MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > 1960's other shower-bath scene...

1960's other shower-bath scene...

posted 2 years ago by swanstep (2616)
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Never On Sunday (1960) was a sizeable international hit in the year of Psycho. Its star, Merlina Mercouri won at Cannes, sort of becoming the Greek Sophia Loren, and she got a Best Actress Oscar nom for her role in NOS. Director Jules Dassin got both a Director Nom (alongside Hitch) and an Original Screenplay Nom. The film also got a costume design nom. and won Best Song for its title song (which is still to this day probably the only Greek Bouzouki tune most people, including myself, have ever heard - it *is* that music on a world scale). So NOS got at least as much Oscar love as Psycho did.

The title 'Never On Sunday' coming from Dassin, the director of great thrillers and policiers like Rififi, Night and the City, The Naked City, Topkapi, *sounds* like it might be in that same rich vein, but it's not. NOS is instead a somewhat charming fish-out-of-water, romantic comedy/fable about a pretentious, American academic type (played by Dassin himself) visiting contemporary Greece and encountering force of nature/hooker-with-heart-of-gold Ilia (played by Mercouri). Hijinks ensure as Dassin's academic tries to 'save her' but she ends up saving him. The End.

Pretty thin stuff really, and clearly modeled as a business proposition on a host of 'sexy' 'foreign' films that had made Loren and Bardot and Ekberg box office around the world including in the US from the mid '50s on. Mercouri joins that group of glamorous beauties here, and she's a hoot to watch and listen to still. NOS is still worth watching because of her. It's currently watchable for free on youtube here (be sure to turn on subtitles):

https://youtu.be/FIP2FRS2pD8

(Cont.)

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

(Cont.)
If you'd prefer just to jump directly to the scene from NOS that has some strange overlaps with Psycho click here:
https://youtu.be/FIP2FRS2pD8?t=3372

The scene begins with Dassin's academic climbing some stairs to Mercouri's door, behind which music is playing while Mercouri's main boyfriend showers as Mercouri, wrapped only in a towel or two, rinses some laundry in a basin. They chat as some cool mirror shots connect them while she faces away from him. The boyfriend comes out of the shower and things slowly heat up... for the audience too as the camera plays peek-a-boo with Mercouri's spectacular breasts (the scene attracted the censor's wrath in Italy at least). In a way the scene's nothing remarkable but it's well-shot and effective, and it does serendipitously fuse Psycho's opening 'hot' scene between Marion and Sam, with Psycho's later visual interests in both showers and staircases.

NOS also slightly resembles Psycho in the basic conditions of its production and the terms of its commercial success. Psycho was famously a sort of indie, passion project cheapie (made for only $800K) that Hitch mostly self-financed. Hitchcock then personally got a 50% share of all its profits, certainly tens of millions of 1960 dollars. I haven't been able to track down final grosses and profits for NOS but it evidently did well worldwide and was made for almost nothing (despite looking great) so may even have been proportionately about as profitable as Psycho! Amazing. IMDb's Trivia page for NOS includes the following item which at least gives some indication of the scale of things:

[NOS was] Reportedly made on a budget of just $164,000; it got its money back in just one cinema (the London Pavilion, the flagship movie theatre for United Artists in England)

Dassin had been chased out of the US by The Blacklist and, after meeting Mercouri in 1955 (they'd marry in 1962) seems to have fallen deeply in love with her and with Greece. NOS appears to have been a cheapie, semi-passion project for Dassin, one that was also incredibly commercially shrewd. It probably set him up financially for the rest of his life.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

A lot of great nostalgia to seep oneself in here, swanstep.

Where to start?

I'd like to pick this memory: in the 60s and heading well into the seventies and eighties, "movie themes on the radio" made movies a PART of our lives in an interesting "outside of the theater" way.

I'll jump backwards through the 80s (Takes My Breath Away from Top Gun, which I always found rather campy and lugubrious; Danger Zone from the same movie, by Kenny Loggins, who also did Footloose and I'm Alright from Caddyshack).....to the 70's (all the Grease songs in '78; the ragtime from The Sting and the weird theme from The Exorcist)...to the 60s.

Henry Mancini rather ran the "radio movie themes" i the 60's: Moon River, uber alles, but also Days of Wine and Roses and Emily and Dear Heart and Baby Elephant Walk from Hatari.

Annnnd...ASIDE from Mancini..songs like "Never on Sunday" -- which scored biggest with a zithery instrumental version that I heard ALL the time in my parents' car ("Easy Listening" stations specialized in movie themes) but which had a vocal I heard SOMEHWERE ("I will do it on a Monday, a Friday, a Tuesday...but never on Sunday!")

Great memories, and those 60's radio tunes were...how shall we say, more sophisticated?

Another topic: Growing up as a kid in Los Angeles in the 60's, it turns out that the various TV channels -- catering to a "company town" filled with movie and TV people as well as civilians -- showed a LOT of movies that the TV networks(ABC, CBS, NBC) would not or could not show.

KHJ-TV Channel 9 specialized in "foreign films." I didn't watch them, but I read the TV Guide ads and tutored myself on titles like "Two Women," "8 1/2" "La Dolce Vita," "Jules and Jim" and..."Never on Sunday." "Never on Sunday " got the double whammy of TV showings (cut? I don't know) AND that Omni-prescent radio tune(which played well beyond 1960, I can tell you.)

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

NOS is instead a somewhat charming fish-out-of-water, romantic comedy/fable about a pretentious, American academic type (played by Dassin himself) visiting contemporary Greece and encountering force of nature/hooker-with-heart-of-gold Ilia (played by Mercouri). Hijinks ensure as Dassin's academic tries to 'save her' but she ends up saving him. The End.

Pretty thin stuff really, and clearly modeled as a business proposition on a host of 'sexy' 'foreign' films that had made Loren and Bardot and Ekberg box office around the world including in the US from the mid '50s on. Mercouri joins that group of glamorous beauties here, and she's a hoot to watch and listen to still.

---

At the heart of what drove American producers and directors like Preminger, Wilder and Hitchocck nuts about "European art films" was NOT , I think, their art, but the fact that these movies were making big bucks(on tiny budgets) by giving audiences something they really, REALLY wanted: an emphasis on ADULT sex, and a bit of nudity. Hollywood dramas could be somehat "daring"(Steetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront) and fairly violent(Westerns, gangster movies) but nudity? People going to bed for SEX? Pretty unheard of.

And the R/X ratings that eventually arrived took the "European model" and split the knock-offs between soft core exploitation and "good films" (Midnight Cowboy, Carnal Knowledge.)

But hey...ANOTHER aspect of the 60's. All those hookers with hearts of gold. Mercouri in NOS. Shirley MacLaine in Irma La Douce(a rather subpar Billy Wilder movie that became his biggest hit.) Jane Fonda (and others) in Walk on the Wild Side. And a personal favorite -- Ann-Margret(Yum) in the action-packed, blood and guts remake of Stagecoach.

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CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Shower scenes. I found a clips package on YouTube that showed the "shadow through the shower curtain" shot from Psycho all the way back in The 7th Victim -- the shadow has horns, like Satan(but proves to be a benign and expected female visitor to the female shower taker.) There's one called Screaming Mimi which OPENS with a shower stabbing, but the female victim (was it Anita Ekberg?) doesn't die, the wounds are minor, the attacker leaves. Also -- for budget reasons -- staged in an outdoor beach shower.

We can say that HITCHCOCK was inspired by these shower scenes, but really it was novelist ROBERT BLOCH who was inspired by these shower scenes I suppose, to write the great gory one-off("...the knife that cut off her scream...and her head.") in his book of Psycho.

I daresay that Hitchcock borrowed from The 7th Victim for his "figure through the curtain" aspect, though.

And that kaleidoscope of quick cuts, close-ups and angles in the shower scene? HItchocck's. And the music? Herrmann -- the co-equal creator of Psycho, the movie.

