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Psycho/Friday the 13th and American Graffiti/Grease

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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A pondering:

Psycho's my formative movie -- as much a negative experience(don't see it! its too horrible!) as a positive one(what a great movie!) and now, a massively nostalgic one (I'll never be the age to have a movie have such impact on me, again.)

But in championing this movie, one place I go sometimes is: "It was Hitchcock's biggest hit! Lines around the block, for weeks! A true blockbuster."

At least that's what I've read, and there are newsreels and photos from the time to prove it.

"Psycho" is up there, earnings-wise and effect on the public wise, with The Exorcist and Jaws and The Godfather(back when billion dollar grosses around the world were not part of the equation.)

But there is a "dark side" to Psycho being Hitchcock's greatest hit that bugged him, I think:

He knew the audience didn't come for the brilliance of his filmmaking or script supervision; they came because it was a really scary movie.

Hitch picked up some of the same "teenage box office" that made House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler hits and enhanced it with his own fan base(plus a lot of repeat business to double check the twist and enjoy the shocks again.) But in the end, Psycho made its big dollars because it was as Hitchcock said "My Boogie Man is Going to Get You Movie"(how quaint.)

Flash forward 20 years to Friday the 13th. In no way comparable to Psycho in production value or performances, this "slasher movie" made a ton of dough. It had about 10 bloody murders to Psycho's two. Whereas Psycho spent a lot of time on plot and character and not much on killing scenes(they haunted the entire movie, anyway), Friday the 13th spent little time on plot and a LOT on killing scenes.

I'll give Friday the 13th this: as with Psycho at its "isolated motel"(with creepy mansion adjacent), Friday the 13th posited a fine place for slaughter: a closed and empty summer camp, mostly at night, with the always-spooky and crummy wooden structures -- dark, dank, DAMP -- those places have.

And I'll give Friday the 13th THIS. I've said that the movies I saw that got the biggest screams throughout were Psycho(in a 1979 theatrical viewing), Jaws, and Wait Until Dark. But those are all "A" movies; Friday the 13th got just as much screaming; and it was more like a C (though Paramount, which made Psycho, picked it up for release.)

And Friday the 13th got something else: when the "final girl"(the last survivor) managed to chop the head off of the Psycho Mother(as Scream has taught us, Jason wasn't the killer in the first one, a Mrs. Bates knockoff called Mrs. Voorhees was) , my largely teenage audience stood to their feet and cheered in a standing ovation: they LOVED seeing the good girl do the bloody chopping, they got OFF on the bloody revenge.

As Hitchcock might say, "audiences sometimes aren't very nice."

Joe Stefano told pretty much the same story two ways, either, both or none might be true:

VERSION ONE: "I came into Hitchcock's office after Psycho became such a hit and he groused, 'for years I've been giving them fine elegant entertainments and I make this bloody piece of crap and the dollars don't stop coming in!"

VERSION TWO: (On video with facial expression) "I came into Hitchcock's office after Psycho became such a hit and he just looked at me with a (Stefano shrugs and looks astounded) expression."

Either version of the story suggests that Hitchcock knew he had hit pay dirt with Psycho for...perhaps to him...the wrong reasons. Because the "scary movie" audience came out.

No matter. Psycho DID make its money because its a scary movie. But with Hitchcock at the helm, Bloch's base story and the overall quality of the collaborators(the cast, Herrmann, Stefano)...Psycho was the best scary movie ever made (says I.)

On a similar note, this tracks for American Graffiti(my favorite movie of 1973, a year in which about 10 others could qualify too) and Grease, too.

American Graffiti came first. It was a hit, but the critics loved it too. They loved fairly new director George Lucas' command of cinematic techniques and "revolutionary sound recording." The loved the classic cohesion of a story told "from dusk til dawn" in which, at the very end, the two main characters have switched sides(the one who was going to leave town stays; the one who was going to stay, leaves town.) They loved the nostalgia of 1962(the late fifties really in terms of the rock sound track) and the loss of innocence it expressed.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

American Graffiti was a big hit, and got nominated for Best Picture.

But when Grease came out five years later -- dumber, less precise in its casting(40 year old teenagers?) rather slapdash in its filmmaking, even with some good songs -- it was a bigger hit than Graffiti.

And one could see the connection: BOTH movies were hits because of "fifties nostalgia." That was it. The sublime narrative cinema of American Graffiti and the dumb-dumb crass TV-moviemaking of Grease found common ground with audiences: "I miss the fifties!" (Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley cashed in, with even less finesse, on TV.)

A post like this edges towards snobbery, I know, but it goes like this: movies can be classic and artful(Psycho, American Graffiti) or dumb and crass(Friday the 13th, Grease) but the great levellor is: box office. Psycho and Friday the 13th were big hits because they REALLY scared people with their blood and gore(Psycho in 1960 WAS gory.) American Graffiti and Grease were big hits because people wanted to relive "the innocent fifties." Box office rules. But critical assessment perhaps separates the good box office from the bad box office.

And poor Hitchcock. He makes Psycho, he gets a blockbuster(and a "drive in movie" hit, too.) Then(after the similar but not scary enough Birds) he makes Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz and...nada.