Sam Peckinpah on Torn Curtain and Hitchcock

I return to belatedly to say you are welcome, and I'm glad that you enjoyed Peckinpah's comments.

I do think one thing that is interesting about the two brutal Hitchocck murders versus Bloody Sams' famous Wild Bunch massacre/gun battle at the end is that Sam was more of an entertainer in his bloodshed -- we got fast edits, different films speeds, incredible sound effects(bullets, dynamite) EVEN AS the deaths in The Wild Bunch were bloody and painful.

But the murders in Torn Curtain and Frenzy are almost "anti-entertainment," very realistic and brutal, no music, no gunplay and distinctly disturbing: Gromek has to be slowly killed by "the good guy"(Paul Newman) who seems devastated by having to do the deed(via knife, shovel, and gas oven); Brenda Blaney is a totally innocent woman who in no way provoked or invited Bob Rusk's psychopathic attack upon her(which consists first of the violation of rape, then the agony of strangulation). These scenes were hard to watch. Much harder than the rather "action packed" finale of The Wild Bunch, in which, at least, the violence was between hardened, violent men in an unevenly matched gunbattle.

One director said of this scene that "its as if one morning, Alfred Hitchcock woke up and decided to film a scene in which he would show how hard and long and difficult it is to kill a man."

The process had begun, I suppose with Psycho, in which it is not terribly long and hard for Mother to kill either Marion or Arbogast, but its longer than murders in other movies. Especially the killing of Marion -- She is stabbed many times and stands upright for a long time, slowly sliding down the tiles after her killer has left the bathroom.

In The Birds, it is only at the end that we see a character under the onslaught of attack by the birds -- Tippi Hedren in that upstairs bedroom. But she survives, and the scene has a "fantastical quality" that undercuts any realism even though it is --as the shower murder was -- a very long attack.

Marnie climaxes with a bloody murder -- of Bruce Dern's sailor john -- but it ends up being perhaps the most awkwardly staged murder in Hitchcock. Little Marnie hits Dern over the head with a poker, but the blow seems to be with no power at all -- not even a glancing blow -- and she drops the poker. Blood pours but the overreaction of Marnie and her hooker mother plays almost comic. There is no real cinematic power to this murder. Though it begins with a disturbingly sexual component -- Dern "comforting" Little Marnie with too much intimacy and the mother's stuggle with Dern suggested through their legs intertwined in a mocking of sexual congress.

With Torn Curtain, Hitchcock removed the music of the Psycho killings, the fantastic nature of the bird attacks, the bumbling around and sexual overtones of the Marnie murder -- and got down to business. A threatening, menacing man must be killed. By the good guy. Without using a gun( a cab driver is right outside, he would hear that.)