I'm one of those who saw the Van Sant version without ever having seen the original.
At this point, I can't imagine you're surprised.
Plot summary (with spoilers): Marian Crane and her beau, Sam, are having an afternooner at local hotel. Why hello, 1960! This Sam is no Viggo Mortensen, but I wouldn't kick him out of bed, either. Marian would, though. It's time for her to go back to work, so she starts dressing. Sam floats out the idea of getting married one day soon, but Hitchcock is laying the groundwork early on why Marian has to die, so Marian demurs on the marriage question, claiming they don't have the money. Then she's out the door before he can get his shoes on.
She goes into work at a real estate agency, and a new client walks in wishing to make a large payment he owes in cash. 40,000 dollars, to be exact. Which in Olden Times money is the equivalent to well over 70 million dollars today. Marian tells her boss she has a headache and will deposit the money and then take the rest of the day off. The boss is totally cool with this because he's monumentally stupid.
And just like that, Marian's off on a new life. It's Friday afternoon, so they won't discover she's missing until Monday. She imagines conversations in her head between her sister and her boss, wondering where she's gone. There's a great grim look of panic on her face as she seems to realize her whole life has done a 180 in the blink of an eye. She drives and drives and drives and then pulls over for a nap and when she wakes up, it's morning. A cop is tapping on her window. She stutters and acts all shady and weird and the cop gets suspicious. She drives to a used car lot and tells the guy she wants to trade-in her car. He shows her one car and she's like yeah I want it now! Totally! Right now! Gimme gimme gimme!
Meanwhile the cop is across the street, leaning against his hood, staring at her. I love this vicarious thrill that we get from the movies in scenes like this. The feeling of flouting the law and worrying about getting caught, but not really, because it's not us. You ever dream you've been arrested for something and you're super panicked and then you wake up and you're not arrested? So awesome.
Anyway, Marian high-pressures the salesman into selling her a car, and he gets suspicious, then the cop drives over to stare at her some more, and finally she drives off in her new car. But now the cops know what new car you're driving, Marian! And your real name! You're terrible at this, Marian. If you weren't about to be brutally murdered, I'd be concerned about you getting caught.
It starts to rain, and somehow Marian gets off the main highway and finds herself in front of the Bates Motel. For some reason, she gets out and goes to check in, even though it's freaking called the Bates Motel. Has she never seen a movie before?
Enter Norman Bates. He arrives from a house on the hill above the actual hotel rooms. He's super nerdy and friendly and nondescript and totally not a murderer, I bet. She checks in with a fake name, then he asks her if she wants dinner later, and she says yes for some reason. She goes into her room and Norman goes back to his house and has a screaming fight with his Mother. Mother doesn't like that there's a girl checking in, and she screams about it while Norman defends Marian to her. Norman goes back to the hotels and Marian says, "I guess I got you in trouble".
Norman explains that Mother just gets a little agitated sometimes and that she doesn't like it when he talks to other girls and that she prefers he spend all his time at the ventriloquy school where he learned to throw his voice and perfectly imitate elderly women. They have a friendly chat until Marian suggests that maybe Mother needs psychiatric care, and Norman gets darkly and hilariously defensive: "We all go a little crazy sometimes".
Marian quickly ends the dinner and says she's sleepy and wants to go to bed. Norman says goodnight and he'll see her tomorrow morning, or perhaps in about ten minutes or so.
Marian goes back to her hotel room and decides after a long day of driving, it's time for a nice, relaxing, murder-free shower. To that end, she goes into the bathroom, takes off her clothes, does that thing in the movies where they get totally inside the shower before they even turn it on--which is completely fucking nuts, I mean, it would be freezing cold!--and starts lathering up.
Very quickly, she has a visitor.
It's great. She struggles, but Mother is too powerful and makes several slices before Marian falls to the ground. The shots here are fantastic. Hitchcock avoids any nudity or actual slicing (though we feel like we've seen both), and the final shot of Marian's dead eye as the camera pulls back is spectacular.
Mother takes off. Faster than you can say "Clark Kent likes phone booths", Norman is there.
He's horrified at what Mother did, but he nevertheless quickly snaps into clean up mode. What follows is about ten minutes of totally boring and unnecessary action watching Norman clean the bathroom and put Marian into the trunk of her car and drive it to the lake etc. Maybe the 1960's audience was still trying to catch its breath and needed a cool-down period.
So finally, we're back to the real world. Lila Crane, Marian's sister, is looking for her. She questions Sam, but Sam knows nothing. Finally, a private dectective, Milton Arbogast, joins in the conversation. He was hired by the real estate company to try to track down Marian and get her to give the money back without having to involve the police. Wow, that's like the most forgiving company ever.
