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March 2021 : Turner Classic Movies Comes to Praise Psycho -- and Bury It

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
7 replies | jump to latest

In the US:

Turner Classic Movies does something nifty to promote its line-up of movies in a given month: they find some "cool" recent song and cut clips of the movies of the month together into a visual "show"

Psycho and North by Northwest are March 2021 movies, so in the superfast clip show we get such moments as:

Cary Grant's head rising above the window to look into Vandamm's house becoming...King Kong's head rising into the NYC hotel window to look at Fay Wray.

Pouring rain in some movie becoming...rain pouring on Janet Leigh's windshield in Psycho.

And this nifty bit: "evil" Tom Cassidy's deskside leer and wink at Leigh in Psycho becoming...something hearty and jaunty(the music turns him into a happy character.)

Last night (March 5), I turned the TV on -- it was already set at TCM -- and to my surprise suddenly Norman and Marion filled the screen; he was bringing her sandwiches and milk outside of Cabin One. My companion said "oh, no" and I said, "oh, let's just watch it for a bit." Turned it off after the shower scene and the great "drain into eye shot." My companion was funny, slowly coaxing me: "Come on, change the channel...you can do it, you can do it."

Watched something else, but I came back at the end(timed it mentally) to see TWO TCM hosts -- central Ben Mankiewicz and "film noir" specialist Eddie Muller(a dapper, old time sportswriter kind of guy) deep in "love talk" about how great Psycho was . I came in late but they were talking about how Hays Code-dodging sexy the line "I'll lick the stamps" was and how great a red herring the 40 grand was -- Muller noted "it comes back at the very end as being in the swamp, accounted for."

Mank and Muller noted that they were about to show the third Hitchcock film of the night -- North by Northwest. I wondered what the first one , before Psycho had been. Vertigo? Rear Window? No...The 39 Steps. Because this triple bill is part of a March series on "McGuffin movies." Aha. Next week the MacGuffin movies include The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane.

I watched Mank and Muller lovingly introduce NXNW together. Funny comment from Mank -- "When I first saw NXNW...my memory is that it was in black and white!" Muller: "That's pretty crazy because the colors are great in NXNW...from Saul Bass's opening green credits to the blue at Mount Rushmore."(I agree with Muller.) Mank also said that he could never remember what the MacGuffin WAS in NXNW, and it was agreed, it shows up late(the statue) and what's on the microfilim in it...nobody knows. The NXNW MacGuffin, it was agreed, was far more nebulous than the Psycho MacGuffin(the 40 grand.)

(Personally, I always like to note that the statue -- or "figure" -- is a big part of the Rushmore chase. The bad guys can't simply shoot Grant and Saint from a distance or throw them off the monument, they have to "get that figure back!" (Vandamm's orders, the elegant equivalent of "get them!")

Muller contended that NXNW is "the most sexy Hays Code movie ever made" -- the REAL reason that the movie works, he says, is the "Grant/Saint sexual chemistry," which makes everything matter. Maybe so.

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So, a lovefest for Psycho and NXNW last night on TCM. But in a couple of weeks, they are going to show Psycho again...in a darker light.

Psycho will be part of a March series called "Movies in the Rear View Mirror" (it started this week) and will be shown in that context on March 25, along with three other "problematic and disturbing films" (says TCM) in terms of being politically incorrect. Or something. (Part of the problem today is that the "fighting words" terms are all walking clichés.)

TCM will also be showing "the usual suspects" of this type of problem: Gone with the Wind. Breakfast at Tiffany's(Mickey Rooney's Japanese caricature). Guess Who is Coming to Dinner will evidently be shown and discussed in light of the "problematic" superstar career of Sidney Poitier who was evidently the Number One star of 1967(In the Heat of the Night, To Sir With Love, and Dinner) but...worries TCM, "too much of a star meant for white audiences."

