Monthly Archives: July 2015

  • Psycho

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

    If there was ever a case of struggling to imagine what a film must have been like to see if you didn’t know what happened in it, it’s Psycho, now re-released to mark its fiftieth birthday.  I’ve always found it hard to credit that people were shocked to discover that Norman Bates was the eponymous psychopath of the story (adapted, by Joseph Stefano, from a novel of the same name by Robert Bloch) – but I missed my chance to watch the film with an open mind.  When I first went to see it at York University’s film theatre in around 1974, I’d just read The Great Movies by William Bayer, whose selection of (sixty) great movies included Psycho.   Bayer claims that, once Marion Crane has been murdered in the shower:

    ‘… Every convention of storytelling has been defied.  Our heroine is dead and the film is only half done.   Hitchcock experimented with killing off a heroine in Vertigo, where we see Kim Novak killed twice!  But because our main identification is with Jimmy Stewart, the effect is not so strong as in Psycho, where our total attention is on Janet Leigh.  … With Janet Leigh gone, we must transfer our loyalties to Anthony Perkins, the pleasant, modest, charming young man, who gains our sympathy, Truffaut insists, by the way he cleans up the bathroom and protects his mother.  Yes, incredible as it may seem, when Perkins mops up the shower stall we begin to root for him.   … It never occurs to us that [Mrs Bates] is a mummy, preserved by her friendly young taxidermist son, the matricidal maniac.  And when he is revealed as the killer, our world is shattered again. …’

    I’m exceptionally hopeless at solving whodunnits and I’m sure that, if I’d not read  Bayer’s piece, I wouldn’t have worked out that Norman Bates was preserving his mother as a mummy (although the knife-wielding Mrs Bates is remarkably tall and strong-looking and seems to be wearing a wig).  But I’ve never been able to believe that Norman is above audience suspicion until the climax of Psycho.  It’s very evident from his first conversation with Marion, in the parlour behind the motel reception desk and office, under the eye of his stuffed birds, that Norman Bates is emotionally disturbed (and disturbing).  I don’t think either that, once we’ve encountered Norman, our attention continues to be on Marion exclusively.  Anthony Perkins interprets Norman with considerable sympathy and brilliant detail.  His physical movement – the odd combination of a jerky, rangy boyishness and a mincing walk – seems hardly noticeable at first (without your realising how, it becomes gradually more insistent as the film goes on).  But, as a talking head, Perkins has an electric, ingratiating neuroticism that makes Norman spellbinding from the word go:  within a very few minutes, Janet Leigh has been nearly eclipsed by him.

    Of course there’s a disorienting aspect to Marion Crane’s death that goes beyond the fact she’s been on the screen almost uninterruptedly for the first three-quarters of an hour.  Hitchcock famously insisted that people who didn’t arrive at the start of the film shouldn’t be allowed in until the beginning of the next show.  (Is it true that this diktat changed single-handedly and for ever the then standard practice of showing films continuously rather than as distinct programmes?)  In his interview with François Truffaut (extracts from which the BFI are using as their programme note), Hitchcock explained that, if latecomers had taken their seats after Janet Leigh had departed the scene, it would have deprived him of one of his biggest audience manipulation coups – killing off the best-known name in the cast.     Because this is an essential part of cinema lore, it’s unarguable, but I still wonder what audiences in 1960 inferred from the fact that Leigh’s name appears after those of the other leading players on the film’s poster.  The list of names ends with ‘and Janet Leigh as Marion Crane’, a time-honoured way of indicating that a big name has a significant role that isn’t the main one.

    Perhaps, since Leigh in a bra and slip is the dominant figure on the poster, no one was expected to notice the text at all, and voyeurism is a recurring aspect of Psycho.  Talking with Truffaut, Hitchcock is candid about the appeal of the film’s opening sequence, as John L Russell’s camera moves through the Venetian blinds of a window high up in an apartment block to find Marion and Sam Loomis in a state of undress, coming to the end of one of the brief bouts of lovemaking they snatch during Marion’s lunch hours.  The way we get inside the room, says Hitchcock, ‘allows the viewer to become a peeping Tom’.  Norman Bates removes a picture from the wall of his parlour to watch Marion taking off her clothes.  And the shower scene – where Marion’s nakedness intensifies her terrible vulnerability – is, of course, spectacularly voyeuristic.  Perhaps that’s subliminally acknowledged in the celebrated (though garish) shot that fades out on the plughole, down which mingled blood and water are disappearing, and fades in the murdered woman’s eye in its place.

    As well as disposing unforgettably with the star of the show, Hitchcock violates another convention:  he also kills off the private detective who suddenly appears on the scene and whom we’re primed to see as a deus ex machina, a man who can bring justice and restore normality.  Martin Balsam’s Arbogast has a warmth, a common sense and a reality which are both reassuring and engaging.  So when he meets the same fate as Marion Crane on the staircase of the Bates house, it’s a shocking moment not just because of the terrific staging but because it ruptures audience expectations – and also, of course, because you’re less prepared for this than for what happens in the shower.  I remember being more horrified and scared, when I first saw the movie, by the killing of Arbogast than by the murder of Marion.  You could hear from reactions in NFT1 half a century on from the first release of Psycho that people there were feeling the same way.

    As a result of playing Marion Crane, Janet Leigh is one of the most famous female images in cinema history.  Leigh’s acting is conventional, prosaic in the opening scene – yet Marion’s presence already has a troubled weight to it:  perhaps that’s because Leigh is doing something subtle, perhaps it’s because of your awareness of what’s coming.  Leigh is best looking and listening – she skilfully dramatises Marion’s state of mind both as she stares from the driving seat of her car into the camera and as Norman Bates sits chatting to her in the motel parlour.  Psycho contains naturalistic acting much superior to what you often get in Hitchcock – from Perkins and Balsam, especially in the absorbing scene in which Arbogast is questioning Norman, and also from John Gavin, who does well in the difficult role of Sam.  As Marion’s sister Lila, Vera Miles’s playing is standard issue Hitchcock:  it’s unkind to say so but there are moments when you regret it wasn’t her in the shower.

    Watching Psycho in 2010, you’re in no doubt that you’re watching a classic movie.  It’s classic in the sense of definitive and enduring rather than classic in the sense of highest quality – but it’s classic nonetheless.  When we think of a haunted house, the image of the one that looms above the motel will come into many minds.  The illuminated lights of ‘Bates MoteI’ that Marion sees through the driving rain on the windscreen of her car are certainly the most notorious welcome sign in cinema history.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who, when they step into the shower, often think of Marion Crane (I occasionally  do).   But it’s not just the horror highlights that stay with you.  I think this may have been only the third (at most the fourth) time I’d seen Psycho in its entirety and I’ve not read a great deal about it – yet it’s remarkable how uniquely familiar it all seems.   There are the minor characters, played by actors whose names I don’t know but whose appearance in Psycho has immortalised them – especially Mort Mills, as the highway patrol man in shades who questions then follows Marion Crane on her guilty flight from Phoenix.  Others whom you don’t forget include:  Frank Albertson, as Tom Cassidy, the revolting slob rancher whose money Marion steals to try and make a better life for her and her boyfriend Sam; John Anderson, as the car dealer with whom Marion trades in her motor; Lurene Tuttle, as the homey wife of the deputy sheriff in the country where Bates Motel is located; and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, as the office junior who works with Marion.  Vaughn Taylor, as Marion’s boss, is a face I think I recognise from other pictures but it’s the shots of him in this film – acknowledging Marion as he crosses the road and sees her in her car, then doing a double take as he worriedly remembers she’d said she had a headache and was going home to bed once she’d banked Cassidy’s cash – that define him for ever.  (John McIntire, as the deputy sheriff, is perhaps the only member of the cast whom I associate more strongly with a different role, that of the paterfamilias he played in the long-running television Western series The Virginian.  Norman Bates’s ‘mother’ voice was supplied by a trio of actors, including McIntire’s wife Jeanette Nolan.)  Small things – like how Marion folds the envelope containing the stolen money and hides it in her handbag – are inscribed in my memory.  So are the names of the characters:  Arbogast and Sam Loomis, as well as Marion Crane and Norman Bates.