I sometimes like to cite what I call "the multiple layers of terror" of the Psycho shower scene -- its more than JUST a shower scene.

A woman
Naked
In a shower
In a motel room
In a shabby motel
With no other customers
In the middle of nowhere
In the countryside
At night
Down the hill from a creepy Victorian mansion
Is stabbed multiple times
By a huge butcher knife
Wielded by an insane old woman
With superstrength and vicious mercilessness
Who turns out to be a mentally ill young man

...now THAT's scary stuff -- all in our heads at the same time(except for the final twist)

That's why Hitchcock's shower scene is THE shower scene in movie history. And history.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

OK, I'm going to this place because, hey why not?

To go with my own stories of seeing/meeting some Hollywood stars in my lifetime, my late FATHER had a few, too.

One is kind of banal: he met Anthony Perkins in person, at the premiere of Friendly Persuasion in Hollywood; he had tickets to it due to a city job he had. So HE got to shake Perkins hand, but I never did.

This one is a little more interesting. In the fifties, my father had that city job and it involved building permits and it served Beverly Hills. So one day, Glenn Ford (then a Top Ten movie star) came in, with a bunch of architectural drawings and "great manners" and spent an hour with my father getting permits approved.

This one is the best. Also because of that ministerial job, my father was sent to a Beverly Hills mansion to go over some architectural plans with the owner. Who turned out to be Anita Ekberg. Who turned out to be wearing only a towel. And dropped it, "coming on" to the young man, who made a hasty exit. I believe this story.

How come I never met a star like that?

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

A lot of great nostalgia to seep oneself in here, swanstep.
Glad to be of assistance. On another nostalgic note I thought I'd mention and recommend a podcast series that I've been enjoying: the latest season of Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This. I've recommended her stuff before, notably her series on Charlie Manson and all his Hollywood connections. Anyhow, her most recent project is 'Erotic '80s' (which is actually the first half of a larger project that'll stretch up to 1999 and Eyes Wide Shut), a series about how Hollywood's representations of sex evolved year-by-year through the 1980s (plus tracking back for an ep on 1979 and an ep. on Last Tango and porno chic from early '70s.). Most eps focus on one or two specific films from the year in question, e.g., the ep. for 1980 focuses on Schrader and 'American Gigolo' whereas 1981's shares its focus between 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' and 'Body Heat'. You can find lots of previews of the series just by googling 'karina longworth erotic 80s' but Vanity Fair has one of the best of these:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/04/you-must-remember-this-erotic-80s-karina-longworth-interview

As a side-issue, the series has forced me to confront the horror that more time (41 years) has transpired between Body Heat and right now than had transpired (37 years) between Body Heat's release in 1981 and that of its main inspiration, Wilder's Double Indemnity. Recommended, but be forewarned of the show inspiring lots of yikes moments like that along with your nostalgia!

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

On another nostalgic note I thought I'd mention and recommend a podcast series that I've been enjoying: the latest season of Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This. I've recommended her stuff before, notably her series on Charlie Manson and all his Hollywood connections.

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I gotta go look at all of this stuff. "Up my alley."

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Anyhow, her most recent project is 'Erotic '80s' (which is actually the first half of a larger project that'll stretch up to 1999 and Eyes Wide Shut), a series about how Hollywood's representations of sex evolved year-by-year through the 1980s (plus tracking back for an ep on 1979 and an ep. on Last Tango and porno chic from early '70s.).

---

Here at the Psycho page, I remain evidently "way back there" in terms of movie history. The 60's. Fair enough for me, but I more truly "lived" through the 70's on "at the movies" and the 80's always gets short shrift in my memory.

My memory of the 80s is this: Lucas/Spielberg. Lots of movies for kids or the "kids in adult hearts." So often I saw a movie in the 80's(say "Gremlins") and thought: "Boy if I was only 20 years younger, I would have loved this." I was almost JEALOUS at the sheer volume of big budget super-well-produced "kids genre project" all around me. Though I would cling to things like how "Ghostbusters" had Bill Murray and all his adult improve lines to go along with the kids' stuff.

There was also, I suppose, the "nice" fact that a lot of my 50's horror favorites ended up with 80's re-dos: The Thing, The Fly, The Blob. Psycho, too, sort of -- but those sequels just didn't mimic the source.

But I FORGOT that they actually managed to make some pretty good, pretty adult, erotic films in the 80s.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Its a decade always worth a "deeper loo Its th Most eps focus on one or two specific films from the year in question, e.g., the ep. for 1980 focuses on Schrader and 'American Gigolo' whereas 1981's shares its focus between 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' and 'Body Heat'.

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Ah, 1981. Lucas/Spielberg gave us Raiders of the Lost Ark(a BIT violent and adult for kids audience; kind of a family actioner.) But...Body Heat(an informal remake of Double Indemnity) and the Postman Always Rings Twice( a direct remake.

Both from James Cain novels. Both "plenty sexy but with no sex" as made in the Hays Code forties.

The "sell" in the 80's versions was that now we'd see the criminal lovers "doing it." And hey, it was pretty good. The ladies were gorgeous. Nicholson was in one of "beefy periods" but sold the sheer animal lust of his character. William Hurt had a great body.

Interesting: Lawrence Kasdan wrote and directed Body Heat. He was connected to the Lucas/Spielberg gang. Wrote or co-wrote a Star Wars and...Raiders? So Body Heat was his experiment in "homage" to something a few levels up from kids.

I have to say this, though. In both versions of Double Indemnity, I just could never buy the MacMurray/Hurt character "going all the way" to agree to a murder plot on the basis of a few days(weeks?) of "sexy time." Oh, well, I guess it happens in real life. Also, in the origina Double Indemnity, the murder just seemed dumb -- make it look like a man fell off a slow moving train and died?

"American Gigolo" always fascinated me for one particular "guy" reason. It was made well before viagra and I just had to deal with how young hot Richard Gere could get functional with fairly old women. (But hell, I know now that fairly old women are...pretty good.)

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

As a side-issue, the series has forced me to confront the horror that more time (41 years) has transpired between Body Heat and right now than had transpired (37 years) between Body Heat's release in 1981 and that of its main inspiration, Wilder's Double Indemnity.

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Ha. Yep. These "old days" weren't all that long before their homages.

With Hitchcock, I'm often amazed that it was only 20 years from Rebecca to Psycho. 20 years ago today would be back to...2002. (Chicago was my favorite movie that year.)

---

Recommended, but be forewarned of the show inspiring lots of yikes moments like that along with your nostalgia!

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Weirdly enough, none of this "backwards look" bothers me at this age, at all. Rather, I feel kind of exhilarated when I review a lifetime of movie going that included the 60s, 70's, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s. Makes it sound like I don't have much time left. Maybe not - -but I"ve still got the 90-somethings as my target idols(Eastwood, Hackman, even when he was alive, overweight Ernest Borgnine.)

What's much more dazzling is simply thinking back to all the GREAT TIMES I've had in my life with "the movies." When I was younger they were more exciting to me(certainly Psycho was), but my recent infatuation with "Licorice Pizza" taught me that the present can sometimes be just as exciting as the past. (And lest it seem like I'm infatuated ONLY with that recent movie, not at all: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Irishman, Buster Scruggs, Molly's Game...)

So I will watch this series with that attitude.


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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

I should add that Longworth heralds Hitchcock as the godather of the '80s erotic thriller genre, and that Hitchcock is discussed at length in the 1984 episode focusing on Crimes of Passion and Body Double.

I confess that (with 4 eps left to go) I'm getting slightly less convinced by the episodes as we go along. E.g., the 1983 episode about Flashdance and Risky Business felt slightly off to me. Longworth seemed anxious to take RB down a peg critically and elevate F and, personally, I felt her take on RB traded on an ambiguity in what a movie being 'cynical' can mean, which left me grumpy! And some of the 1984 ep's shortcomings raised questions for me about some earlier eps, e.g. why wasn't Dressed to Kill discussed more in the show's 1980, actually American Gigolo-fixated episode?

I still recommend the podcast series but half-way through I'm finding my questions about both emphases and analyses starting to pile up.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I should add that Longworth heralds Hitchcock as the godather of the '80s erotic thriller genre,

--

He certainly was -- and yet, not.

His great kissing scenes (Notorious at the top with Grant's and Stewart's and Peck's in short order, plus Leigh and Gavin in underwear) had a sexuality all their own, but Hitch never really did get to film scenes of people BEING erotic(ie) having sex. We saw matter "pre" and "post" in the consensual part of Frenzy(Blaney and Babs); Post in Topaz.

But wait...its quite possible that Paul Newman and Julie Andrews are "doing the deed" unseen under blankets in Torn Curtain.

Basic Instinct nicely went out of its way to dress and coif Sharon Stone like Kim Novak in Vertigo (along with San Francisco locations) and then had Sharon go graphic places with Michael Douglas that would have been impossible with James Stewart in 1958.

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CONT

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

I still recommend the podcast series but half-way through I'm finding my questions about both emphases and analyses starting to pile up.
My problems with the 'Erotic '80s' podcast have continued to grow. The 1985 movie it focuses on is Jagged Edge, which (unlike any of the other eps in the series) was previously unseen by me so I needed to find it and check it out before listening to the ep.. The title of the episode is '1985: Fear Sex. Jagged Edge and AIDS'. As the podcast points out, 1985 was the year of Rock Hudson's AIDS revelation and death happened but I really didn't see what the big connection was between that and Jagged Edge, a barely competent, sluggishly directed courtroom thriller with some crossed wires (courtesy of Joe Esterhasz's smarmy, vaguely misogynist, low-brow script) about what its perspective is on its lead character played by Glenn Close. Indeed, Jagged Edge felt very un-erotic to me (and certainly less so than certain big movies at the time, e.g., Out of Africa, Room With A View, that weren't thrillers but that had quite satisfying erotic/romantic strands) so why really were we talking about it rather than them (and all their conservative tastefulness)? 1986's ep. nominally got back on track with an ep. focusing on '9 and a half weeks'. I didn't know all the stories about that movie's somewhat abusive (to Basinger) production let alone about all the surrounding stuff with Rourke's career in the '80s, so OK. 1987 focused on Fatal Attraction and on its now notorious, test-audience-driven, completely rethought ending that made Glenn Close's character into much more of a true witch and Psycho-mother-like monster. Longworth takes the side that the original, more realistic ending (included as a dvd extra and available on youtube) was much better, which she's certainly entitled to. (Cont.)

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

(Cont.) But, honestly, as I listened to her and Shery Lansing and Close herself express near boundless sympathy for Close's character, Alex Forrest... they all seemed a little crazy to me. I actually remember feeling quite a lot of sympathy for Close's character when I saw Fatal Attraction on its release, but the last 30+ years have educated me to think of 'consent' and "people having to take 'no' for an answer" much more seriously than I did then. All sorts of romantic ideas (esp. in movies) about, e.g., persisting with people, pursuing them, trying to win them over now look like flat-out stalking. The upshot is that Alex Forrest looks much worse to me (and almost everyone else I think) now than she did then. Flip the genders of the movie premise and even simplify marriage out of it to see the point: a gal has (possibly somewhat out of character for her) a hot and heavy weekend with some guy but then decides she's not that into him and doesn't want to see him again. But the dude won't take 'No' for an answer and thinks he's entitled to some further time and sex with her. That's a nightmare that a lot of women face. Now, there can be lots of complicated details of how the situation was handled that can make some sympathy for the guy in this situation appropriate (maybe the gal could have expressed herself or generally handled her change of mind better), but the basic structure of the situation ensures that we're on her side. The dude is not entitled to anything, he *has* to take 'no' for an answer and he's a monster to be feared to the extent that he doesn't. Alex in Fatal Attraction *is* that hypothetical dude gender-flipped and Longworth et al. are deluded to the extent that they don't see that. Charity suggests that the test-audiences for FA weren't just blood-lust crazed, rather they also instinctively grasped the core moral structure of the film's basic situation. They probably wouldn't have grasped the structure in a gender-flipped case then. Feminists have changed that in the last 30 or so years.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

As the podcast points out, 1985 was the year of Rock Hudson's AIDS revelation and death happened but I really didn't see what the big connection was between that and Jagged Edge, a barely competent, sluggishly directed courtroom thriller with some crossed wires (courtesy of Joe Esterhasz's smarmy, vaguely misogynist, low-brow script)

--

Jagged Edge was a March release, as I recall, rather minor in intent, that became a surprise hit. I recall Siskel and Ebert doing a special segment on WHY it was a surprise hit, and part of the reason was that a final shot of a "killed killer" on the floor was unclear as to exactly WHICH actor in the story it was. Siskel and Ebert thought it was a rather brilliant ploy to send audiences back in again to try to figure the face(which COULD be star Jeff Bridges), but I think it was actually just poor moviemaking. It WAS Jeff Bridges, it was INTENDED to be Jeff Bridges, but the filmmakers fumbled it.

Screenwriter Joe Esterhasz -- I can never spell his name right, that' my latest guess, I'll call him "Bad Joe" -- moved on two tracks in the 80s and 90s -- (1) Among the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood and (2) among the WORST screenwriters in Hollywood(actually often called THE worst.) He was pretty bad on the page, and worse in TV interviews(he had big unkempt hair and a big unkempt beard and looked like a wild man.) I've read some of his nonfiction and he could actually be a pretty funny, self-aware guy (he KNEW he was considered the worst screenwriter) but it was as if he couldn't stop himself -- and some real dummies in Hollywood executive suites kept paying him. Of course, the people who hated him most were WRITERS -- critics and magazine writers who could write well but NEVER get paid what Bad Joe got.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I remember I proved to myself one time how bad a screenwriter Bad Joe was when I was watching a movie with Debra Winger called "Betrayed" on cable. I came in late, missed the credits, I stuck it through, but the dialogue was so bad and overwrought, I checked for the screenwriter on Imdb and sure enough -- Bad Joe.

The worst thing about Bad Joe (and you could see it if you saw all his movies, and guess what - I DID, I thought he was a bad auteur whose movies had some good sex in them) is that he wrote the same plot OVER (Jagged Edge) and OVER (Music Box) and OVER (Betrayed) and OVER (Basic Instinct, the big one with Sharon Stone having sex but Jeanne Trippehorn having it better) and OVER (Sliver, also with Sharon Stone having sex a lot) and OVER (Jade) until he was found out an purged. The two death blows were Showgirls(which for once didn't use the Jagged Edge template) and a self-made atrocity called "Alan Smithee: Burn Hollywood Burn."

The worst of these was "Sliver," because Sliver was from a novel by Ira Levin(Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives) and was a well plotted "Rear Window in a skyscraper novel" (which I read) that Bad Joe converted into...Jagged Edge/Basic Instinct again. Usually a writer of original screenplays(with bad plots and dialogue), Bad Joe was allowed to "adapt" a fine novel and he ruined it.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Indeed, Jagged Edge felt very un-erotic to me (and certainly less so than certain big movies at the time, e.g., Out of Africa, Room With A View, that weren't thrillers but that had quite satisfying erotic/romantic strands) so why really were we talking about it rather than them (and all their conservative tastefulness)?

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I think Jagged Edge got talked about for its botched "ambiguous conclusion" and some of the courtroom stuff was funny in how the prosecutor's case kept blowing up in his face, and Robert Loggia gave us a wise-cracking private eye who was in the line of Arbogast(but didn't get killed.) Indeed, Loggia got the OK curtain line, when the killer is killed: "F him..he was trash."

