Thomson’s ‘Psycho’ is a brilliant look at defining moment in modern film
Published: November 22, 2009, 12:30 am
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They were my personal teen Rites of Spring. It took me years to understand the significance of both.
On May 28, 1958, I waited in the opening day line for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” at the venerable downtown Paramount Theater. I was, at that precise moment, a creature created by television and the Mad Men of Madison Avenue—specifically the devilishly clever print advertising campaign for “Vertigo,” with Saul Bass’ arresting red and black graphic and nothing else. I knew Hitchcock mostly from his TV show, a personal favorite. It was the ads that put me in the line.
What I saw in the theater has changed my life. I understood the possibilities of film as art in ways that—at the ripe old age of 13—I couldn’t have yet articulated but which began to re-form everything that, up to then, I thought I knew about movies. “Vertigo” was not a film by a “master of suspense” but one of the greatest artists of dream in the 20th century.
Two years later, I waited in the opening night line for Hitchcock’s “Psycho” at that same downtown Paramount Theater. I was now a creature of cinema, not just of movies, television and Madison Avenue; I was a Hitchcock fan keyed up to see the hyped new film by the most famous of Hollywood directors.
I emerged from seeing “Psycho” almost as traumatized as I’d been at age 5 seeing the B-film “Dynamite!” —and hearing all those explosions— from the first row of the North Park Theater, and screaming and crying as I ran up the aisle. I had never been so terrified in a moviehouse. I joined so many other “Psycho” viewers (including the film’s star Janet Leigh, or so she said) in a few months of terror in the shower—of constantly peering behind curtains and glass to make sure Norman Bates hadn’t stolen into the bathroom.
In a couple more years, I would dimly sense that what David Thomson quite simply and tersely calls “The Moment of Psycho” was the defining moment in modern movies. Just as nothing in America was ever quite the same after the mid-’50s brought rock and roll into American radios, record players and (later) TVs, nothing was ever the same after the “Moment of Psycho,” either.
Think of them as the jump cuts of shock that forever changed the movie of American life: rock and roll, “Psycho” and, then, three years later, the historic and very real equivalent of the screaming-string horror of Marion Crane’s shower mutilation in “Psycho,” the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, wherein we all discovered that our government was, in some ways, every bit as defenseless as Janet Leigh had been in Hitchcock’s cinematic shower.
“At the end of the 1950s,” writes David Thomson in this virtuoso piece of movie criticism, “Hollywood seemed to be doing its thing in the same old way. It made ‘The Searchers,’ ‘Rio Bravo’ and ‘Man of the West,’ three of the best Westerns ever done. It produced ‘Ben-Hur,’ ‘Gigi,’ ‘Giant,’ and ‘Around the World in 80 Days’—large entertainment bundles in budget and scope, but so tame to the imagination.”
American TV audiences embraced Hitchcock. And so did French film critics, who considered him a great artist long before Americans did.
“Vertigo,” his most dream-like and aesthetically complex film, may have been his answer to his French idolators. And when the public didn’t really respond, “Psycho” may have been his furious answer to that. It was a smash. And it virtually re-invented America.
A “younger generation” writes Thomson “equipped with the Pill and a new attitude toward sex. . . . began to chafe at movie censorship. ‘Psycho’ was ahead of those changes, but it was ahead of everything: we should never forget that it indulged sex (nakedness) and violence (that knife) and told censorship to get lost. Many people condemned that audacity; some thought it was trashy. But Hitchcock carried discretion past all known codes and guessed that the audience was ready. ‘Psycho’ played in first-rank theaters, it made a fortune, and quite quickly, it would be talked of as brilliant ‘art’ by a young generation that wanted to acclaim film and its modernity.”
Many of them became film critics, an occupation beginning to undergo a complete sea change. Some became filmmakers. Some became both.
As Europe (Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Resnais) led young Americans to see film differently, so did the profession “movie critic” change. A critical heritage (James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber) was suddenly discovered. A bitter division was momentarily revealed (the French-influenced “auteurist” Andrew Sarris vs. ever-combative Pauline Kael, until Kael became, in her way, the most intractable “auteurist” of them all).
And then, courtesy of a couple of fame-drunk Chicago opportunists— Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—it went to TV, where its capacity to dumb itself down (with accompanying expansion of income and influence) was virtually limitless. So, too, did the capacity for movie critics to turn into adjuncts to film promotion increase correspondingly.
And when the Internet so radically democratized film commentary that intelligence itself became an embattled value (and we had a presidency to prove it), daily journalism’s nervous breakdown pushed newspaper executives to marry movie reviewing and celebrity journalism, and then to thin the herd of the resultant hybrid occupation when staffs were in need of downsizing.
The film promotion business rose. Film criticism dipped. Commerce— with often dismal results onscreen— began to rule again with an iron fist.
And that’s the “moment” when a truly great piece of film criticism by our finest living film critic—David Thomson—is appearing. Thomson is 68 and is, like Hitchcock, a Brit who became a completely American transplant.
Make no mistake. In anticipation of “Psycho’s” 50th anniversary year, “The Moment of Psycho” does a virtuosic thing. It tells the story of “Psycho” minutely to readers, even young ones, who have, quite likely, already seen the film several times in the past half century. But it does so in such an original and brilliant way that you’re almost hearing about a film you’ve either never seen before or only dimly and inadequately remembered.
In a sense, Thomson’s “Psycho” truly is a film you’ve never seen before— not his way, at any rate. Even his thorny asides stop you in your tracks.
Consider this about Norman Bates, whom Anthony Perkins played immortally in “Psycho.” “The only other functioning crazy in American film then was Jerry Lewis —which is not a flippant observation. Lewis was getting at the underside of America, as (James) Dean and (Elvis) Presley were attempting. But no one would have dared think of Presley in ‘Psycho’ (until you have the idea, and then you can’t get rid of it.)”
Elvis Presley as Norman Bates. It does indeed give one pause—very, very long pause (we learned, by the way, from Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber’s recent mutual autobiography that the two rock songwriters and producers suggested Elvis to Elia Kazan to star in “East of Eden” instead of James Dean.)
“Psycho” now stands as, perhaps, the point of demarcation.
“The thing I have called ‘nastiness’— a noir disillusionment with the dream of happiness—was about to overtake not just the American movie but the nation’s way of life,” writes Thomson.
We’re still there. Hitchcock’s cinematic voyeurism is now everyone’s. “Reality TV” demeans on both sides of the screen.
Hitchcock knew where we were going long before we did. And, as if to prove how much a film critic can still do, David Thomson tells you how— and what—Alfred Hitchcock knew.
NON FICTION
The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder
By David Thomson
Basic Books
172 pages, $26.95
Jeff Simon is the News’ Arts and Books Editor.
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