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I've Seen "78/52: Hitchcock's Shower Scene"

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Well, its here.

In theaters somewhere, but also available on demand/cable. That's how I watched it.

The new title gets right down to business. 78/52 was too oblique: Hitchcock's Shower Scene(not the Psycho shower scene) gets right down to it.

For the diehard residents of this board and its imdb predecessor...not too much here is new. But somehow, it feels indispensable. Its as if, from the 1967 book Hitchcock/Truffaut, through various books about Hitchcock, and on to the Stephen Rebello book...with stops at the Universal DVD documentary(almost as long AS Psycho!) from the late 90s (when Janet Leigh and Joe Stefano were still alive) ; "Hitchcock" with Tony Hopkins, and the FILM of Hitchcock/Truffaut...

...we needed to "bring it all together here." It jells like aspic; it all comes together, nothing's missing.

For "talking heads" we get some usual suspects: Guillermo del Toro(becoming The World's Greatest Hitchcock fan); Stephen Rebello(always charming and authoritative, and I think HE has the bombshell of the film to tell);Peter Bogdanovich.

David Thomson gets a one-line appearance. Good -- he doesn't like Psycho after the swamp burial anyway.

But there are some "newbies." Danny Elfman -- who scored Van Sant's Psycho from Herrmann. Amy Duddleston, who edited Van Sant's Psycho. A Hitchcock granddaughter(mama Pat Hitchcock has lived longer than her parents did, and seems to have retired from DVD documentaries. Heavyweight film editors like Walter Murch(who narrates footage from the 1974 Coppola film, The Conversation, that owes a heavy debt to the Psycho shower...and toilet.) Jamie Lee Curtis(talking about homaging her mom on "Scream Queens"); Actor Elijah Wood(I know him as a mute psycho killer in "Sin City," a b/w film and that makes him fitting here), who sits on a couch with two other guys I don't know and talks about the film as they watch it.

And best of the best of the best of the best: Marli Renfro, the lady who was naked in the shower(and in the shower curtain, carried by Norman.) She's an old lady now, but you can see the sexy nudist and Playboy model she once was -- and you get to, briefly, from "back then."

I'm glad Renfro is in the film because here, truly is a KEY player, in a very famous scene(THE most famous scene in movies, this documentary convinced me)...and they found her and she's on screen talking of things that she knows. Nothing earthshaking but "detail" -- like how Perkins dropped her too hard when he dragged her body out of the bathroom; and how she asked Hitchcock if she could take off the crotch patch she wore in the shower scene("Absolutely not!" a panicked Hitch said; some sex predator he was, hah.)

Stephen Rebello's key bombshell remark, to me (paraphrased) is this:

Rebello: "I asked Janet Leigh when she filmed the shower scene, WHO did she think she was seeing stabbing her in the shower. She said in her mind to act the scene, 'I saw Norman Bates.' So that adds pathos to the scene -- Marion realizes she is being stabbed to death by the man she tried to connect with minutes earlier."

Me, I've always felt the footage doesn't show Norman's face, so Marion didn't see it either. But Janet Leigh says yes, so -- I'm with her.

---

This film is very much a companion piece to the film "Hitchcock/Truffaut," I think. I don't know if the same production company made both docs, but it FEELS the same...a lot of classical music for strings, a lot of "air pockets of silence"(in the Hitchcock tradition) between the classical music segments, a lot of CGI-style trickery to make script page directions and storyboard drawings "rise from the screen in 3-D." The overall feeling of the film is -- as with Hitchcock/Truffaut and contrapunturally to the material...quiet.

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Some "additives" I liked:

The film opens with "re-staged footage" (all in black and white) of Marion making her long drive, filmed in a way that Hitchocck could not: with real footage of a car on an open desert highway, often at a distance from us. Its "Marion's drive" seen a new way. We get new footage of Marion's approach to the Bates Motel and her getting out of the car(the actress has on a "Marion Crane wig" that looks like MRS. BATES, however, very odd.) New footage of Mother crossing the window in the house above(not nearly as good as in the film.)