I can't much remember the sex scenes in Jagged Edge, but they were there and this: it only lasted a few films, but Glenn Close as a sex actress was a weird 1980s phenomemon. Soon, she would play rather mannish and matronly , sexless parts, but for awhile there -- based on her own ambition to change her image -- Glenn Close was doin' the bad thing with handsome guys like Jeff Bridges and Michael Douglas.

The eroticism in Out of Africa and A Room With A View(I saw only the former, so I'll guess) was at more refined and cerebral level that what Bad Joe put out. Bad Joe dug on the mix of sex AND violence in his movies.

Indeed Bad Joe wrote that -- surprise -- Psycho was a big influence on him. He saw it on first release as a teenager in 1960 Ohio (against the wishes of his immigrant parents) and decided "this was the most exciting movie I'd ever seen in my life." That's a good assessment. I can't say that Psycho, Jaws, and Alien scared me, but they sure were EXCITING.

Bad Joe loved Psycho, so his movies had knife murders ("Jagged Edge" is a title ABOUT a knife) and twist endings that weren't so twisty.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Basic Instinct, btw, has a "shrink scene" early on that is so ham handed , over wrought and badly written that it makes Simon Oakland's speech in Psycho sound like Harold Pinter. Really, it has to be seen to be believed, and an otherwise good actor named Stephen Toblosky is reduced by Bad Joe to sounding like the most stupid and nutty psychiatrist in film history.

Basic Instinct also has an Arbogast -- cop Michael Douglas's partner (played by George Dzunda) -- who gets a line with the words "Magna cum laude" in it, that is considered Big Joe's worst line, ever.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

1986's ep. nominally got back on track with an ep. focusing on '9 and a half weeks'. I didn't know all the stories about that movie's somewhat abusive (to Basinger) production let alone about all the surrounding stuff with Rourke's career in the '80s, so OK.

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I really liked the "comebacked" Mickey Rourke of the 90s and 2000s. He's great as a crooked but smart lawyer in Coppola's The Rainmaker, and as a noble cartoon faced brute in Sin City(with a face that looked like "Kirk Douglas crossed with a tank" said one critic.) , and in his Oscar-bait role as "The Wrestler"(a broken down old one.)

But 80's Mickey seemed to start good(Body Heat, Diner) and crash hard in a sea of ego, drugs, booze, and abusive behavior. Too bad. He really had something. Well, he's still got it, but he sure don't look the same.

9 1/2 weeks was kind of an "erotic event" in the 80s; I believe it found a very large female following who rather dug on the fantasy of it , and there was that weird scene in which Kim was blindfolded and had to experience different items(all fresh and safe) being put into her mouth by Mickey. Erotic? Not to me...but to some.

The director was Adrian Lyne, I believe a former cosmetics commercial director who made three successive hits of dubious value: Flashdance, 9 1/2 Weeks, and the infamous Fatal Attraction. Lyne's critics were suspicious of how much his movies looked like too-gauzy TV commercials. And I remember a funny comment by renegade movie producer Julia Phillips(The Sting) about "Flashdance" -- "all these co-producers were rushing to take credit for a movie that, in the 70's, they'd be trying to hide on their resumes." 70's jealousy of an 80s hit but...not far off the mark.

CONT

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

1987 focused on Fatal Attraction and on its now notorious, test-audience-driven, completely rethought ending that made Glenn Close's character into much more of a true witch and Psycho-mother-like monster. Longworth takes the side that the original, more realistic ending (included as a dvd extra and available on youtube) was much better, which she's certainly entitled to.

---

I have here in my hands Stephen Rebello's seminal 1990 book on the making of Psycho. Near the end(page 192), Rebello writes:

"Few films since Psycho have seeped as much as it did into the dark imagination and consciousness of the public. Merits or demerits of the Psycho successors aside, that select circle must include Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Halloween, and Fatal Attraction."

That's a pretty good list, but I was surprised to see Fatal Attraction(then only 3 years old) added to it. Rebello went further here and got a few interview quotes from Adrian Lyne ON Psycho vs Fatal Attraction. Lyne's Psycho analysis goes on for two pages, so I won't repeat it here, but Lyne did attribute the box office success of Psycho and Fatal Attraction to "the believable characters." Saying of FA: "Almost everyone who saw my film put themselves in the shoes of the lover, the wife, the husband -- sometimes all three. A movie is much more difficult for the audience to dismiss if they can identify innately with the problems of the characters in it."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Fatal Attraction and on its now notorious, test-audience-driven, completely rethought ending that made Glenn Close's character into much more of a true witch and Psycho-mother-like monster. Longworth takes the side that the original, more realistic ending (included as a dvd extra and available on youtube) was much better, which she's certainly entitled to. (Cont.)

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I have never seen that original ending, but it certainly was released into public discourse on FA so quickly that I think we all see the movie with BOTH endings in our minds. Which is not a good thing, such an either/or story detracts from a final statement.

I don't have evidence of Hitchcock submitting his movies to test screenings except one: Topaz. In the Topaz DVD documentary, we are shown preview cards HATING the move, but mainly HATING the original (and quite dumb for Hitchcock) "duel" climax. The preview cards had the logo "Alfred Hitchcocks TOPAZ" and one viewer had crossed out "Alfred Hitchcock's" quite violently -- as if not believing that Topaz was a real Hitchcock movie at all.

Well, Hitchcock took the duel scene out, filmed another scene(the villain boards a plane and gets away) and then cobbled together another scene from existing footage(the villain kills himself offscreen) and THAT one went into 1969 release, but we can all see ALL THREE endings in our minds and so Topaz is a failure.

Just like Fatal Attraction. No, really --Fatal Attraction was much more famous than Topaz, and a much bigger hit, but it has the same essential problem -- a failure of confidence, a "throwing in the towel" ending.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Now that tacked on ending is "classic Hitchcock suspense" -- we go nuts as Douglas in the kitchen down below is unaware of Close getting ready to (maybe) kill his wife in the bathroom upstairs(bathtub, knife -- hmmm...but this homage is more to "Diabolique.")

And...SPOILER..in the final fracas in the bathroom, it is eventually the WIFE (not Douglas) who kills her rival..blasting her away with the house gun --to audience cheers.

It was that ending that drove the OpEd press about the "controversy" of Fatal Attraction. Perhaps bad as dramaturgy...it was GOOD as reality show type chit-chat.

Was it a GOOD thing, that a movie that starts with Michael Douglas cheating on his wife ends with that wife getting to kill her rival? And Douglas rather gets everything he wants?(Wife, daughter, job...good life.)

Feminists sought to side with Glenn Close's "single career woman" as being besmirched(yes, she was a single career woman, but she was also a psycho); wives tended to side with -- the wife(natch) -- and in real life got to admonish their husbands: "See what happens if you try a one night stand away from me?"

Adrian Lyne was right -- the husband/wife/lover triangle at the heart of FA allowed for all sorts of public discussion(Time Magazine gave the movie a cover story) and gave FA some resonance rather beyond its actually rather weak thriller construction (in which we get one of those "false alarm" sequences I hate -- Glenn Close takes Douglas' little girl on a roller coaster ride and we are meant to fear for the girl's death but...nothing happens.)

And then there was the famous "boiled bunny" scene, which went from pretty scary and cruel(surely Glenn Close must die if she boiled a widdle bunny wabbit) to ...quite the joke in spoofs.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

But, honestly, as I listened to her and Shery Lansing and Close herself express near boundless sympathy for Close's character, Alex Forrest... they all seemed a little crazy to me.

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Well, they are. A lot of Hollywood people are borderline crazy but getting quite rich at their trade...which only makes them crazier. And their political views tend to get a little crazy, too. I'm not talking about progressivism -- pretty much everyone of consequence in Hollywood is progressive -- its the nutty DEGREE of their intense viewpoints.

And its the old problem about "forcing" crazy characters(Close's potentially murderous stalker) into "societal norm analysis" ("the lonely single career woman.")

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I actually remember feeling quite a lot of sympathy for Close's character when I saw Fatal Attraction on its release, but the last 30+ years have educated me to think of 'consent' and "people having to take 'no' for an answer" much more seriously than I did then. All sorts of romantic ideas (esp. in movies) about, e.g., persisting with people, pursuing them, trying to win them over now look like flat-out stalking.

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A thought on that. My recent fave "Licorice Pizza" opens with a 15-year old boy rather continually pursuing 25-year old woman and it seems a BIT like stalker behavior (or harassment)...except it isn't. The boy is witty, warm, charming and complimentary of the girl. The girl COULD ditch the boy at any time, but continues to chat with him and eventually shows up for a "date." In short, that scene is actually a good old-fashioned Hollywood "successful date-get" that I found quite heart-warming(the age-distance issue is carefully and successfully eliminated, principally by the feeling that these two are BOTH "child-adults" who are made for each other.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Now the thing about Fatal Attraction (and other films) is that the "meet cute date get" (well, in Fatal Attraction its a "sex get") CAN turn into unwanted sexual harassment and stalking, and that the "human dynamic" can change.

Consent is not always permanent. (Hey I experienced it for real in my dating years. When a relationship breaks up, consent is taken away with it. And you have to agree not to be with that person anymore. And it hurts. But that's real life -- and people have to agree to it. Only nutty stalker types don't and, sadly, our newspapers are filled with stories of exes killing the people who left them.)

Brian DePalma was offered Fatal Attraction first, but turned it down. He saw it as a rehash of Clint Eastwood's 1971 directorial debut, "Play Misty for Me," in which a one-night stand for Clint with Jessica Walter turns scary when she stalks him and actually kills someone who gets in the way.

Glenn Close doesn't kill anybody in Fatal Attraction(except that bunny.) The man who gets killed in Play Misty for Me is another Arbogast successor(here , a police detective), and thus Play Misty is more in the Psycho tradition and less of an OpEd thing than FA.

Crucially, in Play Misty for Me, Clint is an umarried man with no children, and it is shown that he is currently in a "break up" period with a girlfriend and so isn't cheating on her with Jessica. This got a little debate over at the Play Misty for Me page which i link to here:

https://moviechat.org/tt0067588/Play-Misty-for-Me/58c72c5c5ec57f0478f336b6/Key-Difference-With-Fatal-Attraction

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Alex in Fatal Attraction *is* that hypothetical dude gender-flipped and Longworth et al. are deluded to the extent that they don't see that. Charity suggests that the test-audiences for FA weren't just blood-lust crazed, rather they also instinctively grasped the core moral structure of the film's basic situation. They probably wouldn't have grasped the structure in a gender-flipped case then. Feminists have changed that in the last 30 or so years.

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I think it is interesting that we have two fairly major "stalker woman" movies in film history -- one with big star Clint Eastwood and another with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close -- and not necessarily a major "male stalker" movie. I mean we have a lot of such male characters out there(I'll posit Ray Liotta in "Something Wild" off the top of my head), but with the male stalkers, they are rather "straight out bad guys" and don't get sympathy at all. And again - someone help me if they can -- we don't have a really MAJOR movie about a one-night stand man stalking a married woman, her husband, and her kid.

And thus indeed, perhaps the "gender flip" approach to Fatal Attraction reveals why some folks gave Glenn Close sympathy. Though I think it was a more nuanced argument than that from the feminists: "They should NEVER have besmirched the role model of the successful single career woman by turning her into such a man-dependent psycho monster."

This happens a lot in Hollywood political analysis. "The single career woman should always be a hero -- don't write her as a villain."

Well, why not? It gives us a particular story about a PARTICULAR single career woman.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I return to "Making of Psycho author's" list of worthy Psycho successors:

"Few films since Psycho have seeped as much as it did into the dark imagination and consciousness of the public. Merits or demerits of the Psycho successors aside, that select circle must include Rosemary's Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Halloween, and Fatal Attraction."

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I thought then -- and I think now -- that Fatal Attraction is fatally wrong for that list. The others are much more in the "horror genre" and lack the "cosmetics commercial soap opera" aspects of Fatal Attraction. And the others have proven themselves, I believe, much more justifiable as classics.

To Rebello's list, I would add "Jaws"(my personal vote for closest to Psycho as both a blockbuster event AND a beautifully structured shock thriller) , "Alien" and "The Shining." AFTER Rebello's 1990 book, I would add "Silence of the Lambs." And that's about it. And I think Psycho -- while more Old Hollywood and less sophisticated than some of those later R-rated films...beats them all in various ways in one-to-one matchups.

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[–] ElizabethJoestar (930) 2 years ago

I thought then -- and I think now -- that Fatal Attraction is fatally wrong for that list. The others are much more in the "horror genre" and lack the "cosmetics commercial soap opera" aspects of Fatal Attraction. And the others have proven themselves, I believe, much more justifiable as classics.
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Yeah, I don't think Fatal Attraction has held up as well as the other films mentioned. Those other titles still remain resonant and they are all well-made films to boot. Fatal Attraction is a pretty subpar thriller-- the technique isn't up to snuff. Earlier you mentioned the fakeout roller coaster scene, which annoyed me on a first viewing.

I also find it weird that the characters were considered "believable." It's been a few years since I saw FA, but I recall it coming off like a big soap opera. Rosemary's Baby, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Exorcist are all popular horror titles which have far more realistic and interesting characters as far as I'm concerned.

On another note: I wonder if The Blair Witch Project would be eligible as another big horror film that "seeped as much as it did into the dark imagination and consciousness of the public"? For more modern fare, I think Hereditary might be eligible for a place on that list. It has a robust cult following and I recall lots of people going to see it when it came out.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I thought then -- and I think now -- that Fatal Attraction is fatally wrong for that list. The others are much more in the "horror genre" and lack the "cosmetics commercial soap opera" aspects of Fatal Attraction. And the others have proven themselves, I believe, much more justifiable as classics.
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Yeah, I don't think Fatal Attraction has held up as well as the other films mentioned.

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Interestingly, when swanstep brought up Fatal Attraction, my memory zoomed to Rebello's Psycho book and how it spent two pages on Fatal Attraction, and how WRONG that felt at the time. I couldn't figure out why that mediocre thriller got put in there for two pages worth(plus some interview time with Adrian Lyne.)

Thinking about it now, perhaps Rebello simply wanted to link the long-ago Psycho to something more current, and FA DOES climax with a knife in a bathroom (Lyne pointed out that to avoid a direct Mother Bates angle, he had Close absent mindedly cut at HERSELF with that knife.)

Oh well.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Those other titles still remain resonant and they are all well-made films to boot.

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Indeed. Though, honestly I find each of them a bit lacking against Psycho -- even as I can ALSO see certain flaws(that aren't flaws to me, really) IN Psycho.

For instance, the Halloween climax has Jamie Lee Curtis rather continually stabbing MIchael and then just SITTING there rather than running away. And he keeps rising again. And she keeps sitting there. Its all more forced and unbelieveable than the events in the fruit cellar in Psycho.

William Freidkin said he saw Psycho "I00 times" to study its technique and that paid off with The Exorcist, but I don't really see the lessons learned. Freidkin DID(he says) "homage Arbogast's fall" by having the psychiatrist take a similar fall to the carpet after Regan grabs him by the crotch(a rather funny twist on Arbogasts' fate.)

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Fatal Attraction is a pretty subpar thriller-- the technique isn't up to snuff. Earlier you mentioned the fakeout roller coaster scene, which annoyed me on a first viewing.

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Well, its a movie that doesn't really have the courage of its thriller convictions. It is (indeed) "half hearted" about Glenn Close's villainy, so none of the set-pieces are very powerful, though I do think the "boiled bunny" laid out Close's villainy in a nicely direct way.

Brian DePalma turned down Fatal Attraction(likely because of its lack of true horror thriller aspects) to make The Untouchables , and THAT paid off. Indeed in 1987, Paramount had three big hits in a row -- Beverly Hills Cop II, The Untouchables, and then Fatal Attraction in the fall. I found BCH II and Fatal Attraction to be way too glossy and 80's "shallow." The Untouchables had SOME of that quality, but beat it out with great movie star actors, stylized action("DePalma does Hitchcock doing Ford") , and heart. I mention this because I found FA to REALLY fail against The Untouchables as exciting well-crafted entertainment..in 1987.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I also find it weird that the characters were considered "believable." It's been a few years since I saw FA, but I recall it coming off like a big soap opera. Rosemary's Baby, Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Exorcist are all popular horror titles which have far more realistic and interesting characters as far as I'm concerned.

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Yep. I'm not sure I here to dump all over Fatal Attraction, but I suppose I'm chiding Stephen Rebello -- who otherwise wrote a wonderfully detailed look at how Psycho was put together, shot and released -- for giving FA so much ink at the end of his book on Psycho...as if they were equivalent.

Recall that Michael Douglas had his big hit in 1987 with Fatal Attraction and then won Best Actor for Wall Street the same year. 1987 WAS Michael Douglas' year to become the hottest male star around(as papa Kirk watched his son win the Oscar he never could) and the "one-two punch" of pulp and prestige did it. Yet it took a full five years for Douglas to get his "follow up" to FA in Basic Instinct, in which the sex was more graphic and the murders indeed in the psycho horror tradition. (Its just that the script sucked.)

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

On another note: I wonder if The Blair Witch Project would be eligible as another big horror film that "seeped as much as it did into the dark imagination and consciousness of the public"?

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Oh, yes. I'll go ahead (as I often do) and contradict myself on two points I made earlier:

ONE: "The Silence of the Lambs and that's it" ...for ranking alongside Psycho as a horror classic. I instinctively KNEW there were more after SOTL, but I figured my comment would draw the candidates. Blair Witch Project is on that list.

TWO: "Movies don't scare me anymore." Oh, sometimes I guess they do...not like the childhood terror that Psycho induced...but in a "boy, this is really creeping me out" way. Blair Witch set that up brilliantly: imagine that you are camping out MILES in the wooded middle of nowhere, you are lost during the day and now it is night and....you hear screams out in the darkness. Yeah that was enough to get me thinkin'. That and the feverish finale and truly spooky final shot. (The movie also drove home this: a tent may FEEL like shelter in the middle of the woods in the dark, but you are really just on the ground surrounded by some tarp.)

A few weeks after I saw "Blair Witch" at stayed at a cabin in the woods with some male friends. We went walking out at night in the dark away from the cabin and I started "feeling a Blair Witch vibe." There were quite a few cabins in the area and a pub/dance club nearby but....we were "out there" in the dark and in the woods, and I started joking with my comrades about the bad vibes I was feeling. I said "if I see a small triangle of sticks on the ground, I'm outta here."

It was a great feeling: the movies still could influence our REAL world. Summer 1999 also brought us The Sixth Sense, "the horror movie that turns into a tearjerker" with ITS great twist.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

For more modern fare, I think Hereditary might be eligible for a place on that list. It has a robust cult following and I recall lots of people going to see it when it came out.

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I keep reading of Hereditary and I do believe I better get the damn thing watched on streaming. I'm sure it will have an impact on me of some sort.

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[–] ElizabethJoestar (930) 2 years ago

For instance, the Halloween climax has Jamie Lee Curtis rather continually stabbing MIchael and then just SITTING there rather than running away. And he keeps rising again. And she keeps sitting there. Its all more forced and unbelieveable than the events in the fruit cellar in Psycho.
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Don't forget how she keeps dropping that knife too! The first time she just sat there, I assumed she was in shock, but when she kept doing it, I started shouting at the screen.

I like Halloween a lot though. It's so simple and lean. I refuse to watch the sequels because that simplicity is so appealing-- though I did watch the third one, which wasn't a direct sequel or related to Michael Meyers at all.
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William Freidkin said he saw Psycho "I00 times" to study its technique and that paid off with The Exorcist, but I don't really see the lessons learned. Freidkin DID(he says) "homage Arbogast's fall" by having the psychiatrist take a similar fall to the carpet after Regan grabs him by the crotch(a rather funny twist on Arbogasts' fate.)
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I never knew that and yeah, I don't see much influence there either. The Exorcist has a much more melancholy vibe and its openly supernatural, which was something Hitchcock tended to avoid. Anytime Hitchcock approaches the supernatural, it tends to be explained away, as in Vertigo or Family Plot. TE also lacks Psycho's dark humor and twisty plot.

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[–] ElizabethJoestar (930) 2 years ago

Well, its a movie that doesn't really have the courage of its thriller convictions. It is (indeed) "half hearted" about Glenn Close's villainy, so none of the set-pieces are very powerful, though I do think the "boiled bunny" laid out Close's villainy in a nicely direct way.
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That's why I think Play Misty for Me is the much better take on this story. As a thriller, it's actually suspenseful because the villain is a genuine threat. I also don't recall hating the protagonist like I did in FA, even though he was certainly flawed. For me, a thriller can only thrill if I care about the endangered characters. While I certainly felt bad for the wife and kid, I wanted Douglas to get it.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

For instance, the Halloween climax has Jamie Lee Curtis rather continually stabbing MIchael and then just SITTING there rather than running away. And he keeps rising again. And she keeps sitting there. Its all more forced and unbelieveable than the events in the fruit cellar in Psycho.
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Don't forget how she keeps dropping that knife too! The first time she just sat there, I assumed she was in shock, but when she kept doing it, I started shouting at the screen.

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Me, too. I just didn't get the "human motivation." This is what I mean about Psycho beating these other "classics" head to head. Hitchcock simply wouldn't have allowed that kind of narrative staging. It didn't make sense...one felt the writer and filmmaker "falling down on the job." (Carpenter wrote that, right?)

BTW, the elevator murder in Dressed to Kill is a gory thing(very Psycho inspired but far more graphic) but it ends with some "slow motion bumbling" that has the killer just dropping the knife on the smallest "bump" on her wrist by the elevator door. Its like "in the clinch," Carpenter and DePalma got lazy,, and it shows.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I like Halloween a lot though. It's so simple and lean. I refuse to watch the sequels because that simplicity is so appealing-- though I did watch the third one, which wasn't a direct sequel or related to Michael Meyers at all.

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I have this "Halloween" story as a fond mermory. I wasn't going to see it; the ads made it look like a very cheapjack production, "beneath me." But I was visiting at home one night, watching TV, and there was a pounding on the front door, and I opened it to have a younger female relative push into the house, quietly yelling "let me IN!" She was being dropped off by friends after seeing Halloween and was so terrified by it that the run from car to front door was an ordeal. She continued to go on and on about the movie in fear and I thought, "I'll bet this is how it felt for folks coming back from Psycho back in the day."

So I went and saw Halloween and overall, I enjoyed the experience. I like how the tale progresses from day to dusk to night(Hitchcock liked that time shift in Psycho and at Long Island in NNW.) I liked Donald Pleasance as "Dr. Sam Loomis" in a very funny reference to Psycho (but Sam Loomis was this tall, strapping STUD).

The low budget film lacked any of the true character depth of Norman, Marion and Arbogast, or their incisive dialogue, but it had other things on its mind.

Favorite sequence: Jamie Lee pounding on the door to get into a house with quick cutaways to The Shape walking towards her from across the street. Closer. Closer. Closer....but always SLOWLY, as if the killer has all the time in the world, even as Jaime desperately knocks to get in (and how safe will she and the kids be in there, anyway?)

I always like to note that not only is Halloween NOT "the first slasher movie" (Psycho is), but the killer STRANGLES a couple of victims. So its as much an homage to Frenzy as to Psycho, but nobody remembers Frenzy.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

I also saw Halloween II at the theater. I liked how it picked up right where the original ended...with Jamie Lee in one of those local, teeny-tiny hospitals with a skeleton staff. The Shape stalked the hospital and killed his victims with the gruesome things a hospital has "on the natural."

Not bad.

The third "disconnected one" didn't do much for me, and I quit the series.

Something else I liked about the original Halloween: its "clean" Panavision compositions and emphasis on BLUE -- a blue tint to night scenes, blue décor.

Psycho has ITS look -- 1960 black and white television episode on the big screen, plus MORE. Halloween has ITS look: Panavision, clean, blue.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

William Freidkin said he saw Psycho "I00 times" to study its technique and that paid off with The Exorcist, but I don't really see the lessons learned.
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I never knew that and yeah, I don't see much influence there either.

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I suppose what Friedkin was referencing was that a LOT of budding filmmakers in the 60s saw Psycho, were 'jazzed" by it, and used it as an influence to try to rekindle the experience. Eastwood with Play Misty, DePalma with Sisters, Spielberg with Duel and Jaws....Friedkin with The Exorcist. Friedkin got a blockbuster like Psycho, but a very different kind of blockbuster. "No slashing here."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

The Exorcist has a much more melancholy vibe and its openly supernatural, which was something Hitchcock tended to avoid.

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Yep. I suppose some of the reaction against The Exorcist is that not only is it a supernatural film, but it is a religious film -the two concepts are "conjoined" by non-believers and The Exorcist plays both up -- medicine fails, the priests save the day. This was powerful stuff to believers.

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- Anytime Hitchcock approaches the supernatural, it tends to be explained away, as in Vertigo or Family Plot.

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Yep. He just couldn't "commit" to the supernatural. Even the bird attacks in The Birds COULD be explained "in science." And note how Scottie in Vertigo never REALLY believes the Carlotta story; he just obsesses on Madeleine.

That said, Hitchcock always wanted to make a REAL supernatural ghost story called Mary Rose, but the studios would not let him.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

TE also lacks Psycho's dark humor and twisty plot

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It is very lacking in the script department -- the dialogue, the dramaturgy. I always felt that director Friedkin and writer Blatty were humorless, kind of mean men. There is no really good dialogue in the film. Burstyn believably hits a ceiling of hysteria and never comes down. Its understandable for the character, but boring to watch. Lee J. Cobb has some humanity as a "non-endangered Arbogast," but doesn't figure much.

Still, the world loved The Exorcist, so who am i to knock it.

One thing though(SPOILERS): During the final exorcism, when Priest Jason Miller pummels the Devil out of Regan and into his body (HIS face turns into the demon face) and then throws himself out the window to "kill" it, I felt that was just too much contrivance. Forced, unbelievable...borderline silly. And wouldn't the demon leave his body and go pick someone else?

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

though I do think the "boiled bunny" laid out Close's villainy in a nicely direct way.
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That's why I think Play Misty for Me is the much better take on this story. As a thriller, it's actually suspenseful because the villain is a genuine threat.

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Yes. Its an interesting memory -- 1971 as the studio system rather fell away and Eastwood could make a color, low budget film with a certain "fealty to Psycho" that wasn't really of that type. But Jessica is a great, dangerous villain.

Interesting for a thriller. Jessica's first victim is NOT killed: Eastwood's African-American maid, who is hospitalized, leading to Jessica's commitment to an institution.

Psycho screenwriter Joe Stefano noted that one fear "hidden" in Psycho would be if the victims LIVED. Take Arbogast -- doomed to life with a big scar down his face? Hard to imagine what a "surviving" Marion Crane would have looked like -- no damage to her face.

But Play Misty for Me "takes that topic up" -- the maid is not killed, she is injured.

Eventually, Jessica is simply released (no explanation given) and the movie moves nicely on to an exciting climax and the sacrifice of the cop(John Larch.)

As a first time director's film, Play Misty for Me had two specific flaws -- an overlong documentary look at the Monterey Jazz Festival(set where the movie is set) and a love scene cut to Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" that goes the length of the ENTIRE SONG. Clint didn't quite know how to cut a story down yet.

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I also don't recall hating the protagonist like I did in FA, even though he was certainly flawed.

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Both movies perhaps gave women (and jealous men) some satisfaction to see men "punished" for taking a woman for brief sexual pleasure only. But Eastwood tried to placate Jessica and had no family issues at home.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

For me, a thriller can only thrill if I care about the endangered characters. While I certainly felt bad for the wife and kid, I wanted Douglas to get it

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And in the original versin, he DID: framed for Close's suicide as murder.

The version we got -- with a "happy ending" felt wrong, too: did Mike DESERVE all that release and return to family?

I guess it was another OpEd question.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

Something else I liked about the original Halloween: its "clean" Panavision compositions
The width of the image in Halloween (2.39-1) with lots of depth of focus really stood out and still stands out really:
https://thisisyourbrainonfilm.com/2019/09/10/john-carpenters-use-of-space-in-halloween-1978/

It Follows (2014) (which is just a few errant plot points short of being a true classic itself) built a whole movie around the horror potential of something emerging from the background of one of these Halloween suburban street frames.

One of Halloween's (in my view) less classy elements is just as influential as its classy technical stuff: Mike Myers is shot six times and falls to his death out the window.... only to, A-Ha!, disappear when the camera cuts back to Laurie and Sam then Sam looks again to where Michael Myers' body should be (as the main Halloween spine-tingling theme kicks back in). I'm torn. It is fun to have a true Bogeyman/ambiguous but presumptively supernatural moment like that but it's also a cheapening moment: it both undermines what our main characters have been struggling towards the whole film and rubs our nose in the commercial realities of sequelization etc.. e.g., Stranger Things Season 4 winkingly aped exactly this Halloween 1978 ending. Not even a compendious 2.5 hour finale episode resolved *anything* and narratively the whole of Season 4 became just time-wasting and a trailer for Season 5.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

One of Halloween's (in my view) less classy elements is just as influential as its classy technical stuff: Mike Myers is shot six times and falls to his death out the window.... only to, A-Ha!, disappear when the camera cuts back to Laurie and Sam then Sam looks again to where Michael Myers' body should be (as the main Halloween spine-tingling theme kicks back in). I'm torn. It is fun to have a true Bogeyman/ambiguous but presumptively supernatural moment like that but it's also a cheapening moment: it both undermines what our main characters have been struggling towards the whole film and rubs our nose in the commercial realities of sequelization etc

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Oh, yeah. That bothered me when I saw Halloween, and it still does.

I've said that I believe that "Psycho" beats pretty much all competition among its equally famous peers(say from 1960 through 1980), "Halloween" loses both on the basis of its preposterous climax(Curtis dropping the knife and sitting there, Michael Myers rising) AND the supernatural ending, which removes from Halloween that which gave Psycho a lot of its power: plausibility.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Here's one:

I find Jaws to have come the closest to matching Psycho in "how it works" -- a "zone of danger" ( the Bates properties, the ocean), great structure, great characters, great cinematic technique, just the right take on the blood and violence,etc.

But this: the "spectacular climax" of Jaws -- an air tank blowing up the shark like an oil refinery with a big explosion sound is, simply: ridiculous. But it WORKED. Audience cheers and applause -- and it would work again at the climax of Star Wars(insert death star for shark.)

