Psycho: Inspirational?

Funny about Marty being a (likely) influence on The Wrong Man, sort of "Hitchcock's Marty",--yes, LOL!--as it's his most urban and naturalistic film from his American period.

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I very much think so. The casting of the mother is the key "tell." And Marty was a very big hit and a Best Picture. We've discussed how Hitchcock "watched what was going on out there at the movies" and copied it in HIS style. Psycho has William Castle and Diabolique. The Wrong Man has Marty. Indeed, like Marty, The Wrong Man was a TV drama first(with Licht from NXNW as Manny!)

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It's a Marty with the lead character looking not for a girl in the Stardust ballroom but a man, a man who committed a crime he's been accused on, on the streets of New York. No convenient ballroom, either. Poor man's "wrong man" could be anywhere.

Its a great Hitchcock film, and shares also with Marty a straight line to painful emotions. Both films have happy endings, but The Wrong Man is still hurting to think about at the fade out...

That there appears to be an odd synergy between Hitchcock and Sidney Lumet is worth a mention. Both men had long careers, and each proved more flexible as the years went by than his early "signature" work might suggest.

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Agreed. Both Hitchcock and Lumet were "long distance runners" and willing to change, adapt, and cast new younger actors as the decades went by. It turns out they were kinda pals. In 1972, Lumet visited LA while Frenzy was in post-production and asked Hitchcock he could see some of it. Hitchcock arranged for Lumet to see the rape-murder ONLY. I expect Lumet felt immediately that "Hitchcock was about to become disturbingly relevant again."

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Lumet made the very British feeling The Hill in the Sixties, the sort of "upgraded" Ealing and Hitchcockian Murder On The Orient Express ten years later. That both films featured the original James Bond, Sean Connery, is worth more than a passing mention. Just as Hitchcock was fond of using American leading men like Jimmy Stewart in his pictures, Lumet seemed fond of Connery.

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And Vice Versa. Connery worked a LOT with Lumet. I think The Hill helped Connery break away from Bond early, and Connery never forgot Lumet's favor. Lumet got "Orient Express" its all-star cast by casting his friend Connery first -- the biggest superstar of the group -- which got financing AND the other stars on board.

Lumet used Martin Balsam, too - Balsam AND Connery are together in "The Anderson Tapes" and "Orient Express." And of course, Lumet used Balsam in 12 Angry Men...which is where Hitchcock found Balsam.

12 Angry Men is in its way as masterfully made as the best of Hitchcock,--and it was Lumet's first film--and it too raised "wrong man/right man" questions as to culpability, which seemed to be "in the air" for a few years (Vertigo, Anatomy Of A Murder, Town Without Pity) in American films.

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Henry Fonda went right FROM The Wrong Man INTO 12 Angry Men, and it felt like they were a matched pair. A wrongfully accused man; New York City black and white grit, a sense of high drama at a low-key level. Fonda -- who also produced 12 Angry Men and evidently raged the first day on the set that the background painting outside the jury room window "is lousy and fake compared to what I had with Hitchcock -- you would walk right into those paintings, they seemed so real."

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Also like Hitch, Lumet was not only not above channeling the works of other directors in his films, he reveled in it. A bit of Frankenheimer here, maybe Richardson or Schlesinger there. Lumet was a guy who liked to stretch. Hitchcock went that route, too, especially in the Fifties, with Strangers On A Train seeming to owe more than a bit to the All-American Noir of, among others, Anthony Mann, The Trouble With Harry to Ealing comedies, Vertigo to "psycho-dramas" like The Cobweb and The Three Faces Of Eve, and even, most famously, Psycho, to the exploitation horrors of William Castle.

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Some great points about exactly WHO Hitchcock was emulating.

Lumet BTW wrote a great book about how he directed his many movies. Its a lot more lucid and concise than some of Hitchcock's ramblings to Truffaut. Color schemes, lenses...all important to Lumet.

He did a movie with Don Johnson as villain and Rebecca DeMornay as heroine, and it had a Hitchcockian climax to remember: Johnson tries to push the woman off a balcony to her death. Over she goes, but she pulls Johnson over with him, spins him around in mid-air, and makes sure he FALLS FIRST, cracking his head open and cushioning her with his body beneath hers.

That relatively short period when Hitchcock went into "deglamorization mode" with The Wrong Man and Psycho, likely reflected the influence of television on Hitch, especially given that he was up to his eyeballs in that medium as much as he was a film director. If The Wrong Man channels the "live from New York" TV drama of the first half of the Fifties, in Psycho has he vibes of the second half of the decade, of filmed television, shot on back lots in L.A.

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Hitchcock's assistant Hilton Green noted that Hitchcock watched a lot of TV, and used the "New York live dramas" of the fifties to cast a lot of his character talent. The TV drama that begat The Wrong Man starred Robert Ellenstein(Licht from NXNW.) I've never seen it, but what Hitchcock was kinda/sorta doing was making a movie like Marty or 12 Angry Men : REMAKING a TV drama on film so that it could "last forever"(with bigger stars.)

AT TIMES, Psycho looks a lot like a typical Hitchcock TV episode or Revue TV episode -- that's why New Yorker critic Dwight MacDonald dismissed it as "just another one of those TV episodes, except with plot padding and more characterization that makes the murders more sadistic." MacDonald was right -- a lot of Psycho DOES look like a TV show -- and wrong -- a lot of Psycho does NOT look like a TV show. The 78/52 montage of the shower scene took 7 days to shoot -- twice the schedule of an entire Hitchcock half hour. And of course neither the brutality of the murders nor the frankness of the sex themes nor the sickness of the solution could be shown on TV.

It's fascinating that Hitchcock, so aware of what was going on, often channeled things that one might think, if one was in a pensive mood, what could, in theory, damage him in some way, reduce the power of his film, when in fact it often increased it. You can see this in the Grace Kelly pictures, with the first two cramped and somewhat theatrical or like live television even as both were in color.

Well Dial M was from a play, and Hitchcock determined NOT to "open it up" with superfluous scenes away from the apartment(flat.) I think the cuts to the stag party that Milland and Cummings attend is about it.

Rear Window fascinatingly was staged "in one room"(Jeff's apartment)...but he is gazing upon a richly mounted(and yet "cloistered") world of apartments across the courtyard. The film is at once claustrophobic AND open -- and yet EVERYBODY seems trapped in their little rooms.

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I can imagine Dial M For Murder made ten years earlier, in black and white, but not the way Hitchcock did it.

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1953 allowed Hitchcock just a little more latitude to play up the tawdry side of Dial M -- The married Grace is having an affair with Bob Cummings. She is "punished"(nearly murdered, nearly hanged), but she gets Bob in the end. I've always thought that was a rather interesting "allowance" by the Hays Code censors.

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To Catch A Thief was more lighthearted, a romp of the kind Audrey Hepburn was appearing in around the same time, but Hitch preferred fair Grace to dark Audrey; and Grace did sparkle in Technicolor.

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Hitch would be wanting Audrey Hepburn for many years in a film -- and almost got her in "No Bail for the Judge" a project for 1960 that Hepburn sank by quitting(it was replaced by...Psycho. Fortuitious.)

But Hitch was enamored with Grace Kelly and she fit To Catch a Thief better than Hepburn would -- the American princess, and a bit better in a bathing suit for the beach scenes(and stating that she was ladies swimming champion somewhere.) So we get two amazing physical specimens -- Cary Grant at 50 and Grace Kelly gorgeous -- in one of Hitchcock's best movies IMHO. Its a time capsule of glamour that will never return to America or the world.

Hitch was watching TV in the fifties, and he had a TV show in b/w, but he was also competing with TV at theaters. He "joined the crowd" with Techniclor travelogues --- To Catch a Thief(Monaco), Man Who Knew Too Much (Morocco, London), The Trouble With Harry(American New England), Vertigo(San Francisco). Its as if "Three Coins in the Fountain" was an influence, too.

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Vertigo was more mainstream Hitch, but he stumbled with it. Maybe it was the rapidly aging Jimmy Stewart romancing a young enough to be his daughter Kim Novak. This might have worked, it did work, for an action thriller like North By Northwest,

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But Cary Grant was ageless and sexually matched with Eva Marie Saint on the "visual."

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but Hitchcock was reaching with Vertigo, and his reach exceeded his grasp.

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Well right now its "Sight and Sound's" "Greatest Movie Ever Made, but I think that's an arty and contrarian slap at many other great movies with far fewer flaws. Stewart WAS too old, but he seems weirdly right for the role: ornery, obsessive, pathetic, desperate, kind of macho(a cop), but kind of sniveling. It seems to be what Hitchcock wanted. (Me, I would have cast Mr. Sexy Lovelorn, Sinatra.)