And just when we think this documentary won't HAVE any footage from Psycho(shades of "Hitchcock") -- we get some. Plenty. In careful snippets along the way.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

ALSO: The filmmakers elect to stage the opening of the shower scene as from Robert Bloch's book, reading the lines from the novel about "a face hanging in mid-air." They don't get that right, and they put "Mrs. Bates" in her wig, rather than the head scarf in Bloch's book. But otherwise, they "get the chill" -- how this scene would play if Norman's face was clearly seen before starting the shower attack, with rouge on his cheeks and a deadly, crazed look on his face. (But it is not a young face like that of Tony Perkins; nor is it the fat forty year old face of Norman in the book.) Still...scary. We hear the final line, "It was the knife that, moments later, would cut off her scream. And her head." But this is not enacted.

Peter Bogdanovich has a great line worth thinking about: "Psycho was the first movie that made you feel unsafe in the theater." I get THAT. I always used to think about Psycho and the films that followed it, like Homicidal and Strait-Jacket, as movies where if you went in the theater, it was a "bad place" and you wouldn't be able to escape seeing the horrors within. You could close your eyes, but for how long? You could HOPE to run out of the theater but...could you?

ALSO:

One of the guys on the couch with Elijah Wood makes a pithy comment:

The LAST shot of North by Northwest, is Grant and Saint bedding down to have sex, as the phallic train enters the vaginal tunnel. Well, the FIRST shot with actors in it, of Hitchcock's next film(Psycho) is of a couple AFTER having sex.

Elijah Wood and the other guy praise their partner for his "insights" -- and then all three of them laugh at it. But hey, it works for me -- and the documentary filmmakers run the end of NXNW and the opening in bed of Psycho side by side...and it FITS.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Indeed, this documentary is very generous in having clips from ALL the relevant Hitchcock movies before and after Psycho. It looks like everybody -- Universal, Paramount, Warners, MGM -- gave up all the clips necessary to immediately show a shot from Strangers on a Train, Rear Window("He probably cut her up in the bathtub"), Vertigo and NXNW to illustrate how these films tie into Psycho. Old ones like Notorious, too -- which is part of a "Mother montage" that takes us from Mrs. Sebastian to Mrs. Anthony to Mrs. Thornhill("You men aren't REALLY trying to kill my son, are you?")

And in another segment, all of the lush Technicolor of To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and NXNW are juxtaposed with the b/w of Psycho to show how purely that film clashed with "what Hitchcock movies had looked like."(Though not really, says I: Psycho has that 3-D clarity of depth and composition that screams Hitchcock.)

ALSO: The film has enough confidence to let one talking head opine "I didn't much like how Mother's head looked in the shower scene -- couldn't see her face and her head had a "mushroom" look to it -- it could have been scarier." Well, OK.

The movie splits roughly into two parts:

PART ONE: Everybody talks about how Psycho changed movie history, and history, and the world, and when you could enter the theater, etc. I gotta admit, by now, well, we've sure heard THAT one, yes? But some of the comments are different and more incisive than we usually get.

"Psycho is a movie that wears a teeshirt and blue jeans made by a man who usually wore a tuxedo." -- not true, Hitch wore suit and tie usually, but they SHOW him in a tuxedo as this quote is heard.

"Everything in Psycho feels like Hitchcock is ANGRY -- angry at Hollywood, angry at his audience, angry at the censors, angry at his ACTORS..."

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

PART TWO: The true guts of this documentary, and what makes it different. Everybody looks at, and comments on, the entire shower scene...from the shot of Leigh at the desk subtracting the $700 to the final moment of Norman's yelling..."Oh, God Mother, Blood Blood!"(which, one commentator says, is a very wooden line reading that rather spoils this great scene for him; I tend to agree even IF Norman's "bad acting" is because of his own delusion.)

We get the shower scene "shot by shot," and in slow motion, and re-wound for certain moments(again and again), and set up with little scientific number counters giving us the scene in seconds and fractions thereof; the shock of the whole thing starts to get a bit enveloped in analysis and yet -- it never stops being shocking.

