What might you get by combining the two stars of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite film, with the same musical touch composer Dimitri Tiomkin gave to another Hitchcock thriller, Strangers on a Train? The best answer might be 1952’s The Steel Trap, a tense film noir from director Andrew Stone, available at the Warner Instant Archive collection.
Nine years after Hitchock’s Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotten (the Merry Widow Murderer ”Uncle Charlie”), and Teresa Wright (Cotten’s innocent neice, (“Young Charlie”) are paired again, very effectively (despite some age differences) as a middle class husband and wife. Restless bank teller Cotten carries out his routine vault duties, but his mind drifts to all the money within.
He seeks an escape from his stagnant life, accompanied by a suitcase containing one million dollars in bills and, preferably, by his unsuspecting wife and their little daughter. Much too quickly and overconfidently, he devises his nefarious plan. Things immediately go wrong, however, and we’re brought along for the nerve-racking ride.
If you’ve ever been running late for an important engagement, only to encounter every red light, train, or slow-moving vehicle ahead of you on the way, you’ll have an idea of what this would-be criminal experiences as he desperately attempts to carry out his heist. While I had some reservations with the film’s conclusion, The Steel Trap has a lot to offer, including extensive location shots of New Orleans’ French Quarter and elsewhere.
Last but definitely not least is Tiomkin’s wonderfully moody score—as much a character of this film as it was in Strangers on a Train. Nearly every action, gesture or glancing aside has its own theme. We go abruptly from nervous to whimsical in matter of seconds, and it all works beautifully.
No, it’s a not a rock band. They’re the nine surviving masterpieces from Alfred Hitchcock’s silent years, and they’re coming to a theater near you.
The Herculean restoration project by the British Film Institute required a series of daunting tasks — from reintegrating lost footage to tinting restoration. Hitchcock once said, “The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema.” The release of these films offers audiences a remarkable opportunity to experience his force of genius in full glory, instead of on old, damaged prints.
The Hitchcock 9 includes:
THE LODGER (1926)
THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1926)
DOWNHILL (1927)
EASY VIRTUE (1927)
THE RING(1927)
THE FARMER’S WIFE (1928)
CHAMPAGNE (1928)
THE MANXMAN (1929)
BLACKMAIL(1929)
To add to the drama, live accompaniment, including some new scores, will be part of the screenings.
The Hitchcock 9 opened at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival last week, goes bi-coastal this week in L.A. and New York, and then moves on to Seattle, D.C., and points beyond.
I know where I will be in August when The 9 shows up at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre.
HERE IS SOMETHING you don’t know about Norman Bates if you have seen the movie but not read the book:
Along with his collection of pornography, he owns copies of A New Model of the Universe, The Extension of Consciousness, and Dimension and Being.
Something you don’t know about Sam Loomis, Marion’s boyfriend:
In the back room of his hardware store, he keeps a tiny FM radio to listen to classical music. (“But there was no one in Fairvale who would recognize either the music itself or the miracle of its coming.”)
Something you don’t know about Marion Crane (Mary Crane in the book):
Lowery, the man from who she stole the $40,000, once tossed a hundred dollar bill on her desk and suggested she take a little trip with him to Dallas (“three days’ rental privileges of the body of Mary Crane”). She did not do it.
The Book (1959)
Poor Robert Bloch. His agent sold the movie rights to PSYCHO for $9000. After the publisher, the agent, and the IRS took their share, Bloch got about $5000. For comparison, Bernard Herrmann was paid $34,501 to score the movie; Saul Bass, $3000 to design the title sequence.
It was a blind bid. Bloch and his agent did not know until too late that the buyer was Alfred Hitchcock.
Bloch writes in a monotone: everyone sounds like everyone else. (The exception is Norman Bates, for whom Bloch writes long interior monologues.) But the novel enjoyed good sales and good reviews, and won a major prize in 1960 from the Mystery Writers of America. It has slipped down in status to cheap pulp, a status it doesn’t quite deserve.
