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A Phoenix "Side Road" : Grisly Murders Imported from Vegas

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Alfred Hitchcock in general -- but perhaps particularly in Psycho -- wasn't much for getting into the real detail of a city, its inhabitants, its surroundings. I suppose "Vertigo" is an exception, with its many, many, many location shots around 1957 San Francisco and the rural environs nearby.

And yet, a little of this kind of detail "edges into" Psycho.

Primarily because Hitchcock elected to begin Psycho in Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix is not a city that was in many movies(any movies?) before Psycho ,and it hasn't been in that many since.

One supposes there was curiosity - - worldwide - about that opening sweep over the Phoenix skyline, with its small skyscrapers framed by rocky desert vistas. One can picture the international audiences for Psycho -- the folks in Japan or France or London -- wondering about the desert city where the film starts.

Why DOES Psycho start in Phoenix?

The book starts in Dallas, Texas. That's where "Mary Crane" works in real estate, and her sister Lila is gone to...Fort Worth (not Tucson) for the weekend.

Mary drives north from Texas, up through Oklahoma, short of Illinois and Robert Bloch's Bates Motel ends up in an "un-named state." Possibly Kansas or Missouri.

Hitchcock wasn't much for mid-American locations at the time. When his movies weren't in urban New York City, they were often set in California : Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, The Birds.

Hitchcock seems to have decided that HIS Bates Motel would be in rural, inland, backwater Northern California -- north and east of Vertigo's San Francisco, south of Oregon. Near a city called Redding --about 200 miles north of the inland Northern/Central California capital of Sacramento.

I expect Hitch decided that for "now Marion Crane" to make a long drive into California, she could only start from a few locations: Portland Oregon(driving south to California), Southern California cities like Los Angeles and San Diego (and she "brushes" Los Angeles on her trip to the Bates Motel, purchasing a Los Angeles paper en route).

Or she could start in Phoenix, Arizona...a trip requiring hundreds of miles of driving and not allowing for a "short drive north" starting in Los Angeles.

Hitch got some easy symbolism out of Phoenix -- that's a bird. A mythical bird that, if memory serves, was re-born from death and its own ashes to rise again.

Like Mrs. Bates.

Aside from the opening second unit camera sweep(which certainly establishes Phoenix), and some shots taken at Phoenix intersections to show Marion leaving town(with Xmas decorations on the street screwing up the timeframe), Phoenix exists in Psycho as ...a state of mind.

And that state of mind is largely represented by...oilman Tom Cassidy, he with his Stetson cowboy hat, his bolo tie, his drunken manner, his flirtatious ways drifting into predatory behavior.

Cassidy gets one line that puts a little shock into Psycho early on. "You should spend the weekend in Las Vegas," he tells Marion..."the playground of the world."

The "shock" is how, if for only a moment, Hitchcock's formal, hermetically sealed, and(in this movie) Gothic claustrophobia is briefly punctured by the idea that Marion might "go to Vegas," and hang in a city which, in 1960, was run by Frank, Dino, Sammy, Joey and Peter (aka The Rat Pack), with a swinging US Senator in tow who was looking to be the President.

Cassidy's line famously triggers an exchange that the censors removed from Psycho in 1960:

Cassidy: You should spend the weekend in Las Vegas...playground of the world!
Marion: I intend to spend this weekend in bed.
Cassidy: ...only playground that beats Las Vegas!

Ha. Sexual. Direct. Part of Cassidy's ongoing come-on TO Marion, and a reminder that we just SAW her playing in bed...with the handsome Sam Loomis.

(This exchange was restored for Van Sant's 1998 remake -- where it came off as too broad and old-hat.)

Anyway, for those who wanted to think about it in 1960, Hitchcock by deciding to launch Psycho in Phoenix Arizona was already "tainting" the story of Psycho with the kind of "sinful atmosphere" that would power the entire horror movie to come. For Phoenix in 1960 was a real estate boom town of sorts, evidently already ridden with East Coast gangsters come west who were using Vegas for main operations....and Phoenix as a nearby support city.

