what id this had taken place during winter?
how would it have changed/?
shareWell, I think it would have started on Friday, December 11....
sharehuh?
shareI'm sorry. I'm kidding around a bit.
Psycho DOES start on Friday December 11(says an opening title) and then takes place over the next week plus a few days. The murders are each on a Saturday night -- one week apart -- Saturday December 12(Marion) and Saturday December 19(Arbogast(. The killer is captured on Sunday December 20.
So the story is already set in winter -- sort of.
As a matter of accuracy, winter starts the day after Psycho ends -- Monday December 21.
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I expect maybe you mean: what if Psycho happened in a SNOWY winter?
The Bates Motel and Fairvale are meant to be in Northern California where the winter doesn't have snow. Rains some(as the movie shows.)
Still, a "snowy Psycho" (perhaps in American Midwest or Northeastern state) might provide a different kind of experience.
...with people having to climb through the snow to get up the steps to the house(or up the hill in Lila's case).
With Norman having to DRIVE through the snow to deliver the bodies to the swamp. And what if that swamp was iced over? A scene of Norman having to literally "break the ice" to sink Marion's car might be interesting.
I think there have been some "snowy slashers" made over the years. Black Christmas, I think. And a thriller called Dead of Winter.
Anyway, it would be an interestingly new way to tell the Psycho story ...in the snow.
With everybody wearing heavy coats! Including...Mother?
So the story is already set in winter -- sort of.
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Winter, December, Christmas, play hardly any role in this film, visually or thematically, if not for an accidental background shot or two with some tinsel (including a crucial one where Marion and Lowery spot each other at an intersection). In all the offices, front desks, homes, shops, stores, parlors, backrooms, church entrances, etc., not a single Christmas wreath, paper snowflake, styrofoam snowman, Santa, candy cane, etc. is to be seen.
Psycho plays to me like a hot-time-summer-in-the-city movie, with Gavin and Leigh, half-dressed, steaming up the sheets by an open window ("It's Friday anyway, and hot"), and slobbering millionaire Cassidy providing local weather and color ("It's hot as fresh milk...get your boss to air condition you up."), like some big old sweaty Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy type.
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Still, a "snowy Psycho" (perhaps in American Midwest or Northwest state) might provide a different kind of experience.
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I got through your whole post before I remembered....Fargo! And The Thing, if we're counting creature features.
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With Norman having to DRIVE through the snow to deliver the bodies to the swamp. And what if that swamp was iced over? A scene of Norman having to literally "break the ice" to sink Marion's car might be interesting.
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I'm surprised the Coen Brothers haven't done this one. And then later, as in with Goodfellas, he has to retrieve the body and relocate it. How preserved would poor Marion be in the icy water? But now we're getting into EC Horror territory.
So the story is already set in winter -- sort of.
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Winter, December, Christmas, play hardly any role in this film, visually or thematically, if not for an accidental background shot or two with some tinsel (including a crucial one where Marion and Lowery spot each other at an intersection). In all the offices, front desks, homes, shops, stores, parlors, backrooms, church entrances, etc., not a single Christmas wreath, paper snowflake, styrofoam snowman, Santa, candy cane, etc. is to be seen.
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It remains a grand irony about "Psycho." A film that in most ways speaks to narrative filmmaking at its most "perfect" has this glaring error to it: Hitchcock purposely sets it in December(Christmas time) and shows only one shot OF Christmas time(the street behind Lowery, a Phoenix process plate filmed by second unit.)
Hitchcock slapped that December 11 date on the opening shot to COVER for that brief process mistake. He COULD have flown the second unit crew back AFTER Christmas time to reshoot the process plate, but I guess he was just too cheap. Hitch seems to have made Psycho (somehow) out of his own funds, on the cheap, and he would rather wreck the seasonal accuracy of his film than make that one fix. He WON. Most people didn't pay attention at all to the lack of Xmas in this Xmas-time movie.
Note in passing: some years ago I was in Phoenix on business and I found that intersection where Lowery sees Marion. I stood in the crosswalk and looked in the direction of the Christmas street decorations. Irony: I was there, but actors Vaughn Taylor(Mr. Lowery) and Janet Leigh never went there (for those shots, at least; maybe they went there to visit.) The second unit shot process plates; Taylor and Leigh played their scene on a Universal soundstage with the footage projected behind Taylor.
