MovieChat Forums > roger1 > Replies
roger1's Replies
(Formerly ecarle.)
Heh.
I think this is a clue to how QT may elect to spend his time AFTER he releases his "final film" (The Movie Critic) in the next couple of years (not even cast yet.)
He can spin all sorts of fan fiction about his movie characters.
I still have a problem with his novelization of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" in that he gave us a far LESS heroic and admirable version of Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth than the guy in the movie(who won an Oscar for Pitt.) Cliff had a past not only as a WIII "hero killer," but as a murderer of several people(all of them bad) and -- get this -- a "pimp in Paris." Its as if with QT unbound by the need to write roles that stars would want to play...he could mess with the characters however he wanted.
And now this. So Rick Dalton ended up still married to Francesa(a surprise to me) and living/dying in Hawaii? Well, OK.
I wonder what happened to Robert Forster's massively sympathetic bail bondsman Max Cherry from Jackie Brown. He ends that movie in a sad state of mind...having turned down an escape to Europe WITH Jackie Brown. Maybe he changed his mind ....but...maybe I want to leave him where he was, grateful for his life-and-death adventure, sad not to be able to dare more...
My mother hated that style. She called all those big old suburban homes barns, and had grown up in one herself, albeit in a city, north of Boston.
--
In his book "Suspects," movie critic David Thomson wrote a series of "back stories" for famous movie characters, including Noah Cross and Norma Desmond. A few Hitchcock movie characters got write-ups and one was Norman Bates. Thomson opined that the Bates family moved to California from back east, that "Mr. Henry Bates" was a wealthy builder of homes who built his mansion as "the best of the best" -- an advertisement to his own trade. And then he died. Leaving a wife and only one child to "rattle around" in that big old house.
---
To her, those houses were a royal pain to maintain, cost a fortune to heat, had bad plumbing and were always drafty. Nothing cozy about them
--
I've stayed as a guest in a few such houses, and all of that felt right. Especially the heating and plumbing issues.
--
CONT
I agree, EC (and good to see you return, whatever name you use)
---
We shall see -- the new problem is I get cut off from posting more than once per hour it seems, and then only a paragraph or two. But I'm going to try. The longer "conversational" mode that makes posting here so rewarding -- to READ, when I read you and others here, is the key to coming here. If I'm cut down to a paragraph an hour well, I'm can't be around all day to do that. Anyway, it seems to be a new computer screwup. I can still get in on my cell phone via ecarle, but I can't write much from a cell phone. (This message is for you AND for moviechat honchos.)
--
regarding the Bates family. They likely, I suspect, had some "old money", much as many east coast folk did, true, surely when and where I grew up, in which big old homes, complete with barns (not yet wholly "converted" into garages), front porches, cobwebs in many of the windows, and often an elderly lady or two living alone inside. They looked grander than they truly were.
--
The "funny thing" about the infamous Bates "mansion"(or maybe it was just a big house), is that one could picture it on a street among other such houses(say in the neighborhood where Meet Me In St. Louis takes place) and it would be "fine," quaint, historic, "non-sinister." But put it out in the middle of nowhere, up on a hill looking down on a not-too-modern motel...and it became: creepy and atmospheric -- "don't go in there!"
One film earlier in North by Northwest, the drunken car drive ends, I believe, among houses on the MGM backlot and whaddya know -- there's a house much like the Bates mansion tucked in there, "waiting for its close-up next year" in Psycho. Which didn't happen -- ANOTHER house was cobbled together from SEVERAL houses on the Universal backlot, with some additional construction.
CONT
swanstep..this is the formerly named "ecarle," now using Roger1 for ...the time being?
I changed computers and for some reason I cannot access my old "ecarle" account.
Perhaps someday the moviechat techs can let me back in to ecarle. I'll keep trying.
In the meantime: I'm Roger1
Which reminds me: in Stanley Donen's "Charade," Audrey Hepburn tells Cary Grant that he has changed the name he gives her no less than four times in the course of the movie. Grant replies: "The name may change, but the man is the same."
So it is with me.
.
And the business ticked along until the new highway opened and the pretty part-time desk clerk disappeared, and there were all those awkward questions...
---
Ha..yikes. All bad things have to start somewhere.
---
I presume all of this was covered in the "Bates Hotel" TV show, not that I consider that to be canonical.
---
It sure is NOT canonical. They moved the location to the trees and coast of the Northwest, for one thing.
But I think we can go from the 1960 movie for ITS "canon."
That big old mansion up the hill bespeaks indeed of wealth. And when the main highway existed, indeed the motel could have financed staff to run it. On the other hand, Mrs. Bates was persuaded to build the motel not by her late husband...but by a boyfriend(married) who showed up after Mr. Bates died. Still...the boyfriend probably persuaded Mrs. B to use some of her inheritance(insurance?) to finance the motel.
