How do you film a shower scene with no nudity? - Psycho (1960) Discussion

[–] PaladinNJ (20310) 6 years ago

She was wearing a body suit. Besides at that time, censors would never had allowed it.

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He used Janet Leigh "from the neck up"(and wearing a "moleskin" body suit) and he used a nude Playboy model named Marli Renfro for other shots in the scene(like the blurry view of a naked Marion first pulling the shower curtain closed, and the overhead shots of Mother leaning in to attack Marion.)

There was a LOT of nudity "on the set," but in the movie, just a little bit historically got right past the censors:

With the camera focusing on Marion's hand reaching out to grab the shower curtain as she dies, in the blurry background, you can see...two breasts and two nipples.

Marli Renfro's breast and nipples.

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There was 1960 censored brilliance in staging the shower scene, because, since the camera could never really go below Janet Leigh's neck when she was in the shots -- we had to imagine all the stab wounds appearing down below the frameline, too. "Psychologically," we accepted this.

There is also the stray shot of the big steel knife lightly poking against Marion's bare midriff -- Marli Renfro again -- and a brilliant idea: we see the knife, we see the belly -- we IMAGINE the knife in the belly.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 6 years ago

Just ridiculous beyond belief.

I suppose that one can have that attitude about a lot of scenes from movie history, e.g., 'How do you film a sex scene without showing penetration?' said about every mainstream film sex scene since they started to be allowed in the '60s (this is one of Godard's moans in one of his unwatchable '90s essay-films; he splices in lots of grimy hard core porn scenes to supposedly restore some balance).

But the 'show everything!' attitude *isn't* compulsory - there are pluses and minuses from each additional bit of explicitness and confrontingness about sex, violence, suicide, etc..

At any rate, as others have urged, Psycho had ground-breaking levels of explicit sexual and violent content for its time. Our more jaded palates have to work to register the tightrope Hitchcock walked to get Psycho released! Later directors (including Hitch himself with Frenzy (1972)) would have much greater freedom, and it *is* interesting to watch and compare with the more explicit shower and what we might call 'sexualized, confined space' death scenes in De Palma, Argento, and a whole host of lesser slashers (e.g., Tarantino is a big fan of one called The Prowler (1981); it's almost complete garbage in my view but does have a memorably visceral, lotsa nudity shower death scene).

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Just ridiculous beyond belief.

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I suppose that one can have that attitude about a lot of scenes from movie story, e.g., 'How do you film a sex scene without showing penetration?' said about every mainstream film sex scene since they started to be allowed in the '60s (this is one of Godard's moans in one of his unwatchable '90s essay-films; he splices in lots of grimy hard core porn scenes to supposedly restore some balance).

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Godard did THAT? I assume that was unreleaseable to theaters anywhere.

The coming of porn on video(and now DVDs and computers) pretty much ended the ability of the theatrical mainstream film(even with the R or X rating) to compete.

But the fact of the matter is that once sex scenes were allowed in American studio films -- some of them were pretty good, if brief and suggestive rather than graphic. They captured the mood and feelings of consensual sex, if not the mechanics.

As for the shower scene, there's a nifty (if fictionalized) scene in the 2012 movie "Hitchcock" of Janet Leigh(ScarJo) first meeting with Hitchcock(Anthony Hopkins) on Psycho and saying "So, how are you possibly going to make this shower scene?" I realized in seeing that scene that a lot of insiders were probably amazed that Hitchcock even CONTEMPLATED putting this scene on film, circa 1960. And the fictional Leigh does note to Hitchcock, "I'm an actress, but I'm also a wife and a mother."

Well, we all know how Hitchcock pulled it off -- Leigh's part of the scene is only her head, face and shoulders. A naked body double helps "fill in the gaps"(recall that Hitchcock shot the naked woman's struggles in slow motion to make sure no "naughty bits" showed -- and then sped up the film.) And Hitchcock snuck a bit of soft-focus nudity in.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A male friend once watched Psycho on my recommendation and reported back, "Boy, before the killer comes in , that shower scene is pretty erotic." He actually used the word "erotic." And you know what, it is. Janet Leigh really knew how to communicate a certain intensity and release under that shower water. Yes, Marion is "cleansing away her sins," but her expression is sexual, "within herself," so to speak(her mouth is open at one point). Which only makes the invasion of Mother into the shower all the more obscene.

(I have noted before that in 1998, the Los Angeles Times ran a production photo of Leigh under the shower before the murder side by side with Anne Heche under the shower in the "new" Van Sant -- and the "old" 1960 photo was so much more erotic and "artful" than the 1998 photo that it felt cruel to Heche to publish them side by side.)

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But the 'show everything!' attitude *isn't* compulsory - there are pluses and minuses from each additional bit of explicitness and confrontingness about sex, violence, suicide, etc..

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Absolutely. Ever since the R and X(NC-17) ratings turned up in 1968, we have been given a parade of filmmaker decisions on "how much to show."

And that definitely includes violence as well as nudity or sex. Or even such nausea-inducing images as (1) A close-up of a hypodermic needle puncturing skin(they ALWAYS show that now, they didn't before) or (2) a character vomiting(chicken soup on overtime.) I close my eyes at these moments now, every time. (A guy getting his head blown off...not so necessary.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A side note on the sex scenes in R-rated movies: by luck of the calendar, my teenage years rather coincided with the coming of the R rating. Though I couldn't get into too many "walk in" theaters without a parent, I saw R movies at the drive-ins a lot. I had no access to porn -- unheard of in those days -- and I'd like to think I wouldn't have wanted to.

So a lot of R-rated movies gave me(and both my male and female friends at the drive-in) got a "preview of sex" via these American studio movies(and some foreign ones we could see.) And frankly, I rather consider us lucky to have gotten the taste. It was good preparation for the years ahead, you ask me.

Some well-regarded movies with sex scenes of note include: Goodbye Columbus, MASH, Klute, Shaft, Get Carter, Play Misty for Me, Don't Look Now, The Harrod Experiment, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot...North Dallas Forty. Saw 'em all, and what I like is: they were all scenes of consensual, fun, sometimes loving sex. (Movies like Frenzy and Straw Dogs don't count. Rapes.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

At any rate, as others have urged, Psycho had ground-breaking levels of explicit sexual and violent content for its time.

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The shower scene, for its time, really did mix the sexual and the violent. With the constant SENSE of nudity, even if we don't see "the naughty bits." Much.

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Our more jaded palates have to work to register the tightrope Hitchcock walked to get Psycho released!

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That's why the story entailed in Rebello's "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" is so suspenseful in the beginning and triumphant at the end.

Was it a triumph for movies to have more sex and violence in them? Well, LIFE has sex and violence in it, and movies based solely on the "Sunday school vision of life" were becoming less and less relevant.

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Later directors (including Hitch himself with Frenzy (1972)) would have much greater freedom,

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It remains interesting to me that, armed with the new R rating from 1968 on, Hitchcock barely used it in two out of his final three films.

Topaz was an "M" -- and I think about all that rating was used for by Hitch was for the hero to be adulterous and REMAIN the hero(his wife was adulterous, too.)

Frenzy (R) was Hitchcock's only real statement about "what he could do with the R rating" and it sure was graphic enough. Carefully parcelled-out nudity --- and sex almost as a subject(we are told that the killer is impotent and turned on more by the strangling than the sex; Mrs. Oxford notes that her husband barely has sex with her at all -- the extremes of male/female sexuality.)

Family Plot (PG)was mainly a comedy, and though the two main couples always TALK about sex, we never see them at it(frankly, I couldn't picture Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern even having it; they seemed too goofy, even if they were both good looking. Yes, even Dern.)

Frenzy and Family Plot have a lot of profanity(Topaz, oddly, does not), but both avoid the "F word."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

and it *is* interesting to watch and compare with the more explicit shower and what we might call sexualized, confined space death scenes in De Palma, Argento, and a whole host of lesser slashers (e.g., Tarantino is a big fan of one called The Prowler (1981); it's almost complete garbage in my view but does have a memorably visceral, lotsa nudity shower death scene).

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I have not heard of, nor seen The Prowler. Is this a shower stabbing? And I guess it responds to the OP if this was a film where the nudity was clearly seen.

Personally, I'm just not much of a fan of such graphicness , and particularly when the victims are women.

What happened to Angie Dickenson in Dressed to Kill(the "uncut" version) was repellent in a way that Hitchcock purposely avoided in Psycho -- the blood is in color(red, of course), and copious(it stays on Angie, it doesn't go down a drain), and we are meant to feel the horrific pain when the killer slashes Angie's open palm with a straight razor and later slashes open her throat and her jugular vein.

Hitchcock started it...but others have, horribly, finished it.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 6 years ago

I have not heard of, nor seen The Prowler. Is this a shower stabbing?

No, semi-ludicrously, it's a shower pitch-forking! The killer in The Prowler is a Dear John-ed WW2 vet, getting revenge for some reason against the next generation in 1980. He kills some victims with a bayonet (which makes sense as military paraphenalia and by being easily secreted on one's person) and others with a pitchfork for some reason I forget (if there even was a reason).

The whole film is on youtube, albeit crushed down to the corner of a screen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkyAHx3zOwU
The shower murder sequence (someone outside the shower is killed nastily first) begins around 15 mins 28 secs in. It's pretty ghastly. I only watched the film because Tarantino listed it as one of his favorite (or maybe most overlooked?) horrors or slashers (I forget the exact terms of QT's recommendation of it - I *do* recall him citing The Prowler approvingly as one of the most excessive, late-in-the-first-slasher-cycle films).