I would like to note that in real life, that intersection ("Adams" and something) felt very small and claustrophobic. Hitchcock or his crew knew how to pick 'em for paranoia.
CONT
Psycho plays to me like a hot-time-summer-in-the-city movie, with Gavin and Leigh, half-dressed, steaming up the sheets by an open window ("It's Friday anyway, and hot"), and slobbering millionaire Cassidy providing local weather and color ("It's hot as fresh milk...get your boss to air condition you up."), like some big old sweaty Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy type.
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Yes. Joseph Stefano's screenplay specifies at the beginning: "It is late summer." And Phoenix Arizona in the late summer is one of the hottest places in America -- a desert town, well over 100 a lot, "but its a dry heat."
So all that dialogue and sweaty atmosphere is exactly right for a summer script. That said, the heavy rainstorm early in the film seems more "December." It doesn't rain a lot in August in Arizona and California.
And this: I've wondered before if Phoenix Arizona in December CAN be hot. I know that Los Angeles in December can be.
In any event, that one shot of Christmas decorations on one street certainly skewed the timeframe of Psycho.
CONT
Still, a "snowy Psycho" (perhaps in American Midwest or Northwest state) might provide a different kind of experience.
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I got through your whole post before I remembered....Fargo! And The Thing, if we're counting creature features.
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We can count creature features. Psycho IS kind of a creature feature. Hitchcock himself called Mrs. Bates in murder mode "a human monster."
But the thing about "snowy thrillers" -- of which Fargo and BOTH versions of The Thing are prime examples -- is that the snow becomes a CHARACTER in the film, and in some ways, the MEANING of the film. We likely think about Fargo and The Thing('82 version best known) as "snow movies" before we think about anything else.
Fargo creates a very bleak and depressing mood for all its comical crime stuff...we feel trapped IN the snow, with those trapped Minnesota characters. There's a great shot early on, from high above as wimpy villain William H. Macy trudges across a snowy expanse that is actually a parking lot full of snow-buried cars. He scrapes away at the frozen window of HIS car(more enraged by a recent human failure than the car) and goes berserk. "The snow is his prison." And ours.
In The Thing, the arctic snowy setting separates the victim protagonists from the rest of the world(literally) and there can be no escape into the sub-zero temperatures on foot, even in a parka. (Three years earlier, the characters in Alien were trapped in outer space, "where no one can hear you scream." Same here with the snow.
CONT
With Norman having to DRIVE through the snow to deliver the bodies to the swamp. And what if that swamp was iced over? A scene of Norman having to literally "break the ice" to sink Marion's car might be interesting.
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The more I think about a "snowy winter Psycho," the less I'm interested in it. Again, the snow would take over the story itself -- the characters couldn't move freely up and down the hill to the house, and we would lose the "look" of the women in their dresses and the men in their coats and ties(some of them.)
That said, there is ANOTHER thriller called "The Ice Harvest" (2005) that has John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton taking a travel chest with a LIVE victim locked in it, to dump into an icy lake during a snow storm. "Hilarity ensues" when the victim breaks free from the chest; charcters end up IN the frozen lake fighting to the death.
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I'm surprised the Coen Brothers haven't done this one.
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Well, I suppose Fargo is kind of their Psycho -- bloody deaths and black humor. Blood Simple has some of that, too.
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CONT
And then later, as in with Goodfellas, he has to retrieve the body and relocate it. How preserved would poor Marion be in the icy water? But now we're getting into EC Horror territory.
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One critic DID call Psycho "Hitchcock's EC horror comic." I think mainly because of how Mother looked in the fruit cellar. But the overall gore and grue (of the time) suggests it too. Yet ANOTHER of the influences on Psycho.
Some folks remember "the famous last shot" of Psycho to be: Norman in the cell, leering up at us. Not really. That shot MERGES with the shot of Marion's car emerging via chain from the swamp(and then The End), but that FINAL shot has always held horror for me. We KNOW that Marion's body is in that car, we sort of fear that the trunk is going to pop open and we will have to see her punctured, now waterlogged body(maybe the shower curtain has floated off her). We are spared the reality -- but the imagination runs wild. A GREAT final shot.
