Saturday December the 19th
That's the day I'm posting this, and in Psycho...its the Day Arbogast Dies.
Saturday December the 19th is perhaps not as important to movie history as Saturday December the 12th (The Day Marion Crane Dies), but it is important enough, and it is that bit of calendar luck that brings the 19th to us today on the Saturday that it was (fictionally to be sure) in Hitchcock's classic.
A long fade to black from Saturday December the 12th (as Norman watches the swamp hungrily slurp up Marion's car with Marion's body in it) takes the place of an entire week as we fade in on a close-up of the letter Sam Loomis is writing to Marion. The letter says "Saturday" at the top -- no date. And its pretty clear that the letter will end by asking Marion to marry Sam and live in the room in the back of the hardware store where he is writing it.
The pain is palpable. Marion stole that $40,000 in a mad effort to get Sam to marry her(it will extinguish his debts) and...he would have married her anyway. Hitchcock dealt in irony as much as he dealt in suspense(they were rather two sides of the same coin) and the iriony here is savage: Sam WOULD have married her. And he's proposing to a corpse now...
The camera pulls back from Sam writing that letter out to a middle-aged woman talking to the boyish young counter clerk about the insecticide she is looking to buy..."...and I say, whether insect or man, death should always be painless." MORE irony. Effortless irony.
On the wall above the woman...a circle of knives. They remind us of the knife that killed Marion, and soon Arbogast will stand right under them, foreshadowing HIS appointment with the very same weapon.
This hardware store scene is one of my favorites in movies. Irony and fate hang over it with the smooth certainty of Hitchcock at his best. Setting aside the bit players of the customer and the clerk, we here "re-meet" Sam Loomis(he will never be with Marion again) and meet two great new characters -- Lila, the pretty and pressured "avenging sister" and good ol' Arbogast, the private eye with all the right one liners ("Somebody's seen her, somebody always sees a girl with forty thousand dollars.)
The concision of this scene is breathtaking. Lila comes in and accuses Sam of being in cahoots with Marion on the theft("What theft?" wonders Sam.) Arbogast comes in and accuses LILA of maybe being a part of it ("With a little checking, I could get to believe you" says Arbogast, and Lila slams the return ball hard: "I don't care if you believe me or not!)
Sam and Lila are stressing, but Cool Guy Arbogast stands apart from them, leaning back against the counter and watching the two loved ones sort things out. Hitchcock's angle on Arbogast here -- low, detached, as cool as the man himself -- is one of the pleasures we get WATCHING a Hitchcock film.
And the hardware store itself is a wonderful set. Its like a tunnel going back to Sam's pathetic room in the back. Stuffed to the gills with the implements of life: rakes, knives, peat moss, insecticide..paint cans. All arranged with a composition and sense of perspective that is , again "Hitchcock at His Best." One of the failures of Van Sant's Psycho is to give us a banal, sloppy, uninteresting hardware store for ITS scene. Here's why: Hitchcock's hardware store was a carefully designed and stocked SET. Van Sant filmed at a real hardware store in Santa Monica, California.
Arbogast leaves Sam and Lila walking away on a diagonal from them, screen left to screen right. They stare at him in some worry and some contempt. Hours later, Arbogast will walk EXACTLY the same way away from Norman Bates, and Norman stares at him with the SAME worry and contempt("A Hitchcock Rhyme.") But Norman does something more: grins and giggles. Why? Its a mystery of Psycho.
Between Arbogast's "matched walkaways" from Sam Loomis Hardware and The Bates Motel(note the names in the commerce; it used to be that way), comes the great scene where Arbogast encounters and questions Norman Bates in the motel office and on the motel porch, as night slowly falls and darkness gather. "Night time ain't no time" to be alone at the Bates Motel.
December 19 is just two days short of the shortest day of the year in America. One of the darkest days, with one of the longest nights. Perhaps this knowledge insinuates itself into the mind of the Psycho viewer as Arbogast keeps digging and getting way to close to the secret of the Bates Motel. When you think about it, Arbogast doesn't get too much daylight in his part of the story. A little at the hardware store and some in the "canvass montage" as he questions other boarding house owners. When he meets Norman, it gets dark fast -- a darkness that just COULD harbor Mrs. Bates with knife at the ready to kill the man harassing her son. Arbogast makes his key phone call to Lila(where he accelerates the investigation and alerts Sam and Lila to the Bates Motel) in the dark.