3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for violent images, sexual content and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.7.12
2012 has been a banner year for
Alfred Hitchcock.
The London Symphony Orchestra
debuted composer Nitin Sawhney’s innovative score for a sparkling new print of
1926’s silent suspenser, The Lodger — regarded as the first true “Hitchcock
thriller” — at London’s Barbican Center on July 21.
1924’s The White Shadow —
a silent melodrama long thought lost, on which Hitchcock served as scripter,
assistant director, editor and art director — was found (mostly intact!) in
mislabeled film canisters by a researcher at the New Zealand Film Archive, and
has been lovingly restored and posted online, for all to enjoy.
And the past month has seen not
one, but two quasi-biopics set during Hitchcock’s prime in the late 1950s and
early ’60s.
That sort of attention can be a
mixed blessing, particularly when the first of these projects — The Girl, which debuted Oct. 20 on HBO — was little more than character assassination.
Toby Jones may have been persuasive as Hitch, but Gweyneth Hughes’ tawdry
script plumbed truly deplorable depths, while clearly overstating the degree to
which the director’s infatuation with Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) became
unhealthy and sadistic during the making of The Birds.
Happily, the newly released Hitchcock is a more palatable brew. Scripter John J. McLaughlin — working
from Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho — doesn’t
have any axes to grind, and he also benefits from the genuinely fascinating,
behind-the-scenes back story.
Psycho was a landmark
production in all sorts of respects, from the shrewdness with which Hitchcock
outmaneuvered the censorious Hays Office — one of the early artistic assaults
that illuminated the growing irrelevance of that body of ultra-conservative
bluenoses — to the film’s brilliant marketing campaign, which kept people out
of their showers for weeks, just as Jaws would keep them away from the ocean
in 1975.
Hitchcock benefits from several
great performances, starting with Anthony Hopkins’ dignified depiction of the
Master of Suspense, and Helen Mirren’s feisty reading of his wife and longtime
creative collaborator, Alma.
They’re merely the tip of the
iceberg. James D’Arcy’s portrayal of Anthony Perkins, who starred as Norman
Bates in Psycho, is so authentic that it’s startling; at times, D’Arcy seems
more like Perkins than Perkins himself. Scarlett Johansson is similarly
striking as Janet Leigh, who winds up taking that fateful shower in a scene
that has been imitated and spoofed countless times. Johansson doesn’t try for
mimicry as much as D’Arcy, but she definitely conveys the way Leigh walked,
acted and struck a pose; close your eyes slightly, to silhouette D’Arcy and
Johansson, and it genuinely looks and sounds like Perkins and Leigh rehearsing
a scene.
Hitchcock also has a strong
sense of the era, thanks to Judy Becker’s meticulous production design, Julie
Weiss’ costume design, and the art and set decoration by Alexander Wei and
Robert Gould. Hollywood loves to make movies about making movies, but this one
feels right; it plants us firmly in the late 1950s, thanks to cars, clothes,
cigarettes, California beachfront property, tony Beverly Hills mansions and the
Universal Studios backlot, where a fleabag motel and the creepy, cornice- and
pilaster-laden Bates house were constructed for Norman and his mother.
It’s frustrating, then, that with
so many top-notch elements in play, first-time feature director Sacha Gervasi
frequently derails his film with an ill-advised narrative device that not only
brings things to a grinding halt at inopportune moments, but feels as if it had
been imported from some low-grade horror flick. As Hitchcock himself said, on
many occasions, he wasn’t about horror; he sought to deliver suspense. Big
difference.
Events kick off with the
completion and release of 1959’s North by Northwest, the glossy, all-star
adventure thriller that reinforced Hitchcock’s reputation as one of America’s
master showmen. This image was further cemented, on a weekly basis, by
television’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which had debuted in 1955 and been
among the nation’s Top 25 favorite TV shows for four consecutive seasons.
Hitch could have made any film he
wanted, and the execs at Paramount — to whom the director owed one more
picture, on contract — eagerly hoped for another North by Northwest. But the
always restless and contrary Hitchcock, who hated to repeat himself, was
mindful of the financially successful low-budget horror films being made by
American-International, Hammer and other smaller studios.
Consider, as Hopkins’ Hitchcock
muses to his longtime production assistant, Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette),
how much better a first-class, low-budget shocker would be if he directed it.