Much of Vertigo is gorgeous to watch: San Francisco has no greater love letter. But the story will always be annoyingly contrived even as the emotions are as deep as the sea(if you've ever been in love, here's the movie testament of your saddest and most yearning feelings.) A grand, gorgeous, controversial mess, Vertigo is. And as someone wrote, "Vertigo is crazier than Psycho."

Truly, Psycho did bleed, right into the Sixties, and yet its follow up, The Birds, doesn't quite measure up even as it made money.

Come to think of it, I wonder if William Rose and Stanley Kramer had Psycho on the brain when planning their Cinerama It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Think about it: Psycho expanded into a big budget wide screen comedy, one featuring not one but many Marions, Sams, Lilas and even an Arbogast,--Spencer Tracy's cop--

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Yes! I"ve always seen a lot of "Psycho" in "Mad World" (we all go a little mad sometimes.) Though Mad World came out in '63, the year of The Birds, its desert settings and after-the-loot desperate characters remind me more of Psycho, and the cars and clothes LOOK like Psycho (the movie likely began production in '61 ).

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in as uplifting and rollicking good fun film as Psycho is, to be frank, its opposite.

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Well, as the shrink said "Yes....and no!" For Mad Mad World ends very badly for ITS "good person gone bad." That's Spencer Tracy. He steals on a mad whim...like Marion. He doesn't die, but the film ends with him sans wife(divorcing him) and daughter(disowning him)...and facing many years in prison. As a former cop. Yikes. There's a big laugh at the end to "help us forget Tracy's pain"...but the film is as ironic a moral lesson as Psycho. "Don't steal." (The other characters are bound for jail too -- though maybe everybody gets off easy.)

Still, "Mad World" IS a rollicking good time, hurtling with criss-crossing stories at high speed to a great musical score(it has some of the heft of North by Northwest), and featuring a lot of funny people, none funnier than...Jonathan Winters. This is HIS movie monument.

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No, there's no murder in the Kramer flick but there's the death of one character, the old man played by Jimmy Durante, on a California highway (more or less),

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It was and is. On the "backside" of the Palm Springs area(which is where they placed the gas station...and destroyed it.)

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and then all these unhappy but basically chipper, chirpy people looking for the fortune presumably hidden under the Big W (double-ya, as Durante pronounces it);

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I've never called it anything else -- "Da big double-ya". Ha.

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and then it's off to the races.

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And how. Though the ambiance of Mad World has a Psycho feel (of setting and TYPE of feeling)...this is also a variant on ...North by Northwest. An exhilarating chase. Cary ran across the upper reaches of America. This crowd confines itself to the southwest and California. But still...a race, a chase.

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Who needs bloody murders and spooky houses when Jonathan Winters is on the rampage;

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The Destruction of the Gas Station...a movie unto itself.

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or when those firecrackers go off;

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A visual/sound delight

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or when it's Phil Silvers whose car is sinking into a swamp, not Marion Crane's?

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What's creepy in one scene is funny here. Of course, he's driving his car...and he lives.

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Then there's mama's boy Dick Shawn and his brunette beauty, Barrie Chase (shades of Cape Fear?,--nah) smoking dope and doing the twist. So there IS a mother connection in Mad World, just no embalming.

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"Im' comin' for ya, mama!" "Your baby is comin' for ya!" Ethel Merman's mother in law from hell is hilarious, and so is Shawn, shifting from "not there" to bawling mama's boy. Miss Chase serves the purpose she served in Cape Fear: sex. Different movies, same effect.

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There's also the clueless police, but for one inquisitive fellow who watches and waits...

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Tracy, white-haired and in a hat tipped just right over his brow, quietly watching and waiting.

He gets that sad little scene with Dorothy Provine -- a put-upon wife and Merman's daughter, who sees where the money is and imagines escaping (pretty much to a private island, yes?) But soon EVERYBODY sees where the money is. She says to Tracy, "It was a nice dream...it almost lasted ten seconds."

Yes, "Mad World" knows how to stay memorable. Great comics, big laughs...but a serious theme(greed) and some serious emotion("lives of quiet desperation.")

And the real mean revelation that when a good cop gets screwed by his superiors, and goes bad....he gets it worst of all.

Still, the movie is wonderful. It shares my favorite of 1963 with Charade...but its certainly BIGGER, and a bigger memory of moving-going.