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The Films of Alfred Hitchcock Psycho (1960) Psycho is one of the most famous Hitchcock's thrillers. The film is widely recognized by film critics as the etalon of the genre. Psycho has become almost the synonym to the definition of suspense. What is suspense? Suspense is synonymous to anxiousness, delay, let-up.
Suspended (Latin) to hang. In such a way, suspense can be interpreted as a certain hung up suspended condition. According to Frances Truffle, it is an intensification of suspended expectation. It is a special state of anxiety, alarm the viewer feels during the film. The viewer seems to feel involved into events that occur in film, He feels like he is the hero and he has to undergo al terrible ordeals.
Both in Psycho and The Birds Hitchcock explores the ideas of loneliness, alienation, loss of identity, triumph of the evil through an elaborate set of images and cinematic devices that he worked and reworked from film to film (Vanneman 1). To reach the goal, he uses special tricks: close-ups, fractional split-up cutting, usage of time effects (compression and stretching of time), to mention a few. Hitchcock focused attention on corresponding musical accompaniment. The most important thing was that the producer skillfully felt suspense himself. Just imagine that it was made approximately 45 years ago. The film is black-n-white.
The sound is monophonic. Probably, somebody can claim that the film is too old to examine and there is nothing interesting in it. Really, the quality of modern horror films is perfect with its color and DTS. What can Hitchcock's Psycho set off against the modern miracles? The nervous secretary with her arms clung to the wheel and ve-e-ery suspicious owner of the roadside motel, who amuses himself by creating stuffed birds. The plot of the film reminds us classical she runs away with the money, somebody kills her, somebody tries to find her, and, when they find her, they will show all!
Really, that sounds naive. However, it is far from being a complete story of Psycho. There is much more, something we unable to describe using the usual terms such as intrigue, plotting, strand, masterly role, to mention a few. The film, as we can see, demonstrates the ability of producer to reach his aim (grating on the viewers nerves, charging stress and fear) by minimal efforts. Probably, thats why Psycho is considered the etalon of horror films amongst the cinema theorists. Nobody there is dismembered by a saw; nobody is eaten by living mummy If somebody is killed, he is killed almost bloodless.
Nevertheless, the film completely engrosses the viewers attention from the very beginning to the end. Although Hitchcock creates tension by small spurs in outwardly harmless scenes. It seems there is nothing important in something the girl was able to see from the window of her boss car. What is the importance of the episode when the policeman asked her to show the documents? Yet, every episode touches you a little bit, and gradually you discover that you become nervous together with charming Marion Crain. Even such mere trifle like driving a car on a highway when the rain pours over the car window becomes something scary.
The tension grows gradually, very slowly; it grows but never leaves you. The plotting of the film is amazing. In Psycho Alfred Hitchcock explores themes more often linked to the avant garde than popular entertainment: loneliness, loss of identity, sexual ambiguity, passivity, voyeurism, the triumph of evil, and the oppressive weight of a dead past (Vanneman 1) Marion (the main hero) is not very satisfied with her love affairs with a young man Sam who rarely visits her. Sam and Marion feel overwhelmed by the dead weight of the past. Sam is burdened by alimony payments and the debts of his dead father, while Marion fears the moral judgment of her dead mother if she had Sam over to the house, shed have to "turn mothers picture to the wall" before making love to Sam (Vanneman 1) I especially like the scene where Marion and Sam discuss their cheap relationships taking place in cheap motels. She is not satisfied with Sam.
She hates to spend time with her boyfriend in places like that. Sam: Married couples deliberately spend an occasional night in a cheap hotel. Marion: I know marriage can do a lot of things deliberately. Sam: You sure talk like a girl who's been married. Marion: Sam, this is the last time. Sam: For what?
