MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Three Marion Cranes

Three Marion Cranes

posted a year ago by ecarle (14979)
11 replies | jump to latest

These are SPOILERS for three little-known movies. They happen relatively early in the films, and the films are basically not very good at all, any of them. Quentin Tarantino has called North by Northwest "a mediocre movie"-- no it is not. THESE three movies are mediocre movies, maybe worse than that.

Still, the "Marion Crane connection" emerged strong with one movie of the three, then the next, then the next, and I'd like to share it here. The movies can still be watched(if you really want to) with the SPOILERS.

Introduction:

Amazon Prime has a lot of movies. You can rent almost anything but they rotate in some movies that you don't have to rent at all.

And I tried three of them because...(1) I never saw them when they came out but (2) I REMEMBER them coming out and (3) there is always a nostalgia factor at looking at "an old movie" from within my own lifetime.

Interesting: all three movies are from Columbia Pictures.
Interesting: Somebody at Columbia Pictures must have decided: "these were all flops, but nobody's really seen them, let's put them out on streaming and make a little coin off of them."
Interesting: Two of them were made by the same director, George Schafer, who had a "quality director" reputation on TV productions from the 50's through the 80s like the Hallmark Hall of Fame, but came a cropper here.
Interesting: One of them -- quite bad -- was the second-to-last film of a famous director who, in the Tarantino theory of old directors -- flamed out badly with his final films. This was Richard Brooks, director of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood and my favorite movie of 1966 The Professionals.

The movies and the Marion Crane elements:

ONE: Doctors Wives(1971). Directed by George Schaefer. Its one of those tawdry "paperback sex movies" from when the R rating came in. But a studio production, so everybody talks sex, but very little sex or nudity is actually shown. What's incredible is the star power in this very bad movie: Gene Hackman(the same year he won the Best Actor Oscar for The French Connection!) Carroll O'Connor (the same year he became a TV legend as Archie Bunker in All in the Family) and Richard Crenna(from The Sand Pebbles and Wait Until Dark; a star for a little bit) and...Dyan Cannon, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice(and a few years as Mrs. Cary Grant and the mother of his only child forever.)

In the opening scene, doctors wife Dyan Cannon plays cards with OTHER doctors wives and pushes them to reveal their sex lives with their doctor husbands(playing cards NEARBY) and then reveals her own sex-driven slutty nature and THEN announces that she will be conducting an experiment to have sex with ALL of the husbands "so I can let you know what they like sexually." What an evil vixen! What a plot!

That's scene one. In scene two, Dyan Cannon is dead -- well, her nude body double is. Shot to death in bed with a doctor(who SURVIVES a bullet to the heart! A surgeon succesfully removes it!)

Dyan Cannon never appears in Doctors Wives after the first scene(a bit reminiscent of Letter to Three Wives) -- I was waiting for flashbacks, but none came. And so I ended up with that "Marion Crane" feeling: our female lead sure exited the movie early all right -- after FIVE MINUTES! Even Janet Leigh last longer than that.

TWO: Wrong is Right(1982.) Directed by Richard Brooks. With a very big star(career wise and physically): Sean Connery. But this was back when his career was wobbling a bit, too many bad choices like this one, Meteor(the AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL disaster movie) and Cuba. I saw this a few weeks ago and I can barely remember the plot: kind of an overly broad "Dr. Strangelove" type movie with George Grizzard as the President, and Robert Conrad(The Wild Wild West star in a rare feature film) in the General Turgidson/George C. Scott part.

Sean Connery(in a rather flattering hairpiece that he removes at the end of the movie) plays a rabble-rousing TV reporter-cum-anchor -- its a bit of Network to go with Strangelove -- and Katherine Ross -- the lovely star of The Graduate and Butch Cassidy -- is a Middle East correspondent. Connery and Ross have a nice scene together and a scene or two later -- Katherine Ross is blown up by a terrorist bomb in a briefcase. She never returns to the movie in flashback -- GONE in a few opening minutes.

Marion Crane Number Two.