    The opening titles sequence, designed by Saul Bass, is also brilliantly memorable – and introduces the famous Bernard Herrmann score.   The fractures in what we see and hear at the start are grippingly ominous; the short, yearning interlude between the blocks of helter-skelter dissonance in the score is eerily powerful.  Once into the narrative, Hitchcock uses Herrmann’s music very effectively to convey the gathering momentum of Marion’s guilt and desperation.  The whole story of her journey to Bates Motel is wonderfully exciting and for well over an hour the film is hard to fault – but, in the final twenty minutes, I think it starts coming to bits.  At first, there’s the odd tiny, careless detail.  When Lila tells the deputy sheriff the name of the private detective, she pronounces it in a way that means it could be either ‘Arbogast’ or ‘Arbergast’:  the deputy sheriff, who can’t know which it is, then pronounces it on the telephone ‘Arbogast’ with a very definite ‘oh’.  Lila and Sam go hunting for clues in Bates Motel and she finds a bit of paper in the toilet bowl beside the shower:  Lila immediately identifies it as a fragment of Marion’s shredded calculations about the $40,000 she’s stolen and has decided to return – yet the scrap of paper is too tiny for her to do that.  Then there are larger blunders:  Sam keeps Norman talking so that Lila can go to the house to talk with Mrs Bates but the men’s conversation goes on far too long before Norman’s edginess boils over into realisation that Lila is on the loose.   This all leads up to the finale in which, after Norman Bates’s arrest, his state of mind is explained, ludicrously and lengthily, by a police psychiatrist (Simon Oakland).   The BFI audience was laughing by this stage:  and the scene is ridiculous in more ways than one – Lila and Sam seem more interested in hearing about Norman’s psychosis than they are distressed to be told that Marion is dead.   The director was no doubt well aware of the naff bathos of all this but does that make it any less naff?    (I imagine there are those who regard Lila and Sam’s dispassion as a witty comment on a film audience’s fickle allegiances but I’m not convinced.)

    In the very last minute of Psycho, Hitchcock redeems the situation in a sequence of famous images.  Norman/Mother watches a fly that’s settled on his hand (this nicely resonates with Bates’s will-you-come-into-my-parlour invitation to Marion earlier on).  Anthony Perkins looks up from the fly to face the camera and the skeleton’s grin is superimposed on his face as he smiles.  Marion Crane’s submerged car comes up from the swamp where Norman disposed of it.  I’m not sure if William Bayer was right to include Psycho in his sixty greatest movies book (getting on for forty years ago).  But it is a great entertainment, made by a master entertainer at his peak.

    13 April 2010

     

  • The Birth of a Nation (1915)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    D W Griffith (1915)

    Kate Muir in the Times described the recent film of Testament of Youth as ‘heartfelt and stirring in all the right ways’.  I haven’t seen Testament of Youth and the smug words ‘in all the right ways’ didn’t make me keener to do so.  But I wonder, having seen The Birth of a Nation for the first time, if I was unfair to be so irritated by what Muir wrote.   D W Griffith’s notorious, legendary picture could be described as heartfelt and stirring in all the wrong ways.

    According to Pauline Kael in Going Steady:

    ‘After the reactions to The Birth of a Nation, Griffith was so shocked that people could think he was anti-Negro that he decided to expand some material he had been working on and make it an attack on bigotry throughout the ages.  [The resulting film] Intolerance was intended to be virtuous and uplifting.’

    I think Intolerance is a tremendous film although it’s troubling that social reformers are Griffith’s bigots of choice in the early twentieth-century America section of the story.  His relatively small-scale Broken Blossoms seems a more unequivocal renunciation of racism but it’s nowhere near enough to erase the contrary message of The Birth of a Nation.  The instant public controversy – and widespread sense of outrage – caused by the film makes it impossible to downplay the racial views that Griffith expresses as an example of bygone benightedness, of that’s-the-way-people-thought-in-those-days.   If Griffith was ‘shocked that people could think he was anti-Negro’, it seems he’d recovered from the shock by the time The Birth of a Nation reappeared in 1930.  An introductory title to the re-released film explains that:

    ‘The prelude to our picture is the record of an intimate conversation between Mr D W Griffith and his friend Mr Walter Huston which occured [sic] on an evening in the Spring of 1930.’