Its theme is the unknowability of another human being. This is Sam speculating about Marion:
Once you admitted to yourself that you didn’t really know how another person’s mind operated, then you came up against the ultimate admission—anything was possible.
The Movie (1960)
The movie and the book have the same plot. Even that peculiar coda in the mental institution came from the book, although in the book Sam talks about a conversation he had with the psychiatrist, and in the movie, the psychiatrist speaks for himself. Both book and movie have the same last line: “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.”
However, Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano made two big changes relating to the characters:
They made Norman Bates young and handsome rather than middle-aged and fat.
They turned up the heat under the relationship between Marion and Sam. That opening scene with them in the hotel room is not in the book—one of few places where the movie veers away.
That Shower Scene
The shower scene is not a Hitchcock invention. Marion’s death comes at the same early, disorienting point in both book and movie—and in more or less the same way.
A difference: in the book, Norman cuts off Marion’s head. As we all know, Hitchcock didn’t play it that way.
Another difference: Hitchcock waited, proportionately, almost twice as long as Bloch did to kill her off. In the 175-page paperback copy, the murder occurs on page 41. In the 109-minute movie, the murder occurs 47 minutes in.
Genius vs Talent
Hitchcock was the major talent; Bloch, the minor. That is why PSYCHO the movie made history, and PSYCHO the novel is remembered today mainly because the movie did make history.
The scene where Marion sells her car shows the difference between Hitchcock and Bloch.
In the movie this scene is tense. When Marion’s frightened, defensive behavior makes a highway trooper suspicious and he follows her to the used car lot, his presence symbolizes her guilty conscience. It is at that point that she starts to regret stealing the money. This scene sets up the later one at the motel when she decides to abandon her plan and go back to Phoenix.
Bloch handles this scene dismissively, in a single paragraph. Marion does not appear nervous or frightened. No trooper follows her. There is no emotional payoff. As if bored by the whole thing, Bloch has her trade her car not once, but three times in that single paragraph.
I wonder what Hitchcock saw in the novel. In his book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Stephen Rebello offers various explanations. Hitchcock owed Universal a picture and thought PSYCHO would get the commitment out of the way quickly and cheaply. Hitchcock had competitors who were making scary, successful movies on small budgets and he wanted to show them he could, too.
Rebello speculates that “the fifty-nine-year old suspense maestro felt bullied by his brilliant present and past.”
Lindsay Edmunds blogs about robots, writing, life in southwestern Pennsylvania, and sometimes books and movies at Writer’s Rest. She is the author of a novel about love in the age of artificial intelligence: Cel & Anna.
Good evening. If you’re contemplating a trip to the movies tonight, we highly recommend a picture that’s just opening. This recommendation comes, if for no other reason, because of it’s ingenious and intriguing, one-word surname title. The film concerns a famous, portly director (played by Anthony Hopkins), whose big, glossy technicolor hit, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, was followed by “a new and altogether different motion picture excitement!”. And that famous movie is the subject of the following quiz.
Good luck, Mr. Thornhill, wherever you are…
(*The quiz title was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest:“Something wrong with your eyes?” “Yes”, says the sunglass-clad Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant), “They’re sensitive to questions”. Later, confronting Vandamm, Leonard and Eve at an auction house, Roger inquires of them, “I wonder what subtle form of manslaughter is next on the program?”.)
Sitting in a cab the other day, I glanced at the odd image that appeared on the small television screen mounted on the back of the front seat. “What in the world is that?” I wondered as I looked at the closeup of some beige and bumpy blob. Was it a meteor? an enlarged fat cell? a mutant virus?
The mystery began to unravel as each of the ensuing shots zoomed out to reveal more and more information. As the camera moved back, I saw that the blob was one of many oyster shells chilling on ice. Then a hand holding a knife appeared; the hand belonged to a man who picked up the oyster and pried it open. It turned out that the man was casually sitting at a bar, the atmosphere dark and woody. The big conclusion at the last cut: A restaurant logo and operating hours flashed on the screen.