AGAIN, I felt the "Marion Crane" effect(after having seen Dyan Cannon leave Doctors Wives so early) and I realized: so THAT's what it feels like to lose your female lead early. Moreover: I can only assume that both Dyan Cannon and Katherine Ross were paid a LOT of money to do these one-scene opening cameos. There is impact to killing a star early. The dead Cannon haunts Doctors Wives, and the dead Ross drives the plot of Wrong is Right(she wasn't just a correspondent, she was a spy.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

As I say, my memory of "Wrong is Right" is fading fast but I do remember these two items: (1) the movie climaxes with Arab terrorists trying to detonate a nuclear device -- at the World Trade Center towers! and (2) There are a couple of scenes with Sean Connery(the best James Bond) and Robert Conrad(the best James West) together and this 60's kid LOVED seeing that.

Richard Brooks made only one more movie after Wrong is Right -- the gambling drama Fever Pitch(with fading Ryan O'Neal) -- and then retired.

But The Professionals will always be one of my all time favorites -- and he did an OK follow-up to it in 1975 with Bite the Bullet (Gene Hackman and James Coburn instead of Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin.)

THREE: Pendulum(1969). Directed by George Schaefer, two years before he directed Doctors Wives.

"Pendulum" is now famous for being the movie title on the marquee "across the street"(at the Westwood Village theater near UCLA) in QT's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." That marquee faces the marquee at the Westwood Bruin(named for the UCLA Bruin sports teams) in which Sharon Tate(Margot Robbie) goes to see herself in the Dean Martin/Matt Helm spy spoof "The Wrecking Crew."

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

QATIH made me curious to see Pendulum some day; the chance came last week on Amazon Prime. Its an oddball little movie with an oddball little cast:

George Peppard: In 1969, his days as a movie star were about over. Came the 70's, he would be a TV detective on Banacek, and came the 80's, after getting fired from the John Forsythe role in Dynasty, he got his own hit in "The A Team."
But in Pendulum, he's kinda/sort of a movie star -- looking great in longish 1969 hair, tempermental, smooth voice, I guess he COULD have stayed a star(Breakfast at Tiffany's launched him in '61) but it just didn't happen.

Jean Seberg: Blonde, beautiful. Discovered in the 50's by Otto Preminger(St. Joan, Bonjour Tristeste), made famous by Godard in "Breathless" (1960, the year of Psycho with a title almost used for "North by Northwest") and alternating American films with foreign films for her whole career -- which was cut short by suicide age 40(a movie was made called "Seberg" in 2019 starring Kristen Stewart.) Jean Seberg had romantic entanglements and political alliances(like with the Black Panthers) that made her notorious, but her film career was always iffy. Except in a weird one-two punch with Paint Your Wagon in 1969 and Airport right after that in 1970. They were both BIG movies -- Wagon famously flopped and Airport famously hit and ....Seberg faded right away.

Pendulum is right before those two.

Richard Kiley: Kiley has real star presence in Pendulum --a booming voice, manly features, strapping -- but I checked IMDb and he hardly worked in movies at all. He was a Broadway guy("Man of La Mancha.") He played a great Columbo villain -- he was Columbo's police commissioner BOSS. Famously, Michael Crichton wrote Richard Kiley as "the voice of Jurassic Park" in his novel and Spielberg hired Kilely's voice for the movie.

Those are the names on the marquee in OATIH -- Peppard, Seberg, and Kiley -- and now they are forgetten.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Its funny: as the clips shown in OATIH attest, The Wrecking Crew was a really bad movie -- the WORST of Dino's four Matt Helm movies -- he refused to do anymore and got sued. As it turns out "Pendulum" wasn't a REALLY bad movie, but it was a PRETTY bad movie...I guess in the year of The Wild Bunch and Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy, bad and/or mediocre movies were still getting green lit.

Jean Seberg is Marion Crane in Pendulum, but this time, I saw it coming, because the plot summary on the Amazon Prime screen said:

"When police captain Frank Matthews is accused of murdering his adulterous wife and her lover, he avoids arrest and sets out to find the real killer."

Jean is the adulterous wife, natch and gets about 1/3 of the movie alive (ala Marion Crane) before getting shot at home in her OWN bedroom with her male lover in bed with her. Peppard is out of town on a trip. Peppard is accused of that murder, but there is a clever twist, actually: because she was in bed with her lover in her OWN marital bed, the killer thought he was killing her HUSBAND(Peppard) and her. Wrong.

