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Critic Richard Corliss and Psycho

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I was thumbing through what I consider the best of the biographies on Hitchcock -- Patrick McGilligan's "A Life in Darkness and Light." In the back is the requisite filmography of Hitchcock's always impressive 53 films over almost that many years.

In addition to cast and crew, with each film, McGilligan prints out either one full review or one execerpt . Some of the reviews are from the time of release, like the New York Times Vincent Canby's "Topaz: Alfred Hitchcock at his Best" from December 1969.

Some of the reviews are "retrospective." And thus McGilligan prints a portion of Richard Corliss' piece on Psycho written in 1973 about the 1960 film, and gives us only this excerpt:

"From the time I first saw Psycho(in 1960) at the Avalon theater on the South Jersey coast, the film admirably fulfilled its Saturday-matinee horror movie function: it scared the shit out of me. And it still does. Whatever academic pleasure I might have derived from analyzing Psycho's shower sequence on a movieola for this essay was overwhelmed by a purely physical discomfort at reliving an experience that still sets my stomach seismograph acquiver every time I step into a strange shower stall." END

Alas, there was a lot more too that essay than that excerpt. It is from a 1973 collection of essays called "Favorite Movies: Critic's Choices." Corliss(for awhile a critic at Film Comment, I think, and eventually a critic at Time magazine) named Psycho his favorite movie of all time(13 years after its release) and noted(says MacGilligan) that Corliss "was one of the four lonely souls" who ranked Psycho among the ten best films of all time in the 1972 Sight and Sound poll. (As we all know, the 2012 poll ranked Vertigo as the greatest film of all time and I guess we have to wait until 2022 to see if Vertigo can hold that slot as Citizen Kane once did.)

If the bad news is that all I have of that 1973 Corliss essay is the excerpt above, the good news is that I memorized a lot of it, both from that 1973 book and from subsequent times when Corliss referenced that essay later. I recall two times Corliss went back to it: for a 1976 complete and utter takedown on Family Plot called "Let Us Not Praise Famous Men," and for his 1998 Time review of Van Sant's Psycho ("As a critic who back in 1973 named Psycho as my favorite film...")

Here are some things I memorized from Richard Corliss essay on Psycho:

"I saw the film six times in three days at the Avalon theater." THAT comment has always interested me. Corliss was 16 in 1960 and that's prime "movie watching age" for teens just coming of age in this world and getting that movie love bad. Six times in three days. Twice a day? Once in the afternoon and once at night? Or four times in one day, then one more time one day, then one more time.

I don't know where they got the research, but it has been written that Psycho got "the most repeat business of any movie released until its time." Which makes sense. You can figure that everybody went back a second time to figure out how they were fooled by the twist ending. So much of the game is brilliant(how Mother MOVES in the window, but only once, and that's enough) that it is too bad that "Mother's voice" is always branded a cheat. (Is it? A MAN did it some of the time, Paul Jasmin.)

But Corliss went back FIVE times. By the second, I expect he "understood how the twist was concealed." So what about those other four times in three days? I can only expect that Corliss, like many a rabid fan of "the movie that changes their life," just wanted to re-live the experience of Psycho a few more times. To relive the shock murders, to drink in the atmosphere, to take in the perfection of it all(shrink scene included.)

Of course, in 1960, movies didn't go to VHS or DVD or cable or streaming. They were in release for a few weeks(or a few months in Psycho's case) and then...they were gone. If you saw Pscyho in 1960, you had to wait to 1965 for it to come back to theaters in re-release, 1967 for it to be on TV(but only in a few cities), 1969 to see it in a SECOND re-release("See the version of Psycho that TV Dared Not Show") and 1970 for it to hit American TV everywhere.

So young Richard Corliss may well have seen Psycho 6 times in 3 days in 1960 because he knew he might never see it again for a long, long time.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

In my own case, with favorite movies of the 70's like Jaws, Dirty Harry, The Godfather and Hitchcock's Frenzy...before VHS and cable...my RULE was to see a beloved movie three times.
The first time was to "experience it with all the surprises."(Wrote critic Charles Champlin: "You only see a movie once." He meant you only see it with surprises once.)

