MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > "Psycho" and the JFK Assassination Museu...

"Psycho" and the JFK Assassination Museum in Dallas, Texas

posted 4 months ago by roger1 (4026)
4 replies | jump to latest

I'm pretty sure that a number of years ago -- maybe decades ago, frankly -- I read somewhere that a 1960 poster for Psycho could be found among the displays in the JFK Assassination Museum in Dallas, Texas. As I recall, it was written that the poster was meant to contribute to a sense of popular culture in the "early sixties." Not just in 1963(when JFK was shot on November 22), but as "the fifties gave way to the sixties."

Well, it took years -- maybe decades -- but I finally did visit that museum -- and -- yep -- there IS a 1960 poster for Psycho as part of a display.

Except it isn't a poster.

It is a lobby card -- a smaller item than a full poster but one gets the gist of the movie and its era, to be sure.

The lobby card is anchored by a still photo from the movie, easily viewed here on the internet:
Sam Loomis(John Gavin) and Vera Miles(Lila Crane) "checking in" at the motel desk with Norman Bates(Anthony Perkins.)

I pondered why that particular photo was used for the display...maybe because it has the largest number of key cast members in it? Anthony Perkins would have to be in the photo; Janet Leigh never appeared with Vera Miles in the film, and the setting is: the motel office. And Psycho is certainly about the dangers of a motel.

Who knows? The lobby card also has the famous slashed PSYCHO logo below the photo -- with the letters in yellow, not white (matching the movie poster, but not the book cover.)

I read the fine print on the lobby card with interest (paraphrased):

"This lobby card is only to be used to advertise this motion picture when it is booked at this theater."

"This lobby card is to be returned to Paramount Pictures immediately upon this motion picture leaving this theater."

SO: Very much a tool FOR movie theater managers, but very much the property OF the studio..they didn't want these lobby cards circulating all over the place(lost costs and more.)

Under the Psycho lobby card is caption typed by the JFK museum staff:

"Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was a huge money earner in 1960."

I suppose that was meant to convey the "event" status of Psycho -- much as The Exorcist and Jaws would take over the culture in 1973 and 1975. Yet the 70's were a more violent time at the movies and the public was certainly "wised up" from the jolts of the 60s -- including the murder of JFK.

Recall that while JFK was killed in November of 1963( I'll bet that the movie loving JFK saw The Birds in March when it came out)...Psycho year 1960 was pretty important for JFK in a much more positive way: campaigning all year long(with the cultural Oceans Eleven gang The Rat Pack by his side. Sinatra, Dino, Sammy...) Beating LBJ for the Democratic nomination and then Richard Nixon for President.

Psycho star Janet Leigh appeared at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles to support JFK in July even as Psycho was ruling the summer starting with a June release in NYC and the East Coast ---it would be in August that Psycho was released in Los Angeles and the West Coast.

---

The Psycho lobby card was part of an Exhibit entitled "A New Generation," with a head quote from JFK's January 1961 inaugural speech:

"Let the word go forth...that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans."

The wordsmithing made note that rebellion was already afoot in the fifties with Marlon Brando, Jack Kerouac and early Mort Sahl but rather exploded in the early sixties.

Ah...my sweet spot: "The fifties/sixties cusp."

Certainly, over the decades, Psycho has been linked in some film writins to the beginning of the upheaval launched by the JFK assassination and all the tumult -- and positive change -- that followed.

One film scholar wrote that the Hitchcock shower scene FICTIONAL footage was studied as much as "the Zapruder film" ACTUAL footage -- the famous very short film in which JFK's open top limousine into position and he was murdered in front of his blood-sprayed wife and the whole nation (though we didnt get to see the two gruesome bullet hits - the first shot to the throat, the kill shot to the temple -- for many years after it occurred.)

Note: while Oliver Stone famously showed those two gory shots over -- and over -- and OVER again during the courtroom climax of "JFK" (1991) ("Back..and to the left"; "Back and to the left")...photos and projected footage at the JFK Museum scrupulously avoid the "neck shot and kill shot" blood and gore entirely. Which is appropriate. I saw children there.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4026) 4 months ago

Meanwhile, back at Psycho and the JFK assassination. I guess this is a "natch" with me, but I've always felt that the Zapruder film matches more up with the Arbogast murder than the shower murder. First: a man. And looking both at the fictional footage and the actual footage, we watch in mounting suspense and horror as the victim simply slides into the kill zone with what Hitchcock called "complacency" when referring to Arbogast climbing the stairs. "Passivity," said Truffaut, "Complacency" answered Hitchcock. Complacency.