BTW, though the circumstances are different, both Dyan Cannon in Doctors Wives and Jean Seberg in Pendulum are shot while in bed with their lovers, who are shot as well, only one fatally.

Whereas The Wrecking Crew is just plain bad -- badly written, acted, and stunt choreographed(the fights are ridiculous) - Pendulum starts strong and runs out of gas -- you could say it was "just a TV movie" but back then TV movies never looked this GOOD -- they had shorter shooting schedules and lesse production values and cinematography care.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Pendulum is about a psycho rapist-killer (Robert F. Lyons, who in 1969 is rather a dead ringer for Young Jack Nicholson -- probably hurt his career) who is released "on a technicality" by the US Supreme Court. Cop Peppard arrested him and wants him back behind bars; defense attorney Kiley defended him but wants him to "get help." Peppard ends up hiring Kiley to defend him(natch) and the movie (in its first half) has a serious enough contemplation of "the nature of justice": Richard Kiley defends a psycho rapist and a wrongfully accused man(Peppard) with the same constitutional fervor.

Pendulum has some Marnie angles: (1) The judge who sets the psycho free is the same guy who played Marnie's boss at Connery's firm in Marnie and (2) the psycho rapist has a mother who worked as a prostitute out of their home. The Birds alumnus Charles McGraw(Sebastian Sholes at the Tides) is Peppard's cop boss.

Janet Leigh and Marion Crane cast a long shadow over Pendulum, Doctors Wives, and Wrong is Right.

PS. The Amazon summary for Frenzy is almost exactly like that for Pendulum:

"When police captain Frank Matthews is accused of murdering his adulterous wife and her lover, he avoids arrest and sets out to find the real killer."

"When out-of-work London bartender Richard Blaney is accused of murdering his ex-wife, he avoids arrest and sets out to find the real killer."

Goes to show you: a good movie and a bad movie can be made out of the same basic premise.

[–] swanstep (2619) a year ago

There is impact to killing a star early. The dead Cannon haunts Doctors Wives, and the dead Ross drives the plot of Wrong is Right(she wasn't just a correspondent, she was a spy.)

And does Seberg, whose character lasts a bit longer than Cannon's or Ross's haunt the rest of Pendulum? It wasn't quite clear from your review.

Two relatively recent movies that played the 'kill off a star (or two) early' gambit pretty well are Contagion (2011) and Life (2017) - both are solid film and bit underrated in my view.

Contagion (2011) does a double banger: civilian Paltrow dies from the mystery disease immediately, then Winslett (center of the poster so you thought she was safe) as the first Federal expert in to investigate the outbreak dies almost immediately too. Nicely played Soderberg.
Life (2017) has post-Deadpool, peak-tabloid, center-left-on-the-poster Ryan Reynolds die first, and horribly, hauntingly, extendedly, you have been warned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CYv9e0EQUQ

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

And does Seberg, whose character lasts a bit longer than Cannon's or Ross's haunt the rest of Pendulum? It wasn't quite clear from your review.

--

Ha. Well, in retrospect, I don't think that either Doctor's Wives or Wrong is Right have the gravitas for EITHER dead female star to "haunt" them. Wrong choice of word. Still, I FELT the "Marion Crane" effect in that I was surprised to see them get killed so early and I DID keep thinking about them as the movies progressed. Janet Leigh always said this about Marion Crane: "everybody is talking about her for the entire movie, so I am still kind of in it."

Truth be told, Marion Crane isn't really the right template for the Cannon and Ross early deaths. They are more like the "opening star killings" in the Scream movies -- most famously Drew Barrymore in the first one. THAT was a surprise -- our biggest star is killed right off the bat.

And if Jean Seberg "haunts" Pendulum less it is because she has MANY scenes before she leaves the movie; she's rather preordained to die for the story to kick in.