The second time was to "re-check how the movie worked." And the third time was to 'say goodbye" before the movie left release. I recall with Jaws, the first time was a packed screaming theater, but the THIRD time was a near empty theater with nobody screaming and Jaws pretty much "deflated" and I was disappointed. (I remember in particular the scene of the lifeguard getting eaten, without any audience screams...I could finally hear John Williams' creepy musical cue for the victim first being pulled into the water...)

Anyway, Richard Corliss seeing Psycho 6 times in 3 days also illustrates something else: Psycho was a very HYPNOTIC movie, you want into it again and again...you want to enter its WORLD. One of the things that is great about Psycho(to me) is that several early "normal" scenes(Sam and Marion in the hotel room, the real estate office scene, the scene with California Charlie and ESPECIALLY the cop stop scene) feel creepy and ominous even with no horror on the screen. I think it is because one knows that these scenes are set in "the world of Psycho" -- they are CONNECTED to what's coming at the Bates Motel, and the people in them are fairly creepy themselves.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Another Corliss quote(from memory): "With Psycho, Hitchcock himself probably stumbled onto something bigger than he could grasp, something that functioned beyond only what he took from it." Corliss' point is that for a man who made low-pressure glamour films like To Catch a Thief(which, by the way, is NOT lightweight) or dramas like I Confess...had in Psycho obtained material that was so shocking and out there that the movie was bigger than Hitchcock's own intentions for it...and certainly succeeded so wildly beyond Hitchcock's financial intentions for it that it practically ruined the rest of his career.

Corliss offered this funny thought: "It was as if the pudgy old possum had spent the entire fifties making genial little Technicolor romantic thrillers solely so he could shock audiences out of their wits in 1960 with this black and white shocker."
Well, clearly that wasn't Hitchcock's intent, but just as clearly, that IS what happened. With Psycho waiting for them, all those fifties movies look positively QUAINT(save, maybe, Rear Window with its wife-dismemberment theme.)

Corliss offered the formula that the success of Psycho was based on "1/3 Hitchcock, 1/3 Herrmann and 1/3 Anthony Perkins." Yeah, I'd say that's about right. The world of Psycho was created just as much by Herrmann's historic music as Hitchcock's historic images, and when Hitchcock told Perkins "Tony, you ARE this movie" -- Hitch knew what he was saying: audiences would LIKE Norman Bates , and that would keep them in the movie even as it got more and more horrific. Eventually, Leigh and Balsam and Miles and Gavin ALL orbit around the fascinating creature that is Norman Bates, in the unique screen persona of Anthony Perkins.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

But wait, in both his original Psycho essay and in his later diss of Family Plot, Corliss went to a bad place, writing: "I don't necessarily think Hitchcock was a great director; I think he was a director who made some great films." Its a pithy little sentence, but I don't think its true. Certainly not about Hitchcock, whose win-loss record over 50 years was nearly unmatched. Indeed ALL great directors only make a small number of great films...but the fact that they DO makes them great directors.

I suppose you could say that what Corliss meant was that a movie as spectacular as Psycho blots out movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith or I Confess or Topaz,,,and yeah, but that still doesn't mean that Hitchcock wasn't an overall great.

Another wag said that Hitchcock was dependent on his script, writing: "Why is North by Northwest better than Family Plot? Because it was DIRECTED better? No...the script!" (Yes, but age had something to do with it too, by then.)

Psycho has a fine script but what is bigger than that is that it has "the greatest story Hitchcock ever told." Courtesy of Robert Bloch. The motel AND the house(always together). The backwater locale. The shower scene. The staircase murder. Mother as Monster. The swamp. The twist ending. The split personality. Norman in the cell at the end...as Mother. The fly.