Marion: For this, meeting you in secret so we can be secretive. You come down here on business trips. We steal lunch hours. I wish you wouldn't even come. Sam: All right, what do we do instead? Write each other lurid love letters? (Dirks n.
p. ) Marion steals a huge sum of money ($ 40, 000) from her employer and escapes from the town to marry her boyfriend, Sam Loomis. On a way to her boyfriend Sse decides to stay for a night in one hotel. A young man, Perkins, who works there, kills her and buries her in a peat bog together with a car. However, money wasnt the driving motive for a murder.
Perkins mother was the reason of killing. She doesnt want her son to have affairs with the girls. Yet, there is one but. The mother exists only in an imagination of that psychically abnormal guy. Psycho is the classics of the genre made in accordance with the Robert Bloch's novel. The strand trick where the main hero is killed in the first part of the film is quite unusual.
I do not even mention that the scene of murder in a shower cabin has become the classic of horror genre. The whole scene of murder is extremely impressive. Camera placement is amazing and shows us Marion who turns on the water in a showed cabin. The water pours down on her. The film shot is made exactly beneath the showerhead and shows it to the viewer as a great blind eye with the water pouring down on Marion.
When the girl cleanses herself, the scene makes the viewer feel to be present at a near-religions ceremony. Marion cleanses herself and relieves of the burden of her folly. Further the camera shows us a gloomy image of Mother against the light. The image of neon Bates Motel is inverted into the scene.
Mother makes several steps and approaches to the shower curtain. She makes a pause for a second as if it can be a chance for mercy. However, there is no chance. When Mother draws back the shower curtain, as Hitchcock himself wrote in the script, we have "an impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film. " When Mother pulls back the shower curtain, it is Hitchcock himself who is ripping open the screen, Hitchcock himself who is taking the knife to all the impossibly beautiful actresses who have taunted and teased and betrayed him (Vanneman 2) It leaves strong impression on the viewer, especially in combination with Bernard Herrmanns music. Such plotting solution comes against all canons and standards. Hitchcock breaks all film conventions by displaying its leading female protagonist having a lunchtime affair in her sexy white undergarments in the first scene; also by photographing a toilet bowl - and flush - in a bathroom, and killing off its major 'star' Janet Leigh a third of the way into the film (in a shocking, brilliantly-edited shower murder scene accompanied by screeching violins) (Dirks n.
p. ). It seems it should inevitably ruin all film construction (the murder occurred, the main hero doesnt take part in the film anymore, the dull investigation continues and the evil is traditionally defeated in the end of the film). Such solution can exist in somebody elses films. Hitchcock makes an exception.
He introduces new heroes, the tension gradually heightens till the story ends. What concern the end of the film The scream of Lilly Crain makes the viewer flinch. The film is made in black and white. It attaches certain expressiveness to film shots.
Among other things, the film is very photogenic. The camera makes the viewer to feel paralyzed with fright as it moves closer and closer. Than it freezes for a moment and gives the viewer a chance to appreciate sometimes strange but stylish and expressive film shots. For example, In Psycho, as Marion's distress increases, the camera moves closer and closer to her darkened, back-lit face.
This is an image that we will see again (Vanneman 1). Strained glimpse, turn of the head, strange silhouette, - everything is used by the camera placement to create anxious and peculiar beautiful aura of the film. The acting of the main heroes looks great against such background. Jennet Lea (Marion Crain) is gorgeous. She evidently deserves Oscar by her acting in Psycho.
Anthony Perkins plays a perfect maniac-psycho. The image of maniac is played by moderate but expressive strokes of his actors brush. Other film characters are also expressed masterly. Probably, no other film had more influence on Hollywood's understanding of horror films. Nowadays, when any psychological thriller about a crazy man with a knife is easily called a-la Hitchcock, we can forget about the significance of Hitchcock's role in the cinema. Although Hitchcock's Hollywood films were well-known for their stories about murders, killings, intrigues, conspiracies, and adventures, they were mostly known for their high price of production, top film stars, picturesque environment and Technicolor.
Compared with such films like North to North-West, Psycho was intentionally made cheap. Psycho...
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