You might say that Marion Crane -- ironically, as with everything else in Psycho -- left the "criminal hotbed" of Phoenix Arizona for the "backwoods rural contentment" of Fairvale California -- but (of course) actually headed straight for human behavior at its most foul and insane and dangerous.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I figure that oil man Tom Cassidy commutes from Phoenix to Vegas a LOT. And often without his wife.

I figure that private eye Milton Arbogast -- clearly an urban type, maybe a transplant from New York City -- goes to Vegas for work(following cheating spouses?) AND play(cards...ladies?). And I expect that both Cassidy and Arbogast carefully know their way around imported gangsters in Phoenix AND Vegas. (More irony: the tough Arbogast probably watched out for danger from gangsters in Phoenix and Vegas -- but found death waiting for him from a quiet young man and his mother instead.)

All of which brings me to an article I've read recently about a man who ran a Vegas casino....but lived in Phoenix much of the time....and tried to retire there. Instead..he and his wife were murdered there. In a very "Psycho" way.

The man's name was Gus Greenbaum. He knew gangster Bugsy Siegel when the latter tried to launch the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas in the 40's; eventually, Greenbaum himself ran the Flamingo and another Vegas hotel, The Riviera.

Things sure do get murky from there -- but this Greenbaum fellow is tied to a lot of movie gangsters of 'the modern era."

He knew Bugsy Siegel. (Warren Beatty's Bugsy; 1991.) He was an inspiration for "Moe Greene"(the Vegas gangster who gets shot though the eye) in The Godfathe(1972)r. And he ordered the killings of LA gangsters "Anthony Brancato and Anthony Trombino" who were so nicely narrated unto death by Danny Vito in the great LA Confidential of 1997.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Evidently, Greenbaum kept trying to retire..but the mob kept pushing him back into Vegas. On one occasion, the persuasion was the murder of Greenbaum's sister-in-law -- in Phoenix -- "smothered by a human hand" in bed, said the cops.

But a sister in law wasn't enough for the mob to have to kill. Greenbaum started to skim his Vegas profits, and to do heroin and to womanize and....the mob finally killed both Greenbaum and his wife. At their home. In Phoenix. In 1958. -- just a year before the fictional events of Psycho.

Evidently, Greenbaum was safe as long as he and his wife stayed in Vegas -- the mob didn't kill its own in that regulated city -- but their attempt to have Thanksgiving in Phoenix got them killed.

They were found in or near their beds. Their heads, depending on reports...were decapitated or "close to." (Recall that in the book Psycho, Mary Crane loses HER head to Mother's knife.)

And so, when Psycho starts so "normally" in December of 1959 as released in 1960, Marion Crane and Lila Crane and Tom Cassidy and realtor Lowery and private investigator Arbogast -- all lived in a Mafia/Vegas back-up city where people were being smothered and decapitated as a matter of business.

Psycho ends up being a movie that STARTS in horror well before it takes up its own brand...

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

Interesting background on how Phoenix may have read to the Psycho's audience in the '60s. I'm guessing that the average person probably would only have a vague sense of the crime situation in Las Vegas let alone Phoenix, but the switched on and the news junkies would know.

The first time I remember Phoenix creeping into my consciousness as a kid in the early '70s was as the setting for 'The New Dick Van Dyke Show' w/ Hope Lange replacing MTM & in color. Probably only the opening credits were actually shot in Arizona but they made an impact (just as opening credits in Minneapolis would *make* The MTM show around the same time, and which, looking back TNDVDS was imitating). Anyhow, the 'sunny', smiley but also kind of chic and modern home-wise (lots of the Frank Lloyd Wright-imitation desert architecture which was all over magazines like Popular Mechanics - *very* popular at the time, forgotten today - to cinch the deal). It looked pretty great to this kid at the time.

Anyhow, one way Phoenix impacts on the consciousness of all Americans and around the world today is via all its major league sports teams... but I checked and the first major league team to arrive in Phoeniz (or AZ) was the Suns in 1968, just in time to be an occasional topic of conversation on TNDVDS.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Interesting background on how Phoenix may have read to the Psycho's audience in the '60s.

