Hitchcock

Here are my notes for this week's screening:

Hitchcock

USA 2012                    98 minutes

Director:                      Sacha Gervasi

Starring:                        Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, James D'Arcy, Jessica Biel, Michael Stuhlbarg, Scarlett Johansson, Toni Collette

Awards and Nominations

• BAFTA,  Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Best Actress Nominations for Helen Mirren
• 12 other nominations

 “Many people, including his studio, Paramount, had warned against this project [Psycho]: the material threatened to be nasty and gruesome, without Hitchcock’s urbane and attractive people – you couldn’t cast Cary Grant as Norman Bates (and I doubt Hitch could have brought himself to murder Grace Kelly).  The shower killing and the looming mother seemed like exploitation, or Grand Guignol, as well as trouble with the censor.  With his agent, Lew Wasserman, Hitchcock persevered.  So long as he worked cheaply, using the crew from his television show, and staying in black and white, Psycho could be set up in a deal to make more money for Hitch than he had ever known before.”

David Thomson: The Big Screen

After the great popular success of North By Northwest (1959) many critics claimed that Hitchock (Antony Hopkins) was losing his edge and growing old.  Determined to prove them wrong he decides to make Psycho and his wife Alma (Helen Mirren) acts as his chief adviser, censor and muse.

The film, with a script by John McLaughlin, is based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, a fascinating factual study of the film’s creation, with both Hopkins and Mirren having great fun with their roles.  However for legal reasons the film shows no footage from the completed film and the director was even forbidden to shoot any footage at the location of the Bates Motel, which still exists on a Hollywood back lot.

Psycho was an immediate international success, and despite the critical acclaim for Hitchcock’s other films (with Vertigo (1958) being voted first place in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll of the greatest films of all times,  when it displaced Citizen Kane from the position it had occupied since 1962) it is arguably his best known film.  To date it has generated three sequels plus the pilot for a failed TV series in the 1980s.  More recently in 1998 Gus Van Sant made a version of Psycho in colour that was an almost shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s original, and in 2012 a series called Bates Motel, set in contemporary Oregon and thus re-booting Hitchcock’s original story, was successfully screened in the US.

 

Here's one of the trailers:

 

 

 

 

And another one: