the screaming 60s by justin lockwood

How appropriate that 1960 saw the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The classic film neatly separates the more subdued and fanciful horror of the 50s and all that came before from the intense, at times harrowingly realistic movies that followed.  It’s easy to forget how groundbreaking Psycho was when first released, as is often remarked.  Besides the obvious, innovative brutality of the shower scene, there’s a cornucopia of previously taboo subjects on display: premarital sex!  Drag! Voyeurism! Grave robbing!  Oedipal fixations!  The list goes on and on, up to and including frisky costars depicted in their underwear and the screen debut of a toilet.  None of this would seem nearly as striking now, but at the time, Psycho shocked audiences and heralded the breaking down of cinematic barriers.  More adult, previously verboten topics were starting to come front and center.

Hitchcock himself continued the trend of modernistic, unflinching horror with his follow-up movie, The Birds (1963).  While not quite as taboo-busting, the story still involves lusty unmarried lovers—one critic noted that it “starts out like a sex comedy.”  The most provocative element, perhaps, is the ending: an utterly ambiguous final scene in which the central characters drive uneasily away from their farmhouse, surrounded by hordes of birds that might strike again at any moment.  If you were looking for the good guys to win, or for any sort of resolution for that matter, you were out of luck.  Hitchcock’s coda ensured that The Birds’ eerie spell would follow audiences right out of the theater.  The silence that greeted this coda—broken only by the sounds of the car trucking along—enveloped much of the film, which had no musical score.

If anyone really picked up where Psycho’s startling frankness had left off, though, it was Roman Polanski with his adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, released in 1968.  The stylish and deeply disturbing tale of a young woman (Mia Farrow, never better) who comes to realize her unborn baby is the Antichrist is as emblematic of the 1960s as anything could be.  The film manages, in an un-showy, naturalistic way, to challenge religion, modern medicine, the relationship between the sexes, and a multitude of other hot button issues.  Watching the movie for the first time, my boyfriend was impressed by how openly topics like birth control were discussed in the movie.  The trippy sequence in which Rosemary dreams of boarding a yacht with JFK, which plays like a bad LSD trip, is a bit dated, but through its terrifying exaggeration of the fears every woman has when pregnant, Rosemary’s Baby remains relevant and electrifying, and no mere cultural artifact.  For an in-depth look at this seminal film, look no further than this very blog and Jeffery’s recent post on it.

Rosemary’s Baby brought horror into respectable mainstream theaters, but the year’s other horror classic, Night of the Living Dead, aimed explicitly for the drive-in.  George Romero was a director of commercials who pooled talent and resources to make a cheap “Monster Movie” that changed the face of the horror genre.  Shot, like Psycho, in stark black and white and with a cast of unknown but wholly convincing actors, Living Dead depicted the absurd so matter of fact that it felt terrifyingly real.  A group of disparate people hole up in a farmhouse when the dead inexplicably come to life and seek out human flesh.  The radio and television reports watched by the survivors add verisimilitude, but the characters are what make Romero’s opus so convincing.  Like us, they fight, bicker, and get hysterical.  Director John Landis declared that Night pulled an even more shocking twist with its apparent leading lady than Psycho: rather than die, Barbara (Judith O’Dea) goes catatonic after the opening sequence.

That Night of the Living Dead was “read” for a multitude of political meanings probably says more about the 60s than about the movie itself.  Romero and his cohorts just wanted to make a good, scary flick, but in the contemporary climate, having a black lead (Duane Jones) who is accidentally shot by a white zombie killing unit/lynch mob felt like some kind of statement.  So did the dazed, rampaging hordes who could have stood for—take your pick—hippies, antiwar protesters, druggies, and on and on.  Beyond the alleged subtext, Night put a graphic new spin on the horror genre with its vicious gore and relentless nihilism.  This is a film in which there is no escape, no hope.  Its ironic finale was even bleaker than that of The Birds.

If the 60s horror films have one thing in common, it was their refusal to end happily or neatly.  Norman Bates goes completely mad, revisionist 80s sequel notwithstanding.  Rosemary decides to raise the Devil’s baby.  The birds overrun the planet.  So do the zombies.  After this decade, horror stopped pulling punches and started taking audiences into wholly nightmarish worlds they’d have trouble shaking long after the fade to black.


-Justin Lockwood

favorite 60s fashionable flicks by karen g.

If I had a dollar for every time I’d try to find an excuse to bring Alfred Hitchcock into the conversation, I’d have a much healthier looking bank balance.  But I digress – today I thought I’d share a few iconic fashion moments from some of my favorite 60s movies (a smaller sprinkling of Hitchcock this time), but as you know, we all go a little mad (for fashion) sometimes...


Janet Leigh’s outfit and purse – Psycho (1960)

Elizabeth Taylor’s incredible coat – Butterfield 8 (1960)

Natalie Wood’s hat - Splendor in the Grass (1961)

Ursula Andress’ famous bikini – Dr. No (1962)

Tippi Hedren’s green suit and updo – The Birds (1963)

Deborah Kerr’s parasol realness in Mexico – The Night of the Iguana (1964)

Tippi Hedren’s dress – Marnie (1964)

Everything Virna Lisi wore in How to Murder Your Wife (1965)

Raquel Welch’s futuristic jumpsuit – Fantastic Voyage (1966)

The goils and their pill bottles – Valley of the Dolls (1967)

Barbra Streisand’s fabulous hat – Funny Girl (1968)

Shirley MacLaine’s little black dress and red accessories – Sweet Charity (1969)

-Karen G.