Hmm.. Whatever. The issue with Psycho is "transphobia" and it was amusing this week to see still frames of Perkins in grandma drag in the fruit cellar(spoiler alert!) hah as the illustration. That remains a terrifying image to me -- Perkins' face here, his bloodthirsty leer, his tongue sort of hanging out -- he's truly terrifying(its one of the many reasons Perkins was robbed of an Oscar nomination and win). But trans? Did Hitchocck et al in 1960 have any REAL ideas as to what "trans" is/was?

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

One of the "experts" who is going to pick at Psycho on this series says, the movie used the word "transsexual" for the first time and (something bad about that.) Whoa! The word, as we buffs know is "transvestite"(and the Hays Code folks almost threw it out.) But this is my point: an "expert" who remembers a key word wrong is NOT an expert. This is the problem with a lot of the "scholars" dissecting these films. They are literally dumber than the people who wrote and directed(and in Psycho's case with Perkins, ACTED) these classic movies. But then the history of the world is aggressive action taken by the dumb people, isn't it?

One astute critic suggested that TCM is running this series as a pre-emptive strike: explain these incorrect films in "context" and -- maybe TCM won't have to stop programming entirely. For TCM mainly shows OLD movies!

One other Hitchcock movie is in this series -- they already showed it, but I didn't watch: Rope. The first issue there, of course, is that the two male roommate killers are "coded" as gay -- and the second issue is: is their villainy driven BY their gayness? I dunno. I DO know this: Rope was BANNED in many US cities, and on all US military bases, in 1948 and evidently because the characters were "too clearly gay." So we come full circle : a movie that was banned in 1948 because of its gay content will perhaps now be banned AGAIN because of its gay content.

It occurs to me, as TCM follows this path, that maybe "cancel culture" doesn't matter all that much with "old movies." Because ALL old movies are cancelling themselves. Because new generations don't care about them, or know about them. They don't know who James Cagney or Myrna Loy were; they might barely know Hitchcock, but they don't know King Vidor. And they won't watch black and white movies.

Perhaps that is the game here: recreate these "golden oldies" as controversial, and draw some new attention to them.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

By the way, I DO think that Mickey Rooney is awful(with his fake buck teeth and screwy magnified eyeglasses) as the slapstick Japanese neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany's, but the rest of the film is a bittersweet romantic classic anchored by perhaps the greatest love song ever written(Moon River) and Hepburn's most iconic performance so -- we watch the movie with a "self-filter" of the Rooney part. We're adults, we know how to do that. Not to mention, Rooney's Japanese guy goes along with Blake Edwards OTHER comedy Asian character -- Kato the Houseboy in the Pink Panther series, and Peter Sellers' Closeau is, of course, a comedy FRENCH accent creation(Sellers would go on to do a comedy GERMAN in Dr. Strangelove, and comedy HINDU INDIAN in The Party -- accent humor was all the rage back then. I guess Sellers wouldnt' have a career today.)

Back to the "dumb" complaint. TCM recently showed Blazing Saddles --with its racial humor -- and had someone come on to remind us that the bigots are the bad guys and the heroes are progressive, so 'don't be offended." To which I use the old SNL gag line from Norm MacDonald: "Straight from the pages of DUH! magazine." Honestly, these folks are all like the defamed psychiatrist at the end of Psycho.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

I guess Sellers wouldn't have a career today.

Brit actors have always been called on to class up Hollywood productions with their technical skills with accents and ability to be chameleons. Showing your extraordinary abilities in this respect was a huge feather in your cap! So we got Olivier proudly playing Othello, Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi, and Alec Guinness playing Arab and Indian brownface in a series of films up through the '80s (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia, Passage To India), Japanese (Majority of One in the same year as BATiffanies) women (Kind Hearts and Coronets), and a swarthy, hook-nosed Jew (Faigan in Oliver Twist (1947)). In Guinness's case these are still some of the best films ever made so, as with Rooney in BAT, people *are* just going to have to be adult about these 'of their time' parts of these films.