I like technical remarks as to how "the camera jumps the stage line," and details I never saw before (like how a blurry shot of Marion's hand is quickly inserted into a wider shot of her slamming the hand against the wall.)

I like how the film stops to take in "how the Van Sant team filmed it"(we see the much more graphic gore and nudity of Anne Heche's deathfall to the floor) with discussion by the film editor(Amy Huddleston) about how they had to "keep working to make ours feel like the original."

Danny Elfman notes that when he was re-scoring Herrmann's screeching strings, someone said "because this version is in color, shouldn't we have a full orchestra for this version?" No, no, NO! screamed Elfman(who offers the greatest contribution to Van Sant's Psycho IMHO, massaging and stretching Herrmann's score to fit Van Sant's different edit pattern.)

Someone comments on how Janet's eyeball in death on the floor briefly "bulges open" and -- there it is. It doesn't feel like a gaffe -- it feels like the final breakdown of the human machine. But we also get the discussion of how Alma saw Janet gulp(a quick cut to the shower head allowed for that to be cut out.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I was fascinated by how the scene "bookends" in various ways:

It "opens" with the shot of the shower head spurting water -- a cleansing baptismal bath.
It "closes" with the shot of the shower head STILL spurting water -- washing away the blood of the murder that happened instead.

They show how Janet Leigh is positioned screen right both to start her shower and to slide down the wall in death. (Her hair trailing above her head like a blood trail as she slides down.)

They show something that gobsmacked me -- the grab at the curtain and rings breaking off is from a silent version of The Ten Commandments(and they SHOW that clip!)

And, well...on and on and on and on. The Hitchcock buff, the Psycho buff, and the shower scene buff get their bounty (though an Arbogast sequence guy like me gets only a few shots from those scenes. Bah.)

But the film eventually takes what for me is a wrong turn into modern day depravity...and I think folks should be warned...

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

That wrong turn...

78/52 opens with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe, and I can only work from memory:

"The killing of a beautiful woman is the most poetical thing that can happen in any story."

But that's not the quote. Poetical is right. Because I found that an odd word. And maybe the quote is "the death of a beautiful woman."

I suppose that's one draw of the shower scene. There can be no doubt that -- particularly for 1960 audiences -- the scene took in elements of eroticism(especially in how Leigh takes that shower early on), nudity(suggested and also sneakily shown) and rape(by analogy)..all of which don't matter quite so much if its not a beautiful woman getting killed(though Bates Motel went with a handsome man...)

I've also always felt that Psycho escapes some of the misogynistic feeling of, say, Frenzy -- because Arbogast gets killed too. Nothing sexual about it, but men in the audience couldn't take heart -- "Oh, only weak women get killed." Mrs. Bates is an equal opportunity killer sexually, so men AND women could feel fear.

Anyway, in the latter stages of 78/52, the filmmakers leave the stylized and "suggestive" shower murder to give us a little parade of later films in which women are much more gorily sliced up in various stages of nudity and with various dollops of graphic spurting red blood gore(including Dressed to Kill, and much worse). We also get glimpses of the rape in Irreversible and -- outta nowhere -- the nudity in the rape-murder in Frenzy.

To which: I cry foul. Psycho may have laid the groundwork for all these movies where women are menaced, tortured, stripped, killed -- but it was never done at their level. I can picture 78/52 being shown in a high school classroom with a teacher running to turn off the DVD player at this point. Its VERY misogynistic , and sadistic towards women, this footage.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

I suppose what 78/52 is telling us is -- so what? No Psycho shower scene...no gateway to these scenes. (And I still think the Frenzy scene has elements of stylization and profundity that separate it out from the usual giallo bloodbath.)

They also show some of the Torn Curtain grueling murder of Gromek to perhaps remind us that Hitchcock extended his sadism -- and his profundity -- to the killing of men AND women. But still.

And boy,oh, boy do they cover the bases before all this -- we get brief clips from Peeping Tom, and Diabolique....

Its really an "all-purpose Psycho primer."

---

On balance, I'm glad that 78/52 was made, and it has enough "nuggets and little bombshells" to be more than the same old, same old.