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I found among my books a rather tabloid "cut and paste" job about gangsters, and it had a chapter on "the Gus Greenbaum Phoenix murders," and I read the chapter and found that the fact that these gruesome beheadings(never solved) happened in 1958. In Phoenix. And it kind of hit me -- given how I've given "Psycho" ongoing status as something to think about/talk about -- that Phoenix Arizona around the time Psycho takes place evidently already had IN TRUTH the kind of landmark gruesome violence that Hitchcock was ready to spring on Hays Code Hollywood.

Moreover, the Phoenix-Vegas connection -- which Tom Cassidy references for that little moment in Psycho -- seems to have been quite real, with a gangster contingent in Phoenix from at least WWII on.

Another memory: Phoenix ended up as a "sunny place" to put various gangsters in witness protection in the 70s -- they could run swimming pool construction companies and the like --- and I recall a reporter investigating a gangster in Phoenix, and getting blown up in return. To death. Suddenly, Phoenix swarmed with reporters from all over the US to help investigate the murder, and the culprit was brought to justice. This was the 70s, well after Psycho. (But in 1977, Clint Eastwood made a movie called "The Gauntlet" where his Phoenix cop had to get a female witness from Vegas to Phoenix and -- whaddya know? -- THAT one was about the mob in Phoenix, too.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I'm guessing that the average person probably would only have a vague sense of the crime situation in Las Vegas let alone Phoenix, but the switched on and the news junkies would know.

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Likely so. And I expect that Hitchcock -- no fan of gangster stories -- didn't give the background much thought when he decided to start Psycho IN Phoenix. Must have been an interesting meeting with Joe Stefano, though: "Joe, where should Marion start her journey? Los Angeles? San Diego? Portland Oregon? ...Las Vegas? Phoenix?" A decision was made on Phoenix, a second unit crew was sent there to "create the world of Psycho", the rest is history.

Side-bar: The "opening helicopter shot over Phoenix" in Joe Stefano's SCREENPLAY is a model of wish-fulfillment overkill as his imaginary camera sails over all sorts of Phoenix neighborhoods -- "over the stockyards," -- through good neighborhoods and then down to the run-down area where the Sam/Marion hotel is. Its an "imaginary Phoenix on steroids," and the second unit couldn't capture that shot at all -- the helicopter photography was too shaky in 1959. INSTEAD, we get that great, bleak descent over and down, with Herrmann's music tapping emotion from frame one.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

The first time I remember Phoenix creeping into my consciousness as a kid in the early '70s was as the setting for 'The New Dick Van Dyke Show' w/ Hope Lange replacing MTM & in color. Probably only the opening credits were actually shot in Arizona but they made an impact (just as opening credits in Minneapolis would *make* The MTM show around the same time, and which, looking back TNDVDS was imitating). Anyhow, the 'sunny', smiley but also kind of chic and modern home-wise (lots of the Frank Lloyd Wright-imitation desert architecture which was all over magazines like Popular Mechanics - *very* popular at the time, forgotten today - to cinch the deal). It looked pretty great to this kid at the time.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I think that Dick Van Dyke himself was living in Arizona at the time, hence the setting, though perhaps he filmed the sitcom interiors in Hollywood and commuted. TV and movie stars get to do that.

I remember those credits, and a few TV Guide covers and I remember doing the "mental work" to picture DVD as an Arizonian. Certainly the sitcoms of the 70's gave us a few "perfected" American cities...they made snowy Minneapolis a place you might like to live with Mary Tyler Moore and "the gang." Bob Newhart in Chicago(with his 70s series.) Archie and Edith more raw in Queens...

The history of the mob in America is such that I suppose the infamous Italian-American contingent was eventually thinned out of Arizona, and kept to the East Coast. Scorsese's Casino (1995) posited that the mob in Vegas was pushed out by corporations. And population grew in other ways that overtook "the way it used to be".

I suppose Phoenix and environs are a much healthier, happier place today -- with lots of baseball fans visiting. When there's no pandemic.

Still -- on topic - oh the irony. Marion Crane and Arbogast travel on from the tough Phoenix scene and find something far, far worse, in rural Northern California, from a far less dangerous looking person: Norman Bates.