And in both cases, a bloodied head and forehead is part of the damage.

"How dare you?" one might say of such a comparison between the "small stakes entertainment" of the Arbogast murder and the high stakes, monumental, world-changing horror of the JFK assassination Well, "Psycho" lives in history as well and IS predictive of the madness about to come. I say the match up of the Arbogast and JFK murders is rather historic and uncanny.

--

Two other Hitchcock movies figure in the JFK Assassination Museum: Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz(1969) . Neither of these movies were considered among Hitchcock's best -- though I like both very much -- but each one was centered upon a very important event in 60s geopolitical history: The split of East Germany and West Germany via "The Iron Curtain"(hence Torn Curtain). And the Cuban Missile Crisis...about which Topaz is mostly (though not entirely) about. (And we can't forget the Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion disaster, which laid the groundwork FOR the missile crisis.)

Topaz was, I think, the first major film or TV treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was followed by the TV event "The Missiles of October" in 1974 (starring William Devane as JFK -- Hitchcock saw Devane there and cast him in Family Plot.) Much later came the 2000 theatrical film "13 Days" starring Kevin Costner -- but not as JFK. Bruce Greenwood did the honors.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4026) 4 months ago

Note that while Psycho got its lobby card and caption, neither Torn Curtain nor Topaz nor The Missiles of October nor Thirteen Days were mentioned in the JFK Assassination Museum displays. Rather -- the Iron Curtain (and the separation into East Berlin and West Berlin) got its display and the Cuban Missile Crisis got ITS display. It remains an interesting aspect of Alfred itchcock's career that he elected to move on from the "fun" horrors of Psycho to the pollitical horrors of those Nuclear Age events.

Indeed, the JFK Assassination Museum(which is pretty much ABOUT JFK's assassination -- doesn't he have his own JFK Library somewhere else?) seemed to make the point that the almost three-year Presidency of JFK was RIFE with dangerous international events, driven by the Cold War and centralized for awhile in Communist Cuba, so close to American shores. But the museum takes up the Civil Rights movement, and the Race to the Moon(footage of JFK calling for a man on the moon by the end of the decade. He won on that one, posthumously.)

The locale of the JFK Assassination Museum is in the 6th Floor of what was called "The Texas School Book Depository" in 1963 when Lee Harvey Oswald fired his shots from there. (I'll offer that as the "base statement" and let Oliver Stone and others take it from there.) It IS dramatic to look down from the window (remodelled the length of a wall for tourists) and see the target streets below and where the shots were aimed.

And then, of course, one can ride the elevator down to street level and "see it all": the corner of Houston and Elm Streets where the limo made its turn on Elm Street -- Elm Street itself, with two big X's about ten feet apart along the center of the street -- the first X marks where JFK took the shot to the throat, the second X marks where JFK took the kill shot to the head.

Its all very chilling and dramatic, I can assure you. The grassy knoll is there, too.

CONT

[–] roger1 (4026) 4 months ago

Of course, the movie of most relevance to all this Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1991) which was conspicuously NOT referenced in any room of the JFK assassination museum.

Still, its worth looking at Stone's movie either before or after a "walking tour of Elm Street" because ol' Oliver's cameras covered every inch, angle and location within that fairly small Dealey Plaza. Again, I leave it to Stone to make HIS case and I'll add that for all my talk of the "international geopolitical turmoil of the time," JFK and company also seemed to have first befriended and then betrayed some Mafia guys. Add that to the mix.

Entering where I came in -- on this "Psycho" page. Given the hundreds of thousands(I'm guessing) tourists who have walked the halls of the JFK Assassination Museum, and seen that "Psycho" lobby card -- I suppose you could say that "Psycho" has been given yet another "growing audience over the decades" for its role not only in movie history, but in history, as well.

PS. Other pop cultural artifacts alongside Psycho in that "New Generation" display include: A Breakfast at Tiffany's lobby card(but what of Mickey Rooney?) a "Camelot" Broadway program (natch); a "Lillies of the Field" lobby card (Sidney Poitier wins Best Actor Oscar) and a "Virginia Woolf" Broadway program -- along with stills and captions from "Twilight Zone" episodes.

[–] roger1 (4026) 4 months ago

bump