But I'd say this should be about it. We can maybe keep talking Psycho at this board meant to talk it(and some other stuff OT), but I don't think the movies or the documentary need another study of Psycho.

And I will remain shocked by the sudden gout of clips of the kilings and rapes of women at the end of this documentary.

Unless, of course....I'm supposed to feel guilty for liking the shower scene so much. That goes for everyone who does, I suppose.

For the record, my favorite set-piece in Psycho is Arbogast's murder, and my favorite set-piece in all of Hitchcock is the Mount Rushmore climax to North by Northwest.

I'd love to see a movie about THAT one....

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

Anyway, in the latter stages of 78/52, the filmmakers leave the stylized and "suggestive" shower murder to give us a little parade of later films in which women are much more gorily sliced up in various stages of nudity

It's understandable why they'd include a montage of this sort, but my experience is that such montages are often completely traumatizing so that you can't process everything around it very well.

Two examples:
(1) An early Almodovar movie, Matador begins with a shocking sequence where the lead guy jerks off to a video he's watching on his TV. We get to see what he's watching and - surprise! - it's all these scenes from extreme gore videos with people getting their heads chainsawed in half and so on. You are *not* ready to see that stuff if you're going in cold to an Almodovar movie (he mainly makes lyrical, gender-bending melodramas)! I'd convinced someone to go and see this movie with me and I almost had a heart attack as I realized they'd blame me for putting them through this. The upshot was I was very upset and could hardly concentrate on the film for at least first 40 minutes or so.
(2) In 1992, MTV (back when it mattered) had their own Movie Awards show and it gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th movies. It was incredibly funny but the clips segment was scarring:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt7IDAb_HTU

[–] swanstep (2616) 7 years ago

There is something about taking shots or sequences out of context that often makes them worse. I recently read an interview with British actress, Jenny Agutter where she talked about feeling victimized by how technology has evolved since she started in the '70s. She did many nude scenes in ambitious films when she was young, and as things stood then there was a tradeoff: yes, if you really just want to see Agutter naked you can but, e.g., you're going to have to sit through all of Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout or all of Lumet's Equus or all of Logan's Run to get those few seconds. Literally, pre-VHS there was no real way for ordinary people to even pause those scenes. So, yes, Agutter did brief nude and/or sex scenes but they were always in the context of these waking-dream, total film-watching, often quite arty experiences. Since VHS however it's got easier and easier to pull those scenes out of their original contexts, and now every risque frame Agutter ever allowed to be shot has a life of its own completely detached from the films they were part of. She's not happy about that.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Since VHS however it's got easier and easier to pull those scenes out of their original contexts, and now every risque frame Agutter ever allowed to be shot has a life of its own completely detached from the films they were part of. She's not happy about that.

--

Video and freeze frame double-crossed a lot of actresses who thought that their nude scenes would be kept to the screening theater and seen only briefly in the context of an entire story.

I do find that actresses(and male actors) who do nudity today are particularly brave(or vain) in that they KNOW their nude scenes can be re-wound, freeze framed, printed...kept.

I think it was Julia Roberts who said she doesn't do nudity "because then the movie becomes a documentary about my body." True enough. Also true that the biggest stars either don't do nudity or only do it early on.

But some actors and actresses pride themselves on their nude bodies as being "their instruments" and have no problem with nudity in either a sexual or non-sexual context. I used to joke that Helen Mirren must have had a clause in her movie contracts DEMANDING a nude scene in every movie! I think she's a part-time nudist in real life, too.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

It's understandable why they'd include a montage of this sort,

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I guess so. Thought provoking in its way; one female talking head notes that the shower scene was "the first time the movies showed us the assault on the female body." I THINK she said "the assault" not "an assault" -- which meant to move things to a more profound level.

To then encapsulate all these clips of women being killed(or raped) in "single static shot," blood spurting ways suggested that we can't "let ourselves off the hook" about what "the famous shower scene" in Psycho is REALLY about: the protracted, painful, and brutal killing a beautiful naked woman.

Except I'd say -- as somebody wrote -- that graphic imagery and the suggestion of pain and suffering are NOT at the heart of the Psycho shower scene. Terror is. We're ALL scared, men and women both. We ALL take showers. The invasion of a shadowy monster is a nightmare experience.