Meanwhile: Hitchcock's climax to Psycho had everybody screaming ("Two moms -- one a skull face and the other a male psycho) and was PLAUSIBLE. The villain is simply tackled and subdued and ends up in jail being studied by the authorities.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

Jagged Edge...became a surprise hit. I recall Siskel and Ebert doing a special segment on WHY it was a surprise hit, and part of the reason was that a final shot of a "killed killer" on the floor was unclear as to exactly WHICH actor in the story it was...I think it was actually just poor moviemaking. It WAS Jeff Bridges, it was INTENDED to be Jeff Bridges, but the filmmakers fumbled it.
Streamed online I was able to see that it was Bridges just fine. I can easily believe, however, that it wold have been much harder to instantly identify Bridges in a certain percentage of the cinemas back in the day. *Lots* of cinemas used to run the bulbs in their projectors for 1000s of hours over their recommended usage, leading to incredibly dim/dark images. In the '90s I had to give up on one of my neighborhood cinemas entirely because of this sort of cheapskate-ism on their part. The same problem can occur today but in fact my sense is that cinemas generally lifted their game in the 2000s when perhaps they felt much greater need to compete with brighter/bigger screens at home: sound systems got better, screens got brighter (so bulbs weren't run into the ground), seats more comfortable, etc. (they got more expensive to to pay for it perhaps): screens got brighter.

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[–] swanstep (2616) 2 years ago

One slightly strange thought I had while watching Jagged Edge: How Jeff Bridges was blandly handsome in his youth and early middle age but that he aged into true movie-star good looks. In Jagged Edge he's still a blandly handsome All-American-type guy that the camera does *not* love. He signifies boredom and blankness on screen for the most part (going back at least to The Last Picture Show). Anyhow, things all turn around for Bridges when he's solidly into middle-age, and gets The Big Lebowski. He looks *great* slightly grizzled and with a few lines in his face. Camera loves him now, and he belatedly becomes one of those treasured stars, almost an American Peter O'Toole, who the Academy's desperate to give an Oscar to.

Jeff Bridges reviews his career with Vanity Fair (amazing what gets omitted, e.g., no Heaven's Gate, no Thunderfoot and Lightning):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdjx6oaPE-0

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

It WAS Jeff Bridges, it was INTENDED to be Jeff Bridges, but the filmmakers fumbled it.
Streamed online I was able to see that it was Bridges just fine.

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It remains possible, in addition to your technical analysis below, swanstep, that it was SISKEL AND EBERT who couldn't make out the face on the floor -- Ebert became the richest and most famous film critic of all time(thanks to TV syndication), but he missed things a lot. Or I suppose some articles got written(pre-click bait internet) to raise the issue. I saw the movie after the S/E show and it seemed pretty clearly Bridges to me.

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I can easily believe, however, that it wold have been much harder to instantly identify Bridges in a certain percentage of the cinemas back in the day. *Lots* of cinemas used to run the bulbs in their projectors for 1000s of hours over their recommended usage, leading to incredibly dim/dark images. In the '90s I had to give up on one of my neighborhood cinemas entirely because of this sort of cheapskate-ism on their part.

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I certainly believe you. What's funny is that in the 70's we started getting CINEMATOGRAPHERS (Gordon Willis) and directors (Clint Eastwood) who loved to "shoot dark scenes," so even hi def HD couldn't solve that one.

Here's something: after a childhood at the drive-ins where "how good the picture is" simply didn't matter to me, as a more "movie informed" teenager, I went to the drive-in and found myself having to sacrifice "quality of image and sound" for the cameradrie of my drive-in pals(and later, the even better camaraderie of drive-in girlfriends.)

Drive-ins in the summer would start their feature before the sun went down ...so you could barely see the action on the screen. It was as if the entire screen was lost to "glare" and you had to LISTEN to the first 15-20 minutes before nighttime arrived and the image was clear.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Even at that age, I was movie snob enough to make sure that (1) I only saw movies I had already seen in a theater(but this time, with my pals) or (2) purposely chose movies I didn't really NEED to see(because I could not SEE them for the first 15 mins, anyway, not on those summer lit screens.)

Roger Ebert once wrote: "I think I like the concept of a drive-in theater more than the experience of actually going to one." True enough. In the final analysis, the drive-in experience was about something OTHER than the movie(or usually movieS. A double bill.) You went to be with your parental family, or your teenage friends, or your..."lovah."

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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

The same problem can occur today but in fact my sense is that cinemas generally lifted their game in the 2000s when perhaps they felt much greater need to compete with brighter/bigger screens at home: sound systems got better, screens got brighter (so bulbs weren't run into the ground), seats more comfortable, etc. (they got more expensive to to pay for it perhaps): screens got brighter.

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There can be no doubt that home screens and sound and quality are damn good these days; i have some friends with "home theater experiences" where its ALMOST theater quality (sound effects arrive BEHIND me when I watch a movie there, from separate speakers.)

So the question is begged: why even GO to the theater? Oh, our shrinking number of people who go (even before COVID) have our reasons. If kids aren't part of the equation, it is a relatively inexpensive way to "go out for the afternoon or evening." A really BIG screen still DOES beat the screen at home. A good audience still works to make the movie more enjoyable if laughing, applause or screaming arrives.

I've got this one: only at the theater can I truly FOCUS on the movie, its story, its dialogue. At home, there are distractions, and I rather devalue the experience as being meaningful. (The movie is "free" for the cost of a subscription.)

I went to see The Irishman on the big screen for the week it was in theaters and it felt MORE like a movie than it did when it settled in on Netflix.

On the other hand, that OTHER great Netflix movie(The Coens' Ballad of Buster Scruggs), I only saw on the home screen and....I loved it, it got to me, etc. So the movie theater experience wasn't necessary for that one.

Thinking back over the decades -- starting in the 70s when I went to theaters on my own -- I must say that I caught a few movies "first and only on TV" (preferably cable uncut/no commericals) and...they became favorites. Titles like Fandango, Uncle Buck, and even Moneyball came to me on cable first.


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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

One slightly strange thought I had while watching Jagged Edge: How Jeff Bridges was blandly handsome in his youth and early middle age but that he aged into true movie-star good looks.

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It took time -- a few decades -- but he hung in there and two things happened: (1) he got older, more mature roles and (2) as happens with so many good looking unformed young men, age made him more handsome (his beards further did that; he looks odd modernly clean shaven.)

Funny but sad: "In the beginning," older brother Beau Bridges got the launch in movies like "The Landlord" and "Gaily, Gaily" (who remembers THOSE? I do.) Jeff sort of came along behind Beau, the more "dumb and open faced jock stud" of the two. (Father Lloyd Bridges was in High Noon, but basically a TV star; Jeff outdistance him.)

But Jeff got two major roles and shot ahead: The Last Picture Show(dumb, unformed) and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot(a bit smarter but still too young to undercut Eastwood -- except for that Oscar nomination.)

Beau got softer and more "character actorish," and Jeff became the star.

However: try 1989's "The Fabulous Baker Boys" sometime. Jeff and Beau together, with Jeff looking VERY cool and VERY studly and Beau having to play the character part. Its a good movie -- Michelle Pffeifer sings sexily as the lounge singer to the brothers musical act. But STILL a bit too early for Jeff Bridges to "kick in."

I also remember Jeff Bridges playing the President of the United States in some Glenn Close potboiler. I do believe Bridges(clean shaven) got a Supporting Actor nom.
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[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Cut to: The Big Lebowski, True Grit(getting Oscar nommed in the role that got Duke Wayne an Oscar) that country singer movie that won him the wrong Oscar(hey, I saw it in the theater, he was fine.)

but CUT TO:

Bridges' amazing last year in which he evidently fought cancer to a draw...for now. And managed to finish a streaming series in which it looks like he has some down and dirty fight scenes with HIM doing the stunts. (The show is a spy series called "The Old Man" and Bridges looks it...but still cool.) Between Bridges return to THAT series after cancer, and Bob Odenkirk's' return to HIS series(Better Call Saul) after having a heart attack on the set during a scene...hey, man, who says actors aren't tough?

I seem to remember Bridges' amiable Oscar speech for one almost mumbled line(paraphrased):

"I guess we're gonna have to re-think that 'underrated' talk, huh?"

It was "below the radar," but you could see that Bridges understood his own journey.

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