Hitchcock

Hitchcock 2012 U.S. (98 minutes) directed by Sacha Gervasi; written by John J. McLaughlin, based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Dembner Books, New York, 1990).

There must be countless ways a Hollywood movie about a larger-than-life character like legendary director Alfred Hitchcock making one of his classic films could go horribly wrong.

Director Sacha Gervasi and writer John J. McLaughlin’s Hitchcock manages to sidestep them all with flair and good taste, a dash of the legend’s mordant wit as well as his meticulous eye for detail and crisply edited storytelling manner.

Hitchcock provides an imaginative profile of Hitchcock’s marriage and professional partnership with his wife Alma Reville based on the period during which he was making Psycho, one of his most fully realized artistic masterpieces and his most financially successful film.

Psycho (1960) is the story of mother-haunted serial murderer Norman Bates. Bates’ activities come to light after he murders Marion Crane, who disappears after she steals $40,000 from one of her employer’s clients. Marion’s sister Lila Crane and Marion’s boyfriend Sam Loomis hire private detective Milton Arbogast to find her. Arbogast tracks Marion to Norman Bates’ motel where he also disappears. Lila and Sam pick up his trail from there.

The original story, by genre writer Robert Bloch, is based on the Plainfield, Wisconsin serial murderer Ed Gein (whose ‘spirit’ appears to Hitchcock in Gervasi’s movie, played by Michael Wincott). Gein apparently was the model also for the serial killer Jame ‘Buffalo Bill’ Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Hitchcock took this noirish horror genre story and shot it in uncompromising black and white; he made its aberrant sexuality titillating by making his audience complicit voyeurs. He put this revolutionary shocker together with Bernard Herrmann’s classic musical score in such a way that the worst horror and violence, most notably the famous ‘shower scene’ in which Bates’ ‘mother’ savagely stabs the naked Marion to death, takes place in the viewer’s imagination.  

The director personally financed the project when appalled Paramount studio head Barney Balaban refused, and then he fought with Geoffrey Shurlock, administrator of the Motion Picture Production Code, the Hollywood self-censorship board, to clear the finished film for release.

What a daunting challenge this biopic must have presented for an actor! Just being Alfred Hitchcock was a full-time job. Apart from his status as one of cinemas great auteurs, his larger than life-sized personality and all the shopworn anecdotes and pop psychoanalyzing, his instantly recognizable image and profile made this a hard-sell for us going in.

But we were pleasantly surprised. Unlike his campy Richard Nixon for Oliver Stone, Anthony Hopkins had us hooked once we got past quibbles that he does not resemble the Master and tuned into the story about a famous and successful artist hemmed in by advancing age and poor health and others’ professional expectations of him, and about his wife, a gifted and formidable behind-the-scenes presence. Pairing Hopkins's Alfred with Helen Mirren’s Alma was a stroke of inspiration.

Helen Mirren as Alma Reville and Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock editing Psycho in Hitchcock.

In addition to the making of Psycho, we see the portrait of a marriage of a couple who has been working together professionally since the mid-1920s. Gervasi and McLaughlin give Alma the full credit Hitchcock never failed to give her but that the public seldom saw. They also show the controlling Hitchcock’s jealous resentment of Alma working independently to help fictional screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) develop a marketable script.

One wonders how the ‘controlling Hitchcock’ himself would have made such a story convincing. How about hiring two senior stars of great ability and charisma and encouraging the second lead to steal the picture from the first?

Gervasi and McLaughlin frame their story within the format of the popular Alfred Hitchcock Hour television series which was current during the making of Psycho. These delicious, hour-long tales of the macabre opened by pairing a taste of the drama to follow with one of Hitchcock’s ironical comments and closed in a similarly amusing, irreverent vein. In this instance, at the end, a raven lands on Hitchcock’s shoulder foreshadowing his next project, The Birds.  

In a sense, what Gervasi and McLaughlin have accomplished is a kind of narrative jujitsu, by taking Rebello’s factual potboiler, Hitchcock-style, and practicing their company’s technical and artistic strengths to show Hitchcock and his company at work rather than to try to ‘give’ us Hitchcock. The rest of their casting is of the same order as the two leads.

In Psycho, Janet Leigh played Marion Crane, with Vera Miles as her sister Lila and John Gavin as Loomis. Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates.

Janet Leigh, inset, and Scarlett Johansson as Leigh playing Marion Crane in Hitchcock.

Scarlett Johansson makes a terrific Leigh and Jessica Biel makes as good a Miles because what we see is Hollywood professionals working as Hollywood professionals, rather than trying to be ‘personalities’ (e.g., Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor). James D’Arcy’s Tony Perkins looks and feels startlingly close to the original.

We also see Hitchcock’s team: his MCA (Music Corporation of America) agent Lew Wasserman (Michael Stuhlberg); Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette), his production assistant and gatekeeper; Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho (Ralph Macchio); assistant director Hilton Green (Kai Lennox), Saul Bass, Hitchcock’s graphic designer and storyboard artist (Wallace Langham), Bernard Herrmann (Paul Schackman), and film editor George Tomasini (Spencer Garrett), among many others.  

Not least can one imagine Hitchcock and Alma approving Gervasi’s production design and sets (Judy Becker, production designer; Robert Gould, set decorator; and art director Alexander Wei), camerawork (Jeff Cronenweth), and editing (Pamela Martin). The costumes (designed by Julie Weiss), particularly the women’s suits, outfits and lingerie are sublime.

We found this to be a fully satisfying and entertaining hour-and-a-half in the dark with strangers.