I'm about out of Corliss line memories now. I do recall that he said (in both his Psycho essay and his Family Plot essay) that Psycho was a great mix of "Grand Hotel and Grand Motel." That's one of those nonsensical things that critics sometimes write, but I suppose I get it: Psycho is at once bigger than life and down and dirty.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Sidetrack to that Corliss Family Plot takedown in 1976. I hate it. It almost undid my admiration for Corliss choosing Psycho as his favorite film. Corliss had two key contentions: (1) To honor Family Plot as a good film is to dishonor Vertigo as a great film. Nah...Familiy Plot is a good film late in its makers life, compromised by its maker's age and poor health, but welcome as a last reminder of how great he could be.

Corliss's other diss: "Family Plot never for one moment comes close to the power of Psycho." Fair enough except Dick missed this: Family Plot is a structural remake of Psycho, and if you really KNOW Psycho, you see it all the way through. Corliss did not.

I also disagree with Corliss' insult about the runaway car scene in Family Plot: "Steven Spielberg could have directed that with one eye behind his back." Pitting a 75 year old man against a 20-somethign was mean, but the runaway car scene(process shots and all) is a GREAT last lesson on cinematic technique, and kind of heartwarming. The big set-piece in Frenzy one film before had been a rape-murder. THIS time, Hitchcock gave us a FUN action comedy scene.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Leaving where I entered, back to the immediately quoteable Richard Corliss quotes from his essay(entitled "Psycho Therapy.")

--"From the time I first saw Psycho(in 1960) at the Avalon theater on the South Jersey coast,

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A reminder that Psycho, which starts in Arizona and settles in inland Northern California...is a film that was a big hit all the way over on the American East Coast...in New Jersey, home of Sinatra and Springsteen and NIcholson and The Sopranos. You can almost see Tony Sopranos' parents, Johnny and Livia Soprano, seeing Psycho and enjoying the blood very much, with Uncle Junior in tow.

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the film admirably fulfilled its Saturday-matinee horror movie function:

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A reminder that horror movies were as much the provence of a young person's afternoon as an adults "night out."

I'm reminded that I saw "Wait Until Dark" at night(scary coming out of the theater) but I saw Jaws at its first matinee showing on its first day of release(a Friday, not a Saturday.)

I'll bet Psycho scared people who saw it at night(and had to leave the theater at night) more than those who saw it in a matinee...but maybe not. Tales from Peter Bogdanovich and Teresa Wright are of seeing it in matinees with screaming crowds.

--
it scared the shit out of me. And it still does.

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A fun line. "And it still does" is a testament to the longevity of Psycho.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Whatever academic pleasure I might have derived from analyzing Psycho's shower sequence on a movieola

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Corliss wrote his 1973 essay long before VCRs were in general use(though they were available to rich Hollywood insiders.) So he had to watch the shower scene on a " movieola' -- a small hand-cranked projector that projected the image into a small box to look at. The actual FILM ran through the projector.

Trivia: a book on the making of Hitchcock's Frenzy reports that, during the three days that he filmed the rape and strangling of Brenda Blaney by Robert Rusk, Hitchcock would have a movieola rolled onto the "office" set and look at the previous days shots of rape and strangling to properly stage the day's grim work. Modernly, directors have video playback.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

"for this essay was overwhelmed by a purely physical discomfort at reliving an experience that still sets my stomach seismograph acquiver every time I step into a strange shower stall."

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Interesting that Corliss says a "STRANGE" shower stall. As I understand it, the shower scene scared a lot of people about taking showers in their own HOMES. But truly, who, on the road. ALONE -- particularly in a motel room, but maybe in a hotel room -- has NOT thought of Psycho when going into the shower?

I suppose, beyond its historic horror violence and its cinematic wizardry, and its mix of the shocking and the sensual, the reason that the Psycho shower scene remains the most famous scene of all time(indisputedly by now, I'd say --it had a MOVIE made about it, plus "Hitchcock") is very, very simple:

Everybody takes a shower sometime.