In the shower scene, the woman's death is absorbed into terror, shock scream -- as is the MAN's death, later.

---

my experience is that such montages are often completely traumatizing so that you can't process everything around it very well.

---

I found it so, here. I was rather angry, enraged -- as deep red blood spurted everywhere from one woman, I was offended -- this is exactly what Hitchcock said he was out to AVOID with his shower scene.

The nudity in the Frenzy rape murder is very specific and yet stylized. Hitchcock shows "the key nude body parts" as Rusk rips the clothing off but only once each, as to abstractly plant these (body doubled) images of nudity in our mind for the duration of the scene, which is really about close-ups on the heads and faces of killer and victim.

And yet here, in 78/52, when the nudity just suddenly appears without context for a moment(then we see Rusk's face)...its very blatant, more exploitative than how Hitchcock included it in the original montage.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Back to 78/52.

Reviews are out, and they are good, and in two cases, they are almost moving to me.

One review is on the Roger Ebert site(it was their "front page" review, maybe its moved now.) The other is in Variety.

Together, the two reviews remind us why some of us frequent this board and STILL talk Psycho all these years later(as long as we OT to remind ourselves of the other movies out there.)

I can't remember which contention is in which review, but we get(paraphrased in each and every case):

"There is only one movie arguably close to Psycho in having a hold on viewers, and that is The Godfather."

"There are two Psychos. One is the movie that came out in 1960 for people lucky enough to be alive then and experience it first hand with screaming and yelling; the other is "the Psycho of our mind" in which we have lived for years.

Yep...I know THAT one. And so did Gus Van Sant. One reason I've never really "hated" Gus Van Sant's Psycho is that he took the obsession so many of us have, and sacrificed his "golden ticket" with Imagine and Universal to spend millions making a copy.

Also:

"It seems incredible that the Sight and Sound critics replaced Citizen Kane with Vertigo, and not Psycho. For Psycho is a movie that also did what Citizen Kane did in auteuristic authority and cinematic change."

I've been saying this for years. For those who say "Psycho is the Citizen Kane of horror movies," I say "Psycho IS Citizen Kane." They are acheivements of equal magnitude -- with the edge towards Psycho for entertainment and audience participation.

And:

"Psycho is as exciting, modern and cutting edge as it was when it was made almost 60 years ago."

The reviews are very good, much better than those for Hitchcock a few years back. I recommend reading them if only to get a "second wind" of affection for this Psycho board at Moviechat(thank you, Moviechat!) and the one that preceded it(with posts moved here) at imdb.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

A couple of other thoughts on 78/52 having watched it again.

The doc has a nice stylistic touch throughout: they use a scratched-up, beaten up old "8 millimeter" version of Psycho to show clips from the movie sometimes. These things were really made and sold in the sixties before VHS. They were "20 minute versions" of major films, put on teeny tiny film you could run in your home movie projector.

And as seen in "78/52," this footage looks as old as history. And then suddenly, the screen fills with a nice, new restored and clear image from the movie.

There is also a nice study of that "rape painting" that Norman moves to find his peephole.

And this(really great): Someone remarks on the flowered wallpaper in Cabin One that is clearly visible behind Mrs. Bates as she stabs, forming a "backdrop" to her shadowy figure that is somehow creepy in its "old fashioned flower pattern."

That's TRUE.

Back in 1968(when I still wasn't allowed to see Psycho) Esquire magazine published one freeze frame from Psycho and it transfixed me: Mrs. Bates, knife raised high, flowered wallpaper behind her. The wallpaper DID creep me out. I held that image in my mind for a few years before I got to see the movie.

And 78/52 shows that Kubrick used very similar wallpaper for the walls in the hotel in The Shining...

Speaking of not getting to see Psycho, some talking head says what I, too, lived:

"My parents would never let me see Psycho, which was weird, because I got to see all the OTHER horror movies, all the time."

Me, too. Psycho just got "this reputation."

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Another thought about the Psycho shower scene:

This documentary gets deep into the scene in terms of what we see on screen only: from start to finish, the murder, Marion's death, the camera move to the house(thus linking the two icons of the movie.)

But I always like to remind folks that its the CONTEXT of that shower scene that adds all sorts of atmosphere and terror to the scene.

This woman is being stabbed in a shower. But it is not her shower at home. And it is not a shower in a high rise downtown New York hotel.

Its a shower in a motel room. In a creepy, rather shabby motel with "twelve cabins, twelve vacancies." There is no one else there. Maybe if there HAD been...Marion would have been saved.

And it is night. We KNOW that. We feel it in our minds even if the scene is all lit up brightly.

And the motel is down the gnarled bushy hill from a creepy old Victorian mansion...the lair of the very monster mama who is now wielding the big knife.

In reality that shower was on a soundstage at Universal-International studios in North Hollywood. But in our minds...that shower is in the middle of nowhere, rural California back country, in the shadow of a Gothic mansion.

And we never forget THAT while we're watching the shower scene...if we know the movie.

Moreover, 78/52 gives us an "alternate version" of Marion's long drive across vast stretches of desert to remind us: from the wide open spaces of Western America, Marion will end up facing her horrific death in a very ENCLOSED space. "From the farthest to the nearest," just like the opening shot of Psycho itself...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I return to revisit a sentence:

For the record, my favorite set-piece in Psycho is Arbogast's murder, and my favorite set-piece in all of Hitchcock is the Mount Rushmore climax to North by Northwest.

----

Still, true, but to elaborate:

---

Most YouTube and other clips showing the Arbogast murder open INSIDE the foyer with Arbo opening the door and entering.

But To me "the murder of Arbogast scene" begins as he hangs up the phone at the phone booth and we dissolve to the Bates Motel again. The hanging up of the phone "commences the countdown" to Arbogast's death.

Starting this early in the sequence makes sure to include two great shows:

ONE: The very intricate shot in which WE see Norman, and HE sees Arbogast's car approaching, and scurries off to the dark corner of the motel(to another room? No, to the open passage up the hill to the house, we learn later.) Great choreography of actors, the car, the camera, and one of the more interesting juxtapositions of the motel and the looming house in the same shot.

TWO: Arbogast climbing the hill to the house, with Herrmann's chilling yet "loopy" music. I've locked this in here as my favorite shot in Psycho -- and my favorite shot in Hitchcock.

In this "preamble" to murder, there is also some interest to Arbogast encountering the famous stuffed birds(HIS turn) and I assume in 1960 there was maximum suspense as he bent down to check that safe out -- would Mother appear behind him?

Once we are up the hill, the great shots keep coming:

The house porch -- with Mother's lit window visible above -- as Arbogast turns one last time to survey the landscape behind and below him before taking off his hat and entering the house. Could he have maybe realized he should take one last look?

And then the entry into the foyer, etc, etc, etc...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As for the Mount Rushmore climax being my favorite Hitchcock set-piece:

As the Arbogast murder is to the shower killing in Psycho; Mount Rushmore is to the crop duster in North by Northwest.

To wit: the shower scene and the crop duster scene are the "more famous scenes" -- and the crop duster scene is considered quite "artful" -- but the Arbogast murder and the Rushmore climax are the more EXCITING scenes. Arbogast gets a bigger audience scream and the "action" of that staircase fall; Rushmore dispenses with the arch silence of the crop duster scene and gives us Herrmann's thundering orchestra in full swing, up to 11.

The Mount Rushmore scene is the greatest "get them!" scene in the history of movies OR TV(where such scenes were common in the 60's.) The good guys start to run, the leader of the bad guy commands his henchmen: "Get them!" and the chase is on.

Except Vandamm is too cool and quiet for "Get them!" Instead, he intones "get that figure back." The figure is a small statue with incredibly valuable microfilm in it(a classic McGuffin) and its a great plot device, too: henchmen Leonard and Valerian can't simply shoot and kill Roger and Eve on Rushmore(they might fall off the mountain with the statute in hand) -- they have to catch right up to them and retrieve the figure.

