Hitchcock: Going psycho for Psycho

First there was Vertigo crowned the greatest film ever made by Sight & Sound this summer. Then came HBO’s The Girl, about the director and his obsession with his Birds star. And now comes Hitchcock, the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Psycho. Welcome to the Alfred Hitchcock Renaissance.

Really, though, when is it not a Hitchcock Renaissance? The great director’s works are frequently discussed, analyzed, taught and served up as an homage in modern-day films. I once took a college psychology course in which we watched Rear Window to diagnose Freudian theories. Several semesters later, it was rolled out for a sociology course to show how voyeuristic observation can lead to scientific discoveries within a species … or something like that. Hitchcock, it seems, spoke a universal language, the language of the cinema.

The British director — with his famous silhouette and that dire jingle named after a funeral march — was riding high in 1959 after the release of North By Northwest. The world had fallen in love with the spy adventure and its hop-scotching around America. Riding that momentum, Hitch — “Call me Hitch, hold the cock,” he tells his friends — has an idea for his next project and it is loosely based on Ed Gein, the mother-obsessed serial killer who was arrested two years earlier for carving up human remains into lamps, belts and bowls. The script is called Psycho. A studio executive balks at the project, as does an early panel of actors and press. “I’ve seen happier faces on a school bus going over a cliff,” Hitch’s agent tells him after the initial project debut.

But Hitch (Anthony Hopkins) fights back and eventually gets the studio to release the film under the condition that he pays for the production. Hitchcock puts his house up as collateral and begins the brave new experiment: to use all his skills as an expert director to make a horror movie, and to do it all on a miniscule budget with his TV-show crew. That’s the setup, but there is so much more to Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, which skillfully drills a peephole into the faltering psyche of Alfred Hitchcock as he makes what many people thought would be a stinker.

The film is boiling over with conflict: the studio didn’t want to release Psycho, the Production Code wanted to censor the famous shower scene and a single shot of a toilet, Hitch had the flu, he was paranoid that the public would learn the big secret (that the star is killed off a third of the way through the picture), if the film didn’t make money, he would lose his house, the Hollywood press thought Hitch’s days as a top draw were over … on and on and on. Making a movie, it seems, is the art of maneuvering from one problem to another. I love movies about moviemaking and this one is especially fun because Psycho is so well known, and we can see bits of its creation here in between the scenery of the film that frames it.

I would have liked to see more behind-the-scenes moviemaking, including more of the filming of the “shower scene” and more of Anthony Perkins (James D’Arcy) playing troubled momma’s boy Norman Bates. We do get to see lots of Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson), and she’s a terribly good sport even when she has every right not to be, like when Hitch thrashes a butcher knife at her during filming. At one point she gives Hitch a ride home in her Volkswagen and there’s an image for you: a round little man in a round little car. I also loved Toni Collette as Hitch’s lovable assistant, to whom he says one of his great film wisdoms: “Style is just self-plagiarism, my dear.”

Hitchcock is the story of Psycho, but it’s also the story of Alfred and Alma (Helen Mirren), his doting wife. She felt alienated by Hitch during the making of Psycho so she busies herself with other ventures, including a horny author (Danny Huston) who has his eyes on her and every other woman in Hollywood. As great as Mirren is, I found these scenes dull and distracting. They reveal how troubled the Hitchcock marriage was — and how integral Alma was to each of the movies — but they only serve to divert the plot away from Psycho and into some bland character study that is far less interesting. I imagine the real Hitchcock admiring the moviemaking parts, yet growing tired of all the romantic bits on the beach. “Not enough murder,” he might say.

Anthony Hopkins does a commendable job as Alfred Hitchcock. It’s not perfect; occasionally his lips look cold and dead, like the heavy makeup effects on Hopkins’ face had been applied past their sell-by date. Toby Jones, who played Hitch in HBO’s The Girl, looked slightly more convincing, though that movie ignored Hitchcock’s unquestionable impact on the cinema and instead framed him as some kind of pervy uncle who groped at starlets and gave everyone the heebie jeebies. Hopkins, and screenwriter John McLaughlin, don’t ignore Hitch’s various obsessions, but they also don’t ignore his greatness, which makes Hitchcock’s version of the director a more three-dimensional character.

Watching the film, I felt like I was viewing an accurate dissection of the director. It seemed to appreciate Hitch’s craft, his dour personality, his whimsically dark sense of humor and his passion for moviemaking. There’s a terrific scene toward the end with Hitch at the premiere listening through the theater doors for the incoming shower scene. As Norman’s “mother” slashes at Janet Leigh, and Bernard Herrmann’s strings strangulate the audience, Hitch waves his arms madly like a symphony conductor ordering his musicians to impale themselves on their own instruments. The scene has a touch of madness in it, but it’s a wonderfully insightful image into Hitch’s mindset.

I enjoyed this movie, but not more than any of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. If anything, it made me want to have a movie marathon to re-visit his greatness. After all, we are in the Hitchcock Renaissance.