    The film of this ‘intimate conversation’ runs about ten minutes and is divided into two parts, each part preceding one of the two halves of the picture itself.  The great director’s manner in the interview with Huston is self-consciously reflective, even rueful – but Griffith’s regret isn’t anything to do with the film he’d made.  It’s rather personal nostalgia for people who embodied the values that The Birth of a Nation celebrates.  Griffiths reminisces about his father, a colonel in the Confederate Army in the American Civil War, and about his mother, in the years after the war, ‘staying up night after night sewing robes for the Klan … the Klan, at that time was needed:  it served a purpose’.   He goes on to describe The Birth of the Nation as the story of ‘a tremendous struggle – about people who were fighting against great odds’, and to quote from the writings of Woodrow Wilson, in which the latter expresses his admiration for the Ku Klux Klan’s activities in the era of postbellum ‘Reconstruction’ of the American South.   (Wilson subsequently described The Birth of a Nation as ‘… like writing history with lightning … and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true’.)   The second part of the conversation with Huston includes a that-was-then-this-is-now disclaimer on Griffith’s part although he doesn’t explain how it is that things in the South have changed, he suggests conclusively, for the better.  It’s hard not to infer that he feels this is thanks not only to the disappearance of Yankee carpetbaggers but also to the decline of civil rights since the brief period during Reconstruction when blacks held elective office.

    The principal characters of The Birth of a Nation are the members of two families:  the Northern Stonemans and their Southern cousins, the Camerons, landowners whose estate is on the outskirts of the town of Piedmont, South Carolina.  The head of the Northern family is the politician Austin Stoneman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, the abolitionist congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln).  Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) has two sons (Elmer Clifton and Robert Harron) and a daughter, Elsie (Lillian Gish).  Dr Cameron (Spottiswode Aitken) and his wife (Josephine Crowell) have two daughters (Miriam Cooper and Mae Marsh) and three sons.  On a visit by the Stoneman brothers to their cousins, Phil, the elder brother, is strongly drawn to Margaret, the elder Cameron sister, while Ben Cameron (Henry B Walthall) falls in love with a picture of Elsie Stoneman.  When the Civil War begins, the young men enlist in their respective armies:  the two elder Cameron boys (George Beranger and Maxfield Stanley) are killed; Ben, who displays heroic courage during the Siege of Petersburg, is wounded and taken to a Northern hospital.  There he encounters the real Elsie Stoneman, who is working as a nurse.  Ben is sentenced to death for being a Confederate guerrilla but Elsie obtains for Ben’s mother, who has come to Washington to see her injured son, an interview with Abraham Lincoln (Joseph Henabery).  The President, moved by Mrs Cameron’s pleas, pardons Ben.   The first half of the film ends with Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater.

    The second half describes the horrors, as Griffith sees them, of Reconstruction – the results of a malign conspiracy of blacks and carpetbaggers.  Some of the most significant incidents in this part of The Birth of a Nation centre on or follow from the death of Flora, the younger Cameron daughter.  Alone in woods on the family estate, she is confronted by Gus (Walter Long), a black freedman who is now a military captain, and who tells Flora that he wants her for his wife.  (The iniquitous new legislature has allowed mixed marriages.)  She refuses and, terrified that Gus will have his way with her regardless, jumps from a high precipice.  Her brother Ben witnesses this and runs to his sister’s help but she dies in his arms.  Ben has by this stage formed the Ku Klux Klan, whose members hunt down Gus – then try him, find him guilty and lynch him.  They deliver his corpse to the doorstep of the mulatto Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), a protégé of Austin Stoneman and who is now the megalomaniac Lieutenant-Governor of Piedmont.  When Ben’s father is arrested by Lynch for possession in his house of his son’s Klan costume, Dr Cameron’s enduringly faithful black servants rescue him, with the help of Phil Stoneman.  The climax to the film sees Lynch, who lusts after Elsie Stoneman, trying to force her to marry him; her rescue by Klan sympathisers; and Ben Cameron leading the Klansmen into wresting back control of the town.  New elections are held, with armed Klansmen intimidating the blacks from voting; the proper order is thus restored.   Ben Cameron marries Elsie Stoneman and Phil Stoneman marries Margaret Cameron.  A giant warlike figure on the screen fades away and is replaced by the figure of Jesus Christ.  An accompanying intertitle asks ‘Dare we dream of a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more? But instead – the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace …’