Unlike modern summer blockbusters with action every ten minutes and a final half hour of CGI intergalactic mishmash, the entirety of North by Northwest builds and builds and builds and builds to Mount Rushmore. All of Vandamm's attempts on Roger's life lead to Rushmore; the love affair with Eve(and the "real love" that comes from it) lead to Rushmore; even the coldly uncaring CIA Professor and his plan lead to Rushmore. And it all comes together there.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Favorite shots:

Roger and Eve running towards us and stopping dead to look ahead of them. WE know what they will see: the Rushmore heads. And we get that POV. And its marvelous, from BEHIND the heads, just the tips of the Presidential heads, all looking outwards to the endless night vista ahead.

The beginning (refrain) of the first exciting notes of Herrmann's score that open NXNW on Leo the Lion's roar. Again, the motif is building, building, BUILDING,UNLEASHING. This music kicks in over a high shot looking down on the side of Washington's face as Valerian climbs AROUND AND UNDER Washington's chin. That's "Valerian's side of approach." Leonard is coming in from the Lincoln side. Its a "pincer attack" designed to trap Roger and Eve somewhere between Jefferson and Roosevelt.

Meanwhile, over on the Lincoln side: poor Leonard is clinging poorly to Lincoln's cheek -- and he falls. (The audience actually screams over a VILLAIN's near death.) In two shots, Leonard falls down the side of Lincoln's cheek and lands face down on a ledge below. Great, painful looking stunt work here.

I will pause to note that every time I watch Valerian climbing under Washington's chin, and Leonard plummeting down Lincoln's cheek -- I smile wide. THIS is what the movies are all about. They are, as someone wrote, to be LOOKED AT, and in no other medium does one get the visual pleasure and excitement(and fantasy) of this kind of action. With Herrmann's score maximizing the Rushmore excitement at every turn, except for a brief, poignant quietude to show us Roger and Eve clinging to the side of the monument and talking:

Roger: If we get out of this alive, let's go back to New York on the train.
Eve: Is that a proposition?
Roger: Its a proposal, sweetie.
Eve: What happened to the first two marriages?
Roger: My wives divorced me.
Eve: Why?
Roger: I think they said I lived too dull a life.

(And a smiling Eve suddenly falls down the cliff about ten feet herself.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

What a great interlude, worthy of some analysis:

Again,

Roger: If we get out of this alive,

---

Roger is creating hope that they WILL get out alive, but acknowledging that maybe, they won't.

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let's go back to New York on the train.

---

Roger conjures up memories for Eve of their first sexual bliss

---
Eve: Is that a proposition?

---

Eve the Seducer kicks in, thinking she's talking to Roger the Seducer

---
Roger: Its a proposal, sweetie.

---

Aha! Its love, not just lust, for Roger Thornhill. A MARRIAGE proposal and for my money one of the most heartwarming ones in movies -- "Where did Roger propose? On Mount Rushmore while spies were trying to kill us." I also like how he calls her "sweetie." That's a term for a wife, not a lover.

---
Eve: What happened to the first two marriages?

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Here's Eve leaping to acknowledging that she will be Mrs. Thornhill Number Three. Time to inquire about the first two.

---
Roger: My wives divorced me.

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Important info. They left HIM. He didn't ditch THEM.

----
Eve: Why?
Roger: I think they said I lived too dull a life.

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That's a punchline that somes up North by Northwest in all its grandeur: he's not living a dull life NOW. None of us are, who are watching North by Northwest. It is the exhilarating adventure of our lifetimes(well for some of us), with a high rush of happy marital romance at the end.

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(And a smiling Eve suddenly falls down the cliff about ten feet herself.)

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I like how this quiet romantic dialogue between Roger and Eve -- not without humor -- is suddenly ended by the sudden death dangers OF hanging from Mount Rushmore.

And then the climax moves on to what William Goldman said was "solving ten plot points in 30 seconds," to Mason's great final one-liner "Not very sporting, using real bullets," and to that very sexual train ride that Roger promised Eve and Herrmann's last great notes.

Yes, I would love to see a movie about the Mount Rushmore scene...