And thus the die was cast,
Hitchcock getting his way via ploys that would have been admired by a master
tactician. Longtime agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlbarg) makes Paramount’s
wary execs an offer they can’t refuse, mostly contingent on Hitchcock’s offer
to finance Psycho himself. This causes some consternation on the home front,
mostly when Alma’s cost-cutting measures interfere with his gourmand’s palette.
As Hopkins so endearingly
explains, though, Psycho isn’t merely a means for Hitchcock to demonstrate
his ability to efficiently helm a low-budget thriller. In one of many warm
scenes between Hopkins and Mirren, the director evokes their early days in the
1920s, when no-budget films forced them to be quick, inventive and daring.
Wouldn’t it be nice, he suggests, to recapture those exhilarating times once
more?
The team of not-quite-stars comes
together, with Perkins and Leigh joined by Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), the
latter “punished” by Hitchcock for a previous transgression, when he casts her
as Leigh’s dowdy sister, who comes looking for her sibling after she vanishes,
without trace, during the drive to California. (Hitchcock had groomed Miles to
star in Vertigo, and he got vexed when the actress became pregnant and had to
drop out of that production.)
We also meet the production
talents: young screenwriter Joseph Stefano (Ralph Macchio), whose obsession
with therapy cements his being hired; prickly composer Bernard Herrmann (Paul
Schackman), whose slicing string section would add the cherry to the notorious
shower murder; and graphic designer Saul Bass (Wallace Langham), who concocted
the film’s unsettling title credits and storyboarded interior sequences such as
the shower scene and the staircase murder of the private investigator played by
Martin Balsam (Richard Chassler).
And then there’s Whitfield Cook.
Cook, as played here by Danny
Huston at his smarmiest, was a modestly successful Hollywood screenwriter who
had worked on Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and Stage Fright, in the
latter case sharing scripting credits with Alma Hitchcock. These were to be his
final big-screen credits; as the 1950s wore on, he found work only in
second-tier television work.
In a subplot contrived solely for
this film by McLaughlin — in other words, definitely not part of Rebello’s
source book — Cook trades on his position as longtime family friend by
attempting to entice Alma into an affair, which she apparently considers while
being piqued by her husband’s infatuation with Leigh. McLaughlin appears to
have extracted this extra-marital temptation from a stray comment in Patrick
McGilligan’s biography of the director, which suggests that Alma and Cook had a
fling in 1948: a detail rejected by rival Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto,
whose own lascivious focus would have prompted him to exploit such a detail, if
he believed it true.
Ironically, Cook spent most of
his time writing and directing stage plays in the late ’40s for Alfred and
Alma’s daughter, Patricia, a young actress who’d eventually be granted small
roles in three of her father’s films: Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train and ... Psycho. How odd, then, that Patricia Hitchcock is nowhere to be seen
in this film, either on the home front or during the re-created making of Psycho!
But the Whitfield Cook sidebar
isn’t this film’s strangest detour. That honor belongs to Hitchcock’s
imaginative channeling of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the 51-year-old,
small-town Wisconsin serial killer whose gruesome exploits prompted horror
novelist Robert Bloch to write Psycho, the book Hitchcock later purchased —
with an anonymous lowball “blind bid” that netted Bloch only $9,000 — for
screen adaptation.
Numerous times throughout this
otherwise captivating and firmly grounded docudrama, Hopkins’ Hitch finds
“motivation” via imaginary (hallucinatory?) conversations with Gein. I cannot
imagine a plot device that would more effectively rip us away from the story
being told; it’s a dreadful miscalculation on the part of Gervasi and
McLaughlin.
Far better, instead, to
concentrate on their film’s finer moments. Both Mirren and Hopkins have choice
scenes, hers coming when Alma delivers a wounded harangue to her clearly
surprised husband, after he unwisely questions her loyalty. It’s a great
speech, and Mirren conveys it brilliantly.
Hopkins’ transcendent moment,
conversely, is completely silent; it comes as Hitchcock stands in the lobby of
a theater showing the premiere of Psycho. He waits, calculating a key scene
to the nanosecond, and then indulges in a droll little dance, his sweeping arms
perfectly punctuating each collective shriek from the audience within. Pure
visual poetry.
I wish Hitchcock more
frequently aspired to that level of quality. Sadly, while Gervasi’s film is
mostly engaging, these ill-advised lapses — which feel like the exploitative
indie material Hitchcock intended Psycho to exceed, not emulate — leave a
bitter and disappointing taste.
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