I've always been at odds with The Times' writer who referred to this as a work of 'shattering modernity'. But last night I think I understood.
It began with a shot - well, let's go even further back, It begins with a couple in their underwear in a hotel room who have obviously just made love. Let's remember, it's 1960. Think how restrictive things were in America in the 1950s - even Superman comics had had to be toned down - it was the era of fantasy stories where Superman would lose his powers and becomes a happy family man. EC Comics and the like were banned. Things were beginning to change a bit in cinema - The Moon Is Blue had used the word 'virgin' for the first time. Gasp! So that opening right there is quite ground-breaking. And let's not forget that the nouvelle vague was only just about breaking in France let alone the US.
But then there's this shot where Janet Leigh is lying on the bed and she sits up and the camera sits up with her, and (because I'd seen it a lot in our Invisible Women film) it made me think of the way Faye Dunaway stands up abruptly in the beginning of Bonnie and Clyde, and that was seen to be ahead of its time, and it happens again later when she's lying across the seat of her car and the cop comes to the window and she sits up abruptly and the camera goes with her.
And then there's the shower scene. I mean we've all seen it so many times, and obviously it's the work of an absolute genius, and it actually still hasn't been bettered, but what you forget is just how savage and shocking this must have been to a 1960 audience. It's very clever, there's very little gore, but just that one shot of the knife seeming to go into Janet Leigh's midriff is enough, and the combination of music and cutting makes it all the more violent. Try and think of the most violent thing you'd seen up until then on an American cinema screen and you begin to realise what a game changer it was.
And I've mentioned before the ways in which it seems to foreshadow French cinema, for example the scene after the murder where Perkins is washing his hands - there, a direct echo of that in Bresson's L'Argent. But even the way he approaches the bathroom of horror, the way his body looks hunched up from the back, you can almost see the horror in that body posture - that too seems to be very Bressonian.
Loved Anthony Perkins' performance, but all cast are good too.
By the way, how did they do the shot where Martin Balsam seems to fall back down the stairs?
Ultimately, the film cheats and lies and is absurd - but no one really cared, so much on a ride of their life had Hitchcock taken them.
And leaving aside the question of modernity. Hitch is such a master by this point. He's investing his own money in this, so it's relatively cheaply made compared to others in this period, but even so, if you analyse the dialogue scene in the parlour between Leigh and Perkins, you can see that way he's filmed and cut it in three sections, changing the camera multiple times as the scene escalates in meaning and dramatic tension. It's wonderful.
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| More Hitchcock wall art which neither I nor Google images could identify |
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| Vera Miles and some threatening rakes |
Paramount had assigned Robert Burks to another project, which is why John Russell shot it.
You can tell how indebted Hitch was to Bernard Herrmann's score that the composer credit is last before the director himself - most unusual.