As I mentioned earlier, I didn't get much out of the film. It's the sort of slasher that has absurd even impossible kills, e.g. 1, pitch-forks, e.g. 2, a bikini-clad girl later dies when, per impossibile, the killer appears right behind her *in the middle of the pool*. I guess a lot of post-Halloween slashers had villains that were half impossible bogey-men and half flesh and blood killers but I found The Prowler's version of this idea indistinguishable from slap-dash confusion. It just made me mad and curse QT for getting me to watch this.

My own favorite unsung slasher? Terror Train (1980) w/ 2001/Clockwork Orange/Shining DP John Alcott making everything look great, Jamie Leigh an old pro presence at this point, and nifty character turns from Ben Johnson.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

No, semi-ludicrously, it's a shower pitch-forking!

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Well, that's a new one. Psycho started things with a mere(but HUGE) butcher knife. On came the other weapons: axes(Strait Jacket), meat cleavers(Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte), straight razors(Dressed to Kill), power drills(Body Double) ....I guess that a pitchfork was inevitable.

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-The killer in The Prowler is a Dear John-ed WW2 vet, getting revenge for some reason against the next generation in 1980. He kills some victims with a bayonet (which makes sense as military paraphenalia and by being easily secreted on one's person)

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THAT does make sense!

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and others with a pitchfork for some reason I forget (if there even was a reason).

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Eh, he was a farmer before going to war?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I only watched the film because Tarantino listed it as one of his favorite (or maybe most overlooked?) horrors or slashers (I forget the exact terms of QT's recommendation of it - I *do* recall him citing The Prowler approvingly as one of the most excessive, late-in-the-first-slasher-cycle films).

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QT was, famously, a video store clerk, and sometimes I feel that he watched every tape in his store. He has an affinity for the low-rent gore stuff, but also the King Brothers Kung Fu stuff(hence, Kill Bill.) And as much as he is into the sick stuff, he also kept an eye out for less violent crime genre stuff like Charley Varrick(from which he lifted a line for Pulp Fiction about "going to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blow torch"), Get Carter, and The Taking of Pelham 123. In short, with QT, you'll get a guide to the fairly respectable crime stuff AND the gorehound stuff.

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As I mentioned earlier, I didn't get much out of the film. It's the sort of slasher that has absurd even impossible kills, e.g. 1, pitch-forks, e.g. 2, a bikini-clad girl later dies when, per impossibile, the killer appears right behind her *in the middle of the pool*. I guess a lot of post-Halloween slashers had villains that were half impossible bogey-men and half flesh and blood killers but I found The Prowler's version of this idea indistinguishable from slap-dash confusion.

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I guess Halloween started that. "Sam Loomis"(Donald Pleasance) shoots the killer full of holes and he just disappears to kill again. I'm not a fan. I -- like Hitchcock -- like my killers to have real capabilities. Its scarier that way.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

It just made me mad and curse QT for getting me to watch this.

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Oh, a lot of people curse QT for a lot of reasons. Like -- he prefers Psycho II to Psycho. Aw, c'mon, Quentin!

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My own favorite unsung slasher? Terror Train (1980) w/ 2001/Clockwork Orange/Shining DP John Alcott making everything look great, Jamie Leigh an old pro presence at this point, and nifty character turns from Ben Johnson.

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You know, even as I never found a slasher movie that affected me like Psycho, I certainly watched a lot of them over time, sometimes at the theater, more often on HBO when that came in.

And I liked Terror Train, too.

It had that "Agatha Christie closed room" quality to it, as a group of Halloween revelers in costume were stalked and killed on a train. Curtis WAS an old pro at terror by then; and Ben Johnson -- an Oscar winner at the time -- gave the whole thing a weird against-type down-home quality that I found most comforting amidst all the murders. (He was the engineer on the train, and NOT the killer.)

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 5 years ago

What happened to Angie Dickenson in Dressed to Kill(the "uncut" version) was repellent in a way that Hitchcock purposely avoided in Psycho
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This is where we have to ask where the line is drawn. In other words, did PSYCHO get blasted for exploitation due to the shower-scene, since the narrative could had been exactly the same minus that scene? Even though there was no nudity or actual graphic stabbing, audiences in conservative 1960 might have found the shower-scene in itself to be "exploitative" .

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

This is where we have to ask where the line is drawn. In other words, did PSYCHO get blasted for exploitation due to the shower-scene, since the narrative could had been exactly the same minus that scene?

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How so? Perhaps with Marion still dying, but no scene of it taking place? (We could end on a fade out when mother pulls the curtain).

For indeed, it was the super LENGTH of the shower scene that seems to have been the big shocker. the Time magazine reviewer wrote "The camera views at close range every scream, gasp, gurgle and hemorraghe by which a living human being becomes a corpse."(Or something like that.)

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Even though there was no nudity or actual graphic stabbing, audiences in conservative 1960 might have found the shower-scene in itself to be "exploitative" .

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I've read a fair number of 1960 reviews, and yes, that scene was a shocker. It went farther(and longer, and LOUDER) than any murder scene ever previously filmed. And the audience thought they saw all sorts of things they didn't really see: nudity, the knife entering the body, more blood(etc.)

With both North by Northwest (in 1959) and Psycho(in 1960) I've recommended that, to get their full impact, it would do a viewer well to at least read about other movies made in those two years. There were no other spy action thrillers on the level of NXNW, and though Psycho was surrounded by William Castle movies and other low budget horrors(and by Peeping Tom out of England and a few more foreign horrors) none of them had scenes with the impact of the shower and staircase murders in Psycho. But more to the point, 1959 and 1960 also had sedate, late Hays Code movies like A Hole in the Head and Pillow Talk and The Horse Soldiers going on while Hitchocck was breaking new ground.

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 5 years ago

How so? Perhaps with Marion still dying, but no scene of it taking place? (We could end on a fade out when mother pulls the curtain).
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I take that comment back; it would not be the same film without the shower-scene (and Arbogast's murder), since it would no longer be the ground-breaking shocker it was. But with the 1960-mindset, people were more shock-worthy then today and must have set a different bar.

Or is it that a filmmaker can be "exploitative", as long as the film is well produced, acted, directed, photographed, edited? We could ask if Tippi Hedren's attic-attack was necessary also, but the same would apply. I suppose I am analyzing too much, or wondering if exploitative means glorifying the shock (murder) by using too much graphic-detail. The Exorcist could had been much more bloody and sexual than it was also. It's like how much can you show (and say0 before it becomes exploitative.

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 5 years ago

A side note on the sex scenes in R-rated movies: by luck of the calendar, my teenage years rather coincided with the coming of the R rating. Though I couldn't get into too many "walk in" theaters without a parent, I saw R movies at the drive-ins a lot. I had no access to porn -- unheard of in those days -- and I'd like to think I wouldn't have wanted to.
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I was being admitted to R-films in the early 70's when I should not have been. They never checked my I.D., and I don't think I looked 17 when I was 14. Actually, I saw some X-films (porn) also when I was underage.

The reprehensible problem with R films is that just because a child can be admitted with a "guardian", doesn't mean they should be. Nobody under 17 (or 12, or 10, or 8) should be seeing these films, period..Nobody cares, as long as they make money

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[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I was being admitted to R-films in the early 70's when I should not have been. They never checked my I.D., and I don't think I looked 17 when I was 14. Actually, I saw some X-films (porn) also when I was underage.

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Well, you were luckier than I was. Again, my deal was: the drive-ins(with pals), all the R rated films I wanted to see. Indoors, not so much. This led to a nice bonding with my father when I was turned away from Dirty Harry. I was driven back to the house and lured him away from a football game on TV to accompany me back to the theater. He loved the movie, I loved the movie.

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The reprehensible problem with R films is that just because a child can be admitted with a "guardian", doesn't mean they should be. Nobody under 17 (or 12, or 10, or 8) should be seeing these films, period..Nobody cares, as long as they make money

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I agree with all of that. The R rating is ridiculous because it posits allowing ANY age of child seeing overt violence or sex. I can say that I have cringed a few times in my life watching parents bring children in to watch, say, a very bloody slasher-type movie. What's WRONG with them? The R allows more money to be made precisely from children. I'd say that R rated films should be NC-17, just to "clear the decks" for adults only to view these films (hah - says the guy who saw a lot of R-rated films underage! But still -- I would have just still snuck in.)

And I've always said that the true comic danger of the R rating is this: if a father watches an R-rated movie with his son, and it has a hot sex scene, both the father and the son are embarrassed by the other's presence. Neither of them gets to ENJOY the scene(and the film) as they would have without the other family member beside them. I know this from personal experience....

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[–] President4Life (280) 6 years ago

I like it.

It's more artistic and less exploitative.

Plus, today they would've had to picked an actress based on how she would look naked(they actually do this) and whether she'd be willing to do it or not.

This leaves it up to the imagination, which makes it more intense.

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[–] ProductionNow (1072) 5 years ago

'Just ridiculous beyond belief'
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Really, you can't believe it? That would be due to your age. I find today's youngers to be ridiculous beyond belief'
You other posters sure are tactful and polite.

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[–] liscarkat (16522) 5 years ago

It was much more effective the way it was done than it would be today with total nudity, blood, and guts.

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