The Psycho Psychiatrist and the Vertigo Coroner

Once more unto the much disparaged and yet surprisingly effective(to some) psychiatrist scene in Psycho...from another angle(?)

Two of the three Hitchcock pictures immediately before Psycho ALSO have "a psychiatrist scene"(which I shall shrink down to the "shrink" scene not out of disrespect, but for brevity and my fingers.)

In The Wrong Man(1956, 1957 in some markets), a shrink played by Werner Klemperer(about a decade from famously playing Colonel Klink on Hogan's Heroes) gives Henry Fonda the clinical lowdown on why his wife, Vera Miles, is catatonic after a breakdown, and how it will take time for her to return to normal.

In Hitch's very next film, Vertigo(1958), a shrink played by Raymond Bailey (a few years before famously playing Banker Drysdale on The Beverly Hillbillies) gives Barbara Bel Geddes the clinical lowdown on why her boyfriend, James Stewart, is catatonic after a breakdown, and how it will take time for him to return to normal.

The "shrink scenes" in The Wrong Man and Vertigo are so virtually identical that sometimes I feel that Hitchcock chose to remake the little-seen Wrong Man IMMEDIATELY with the bigger production of Vertigo. Why, the two films even share a scene of a character walking down a long hallway in despair(Fonda in The Wrong Man, but a happy ending is coming; Bel Geddes in Vertigo...never to be seen again.)

That Colonel Klink and Banker Drysdale played those two shrinks ended up an unintended embarrassment in revival screenings -- they always get a laugh. But the years have passed and maybe nobody knows who they are, now.

Simon Oakland ended up in a few TV series, but not funny ones like Hogan's Heroes or The Beverly Hillbillies. So HIS shrink has at least escaped THAT issue. But alas his shrink is in the most famous, widely seen, and RE-seen of Hitchocck movies, so ol' Simon's been the subject of "The Great Debate" for decades. (Ironically, I think he missed much of that while he was still alive -- the "I hate the shrink scene" writings appeared soon before he passed -- first in a William Goldman book, then in a Roger Ebert remembrance.)

So Hitchcock was leaning heavily on shrinks in his movies from The Wrong Man thorugh Psycho, less one: the breezy spy chase adventure North by Northwest. And AFTER Psycho, psychoanalytical analysis pervaded The Birds(the family issues) and Marnie(MORE family issues) even without a shrink on the screen. Hitch abandoned his psychological studies for Torn Curtain and Topaz, returned to them in Frenzy, and skipped them entirely in Family Plot.

Still, such a deep "shrink" period for Hitchcock...with a "callback to Spellbound" where it all began.

For all of those kindred Hitchcock shrinks, a recent re-watch of Vertigo revealed to me that Oakland the nameless shrink in Psycho actually has a forbear who is NOT a shrink...in Vertigo.

And comparing their two scenes is somewhat revelatory.

In Vertigo, the shrink's REAL counterpart(who ISN"t a shrink) is Henry Jones as a character sometimes listed as "The Coroner," though he does nothing medical that we can see. He seems like more of a local inquest official...a quasi-judge sitting with a quasi-jury that delivers a verdict almost without a word exchanged among them.

Rather than call Henry Jones "the inquest quasi-judge" I'll settle for "The Coroner."

And take a look at his scene sometime, with the Psycho shrink in mind.

Unlike as with the shrinks in Wrong Man and Vertigo...who speak one on one with a loved one...the Coroner , like the Psycho shrink to come...is the center of attention in a room with officials in it. AND some loved ones.

As Hitchcock seemed to direct Simon Oakland to be loud, brash, and bombastic as the shrink, he seems to have directed Henry Jones to be very snobbish and sneering...Jones (who played the dimwitted and doomed handyman in The Bad Seed around this time) captures for us an official who seems to be permanently looking down his nose at others, with a sneering vocal delivery that is borderline comic in its oily smarm.

The San Juan Bautista area south of San Francisco even in 1958 had a fair number of wealthy people living in or near there. One was Alfred Hitchcock himself -- a weekend visitor to his his home in Santa Cruz, about 10 miles from where the exteriors were filmed for this scene. Perhaps Hitchcock himself had seen or heard the kind of "snobbish local king" played by Jones in this scene. That moment when Jones references Stewart's cop boss "from that fair city to the North," one senses at once a respect for the Big City of San Francisco and a certain disdain for its denizens "invading" the beautiful coastal area to the south.