On Imperfections in Films

Films, even great films, are imperfect beasts... shots in a given scene are often pieced together from different days shooting, or different locations, or, as in Psycho repeatedly, from locations together with soundstages.

Some interesting(to me) examples of that in Psycho:

ONE:

The highway cop stop scene. The scene opens with extensive -- and silent -- footage on location of the cop's car pulling up near Marion's parked car -- backing up, and parking a distance behind her(the screen time given to all this is LONG but mesmerzing.) The "on location cop"(who might or might not be the actor playing him -- Mort Mills -- I can't tell) approaches the parked car. We can't see anyone in the car (Marion's sleeping in there.)

BOOM. When the cop REACHES the car, we are clearly on a soundstage with a PHOTOGRAPH of the hillside near Marion's car as backdrop. Mort Mills and Janet Leigh(and SHE never went up there to Gorman north of LA on location) begin their dialogue scene.

TWO: I"ve attested that my favorite shot in Psycho is of Arbogast climbing the stone steps on the brushy hillisde to the Bates Mansion in -- nighttime? dusk? hard to tell.

But this: there are CLOUDS in the sky behind the house in that shot, but in the shot two shots BEFORE it -- Arbogast's POV of just the house on the hill in the moonlight -- no clouds in the sky.

Doesn't matter. BOTH shots are glorious to the eye and the FIRST one(the POV on the house with mother's window brightly gleaming) is often used now to "show off the house": its the best photograph it took.

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And about that white light shining out of Mother's upstairs bedroom window:

I've mentioned this before , but here is a good place to mention it again:

The famous movie poster for The Exorcist rather homages the "Psycho window" -- if not the Psycho house -- in showing Max Von Sydow from behind, positioned below a more foggy version of the "white light from the upstairs window." Greats imitating grants.

And in late 1973/early 1974, the massive black whale of a modern movie theater called "The National in Westwood"(West Los Angeles) built a facsimile of that window -- complete with white curtain blowing in the manufactured wind. To promote The Exorcist for its record long run with long lines -- folks lined up UNDERNEATH that window.

Oh, I feel all of that, swanstep. While all this fol de rol really exploded with the advent of home video, suddenly rendering every deleted scene, alternate take or what-have-you a commodity, it's something that's been with us almost as long as film has, but in a subdued form.

1925's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, for instance, was rereleased in '29, incorporating music, dialogue and sound effects, as well as re-edited with newly shot scenes and alternate takes of existing ones (the famous unmasking among them) and other original ones deleted. Latter day attempts to reconstruct its '25 form have been frustrated by scarcity of documents from the period, and what now appear to be the highest quality restorations are results of great deals of intuition, outright guesswork and reliance on contemporaneous accounts whose accuracy can't always be verified.

Similar circumstances arose from Chaplin's 1940 rerelease of THE GOLD RUSH, but his control of film elements and documentation was, fortunately, more meticulous than most. And then, of course, there were the "roadshow" versions of big films that were shortened for general release, with the original negatives of some inexplicably cut down to conform, and that material discarded. And sometimes, rediscovered years later.

But the strictly 21st-century practice of film makers and/or marketers, unleashed by technology, bombarding the public with ever more "new and improved" versions of consumer favorites inevitably leaves only another question: when is the number of options and choices just too damned many?

EDIT for an afterthought - My natural cynicism kicked in and answered the question for me: never, as long as there's a buck to be made.

Let's apply that to PSYCHO. Is it the one released in 1960 in NY and L.A.? Or the one released the same year in, say, Munich and Berlin, with the extended shots of Marion undressing, the blood on Norman's hands and Arbogast's stabbing that Hitchcock couldn't get away with in the U.S.?

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THAT's a good one to contemplate. Because Spielberg once moved on HIS director's cut(with newly shot scenes) for Close Encounters a mere THREE years after its 1977 release (now there is a 1980 release to go with it) and I can't really remember WHEN George Lucas put the garish sunset in American Graffiti and tinkered with Star Wars films.

But here are these three quite miniscule but TELLLING edits to the American version Psycho that were discoverede DECADES after Psycho came out and DECADES after Hitchcock died.

Quite frankly, I now see the "German directors cut" as the DEFINITIVE Psycho because clearly Hitchcock put those moments on film (SHOT them, not just WROTE them) and that was his original vision of the film.

Fascinating: the three extra bits in Psycho were tracked down after a fro sleuth noticed that -- in the original 1968(?) copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut, the still frame of Janet Leigh taking off her bra showed more back and a bit of "almost side boob"(as they call it.) WHERE was that footage found for the book? Someone tracked down the print, and voila -- the German version.(And SOMEONE, of the millions of people who looked at the Psycho pages in Hitchcock/Truffaut, raised the alarm. With the modern day internet, one million people miss such details but ONE person finds that gaffe and the world finds out about it eventually. Amazing.

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