    The screenplay was adapted by Griffith and Frank E Woods from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Khan, a novel by Thomas F Dixon of 1885, which its author subsequently adapted successfully for the stage (ten years before Griffith’s film was first released).  In fact, it’s largely the second half of The Birth of a Nation that derives from the Dixon material, much of the first half concentrating on military action during the Civil War.  The battle sequences represent an amazing logistical feat although I found them hard going – and not just because of the gruelling nature of what happens.  The assassination of Lincoln is, however, superbly staged and powerfully foreshadows Griffith’s world of Reconstruction – and the director is sufficiently fair-minded at least to respect Lincoln.  His death is presented as a mortal wound to conciliatory post-war policy and the cause of a power vacuum that Austin Stoneman and his kind are all too ready to exploit.  (D W Griffith’s first sound picture, one of only two full-length talkies that he made, was the biopic Abraham Lincoln – released in 1930 with Walter Huston in the title role.)

    In a way, the shape of The Birth of a Nation anticipates the structure of Gone With the Wind, nearly twenty-five years later, but Griffith’s melding of the antebellum and postbellum worlds is, in narrative terms, remarkably more sophisticated.  The racism is not sophisticated but relentless.  The closest Griffith gets to an acknowledgement that slavery was wrong comes in an early intertitle, which asserts that the arrival of Africans in America sowed the seeds of ‘disunion’.  There’s not a trace of discord, however, in Griffith’s description of the antebellum paradise that is the Cameron family homestead, where smiling, deferential slaves are only too happy to serve their masters.  It’s true that there are certain offensive elements of the film that reflect the conventions of the time when it was made – most obviously, the use of white actors in blackface to play many (not all) of the African-American characters.  But the focus on the racial aspect of the blacks-and-carpetbaggers partnership is unignorably offensive.  On Griffith’s account, power for the blacks during Reconstruction doesn’t corrupt – it gives vent to their native indolence, irresponsibility and rapacity, especially sexual rapacity, in a more dangerous way.   After Dr Cameron has been rescued and he, Margaret and Phil seek refuge from the black powers-that-be, a couple of former Union soldiers agree to hide the threesome.  This is summarised by the intertitle ‘The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright’.

    There’s consensus that The Birth of a Nation is, in terms of movie-making technique, a seminal piece of cinema.  Film scholars, and others who can appreciate in detail the magnitude of Griffith’s achievement and influence, must watch the picture with deeply mixed feelings.  The ardency of Lillian Gish, especially when Elsie Stoneman eventually sees the segregationist light, and the radiant naturalness of Mae Marsh’s playing of Flora Cameron were a challenge of sorts for me.   (The younger actresses – Miriam Cooper too – are much the most fluid performers.)  For the most part, though, I watched with a growing sense of relief that my cinema education is rudimentary enough for me not to feel conflicted about The Birth of a Nation and that I could loathe it.   The massed ranks of a US cavalry in the form of the Ku Klux Klan are something I don’t expect to forget in a hurry but I was grateful that the combination of their daft outfits and the speeded-up movement of the film made them ludicrous too.  If I saw an interview with a present-day KKK supporter, however, I wouldn’t be able to laugh it off.   Piedmont is a real place in South Carolina, about two hundred miles from Charleston.  It’s a coincidence that I saw The Birth of a Nation, in the year of its centenary, less than two weeks after a young white supremacist was arrested for the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, during their Bible study.  But the coincidence brings to mind D W Griffith’s religiose question at the conclusion of The Birth of a Nation (see above).  Of course it’s a rhetorical question but, since it’s asked from a racist perspective, it still deserves a dusty answer.

    28 June 2015

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