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.
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| Alfred Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins, left) guides Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and Anthony Perkins (James D'Arcy) through an early scene in Psycho, as Marion Crane and Norman Bates have a mildly flirtatious conversation that will trigger the awful events to come. |
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.
