Not everything over there is interesting or even really relevant, but, for example there's a link to a good, very +ve article on the new doc. on Psycho's shower scene, '78/52'. Here's the link on that if you'd prefer to avoid the extra tab:
http://tinyurl.com/l9juz6o
Another '78/52' review from the 'News, Rumors, and Gossip' Tab:
http://screenanarchy.com/2017/05/hot-docs-2017-review-7852.html
Sounds very exciting.
Peak Hitchcock may have been reached a few years ago with the twin bio-pics 'Hitchcock' and 'The Girl', but '78/52' may end up being the single best artifact from the whole 2010s wave.
It sounds quite enthralling and brings back Psycho yet again as the centerpiece Hitchcock film...you just can't quite picture this kind of detail going into something from Vertigo or North by Northwest(let alone Torn Curtain.)
Odd, though: One realizes in this minute hyper-focus on these 78/52 details, that the REST of Psycho...the performances of Perkins, Leigh(outside of the shower), Balsam and everybody else; the sharp screenplay by Joe Stefano...all those OTHER SCENES...seem to be thrown under the bus in favor of The Shower.
Someone wrote that Psycho seems to have been made as "filler around the shower scene"(even, perhaps the two other big shock scenes)...with that historic murder moment being of such importance to Hitchcock that it IS the reason Psycho is so historic. Maybe. Recall that Hitchcock told Truffaut the only real reason he wanted to film was Robert Bloch's book was "that scene in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all."
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I like the comment that "the shower scene turned murder into entertainment." Well, Hitchcock had done that before. Just one year before, with the funny/shocking/creative UN murder in NXNW.
But I get the point. The far more lengthy, detailed and horrific shower murder was the sort of thing that people were never going to forget , and ALWAYS going to think about(what would it be like to be stabbed to death, via so many stabs over such a long time, while nude and vulnerable in a slippery shower? A hideous contemplation.)
Hitchcock would continue this course through two movies in which a single, grueling murder scene was "the whole reason he made the movie": Torn Curtain("How hard it is to kill a man -- and the hero does the killing") and Frenzy("The reality of a rape and the grueling time necessary for a strangling.") These were disturbing scenes, and yet Frenzy showed, wrote Richard Schickel "how a master entertainer entertains," and the Gromek murder in Torn Curtain is often hailed as the ONLY good thing in that picture. (Its not; there's more.)
The Hays Code set limits on the depiction of murder that Hitchcock managed to get around a few times before Psycho, IMHO. Stranglings mainly: the opening strangling in Rope and the stylized strangling in Strangers on a Train. Not to mention the lengthy FAILED strangling in Dial M that ends with the killer falling backwards on scissors, for a bloodless but brutal death. I also found the lengthy chasedown and lingering back stab of Louis Bernard in Man 2('56) to be quite brutal for 1956.
But it is as if when 1960 came, Hitchcock felt the need to go for broke and make audiences "feel the fear" and the pain of a killing. With Herrmann's screeching violins, the shower scene was as much a "fun" scene as grueling (and the staircase murder, funner still), but they were shocking killings nonetheless.
I expect that the shot by shot breakdown of the shower scene in 78/52 will reveal things about Hitchcock's sense of rhythm and shot structure. One wonders who contributed what where:
Saul Bass's storyboards(and the lingering shot-down rumor that he "directed" the shower murder.)
Hitchcock's direction(in his mind first, then hour by hour on set, for seven days.)
John Russell's cinematography(the lighting behind Mother's head, the clarity of the room.)
George Tomasini's film editing(he was "Hitchcock's guy," and evidently masterful, and word is he had a small TEAM of editors cutting the shower scene for him.)
Janet Leigh's acting(almost entirely of the face and the scream)
Marli Renfro's body doubling(the overhead shots of nude struggle, the fall to the floor, the blurred breasts)
...and: Mr. Herrmann and the music that Hitchcock thought he didn't want.
Why is it that I feel Tomasini's editing and Herrmann's music are where Hitchcock's vision were most realized for us?