I did rather like how since Seberg allows her lover to share the bed at her HOME while her husband is on a business trip -- the killer thinks he is killing Seberg AND HER HUSBAND. So the husband survives and gets blamed as "the wrong man." A nice twist in a mediocre movie(mainly, as so often happens, with a really dumb climactic fight that throws out the careful construction of the story earlier.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Two relatively recent movies that played the 'kill off a star (or two) early' gambit pretty well are Contagion (2011) and Life (2017) - both are solid film and bit underrated in my view.

---

I need to learn how to do that "black block spoiler" mechanism because I, too, have some favorite examples of what I call "early exits" by the stars . Marion Crane rather started it(or did she? more below) but many other stars of varying magnitude have stunned us by getting killed early.

There is a risk to killing a star early. Sometimes, audiences come to SEE the star(at least once upon a time they did.) If a movie is advertised as a John Wayne movie and John Wayne gets killed 30 minutes in and the rest of the cast carries the movie without him -- audiences might get MAD. So really the "stars" who exit early aren't the true leads.

AND: Was Marion Crane's death REALLY such a surprise? I wrote a post on that once so I would never need to write it again:

https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/61e5c2a667e86a3cf1da8f01/Psycho-and-The-Greatest-Lie-in-the-History-of-the-American-Motion-Picture

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

A thought in passing:

So I went ahead and devoted valuable viewing time to mediocre movies like Pendulum, Doctors Wives and Wrong Is Right(which, given Sean Connery as star and Richard Brooks as director, is a REAL missed opportunity.)

And yet I have not yet seen the 2022 Best Picture winner, and I have not made good progress on all the great foreign classics on HBO Max(soon to be known only as "Max.")

What gives?

Eh, its my time and my attention span and my DESIRE, I guess. And my DESIRE when these old movies came on Amazon Prime was to "go back in time" to my younger years and watch movies that either somehow slipped by me at the time(Wrong is Right -- I DID want to see James Bond and James West together) or I couldn't see(the R-rated Doctors Wives." ) At this point in my life, there is perhaps more entertainment value in camp, or schlock, or curiously misfired movies(Wrong is Right) than in the "great films." As long as the bad movies are from a past decade I lived through.

But I'll get to more of those foreign classics!

[–] swanstep (2619) a year ago

I need to learn how to do that "black block spoiler" mechanism

Here's the link for formatting help:
https://moviechat.org/formatting
You're actually provided that link in blue *right below* every text entry or reply box you open but for some reason it's easy to *not* see it there. The link probably should be above the box with the other commands, maybe in some more eye-catching color.

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

So:

Spoiler (hover to reveal)
hello

I'll run a test...then...I'd like to name some of those "early exit" actors of yore...

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Some favorite "early exits":

ONE: Deep Blue Sea. Rather a "Jaws" clone with more sharks and CGI; top-billed Samuel L. Jackson is in it for some time and then announces how he will lead the cast against the killer sharks:

"Now the first thing we are going to do is" ...and a shark pops out of the water and bites into him, takes him underwater and splits him with another shark -- literally.

I jumped and then I laughed HARD. The "star" of the movie gone like that -- and right after a patented Samuel L. Jackson long speech, too.

TWO: Executive Decision: Military commando leader Steven Seagal accompanies bookish expert Kurt Russell to secretly board a jetliner IN FLIGHT and to send up a team to rescue the plane from terrorists. A special airborne "suction cup" attaches to the plane so the team can board the plane. Kurt Russell and everybody EXCEPT Steven Seagal get aboard, but the "suction cup" is breaking down, disconnecting, about to fall apart. Dialogue:

Kurt Russell: We won't make it!
Seagal: YOU will!

(Seagal seals the lock on the suction cup and falls to his death outside the plane.)

Surprising enough, yes -- but I always felt that the producers wanted to get Sly Stallone or Arnold or Bruce for that early exit. Seagall was the best they could do.

THREE: LA Confidential: It is more of a "second act climax," but police detective Kevin Spacey suddenly getting shot in the kitchen of his boss James Cromwell(no one else is at home) was the BIGGEST early exit shock I ever got, and the saddest. Spacey's death is rather a combination of Marion Crane(biggest star in the movie dies) AND Arbogast(detective dies on verge of solving the crime.)

The LAC early exit comes "late" in later movies such as Minority Report and The Departed; very influential.