I agree, EC (and good to see you return, whatever name you use) regarding the Bates family. They likely, I suspect, had some "old money", much as many east coast folk did, true, surely when and where I grew up, in which big old homes, complete with barns (not yet wholly "converted" into garages), front porches, cobwebs in many of the windows, and often an elderly lady or two living alone inside. They looked grander than they truly were.
My mother hated that style. She called all those big old suburban homes barns, and had grown up in one herself, albeit in a city, north of Boston. To her, those houses were a royal pain to maintain, cost a fortune to heat, had bad plumbing and were always drafty. Nothing cozy about them. I was the one who thought they were the cat's whiskers, as I and a good friend loved to take walking tours of those old streets, looking wide-eyed at those houses, and dreaming of becoming architects.
To me, they were romantic, and just walking around those quaint old streets was as cool and fun as walking around a museum. The houses were the paintings; and the fences and yards were rather their frames, as it were (it was the houses that dazzled me, not the oaks and maples, nor the hollyhocks,--gardens didn't do it for me,--go figure). Anyway, to wind this post up, I have, visually, spatially and, obviously, emotionally, a connection to Psycho that has nothing to do with crime or murder. I do have to admit that I and many other neighborhood kids liked to view those homes as having "dark" histories, complete with arsenic poisoning and the occasional axe murder. None of us had seen Psycho, or not yet anyway. We got our imaginations fired up by books, hardcover, paperback and the (so-called) comic kind, and, of course, TV and the movies.
It was a great time to grow up, and I feel somewhat bad for people too young to have been around then, too late to have had their imaginations shaped by older cultures, and older things generally, in a far more controlled environment.
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roger1 (2394)
a year ago
I agree, EC (and good to see you return, whatever name you use)
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We shall see -- the new problem is I get cut off from posting more than once per hour it seems, and then only a paragraph or two. But I'm going to try. The longer "conversational" mode that makes posting here so rewarding -- to READ, when I read you and others here, is the key to coming here. If I'm cut down to a paragraph an hour well, I'm can't be around all day to do that. Anyway, it seems to be a new computer screwup. I can still get in on my cell phone via ecarle, but I can't write much from a cell phone. (This message is for you AND for moviechat honchos.)
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regarding the Bates family. They likely, I suspect, had some "old money", much as many east coast folk did, true, surely when and where I grew up, in which big old homes, complete with barns (not yet wholly "converted" into garages), front porches, cobwebs in many of the windows, and often an elderly lady or two living alone inside. They looked grander than they truly were.
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The "funny thing" about the infamous Bates "mansion"(or maybe it was just a big house), is that one could picture it on a street among other such houses(say in the neighborhood where Meet Me In St. Louis takes place) and it would be "fine," quaint, historic, "non-sinister." But put it out in the middle of nowhere, up on a hill looking down on a not-too-modern motel...and it became: creepy and atmospheric -- "don't go in there!"
One film earlier in North by Northwest, the drunken car drive ends, I believe, among houses on the MGM backlot and whaddya know -- there's a house much like the Bates mansion tucked in there, "waiting for its close-up next year" in Psycho. Which didn't happen -- ANOTHER house was cobbled together from SEVERAL houses on the Universal backlot, with some additional construction.
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roger1 (2394)
a year ago
My mother hated that style. She called all those big old suburban homes barns, and had grown up in one herself, albeit in a city, north of Boston.
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In his book "Suspects," movie critic David Thomson wrote a series of "back stories" for famous movie characters, including Noah Cross and Norma Desmond. A few Hitchcock movie characters got write-ups and one was Norman Bates. Thomson opined that the Bates family moved to California from back east, that "Mr. Henry Bates" was a wealthy builder of homes who built his mansion as "the best of the best" -- an advertisement to his own trade. And then he died. Leaving a wife and only one child to "rattle around" in that big old house.
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To her, those houses were a royal pain to maintain, cost a fortune to heat, had bad plumbing and were always drafty. Nothing cozy about them
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I've stayed as a guest in a few such houses, and all of that felt right. Especially the heating and plumbing issues.
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