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  When Psycho was originally released in 1960, it broke many "Hollywood rules." It was the first film to show a toilet in a bathroom, and it went places many dared not go. Psycho was filmed in black and white because Hitch considered it to be too gorey and even had the crew of his TV show to film the movie.

  Hitch made the rule that you could not enter the theatre after the movie began because of a main character disappering in the first third of the movie. People would wonder where this character is, and be diappointed they missed a star.

  Psycho was based on a book of the same name, but was far more goreyer, and Joesph Stefano toned it down in his screenplay.

  Psycho was also the film that included the terryifying shower scene that made people afraid to take a shower for at least some time.

  Psycho is hailed as Alfred Hitchcock's greatest thriller/horror/acheivement.

 

Psycho, Universal/Paramount, Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, Rated R, 108 minutes

 

``Psycho,'' which opened yesterday at the RKO-Golden Gate, obviously represents a challenge that Alfred Hitchcock gleefully accepted.

After his suspense pictures and romantic adventure stories could he come up with a shocker, acceptable to regular American audiences, which still carried the spine-tingling voltage of foreign presentations such as ``Diabolique''?

The answer is an enthusiastic yes. He has very shrewdly interwoven crime, sex and suspense, blended the real and the unreal in fascinating proportions and punctuated his film with several quick, grisly and unnerving surprises.

``Psycho'' opens with Janet Leigh and John Gavin in a cheap hotel room. That afternoon, on returning to her office, Miss Leigh succumbs to temptation and steals $40,000.

But as she flees Phoenix, Hitchcock's finger is always on the wheel. A highway patrolman represents menace behind his disturbing dark glasses. She is back in the world of uneasy reality as she purchases a used car from a convincing dealer.

And then suddenly she is in a strange motel, talking to its eager, sensitive manager, Anthony Perkins, who smiles disarmingly, tightens and freezes at certain suggestions, and betrays a speech defect during moments of nervous excitement. Perkins is excellent as young Norman Crane (sic).

No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable but determined private eye.

And just when affairs become bizarre again Hitchcock brings in John McIntire as the most easygoing and acceptable of sheriffs.

Miss Leigh is effective as the troubled fugitive. Gavin and Vera Miles, who plays Miss Leigh's sister, have less to contribute, but the overall effect is expert, and again Hitchcock has used the camera skillfully.

Such a picture, in addition to all this, needs a gimmick. Here it is that no one will be admitted to the theater after the film has begun. This device is the final fillip to Hitchcock's artful and theatrical trickery.

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   Only changing things that were neccesary to modernize it, Van Sant kept every thing the same--except that the film was in color.

   Van Sant even got permission from the Hitchcock family and Universal Pictures to make this film.

    Many viewers of 1998's Psycho were very disappointed because they were expecting a whole new twist on the plot. Instead, they got 1960's version done in color.

 

Psycho, 1998, Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn, Viggo Mortenson, COLOR, Rated R, Universal, 104 minutes

 

By Roger Ebert

 

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The most dramatic difference between Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960) and Gus Van Sant's "shot-by-shot" remake is the addition of a masturbation scene. That's appropriate, because this new "Psycho" evokes the real thing in an attempt to re-create remembered passion.

Curious, how similar the new version is, and how different. If you have seen Hitchcock's film, you already know the characters, the dialogue, the camera angles, the surprises. All that is missing is the tension--the conviction that something urgent is happening on the screen at this very moment. The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.

Students of trivia will note the differences. The opening shot is now an unbroken camera move from the Phoenix skyline into the hotel room where Marion Crane (Anne Heche) is meeting with her lover, Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen). There is a shot of Loomis' buttocks, and when he turns toward her, a quick downward glance of appreciation by Marion. In the scene in which Marion packs while deciding to steal the money, Heche does more facial acting than Janet Leigh did in the original--trying to signal what she's thinking with twitches and murmurs. Not necessary.

The highway patrolman who wakes her from her roadside nap looks much the same as in the original, but has a speaking voice which, I think, has been electronically tweaked to make it deeper--and distracting. We never get the chilling closer shot of him waiting across the street from the car lot, arms folded on his chest.

When Marion goes into the "parlor" of Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), the stuffed birds above and behind them are in indistinct soft focus, so we miss the feeling that they're poised to swoop. There is a clearer shot of "Mrs. Bates" during the knife attack in the shower. And more blood.

