels to me completely under control and to have a consistent tone throughout (Lancaster's star-making debut & Ava Gardner at her foxy best means the film kind of starts on 2nd base). Criss Cross (1949) has one amazing shootout that feels way ahead of its time and surely influenced all your Michael Manns and QTs but otherwise meanders rather like TSS. Siodmak never got to produce or develop his own stuff, rather he was brought in as a hired gun *after* the cast and DP etc. had been chosen, indeed often he was a late replacement for Preminger or Lang. Who knows what Siodmak would have been able to come up with if he'd had more control over his projects? The Killers should have been his ticket to lotsa control but maybe giving credit to Lancaster, Hemingway, & Huston (script-doctoring) blocked that step up.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Of the Siodmak thrillers I've seen The Killers (1946) is superior - it's the only one that feels to me completely under control and to have a consistent tone throughout

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That's a healthy assessment. I've seen this version of The Killers, but ol' "Mainstream Man"( remember him?) has more personal regard with the 1964 remake directed by Don(Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick) Siegel, with Ronald Reagan famously in a role as a crime boss for his final screen perf. Better still, Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager as an old/young team of hit men...kinda Jackson and Travolta 30 years early.

All this said, on my "around the house bucket list" for future years is probably the need to acquaint myself better with the American movies of the 30's and 40's. Yes, they are generally censored and less complex than modern fare, but there's a lot of good stuff there that I SOMETIMES have seen, and should see more of.

Including the original "Killers"(again) and Criss Cross.
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(Lancaster's star-making debut & Ava Gardner at her foxy best means the film kind of starts on 2nd base).

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Nice turn of phrase! I may "borrow" that one for conversations I have out here in the world. Just like I borrow movie lines!

==

Criss Cross (1949) has one amazing shootout that feels way ahead of its time and surely influenced all your Michael Manns and QTs but otherwise meanders rather like TSS.

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In the 60's at least, versus many Hitchcock pictures, if there is one problem I find with many of his competitors, it is "meandering plots" and slack pace (example: The Prize, Baby Jane.)

I think how Hitchcock beat this problem was by beginning every working morning in his office with his screenwriter with the command: "Ok, tell me the story so far." If the screenwriter could keep the whole thing up in his/her head, start to finish, building the story daily -- the finished movie was crystal clear and well structured, I think. The Hitchcock Preparation.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

A variation on this theme: Teresa Wright told one interviewer late in her life that: (1) Hitchcock had TOLD her the story of Shadow of a Doubt, start to finish, on his porch one day before production started and "the finished movie matched exactly what he told me." (2) But in the late sixties, writer-director Richard Brooks told Wright the story of their upcoming work together "The Happy Ending" before production started "and the finished film was NOTHING like what Brooks had told me."

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Siodmak never got to produce or develop his own stuff, rather he was brought in as a hired gun *after* the cast and DP etc. had been chosen, indeed often he was a late replacement for Preminger or Lang. Who knows what Siodmak would have been able to come up with if he'd had more control over his projects?

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This "gun for hire" factor wiped out a lot of directorial careers in Hollywood as they were found to be "expendable" and "disposable." Hitchcock was in a rarefied group who beat that for-hire work (an "auteur") but how sad for others without his control. (And Hitch was certainly "loaned out" in his early days and had to TAKE command.)

That said, I like how in later years, Hitchcock never took a "produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock" credit, even though he could have. No ego there. "Alfred Hitchcock's" over the title and "Directed by Alfred Hitchcock" were enough -- markers of art, not commerce.

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The Killers should have been his ticket to lotsa control but maybe giving credit to Lancaster, Hemingway, & Huston (script-doctoring) blocked that step up.

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Possibly. Sometimes the director is "lost in the crowd."

Even a fairly big one.

When the play "The Odd Couple" was bought by Paramount for 1968 release as a movie, Walter Matthau came from Broadway and Jack Lemmon filled in for Art Carney. Lemmon and Matthau had been fine in the mediocre Billy Wilder film "The Fortune Cookie," so Wilder was considered to direct The Odd Couple for film.

But alas, Neil Simon didn't want a line of his play changed; Wilder was a writer-director; and the Lemmon/Matthau/Simon package cost big bucks. So out Wilder went -- the least "necessary" element.

It happens to the biggest of them..

[–] swanstep (2715) 5 years ago

But alas, Neil Simon didn't want a line of his play changed; Wilder was a writer-director

Writers (who aren't also directors) are so powerless most of the time it always comes as a shock when one becomes such a star that he or she has complete control, from final cut to deciding cast and technicians (up to and including director, who'd better be a 'serve the story' type; hello Gene Saks from Broadway, goodbye Billy Wilder).

Neil Simon had it a few times. Chayevsky had it at least for Network. I recently found out that Diablo Cody had it for 'Jennifer's Body', her first film after blowing the doors off with her debut script for Juno (she's never had it again).

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

But alas, Neil Simon didn't want a line of his play changed; Wilder was a writer-director
Writers (who aren't also directors) are so powerless most of the time it always comes as a shock when one becomes such a star that he or she has complete control, from final cut to deciding cast and technicians (up to and including director, who'd better be a 'serve the story' type; hello Gene Saks from Broadway, goodbye Billy Wilder).

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Conversely, we have read of a number of "primarily writers" who BECAME writer-directors to control their scripts. Like...Billy Wilder.

But truly indeed the "star screenwriters" were/are far between. They really had to make a "star name." Neil Simon did. Chayefsky did, but not for long (director Ken Russell clashed with him and changed things all the time on Altered States, the next Chayefsky script to film. And the last. )

I didn't realize that Diablo Cody had that kind of clout, but Oscar will give it to you for awhile. Its how Oscar nominee Gus Van Sant(Good Will Hunting) got his Psycho remake greenlit.

Neil Simon had it a few times. Chayevsky had it at least for Network. I recently found out that Diablo Cody had it for 'Jennifer's Body', her first film after blowing the doors off with her debut script for Juno (she's never had it again).