Marion

I spend a fair amount of time around here extolling the qualities of the "unsung Arbogast," his sequences(largely paired with Anthony Perkins as Norman), and the actor who played him (Martin Balsam.)

Time to say a little something about the character who gets about twice the screen time of Arbogast and seems to have haunted several generations.

Janet Leigh, as Marion Crane.

There are some contradictions in this role and its historical value in movie history.

For instance, in some writings, we hear that "Hitchcock killed off a major star before the movie was half over."

Well, Janet Leigh was a star. But not necessarily a major star.

Hitchocck himself unfortunately revealed this in a letter to a friend about having to cast Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in Torn Curtain in 1966:

"The studio wants me to cast big stars in this one, having not used any in my last three pictures."

Well, that would be Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Certainly, The Birds and Marnie qualify -- neither Tippi Hedren nor Rod Taylor nor even Sean Connery were considered major stars when Hitchocck cast them.

But Psycho? Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins? Well, I guess Hitchcock knew what he knew. Leigh wasn't at the box office level of Doris Day, Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn. And Anthony Perkins was neither Cary Grant nor young Paul Newman.

But Leigh and Perkins WERE bigger than any of the cast members of The Birds and Marnie. Leigh had "extra star power" as part of a celebrity power couple (Tony Curtis as her then-hubby.) Perkins has top billing, but Leigh might well have been given it. Leigh had been in more successful films than Perkins, with a longer career(Leigh's billing was at the end via "And Janet Leigh As Marion Crane" because her part isn't that long, supposedly, but really it is long ENOUGH.)

So...Janet Leigh was not a "major star." But she WAS a star. And now, Leigh is a star remembered far more intensely than many others, for Janet Leigh has that "b/w Gothic noir horror trilogy" in Welles' Touch of Evil(first, 1958), Hitchcock's Psycho(second, 1960) and Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate(third, 1962.) Together, the films today link together and feed off of each other, we have them as a group. And Leigh survives the two films other than Psycho.

Janet Leigh in accepting Psycho may not have been as daring as Anthony Perkins accepting Psycho(and a cross-dressing serial killer role) , but she was daring ENOUGH. Opening the film in bra and slip, and wearing that outfit in three separate scenes(going to black undies from white after she takes the cash), showing off her substantial breasts (as far as the censors would allow). Playing a post-coital necking scene with shirtless John Gavin in an era when some folks would still disapprove(the couple was NOT married.) And above all, sacrificing herself to the travails of enacting the most gruesome murder scene filmed to that date.

As it turns out, that sacrifice may well have been well beyond just enacting the grueling shower scene. For years thereafter, Janet Leigh got gruesome death threats because of Psycho. She had to have bellmen check her hotel room shower for 'unwanted guests." I personally watched her freeze up during an autograph-signing session for her book on Psycho because the movie was playing all around her on DVD TV set-ups and the shower scene was reached. "You're about to get killed, Janet!" somebody laughed. Leigh looked a bit terrified -- would one of the folks on line elect to kill her? Her security was minimal. She froze, went silent, and looked down until the scene was over.

---

Within the confines of Psycho itself, Janet Leigh opens the film with the great sexy-necking and melancholy of the opening scene with John Gavin(how quickly sex disappears from the screen and is replaced with fear of poverty and loneliness), ends her part of the movie with the shower murder...and then haunts the remaining hour-plus of the film just in sad and shocking memory.

But its that stretch between the hotel room bed and the motel room shower where Miss Leigh perhaps made her own kind of history. She was helped by sexual content in the hotel scene, and sexual violence in the shower scene...but she has to carry the rest of her scenes by ACTING. Much of the time on screen she spends in a dowdy wool dress that tamps down her breasts and her sexuality at the same time, and often Leigh is filmed in huge screen-filling close-ups that allow us to study her every "aging" (32 years old!) face.

Hitchcock supplies the nightmarish banality and suspense of the "cop stop" and "California Charlie" scenes, but Leigh is our focal point. She's pretty. She's tough enough...but perhaps breaking inside. And she's going a little crazy.

Having shown herself off as such a champion sexual necker in the opening scene, I think Leigh keeps us hoping for more sexual displays (with a man, not just with her underwear) as the movie goes on. She's so pretty, she's so sexual...isn't this movie going to give us more "romance"? Like maybe with shy but handsome Anthony Perkins?

Not hardly. Does Leigh do her best work in the parlor scene? Its interesting work. She goes quiet, doesn't say much, listens intently as Anthony Perkins starts to take the movie over. Her sex appeal lessens as her motherly qualities take over. We sense her PASSING the movie TO Perkins.

We have ,unfortunately for Heche, Anne Heche's performance in Van Sant's Psycho to compare to Leigh's, and just check out the facial reaction of Marion after this exchange:

Marion: Do you go out with friends?
Norman: (Pause) Well...a boy's best friend is his mother.

Heche physically blanches, looks down, over-reacts.

Leigh hesitates, thinks for just a moment, does little else. (Hitchcock knew: if the actor did little with her face, the audience would "fill in the blanks". WE know Marion has now written Norman off as a desirable man, or even a fantasy lover. Guys can always "blow it" when they get a woman to talk to them, but Norman REALLY blew it.)

Also unfortunately for Anne Heche, the LA Times in 1998 ran, side by side on its Sunday Calendar cover, shots of Janet Leigh showering in Psycho(1960) and Anne Heche showering in Psycho(1998.) Leigh looked sensual heading to sexual under the shower water -- mouth open and an orgasmic closed-eyed look on her face...even as the water(courtesy of Hitchcock) seemed dark and "knifing." Heche looked...like a scrawny boy-girl taking a shower.

Our final look at Marion Crane is with her face smashed dead on the floor, mouth open like a dead fish, eye staring out at us with a single drop that could be a tear in the eye or...just a water drop.

Again, poor Anne Heche got nothing of what Janet Leigh in that shot, but perhaps here the "genius" was Hitchcock as much as the actress. Its hard to say.

---

If I "dig" on Arbogast in Psycho a bit more than on Marion, its perhaps because I'm a guy and he's a guy and he's more of a surrogate for me than the other main men in the picture: studly dim Sam or spindly nut Norman. I'm simpatico with sly regular guy Arbo.

But there can be no doubt that Janet Leigh as Marion Crane generated a whole group of other reactions in the male viewer: lust(to start with), love(as we spent time with her and felt for her), empathy(with her plight), detachment(as she "passed off" the lead to Tony Perkins) and something between heartbreak and horror when she ended up dead, by a thousand cuts, just like that.

We'll never forget it. We'll never forget her. And no woman in Hitchocck AFTER Janet Leigh(certainly not Tippi Hedren, even after those birds cornered her) could match her.