In Part 1 of THE STORY OF FILM, filmmaker Mark Cousins reminds us how Hitchcock created tension through his “brilliant use of closeups” to start a scene and would then zoom out to reveal place, rather than relying on the traditional establishing shot and moving to closeups from there.
“The guy who directed that restaurant commercial was a Hitchcock fan,” I thought to myself.
My education in the history of filmmaking continues with Part 2 of THE STORY OF FIILM: AN ODYSSEY. (Comments on Part I may be accessed at http://wp.me/pfwMd-ZE)
Part 2 includes the segments “Expressionism, Impressionism and Surrealism: Golden Age of World Cinema” and “The Arrival of Sound,” featuring a collection of insights, observations, and trivia by Cousins, the intrepid film historian, director, writer, and narrator of this newly released primer on the evolution of film.
Cousins narrates the series in his lulling, quiet voice, as if he is imparting special secrets, chock full of analysis and comparison/contrast with a big dose of hyperbole. He says that the the 1920s were “the greatest era in film”; that Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu was “perhaps the greatest film director that ever lived”; and that Alfred Hitchcock was “the greatest image maker of the 20th century.” I couldn’t quite keep up with all of the testimonials to greatness he brings to his commentary, but I have to admit that I enjoy those kinds of big, dramatic statements in his narrative, including pronouncements along the lines of “Cinema can be broken into two periods, before LA ROUE (1923) by Gance and after LA ROUE.”
Nonetheless, Cousins does provide illustrations to support his declarations, doling out a relentless — and fascinating — selection of clips from more than 40 films include Dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC(1928), Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927), Buneul’s UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), and Disney’s SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (1937), just to name a few. Each selection illustrates the innovations in story, action, and technique that dramatically widened the possibilities in filmmaking during “the golden age of world cinema,” and how this world of visual innovation abruptly changed when sound came into the picture. From the dadaists to the realists, we go bouncing around from innovation to innovation like the crazy journey of the baby carriage in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) to the great musical journey of the song “Isn’t It Romantic” from Mamoulian’s LOVE ME TONIGHT (1930).
I am especially intrigued by the movie trivia that Cousins peppers in between his cinema history lessons: That there were 36,000 extras in METROPOLIS. That silent films in France were referred to as “deaf cinema.” That 90 percent of Japanese silent films have been destroyed. That Howard Hawks was responsible for bringing intense speed to cinema (recall the overlapping dialogue in BRINGING UP BABY). That the tragic demise of forgotten Chinese movie star Ruan Lingyu created a national mourning event of historic proportions. That the memorable camera angles in L’ATALANTE were a result of director Jean Vigo not wanting to show the newly fallen snow on the ground. That director Abel Gance watched the restoration of his NAPOLEAN at the 1979 Telluride Film Festival from the window in his hotel room. So many movies, so many footnotes….
As we follow Cousins’ journey through the movie business of the 1930s, he tells us that this era gave rise to the “great genres” of musicals, westerns, horror, gangster films, and comedies. And, at the conclusion of Part 2, Cousins asserts that three key films of 1939 — GONE WITH THE WIND, NINOTCHKA, and THE WIZARD OF OZ — bring “the end of escapism in films.” This statement still stumps me.
The world is heading to war, and won’t there be plenty of escapist films during the tumultuous times ahead? But for some reason, we won’t get Cousins’ perspective on the films of the war years. The next episode of the series begins with a segment entitled “Post-War Cinema.”
Music Box Films is distributing this new documentary, and Chicago’s Music Box Theater is conducting a multi-week screening of this ambitious effort. The DVD will be released in November 2012. You will want to add it to your collection.
Gloria Bowman is a writer, storyteller, blogger, movie lover, freelance editor,
and author of the novel, Human Slices.
Access her blog at www.gloriabowman.com; on Twitter @GloriaBow
HERE IS SOMETHING you don’t know about Norman Bates if you have seen the movie but not read the book:
