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Norman Bates and the Hitchcock Villains

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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As a kid, I was a fan of the "Batman" TV show, and years later I learned why.

The producer, William Dozier, had designed the show so that the lead of each week's two part episode was really the VILLAIN. Straight-arrow Batman(Adam West) and irritating teenage jerk Robin(Burt Ward) were intended as the "straight men" to a weekly villain who usually had a great costume, a great wig, and some sort of great comic-menacing presence.

The Big Four were the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, and Catwoman. But the ABC series came up with scores of other baddies. My favorite was the Mad Hatter(also called Jervis Tetch, evidently to avoid copyright issues.) David Wayne played the guy in a loud suit, a big hat, a stylish moustache, a mop of red hair -- and with a fascinatingly overdone voice(he'd say things like "Its CURTAINS for you, Bahhtt-man"). If there was a model villain from my youth, it was David Wayne's Mad Hatter.

Other sixties shows gave me the "template" for villainy. On The Man From UNCLE and The Wild Wild West, each episode (as Batman did) gave us a villain, his henchmen and a beauty for the hero to romance. On WWW, dwarf Michael Dunn's Dr. Loveless was a recurring villain(he was shorter than short star Robert Conrad) but my favorite there was the over-articulate "Count Manzeppi" played by elegant fat man Victor Buono(who had a charming line reading gag -- he'd start talking with Shakesperean elegance and suddenly descend into coarse Brooklynese, outta nowhere.)

I suppose the hero-heroine-villain template is as old as the movies themselves. We need the villain to tie the heroine to the railroad track for the hero to rescue. Before Batman, I had the cartoon show Dudley Do-Right, with Dudley as the good guy, and villain Snidely Whiplash tying the heroine Nell to the railroad track.

All of this was preparing me, I realized, for the somewhat different world of : the Hitchcock Villain. But it WAS preparing me.

Take North by Northwest(which was made in 1959, before the 60's TV shows Batman, The Man From UNCLE and Wild Wild West came on the air.) You've got your hero(Roger Thornhill), you've got your heroine(Eve Kendall) but you most definitely have your Mad Hatter/Snidely Whiplash/Count Manzeppi. His name is Philip Vandamm and there's nothing flamboyant about him except for his super-smooth voice. And he has henchmen. Three to be exact -- insinuating gay second in command Leonard, brutal knifeman Valerian, and bald Licht(who disappears from the movie, dead in the crop duster though it is never told to us.)

I expect I like North by Northwest so much because Vandamm and Company(whom Thornhil actually CALLS "Vandamm and Company") really ARE the template for all those great villain-and-henchman teams that would become 60s TV staples , and James Bond staples(Goldfinger and Oddjob; The Thunderball villain and his Bahamas-based henchmen.)

Now Vandamm and Company were hardly "firsts." Hitchcock had had spymasters with henchmen as early as Saboteur(Charlies Tobin and his Nazi gang); and Foreign Correspondent(a "hidden villain" in milquetoast Herbert Marshall and HIS Nazi gang.) But those guys didn't have the panache(or the lines) of James Mason in Technicolor and VistaVision.

I've actually made a list of my favorite Hitchcock villains and Vandamm is Number Three.

Here's the list:

1. Norman Bates
2. Bruno Anthony
3. Philip Vandamm
4. Bob Rusk
5. Uncle Charlie
6. Lars Thorwald
7. Tony Wendice
8. Alexander Sebastian
9. Mrs. Danvers
10. The birds

...with such runners-up as Charles Tobin, Willy the Lifeboat Nazi, Arthur Adamson(Hitchcock's final villain, played with relish by William Devane) and Philip and Brandon the "gay dyad killers" of Rope.

The bottom line is that Hitchcock and his writers, from their sources, came up with a LOT of great villains over Hitchcock's 53 movies. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, "the better the villain, the better the picture" and -- you gotta admit, Hitchcock conjured up some great villains.

And, with a certain perversity, he sometimes threw his movies TO the villains. Anthony Perkins is more memorable(and a bigger star) than John Gavin. Ray Milland is more memorable than Bob Cummings (as is Otto Kruger in Saboteur.) Robert Walker is more memorable than Farley Granger. Joseph Cotton is more memorable than MacDonald Carey(though, to be fair, Teresa Wright is really the lead hero...and Cotton's match as a character.)

Cary Grant was too formidable a hero to be overcome by Claude Rains or even James Mason..though those men rather held their own with Grant, especially Mason(who was rather a doppelganger in age, voice, gray hair and suavity.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

James Stewart mixed enough villainy into his Hitchcock roles that things could get confused. Who's the villain in Vertigo? Gavin or Scottie? And isn't Lars Thorwald a poor sap being spied on by giddy Jimmy in Rear Window? And what of his fascist-talking college prof in Rope -- all too influential on his murderous students.

You might say that James Stewart was "Hitchcock's most villainous hero."

One of my thoughts about villains in movies is: eventually, they have to BE villainous. Number One in that regard for me in Hitchcock is...surprise...Bob Rusk. When he enters Brenda Blaney's office at lunch and slowly reveals his true self, it is as if that self is "pure evil for the sake of being evil." And what Rusk does to Brenda is the kind of villainy you just HATE.

Mason's Vandamm soft pedals his villainy, but it is there. As Hitchcock said "All Mason had to do was to nod" -- and in NXNW, in the Glen Cove library, he nods to his henchmen and they commence their first murder attempt on Thornhill -- Vandamm's great "a pleasant journey, sir" as a send-off.

I do love this later exchange between Thornhill and Vandamm:

Thornhill: I suppose the role you most want me to play is when I play dead.
Vandamm: Your very next role. You'll be most convincing, I assure you.

Beautiful! In any other movie, Vandamm (who is enraged in the knowledge that Thornhill has slept with HIS girlfriend, Eve) would say "You're dead! You hear me? DEAD!" Vandamm is saying the same thing, but with much more elegance.

In my Top Five Hitchcock Villains(of the ten) I give four slots to Hitchcock's four great psychos: Norman(the 60s), Bruno(the 50's), Rusk(the 70s) Uncle Charlie (the 40's.) That's one a decade, almost as if planned that way by Hitchcock -- almost as if psycho villains were too unique and powerful to use them ALL the time. But Vandamm gets into that Top Five too , as THE spymaster in Hitchcock.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Vandamm is also a bit of a psycho himself, really -- constantly unable to accept the reality of Roger Thornhill AS Roger Thornhill. That early Glen Cove scene in which Vandamm refuses to believe Thornhill about ANYTHING is rather a...Mad Tea Party. With Vandamm as the Mad Hatter. And like Mrs. Bates one film later, all Vandamm is really interested in is: killing his enemies. Vandamm doesn't want to spare Thornhill, and he can't be reasoned with. Its Mrs. Bates in a three-piece suit.

I'm getting to Norman presently, but we must note that he has two forbears in Hitchcock:

Uncle Charlie, a handsome charmer who, like Norman later, is bound to make long speeches about how he finds the world a hell, and who is also a psychopath.

and...

Bruno Anthony, who really should be the Number One Hitchcock Villain because he clearly IS a villain, from his first scene on, and because Robert Walker -- young, handsome, funny and Playing Against Type -- is a mother-dominated dry run for Norman, with much more in the way of flamboyance and menace to him. Perkins never really gets to BE villainous in Psycho(the stunt doubles playing Mrs. Bates do that for him), he's playing the straight man to his own murderous creation.

Its hard for me to define "a great performance" or how one comes about, but I would certainly vote for Walker's first scene in Strangers on a Train with Farley Granger as BEING that. Hitchcock captures Walker in dynamic low angles and cutting Venetian blind shadows and Walker is as dynamic in his line reading and every physical move as Hitchcock's camera work.

Yes, its Hays Code 1951 and Bruno clearly has a gay vibe -- but something else is going on with him. He's fey, otherworldly, adrift in his own dreams. But subject to sudden bile (like Norman in the parlor.) He's funny, and he's also kinda macho manly -- about his drinking("Oh, there's a new cure for that...doubles, please.")

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Anyway, Robert Walker's first scene in Strangers on a Train coulda/shoulda be enough to win him the award for Hitchcock's Best Villain, but alas, 9 years later, ANOTHER handsome young boyish actor would act against type and win the title instead.

Its a trick performance in a trick ending movie, isn't it?

We always have to imagine that 1960 audience that doesn't know Norman is the killer. So all his scenes are pretty much "hero" scenes -- or at least "protagonist" scenes, in which late Hays Code 1960 rules are telling us fairly early on: if Mrs. Bates is exposed and captured...Norman's going to JAIL. He covered up the murder of Marion, buried her in the swamp, lied about her to Arbogast, buried Arbogast in the swamp -- rather like Judy Barton two films earlier, Norman Bates is NOT a hero, he's an accomplice to murder. But -- as with Judy -- we like him and he gets our sympathy. And 1960 audiences who liked Tony Perkins must have been demoralized by the knowledge that he is an accomplice bent for jail, long before the twist ending revealed all.

Many 1960 audiences saw Psycho twice. The first time to experience all the shocks and the ending for the first time. The second time, to "double check the twist": How did Hitchcock fool us? Did he play fair?(90% fair, I say -- Mother's voice was a bit of a cheat, even if a man did it some of the time.)

And suddenly, Tony Perkins performance changed ENTIRELY, the second time around. Same performance, but now seen in an entirely new way. When he says "Mother's not herself today", well, she's HIM. His outbursts in the parlor("People cluck their thick tongues and suggest oh so very delicately") are in Mother's verbiage. When he tells Arbogast "She may have fooled me, but she didn't fool my mother," he seems a bit mean. When he tells Mother "He came after the girl, and now someone will come after him" -- he's pretty callous and uncaring about two human beings who were slaughtered by his mother.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And yet, BOTH times around, Norman is just too polite, too nice, too victimized -- NOT to keep liking him, at some level.

Critic David Thomson claimed that Psycho cheated its audience in a lot of ways - and one, wrote Thomson, was that there was not a clue in Perkins' "nice guy" performance to the savage killer that Mrs. Bates was shown to be. He felt it was if Perkins was acting "a good guy" and letting the Mrs. Bates stunt double do the wetwork.

But au contraire, Mr. Thomson -- Mrs. Bates is clearly there in Norman during the parlor scene(in his low-key rant about being put someplace), and a bit there in the Arbogast interrogation("She didn't fool my mother" -- and Norman's earlier rage "But I'm not a fool, and I'm not capable of being fooled, even by a woman.") And in the clean-up of Marion's murder(Norman can handle the blood and the body... a psychopath's talent.) And in his callous talk with MOther on the stairs("He came after the girl...") and in his refusal to make chit-chat comfortably at ALL with Sam and Lila and...

...unforgettably

..in the cell at the end, where the facial acting of Anthony Perkins -- criminally ignored by the MPAA -- confirms to us all that the monster IS Norman, even if he has decided that he is Mrs. Bates forever. If Robert Walker's first scene in Strangers almost wins him the Hitchcock's Greatest Villain title, Tony Perkins final scene in Psycho steals away the crime.

"In closing"(applause, give him the hook) there remains this anomaly about Anthony Perkins being "Hitchcock's greatest villain." He commits two atrocious, vicious, brutal and merciless knife murders. He poisoned and stuffed his own mother. And yet...he never quite seems like a "villain" in the pure sense. We never have reason to hate him. As we would with Bob Rusk. As we did with Uncle Charlie and Bruno(both of whom rub the noses of the innocent in their villainy.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Truth be told, there are OTHER sympathetic villains in Hitchcock: Alex Sebastian, Lars Thorwald, Gromek. Hitch sure knew how to mix our emotions.

But none of them were as sympathetic, as inscrutable, as loveable, and as terrifying...as Norman Bates.

Hitchcock's greatest...and most famous...villain.

PS. And how about those birds? Critic Dwight MacDonald, who hated Psycho among other reasons for the "wild card" nature of a psycho villain("He has no human motives or passions") felt that birds were on step beyond -- "The birds are more irrational than a psychopath -- what's next, man-eating PLANTS?"

Irrational villains. Killers who kill you in the shower or in your office, for no good reason. Birds who turn murderous by the hundreds.

Hitchcock knew from irrationality...and sudden death. Its very much the world we live in today, isn't it?

[–] movieghoul (213) 6 years ago

Yes, NBN did set the template for villain and henchmen, or should we say, henchpeople - Van Damm has help from 2 females, the housekeeper and the fake Mrs Townsend.

However, in the interests of economy, TV henchpeople were no more than extras in many cases. On Batman, there raison d'etre was just so B&R would have guys to punch out at the end. Of course, there were a couple of specials, like Jill St. John in the first episode and Lesley Gore as Pussycat.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Yes, NBN did set the template for villain and henchmen, or should we say, henchpeople - Van Damm has help from 2 females, the housekeeper and the fake Mrs Townsend.

---

How er, sexist of me?(Though I refuse to accept the label; I like women very much.) I suppose I forgot them because their assignments aren't to kill Thornhill -- though the housekeeper is willing(the gun she points at Thornhill -- the FAKE gun).

But back to being sexist: the heavy set housekeeper seems more like Valerian's mother than his wife. I felt Hitchcock was being "realistic witty" here: a mean psychopathic brute like Valerian isn't exactly going to land a cutie-pie(and this woman harkens back to John Robie's housekeeper in To Catch a Thief -- who once strangled a German general "without a sound.")

And: charming bit -- the woman posing as Mrs. Townsend, we learn, was Vandamm's SISTER. All in the family...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

However, in the interests of economy, TV henchpeople were no more than extras in many cases.

---

Yes. Though I am reminded that, on Wild Wild West the SAME FOUR GUYS were henchmen every week, usually using disguises. One of them was Red West, an Elvis bodyguard who moved on from Elvis. One was a guy named Dick Cangey(not Cagney) from "Mahoningtown, Pennylvania."

I know this because I bought Cangey's vanity-press book about The Wild Wild West, and it was delightful. Star Robert Conrad(who comes off as a nice guy unfortunately prone to bar fights) called Cangey "Cang from Mahoningtown" and took the man on the road to rodeos to play the bad guy who jumps him.

When a CBS executive wanted the stunt men fired because they were too familiar, they wore hoods for one episode -- but were immediately identified per body shape -- "You're Red, you're Cang..." Conrad protected their jobs to the end, though.

----

On Batman, there raison d'etre was just so B&R would have guys to punch out at the end. Of course, there were a couple of specials, like Jill St. John in the first episode and Lesley Gore as Pussycat.

---

I'm reminded that Batman added one more element to the Hero-Heroine-Villain template: Villain's mistress. Well, it was hard to picture guys like The Joker and King Tut and The Mad Hatter DOING anything with the beautiful henchwoman who graced every episode(usually straight from playing the hottie on Wild Wild West or Man from UNCLE) but they sure were beautiful. Jill St. John was the biggest star "mistress" (and used in the pilot with the Riddler) but cuties like Francine York and Diane McBain and Nancy Kovack filled the bill equally well with other villains. Watching these episodes as an adult, its pretty funny: such gorgeous women evidently hired simply to "hang out" with the Penguin or Joker -- no hanky panky implied.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Meanwhile, back at the Batman henchMEN. They usually didn't rise too far as actors, but you can find Alex Rocco(shot-through-the-eye Moe Greene) as a henchman in one show; and that Please Don't Squeeze the Charmin guy as a henchman in another(a rather easy-to-fight, middle-aged henchman, alas.)

Yes, you could say it was a wasted childhood...but it didn't seem so at the time. I was getting my Thriller Movie Training. And truth be told, I never watched a Wild Wild West or an UNCLE start to finish. Usually just the opening credits and theme and the climactic fight, doing homework the rest of the time.

BTW, if the Batman villains helped prep me for Hitchcock's baddies in the 60's, another set of villains did the work in the 70's:

The Columbo killers, of course. Peter Falk was a more interesting star than Adam West, but the Columbo episodes were really designed to showcase some TV-level star in every episode as a baddie(a BAD baddie -- a murderer): Robert Culp, Jack Cassidy, Patrick McGoohan. Janet Leigh and Vera Miles were both guest killers, too. (I guess Tony Perkins was a bit too pricey?) William Shatner AND Leonard Nimoy. Robert Conrad AND Ross Martin. And Dick Van Dyke.

And of course, the Columbo vs the Rich Killer cat-and-mouse was very much influenced by Arbogast and Norman's parry-and-thrust...