And then it all ended, and Norman was there all alone...
The quality of the work he got declined in the second half of the 60s.
---
He did two good things in 1972 that I remember:
A TV movie called "Goodnight My Love" with Richard Boone. Boone and Buono's fellow WWW villain Michael Dunn(a witty little person), played a Mutt and Jeff team of 40's private eyes in LA. Buono played the Greenstreet role, quite nicely in a white suit.
And a movie-movie called "The Wrath of God" with Robert Mitchum. It was a rather cult period action movie set in ...South America? Mitchum formed a "mini-magnificent seven" with Buono and some other guy; Buono went out in a blaze of glory, saving the day.
But that's all.
---
My sense is that he did have star quality, and with careful handling enjoyed greater success as a character star.
--
Well...he could have been another Sydney Greenstreet. (His voice, BTW was great...it could sound in Shakespearean elegance and then suddenly coarsen into a New Yawk squawk.)
My favorite movie with a Boston Strangler motif is the low budget 1964 Victor Buono vehicle (as it were) The Strangler. It was very well made, set safely in L.A., thus not having to be held "accountable" for mimicking the Boston case;
---
It occurs to me that The Strangler was likely well within the timeframe of the Boston murders but...so apart from the reality of it all that neither the public nor the critics got the connection.
---
and overall, it worked for me, and time had been kind to it. Buono's playing of the title role is Master Class.
--
It has often been noted that Norman Bates in Robert Bloch's 1959 novel is quite an overweight man. Rod Steiger has been suggested for proper casting but...perhaps Victor Buono could have done THAT version of Norman as well. Alas, then Norman would have lost the sympathy of the audience (and the motherly lustful love of female audience members) that Tony Perkins brought to the role (Hitchcock eschewed the heavy guy from the book and SAW Perkins in the role, having long wanted him in a picture.)
---
If Allied Artists been able to find a better director for the film, which is, for what it is, quite well made, they might have had a cult classic on their hands,
---
There are a lot of "Psychos" made in the 50s and 60's -- but not by great directors like Hitch(or good ones like Robert Aldrich) and hence...they are lost to us as not much more than Bs.
---
and Buono enjoyed a better than "novelty" career.
---
He was a "go to" TV series villain in the 60's -- I loved his Count Manzeppi(twice) on The Wild Wild West, and he was King Tut on Batman. I'm sure he did The Man From UNCLE, too.
---
CONT
TWO: Could Norman have run the motel for more years if his crimes were not discovered?
Possibly. The sequels had him running the motel in the 80s, so perhaps the 60s through the 70's were possible.
But it seems his crimes were due to catch up to him SOMETIME. Marion did. Marion disappeared from the Bates Motel and then Arbogast did. Had Sam and Lila disappeared, the cops would have come out again and again.
But if Norman kept the murders rare perhaps he could have run the motel, eventually closed the motel , and then retired as a recluse up in the house with mother.
This is how Tarantino seems to be readying his "life after his final film" (ostensibly titled The Movie Critic and coming next year.)
Once that final film is finished and shown, QT can spend the years tracing ALL of his characters, if he wants to.
Maybe temps, paid in cash, not regular, salaried people. The motel was basically a one man job. If business had picked up; unlikely, given its location and its drabness.--the market for places so out of it they're hip, thus funky, was still a few years down the road, and the motel had a forbidding quality thanks to its owner, and this would have continued, and likely worsened, as time passed and Norman hadn't been caught.
---
Telegonus...this is the formerly named "ecarle," now using Roger1 for ...the time being?
I changed computers and for some reason I cannot access my old "ecarle" account.
Perhaps someday the moviechat techs can let me back in to ecarle. I'll keep trying.
In the meantime: I'm Roger1
Which reminds me: in Stanley Donen's "Charade," Audrey Hepburn tells Cary Grant that he has changed the name he gives her no less than four times in the course of the movie. Grant replies: "The name may change, but the man is the same."
So it is with me.
---
You raise two interesting topics in one:
ONE: Did Norman have help? Short answer is probably no. The business wasn't there to support HIM very much, let alone another worker.
A writer named James Cavenaugh wrote a first draft of Psycho for Hitchcock. He was let go -- evidently he couldn't face the horror of the material and turned "Mother in the fruit cellar's " face into that of a huge DOLL with button eyes! Goodbye.
Bits and pieces of the Cavenaugh draft are in Stephen Rebello's book on the making of Psycho, but relevant here: in THAT draft, Norman shows Marion a recent foreclosure notice on the motel and cries about it.
That would have really screwed up the storyline, yes? We aren't meant to worry about Norman's business survival...just to wonder about it. These things keep things OK for him:
He probably owns the house outright. And the land (valuable, a blackmailer in Psycho III urges him to "sell off an acre."
CONT