In reality, almost all films more than about 50 years old need *some* introduction/discussion (e.g., of relevant history, social norms at the time of production, etc.) if people are going to understand them. Cases where people are going to be inappropriately offended are just a special case of the sorts of misunderstanding to which naive/unprepared viewers are going to be prone. Only a few old films, normally those like 'Birth of a Nation' or 'Gabriel Over the White House' that even in their time were widely protested, are truly dangerous and best restricted to people (usually students) who have weeks or even months of context and prep. to guide their viewing.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I guess Sellers wouldn't have a career today.
--

Brit actors have always been called on to class up Hollywood productions with their technical skills with accents and ability to be chameleons. Showing your extraordinary abilities in this respect was a huge feather in your cap! So we got Olivier proudly playing Othello, Ben Kingsley playing Gandhi, and Alec Guinness playing Arab and Indian brownface in a series of films up through the '80s (e.g., Lawrence of Arabia, Passage To India), Japanese (Majority of One in the same year as BATiffanies) women (Kind Hearts and Coronets), and a swarthy, hook-nosed Jew (Faigan in Oliver Twist (1947)). In Guinness's case these are still some of the best films ever made

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An interesting review of performances. One wonders -- with the current emphasis on casting "same race as same race" if that's over or -- as long as there is a "classic gravitas" to the film, it is still allowed.

Sellers, of course, used his accents for comedy and rather overdid all of them accordingly. And I just remembered that as late as 1976 -- in the Neil Simon detective movie spoof "Murder by Death," Sellers did a Chinese accent as a spoof of Charlie Chan!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

so, as with Rooney in BAT, people *are* just going to have to be adult about these 'of their time' parts of these films.

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I've been thinking a bit more about Rooney's role in BAT, and these thoughts have come to mind:

ONE: The movie was from a Truman Capote novel...was this Japanese character in the book? In which case, Blake Edwards was simply adapting someone else's work.

TWO: If NOT from the book...why WAS this character there? One guess I have is that the rest of the movie was really on the bleak, rough side -- Hepburn and Peppard are "kept" people, their love is rather sad and agonizing, Hepburn turns out to have been a child bride to a hillbilly(Buddy Ebsen), a happy ending arrives only in the last minutes of the film. Was the Rooney character devised not only as "comedy relief" -- but to give audiences a respite from the darker side of the movie he was in?

THREE: Was Rooney funny THEN? He isn't now...but here we do have to take in changing audience tastes. SNL producer Lorne Michaels recently said that John Belushi's (funny) "Samarai" character of the 70's couldn't be done today.

FOUR: Would it have been worse if a REAL Japanese actor was hired to play the role?

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

In reality, almost all films more than about 50 years old need *some* introduction/discussion (e.g., of relevant history, social norms at the time of production, etc.) if people are going to understand them. Cases where people are going to be inappropriately offended are just a special case of the sorts of misunderstanding to which naive/unprepared viewers are going to be prone. Only a few old films, normally those like 'Birth of a Nation' or 'Gabriel Over the White House' that even in their time were widely protested, are truly dangerous and best restricted to people (usually students) who have weeks or even months of context and prep. to guide their viewing.

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I agree with all of that. I believe that whenever Breakfast at Tiffany's is shown on TCM,it is obligatory to offer a protest and rejection of the Rooney part...and then the movie(with all of its other now nostalgic attributes) is shown. I'm OK with that.

But this attack on Psycho makes me wonder. The idea that what made the movie both a lollapalooza of a "twist ending" movie in its time AND gave the film its driving sense of terror (A Merciless Monster Mother) should be rejected on its face due to criteria that doesn't fit it -- NOW we start to get into difficult censorship territory.

I'm reminded that Robert Aldrich(director of Baby Jane and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte) made those movies because he felt that Psycho would have been more terrifying if the mother really WAS the killer -- the movie as we have it allows that to function as the answer, for awhile.

And there is this "off screen" aspect of analysis: Anthony Perkins was himself a man who seems to have lived a male gay lifestyle until electing to marry a female, sire two children....and die of AIDS. The actor who portrayed Norman Bates was more "fluid" than Norman himself.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Ahh...I guess we should just let all these movies be seen "through the rear view mirror" introduced with "warnings"(but of WHAT?) and to let the chips fall where they may.

But they should not be removed from distribution.