nitpicking 'hitchcock' by justin lockwood

I’m an expert on Psycho.  I’m not bragging; it’s just a fact.  It’s one of my all time favorites, and besides having seen it probably a hundred times, I’ve read practically all there is to find on its making.  So I was obviously intrigued to see Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren and based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of  Psycho.  After the film, my boyfriend asked, “What about it was inaccurate?”  “What wasn’t  inaccurate?” I quipped.  Putting aside the whole wife crushes on screenwriter plot, which I’ve heard is utter hogwash, here are the inaccuracies that plagued this movie:

Ed Gein—A highlight of the film for me was its depiction of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the real life necrophile who inspired Norman Bates.  The role was well cast and the scenes of his home and bizarre crimes were excellently staged.  But Hitchcock wrongly says that he “dug up his own mother,” and the scene of Ed cozying up to his mom’s corpse in bed is total fabrication. Gein told authorities he tried to dig up his late mother’s grave but couldn’t break through.  He’s also shown in the basement of his house when the cops arrive to arrest him, but he was actually dining at a neighbor’s when his victims were discovered.

The shower scene—In Hitchcock, the director loses it during the filming of the shower scene and slashes wildly at Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson).  It’s a great way to dramatize Hitch’s mental state, but Leigh is obviously frightened in the sequence, and the incident never happened.

Raising their right hands—Vera Miles was quoted as saying that “We all had to raise our right hands and promise not to divulge one word of the story.”  She has a way with words, but the scene of Hitchcock literally instructing his cast and crew to raise their right hands and recite an oath is pretty ridiculous.

Tony Perkins—While Perkins did, as he hints in Hitchcock, have an unusually close relationship with his mother and lost his father at a young age, he was nothing like the shy mama’s boy he played in Psycho, and James D’Arcy’s strained, Batesian performance does him a real disservice.

Joseph Stefano—The idea that Stefano landed the screenwriting gig because he was in therapy and had issues with his mother is cute but disingenuous.  Stefano was in therapy, and Hitchcock asked him about it, but Stefano got the job because Hitch liked his take on the opening scene, which he said “Alma loved.”

Alma takes over—Alma Reville was not only Hitchcock’s wife but also his closest and most trusted collaborator, and the movie is a fitting tribute to that.  Still, the idea that she came in and directed while Hitch was laid up in bed (after the bogus “shower scene incident”) is pure invention.  In reality, no one directed but Hitch, and pictorial consultant Saul Bass’ contention that he shot the shower scene has been repeatedly rebuked by sources including Janet Leigh herself.


-Justin Lockwood

back to the bates motel

A windy October night screening at Film Forum of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho revived my feelings about the movie. Even if they have never seen the film most people are aware of Norman Bates, the “shower scene,” or the reputation of the Bates Motel. Sometimes a movie can become so famous it can lose its original power. Yet watching this wonderful print on the big screen made me respect and treasure Psycho more than ever.

Janet Leigh is perfectly cast—those eyes, her raspy voice, and her steely ways in which she expresses guilt and fear. We follow her through the fascinating first half, as her Marion Crane thieves $40,000 from work and leaves town. A novice, she is a terrible thief, interacting awkwardly with a police officer, and car salesman. The film emphasizes material possessions: her car, her money. It makes the fate of Leigh's Crane all the more shocking once she turns into Bates Motel and meets its tortured owner Norman (Anthony Perkins).


Leigh and Perkins play characters who are different yet similar in many ways: stuck in a rut, haunted by wrongdoing, lonely. Perkins' performance is akin to fire: a fidgety mess with intense flickers of menace. He was typecast forever for this role, and he’s so good and memorable, it’s hard to shake Norman off from his other works. It’s not a typical performance of the times, nor of a Hitchcock picture. Perkins interrupts and his dialogue sometimes runs over other people’s lines. His scene with the prodding detective Arborgast (Martin Baslam) is one of the great pieces of acting. Bates feels human, entirely authentic, and Hitchcock enriches him even further by giving the audience glimpses of his material surroundings and biography via other characters. In the haunting ending, Perkins, wrapped in a blanket, gives a great, unsettling performance of reaction (a recall of Leigh’s driving scenes).

On this viewing, having recently watched some other Hitchcock films, I was struck just how stark Psycho is compared to his other works. I feel Psycho is one of the most economical and claustrophobic of his films (we are constantly in confined spaces). Shot on a low-budget and featuring a female protagonist who is killed off quickly, Psycho, one of Hitch’s defining pictures, is still one of his most unusual. The grimness of it, its rich black and white photography and bleak subject matter make it a departure from the glossy color films he was making during the 1950s (North By Northwest, Vertigo, Rear Window).


Psycho also has that incredible, unrelenting score by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann shed the sweeping orchestral pomp of other scores of that era and relied solely on strings. The music makes a tremendous impact in a movie theater. His cue “The Murder,” remains chilling today. I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been in 1960.

On this viewing, the infamous and dated “psychiatrist scene” played better than it ever has. Not only is it a perfect transition into the closer, but it’s another farce of higher societal figures who try to explain and reason out impossible things. In Psycho, the people of authority in the picture are uncaring and worthless: the creepy, robotic cop following Crane, the doddering town sheriff. This is a common cinematic trope but the fact that we can laugh at the psychiatrist is a testament to Hitchcock and the power of Perkins’ performance. The film has the ability to manipulate us to have some empathy for Bates, even if he’s a deplorable murderer.

Anthony Perkins on Norman Bates: "I do have affection for Norman as a person. He does the best he can out of the diminished circumstances with which his personality stranded him, and Norman's childhood was difficult and traumatic. Norman is, at heart, a benevolent soul, with a dark side, but Norman's conscious mind is always on the positive things in life."

Psycho is playing at Film Forum until November 4th.

birthday

Happy Birthday, Hitchcock.