So Milton goes to various hotels along the route Marian took and he finally arrives at the Bates Motel. Norman acts shifty and shady and Milton gets suspicious. Norman lets it slip that Mother lives up in the house on the hill and Milton wants to ask Mother if she knows anything about Marian, but Norman won't let him speak to her. Milton calls Sam and Lila and tells them that he's at the Bates Motel and thinks Norman's hiding something. He decides to talk to Mother anyway. He goes into the Bates house and walks up the stairway.
There's a great quick overhead shot and Mother appears suddenly and stabs slicing Milton in the eye when he reaches the top step. Down he goes, all the way to the bottom.
Sam and Lila get worried when they don't hear from Milton and decide to go to the Bates Motel themselves.
But first they tell the local police about what Milton's suspicions and that he was going to interview Norman's mother. The cop tells Sam and Lila that Norman's mother has been dead for ten years.
WHA????
What could this mean?!
Meanwhile, Norman has a conversation with Mother, telling her he needs to move her to the cellar in case people come looking for her. We see a nifty overhead shot of him carrying her down the stairs as she hollers in protest. (B-B-But the cop said she was dead! What could this mean?!)
Sam and Lila show up at the Motel and pretend to be a honeymooning couple. Sam tells Lila to find Mother and question her while he distracts Norman. This works for a bit, while Lila searches the house. She can't find Mother anywhere upstairs. Finally, she heads downstairs to the cellar. Norman and Sam shoot the shit until Norman smells a rat. He knocks out Sam and rushes to the house. Lila reaches the cellar. Mother is there, sitting in a chair, facing the wall. Lila slowly slides up to her, muttering "Mrs. Bates?" over and over.
She taps Mother's shoulder. The chair spins around, revealing a skeleton!
Norman rushes in, wearing a dress and a wig and wielding a huge knife, but Sam rushes up and grabs him just in time.
Cut to, a police station. Now it's time for a weird and super anti-climatic debriefing, where a magical shaman called a "psychiatrist" explains to Sam and Lila and the cops in laboring detail his theories on multiple personalities and psychotic breaks and blah blah. This goes on and on for like over five minute. Seriously, it's a monologue at the end of a movie by a brand new character explaining the movie we just saw. He even gets several follow-up questions.
But then finally, we see Norman one last time. But it's not really Norman. It's Mother. Mother's convinced they'll blame Norman for the murders and she'll get off scot-free. No one would ever accuse an old lady of those horrible things. A fly lands on Norman/Mother's hand. Why, I'm not even going to swat at that fly right there. That will prove I'm harmless. "Why that old lady wouldn't even harm a fly", they'll say.
Then Mother looks straight into the camera and smiles.
Review: As I said, I saw Van Sant's version when it came out, and was none-too impressed. I was genuinely surprised how much more I liked it this time. I'm trying to figure out exactly why. I can't say it was the music or the writing or even the directing, because it was all the same. I guess it really was the acting. Anthony Perkins is great in this. He starts out so small and innocuous, and such a typical Olden Times movie character, that you never suspect the hidden dark side at all. In contrast, Vince Vaughn is big and doofy and scary already. Also, Anne Heche seemed to know she was in a movie, and played it way too broad as I recall, where Janet Leigh is far more subtle and sympathetic. I also think the black and white helps give the move some credibility, or a least a free pass with scenes like the fakey way Milton fell down the stairs. It's fine for 1960, but in Van Sant's version it just looked corny. I find myself incredibly jealous of the original audience, who didn't know the lead actress would die at the halfway mark, or that Mother and Norman were one and the same. How awesome would that be to discover those huge spoilers in the darkened theatre? But unfortunately, I can't ever know what that would've been like, so I have to judge it based on watching it here and now in 2012. There are some great moments in this movie, but some of it is quite slow, and once Marian is killed, the whole thing kind of runs out of gas a bit, at least for anyone watching it now, who knows the "twist". I still mostly liked it, though. This Hitchcock guy has promise. Can't wait for Vertigo.
Stars: Three and a half out of five.
Next, it's the droids we're looking for in "Star Wars" and then...perhaps my least favorite actor in all of cinema, John Wayne, stars in some fucking cowboy thing.
I love the part in that Season 1 episode of Mad Men where Roger dismisses modern movies with "Did you see that ridiculous Psycho thing?"
ReplyDeleteWhen the remake came out, critics talked about how the original was such a great masterpiece that it should not be duplicated. They said the same shocked and outrageous things when Psycho 2 was announced, being at the very least dubious that such a piece of cinematic
So I find it so hilarious to see a person who had the privilege of viewing the original on the big screen during first release casually dismissing it as some random piece of garbage or at the very least just a typical goofy Hollywood movie, as opposed to the shocked state of having viewed an innovative cinematic masterpiece that most modern-day critics imagine.
What makes it better is that there were undoubtedly a lot of people who had the exact same reaction as Roger in real life!