There was a late Billy Wilder black comedy, a stinker apparently (sigh), teaming up Walter Matthau as a hitman and Jack Lemmon as Jack Lemmon, and another (non-Wilder) film where they were paired as rival ice fishermen. Combine the two and it could be in the wheelhouse of The Ice Harvest. I like Cusak and Billy Bob, I hadn't heard of The Ice Harvest, it sounds like they are doing their own black comic Fargo.
In Buster Keaton's short, The Frozen North, he is on a frozen lake with his fishing line in an ice-hole and, after an apparent bite on the line, yanks on it hard, pulling another nearby fisherman into his own ice-hole. There's also a sled-dog racing scene (when one dog comes up lame, he pulls a spare dog out of the trunk of his dogsled), and there's a moment when he leans against the wall of an igloo only to fall right through the slush. Combined with the usual thriller hijinks, there might still be black comic gold there yet.
There was a late Billy Wilder black comedy, a stinker apparently (sigh), teaming up Walter Matthau as a hitman and Jack Lemmon as Jack Lemmon,
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Ha, I think i get that -- Matthau having a certain talent for changing his personality and Lemmon...not.
It was a stinker to my mind -- though I've seen a few good reviews--- and sadly it was Billy Wilder's final film: Buddy, Buddy. 1981...one year after Alfred Hitchcock's death in 1980. Thus, Wilder -- and not Hitchcock --managed to crawl over the finish line into the 80s.
One testament to its stinkerhood is that Hollywood studios never gave Wilder a chance to direct again. One studio did hire him as a "consultant" to advise on scripts, but when he told them regarding one script -- "Its a piece of sh...all I can do is tell you how to make it a smaller pice of sh..." they let him go.
No matter. Mr. Wilder had plenty of hits and classics to protect his legacy, and he was rich at the end.
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and another (non-Wilder) film where they were paired as rival ice fishermen.
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Yep. Grumpy Old Men -- the late-breaking career saver for both Lemmon AND Matthau. Hit enough to generate a sequel and a few more old man movies for them -- including a very unfortunate Odd Couple II sadly penned by Neil Simon himself.
But look, Wilder, Lemmon and especially Matthau made my day for many successful years before all that happened.
Grumpy Old Men was indeed yet a very good example of the "snow" movie -- Minnesota in the dead of winter and you could FEEL the cold and contemplate how old single men Lemmon and Matthau could live "hermetically sealed" in their houses in winter -- and then out to the ice fishing shacks.
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Combine the two and it could be in the wheelhouse of The Ice Harvest.
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Well, in certain ways...yes. Though The Ice Harvest is meaner than a Lemmon/Matthau film...very funny, too.
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I like Cusak and Billy Bob, I hadn't heard of The Ice Harvest, it sounds like they are doing their own black comic Fargo.
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Pretty much so. Not as good as Fargo, but very funny and nasty on its own terms. And secondary players Oliver Platt(as a rich, drunk attorney) and Randy Quaid(no spoilers) make it even more fun.
Here's a link to a post I made on its board...a bit spoilery:
https://moviechat.org/tt0400525/The-Ice-Harvest/5a2d745a8103470012e52bf5/Its-Christmas-Time-To-Enjoy-the-Xmas-Murders-Mayhem-and-Comedy-of-the-Ice-Harvest
I would watch the movie first before reading it. Or you can skip reading it!
In Buster Keaton's short, The Frozen North, he is on a frozen lake with his fishing line in an ice-hole and, after an apparent bite on the line, yanks on it hard, pulling another nearby fisherman into his own ice-hole. There's also a sled-dog racing scene (when one dog comes up lame, he pulls a spare dog out of the trunk of his dogsled), and there's a moment when he leans against the wall of an igloo only to fall right through the slush. Combined with the usual thriller hijinks, there might still be black comic gold there yet.
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Well Buster Keaton was several levels of genius ...and so very funny...I'm not familiar with that one but you gotta admit that ice hole fishing shacks are MADE for comedy(I love how, in Grumpy Old Men, the fishermen actually keep small TV sets in the shacks to watch games!)
I catch The Ice Harvest once a year among my Christmas movies. And I love Billy Bob's line about his wife....