As for the masturbation scene as Norman spies on Marion through the peephole between the parlor and Room No. 1: Even if Hitchcock was hinting at sexual voyeurism in his 1960 version, it is better not to represent it literally, since the jiggling of Norman's head and the damp off-screen sound effects inspire a laugh at the precise moment when one is not wanted. All of these details would be insignificant if the film worked as a thriller, but it doesn't. One problem is the casting of Vaughn in the Norman Bates role. He isn't odd enough. Norman's early dialogue often ends in a nervous laugh. Anthony Perkins, in the original, made it seem compulsive, welling up out of some secret pool of madness. Vaughn's laugh doesn't seem involuntary. It sounds as if he intends to laugh. Possibly no actor could have matched the Perkins performance, which is one of the unique creations in the cinema, but Vaughn is not the actor to try. Among actors in the correct age range, my suggestion would be Jeremy Davies, who was the frightened Corporal Upham in "Saving Private Ryan." Anne Heche, as Marion Crane, lacks the carnal quality and the calculating detachment that Janet Leigh brought to the original film. She is less substantial. Van Sant's decision to shoot in color instead of black and white completes the process of de-eroticizing her; she wears an orange dress that looks like the upholstery from my grandmother's wing chair. Viggo Mortensen is also wrong for Sam Loomis, the lover. Instead of suggesting a straight arrow like John Gavin in the original film, he brings an undertow of elusive weirdness. The only new cast members who more or less get the job done are William H. Macy as the private eye Arbogast, and Philip Baker Hall as Sheriff Chambers. By having a psychiatrist (Robert Forster) reproduce a five-minute speech of clinical diagnosis at the end of the film, Van Sant demonstrates that a completely unnecessary scene in the original, if reproduced, will be completely unnecessary in the remake as well.

I viewed Hitchcock's "Psycho" a week ago. Attending this new version, I felt oddly as if I were watching a provincial stock company doing the best it could without the Broadway cast. I was reminded of the child prodigy who was summoned to perform for a famous pianist. The child climbed onto the piano stool and played something by Chopin with great speed and accuracy. The great musician then patted the child on the head and said, "You can play the notes. Someday, you may be able to play the music."

II

 

I I I

 

By Roger Ebert

 

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How well we remember Norman Bates. Tens of thousands of movie characters have come and gone since 1960, when he made his first appearance in "Psycho," and yet he still remains so vivid in the memory, such a sharp image among all the others that have gone out of focus.

Most movies are disposable. "Psycho" supplied us with the furnishings for nightmares. "Dear Mr. Hitchcock," a mother wrote the master, "after seeing your movie my daughter is afraid to take a shower. What should I do?" Send her to the dry cleaners, Hitch advised her.

In "Psycho III," there is one startling shot that completely understands Norman Bates. Up in the old gothic horror house on the hill, he has found a note from his mother, asking him to meet her in Cabin Number 12. We know that although his mother may have frequent conversations with him, she is in no condition to write him a note.

Norman knows that, too. He stuffed her himself. As he walks down the steps and along the front of the Bates Motel toward his rendezvous, the camera tracks along with him, one unbroken shot, and his face is a twitching mask of fear.

The face belongs to Anthony Perkins, who is better than any other actor at reflecting the demons within. Although his facial expressions in the shot are not subtle, he isn't overacting; he projects such turmoil that we almost sympathize with him. And that is the real secret of Norman Bates, and one of the reasons that "Psycho III" works as a movie: Norman is not a mad-dog killer, a wholesale slasher like the amoral villains of the Dead Teenager Movies. He is at war with himself.

He is divided. He, Norman Bates, wants to do the right thing, to be pleasant and quiet and pass without notice. But also inside of him is the voice of his mother, fiercely urging him to kill.

At the beginning of "Psycho III," only a short time has passed since the end of "Psycho II." In a nearby convent, a young novice (Diana Scarwid) blames herself when an older nun falls to her death. She runs out into the night, gets a ride with a sinister motorist (Jeff Fahey), and ends up at the Bates Motel. Fahey arrives there, too, and is hired as a night clerk. Other people also turn up: an investigative reporter who wants to do a story on Norman; a local woman who gets drunk and is picked up by Fahey, and finally a crowd of rowdies back for their high school reunion.

By the end of the movie, many of these people will be dead - and because this is a tragedy, not a horror story, some of the dead ones won't deserve it, and others will survive unfairly.

The movie was directed by Perkins, in his filmmaking debut. I was surprised by what a good job he does. Any movie named "Psycho III" is going to be compared to the Hitchcock original, but Perkins isn't an imitator. He has his own agenda. He has lived with Norman Bates all these years, and he has some ideas about him, and although the movie doesn't apologize for Norman, it does pity him. For the first time, I was able to see that the true horror in the "Psycho" movies isn't what Norman does - but the fact that he is compelled to do it.

There are a couple of scenes that remind us directly of Hitchcock, especially the scene where the local sheriff dips into the ice chest on a hot day, and doesn't notice that some of the cubes he's popping into his mouth have blood on them. Perkins permits himself a certain amount of that macabre humor, as when he talks about his hobby ("stuffing things") and when he analyzes his own case for the benefit of the visiting journalist. But the movie also pays its dues as a thriller, and there is one shocking scene that is as arbitrary, unexpected, tragic and unfair as the shower scene in "Psycho." Only one, but then one of those scenes is enough for any movie.