Sacha Gervasi's "Hitchcock'

Alfred Hitchcock had a nasty view of human nature, or a realistic one if you prefer. He liked to court his leading ladies and humiliate his leading men, or at least put them in helpless positions of one sort or another. Jimmy Stewart proved the perfect foil in that regard, and Vertigo, which some critics regard as Hitchcock's best film, is almost sadistic in its degradation of Scottie Ferguson, the much-tortured hero he plays.

Hitchcock got away with this because of the oleaginous British exterior he cultivated— part butler, part carnival tout and part procurer— but also because he knew how to tap into a certain psychological voyeurism in his audience. This quality was most obvious in Rear Window, a film about voyeurism itself.

In most of Hitchcock's films, though, we're invited to look at something we shouldn't see, and stages of one kind or another are used to frame the observation: a courtroom in The Paradine Case, a carnival in Strangers on a Train, a concert hall in The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But, of course, Hitchcock's most ultimately voyeuristic film is his 1960 classic, Psycho.

Shower slasher

What Norman Bates sees through his peephole is what we're all invited to see through his murderous eyes in the celebrated shower scene, source of a thousand slasher films and probably the most studied 45- second sequence in film history as well as the one with the greatest hold on the popular film-going imagination. In this scene, we all get away with murder, and we know it.

Is Psycho really that good? Well, what's good? Hitchcock set out to make a cross between a detective story— a favorite device of his— and a horror film.

The tale is tawdry: A thief on the lam runs into a homicidal maniac. The suspense is dispensed with early when the apparent protagonist, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is killed. The shower scene is pruriently voyeuristic for the viewer, but the more interesting curiosity for us is what's in Norman's head— and that is something Hitchcock shrewdly withholds from us in the end.

Norman's unknowable soul

We get what's obvious: that Norman has made his dead mother into an idol that must be fed human sacrifices. But what we'll never get is a glimpse into the opacity of Norman's soul, for, like Iago, he chooses to tell us nothing— perhaps he can say nothing. Evil is untellable; we can get just so close to it and then it wraps itself into an enigma.

Gus Van Sant paid Psycho the ultimate homage when he decided to remake it in 1998, using every scene just as Hitchcock had set it up. It fell flat, of course.

But Sacha Gervasi, in his Hitchcock, has recreated the story of its making, thereby turning the camera on the director himself. That approach requires bringing another character into focus: Hitchcock's wife and close collaborator, Alma Reville.

Unsung collaborator

Alma, a day older than Hitchcock, was then his wife of 54 years, and was intimately involved in every film he ever made, writing or co-authoring several and serving as a second pair of eyes— at times sharper than Hitchcock's own— in every aspect of the production and editing process. The only function she didn't perform was that of a muse; rather, she had to bear his infatuations (they seem to have been nothing more) with his female leads throughout the five decades of his career.

It's good to see Alma get some of her due; Hitchcock did acknowledge her when he received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1979, but the myth of the master director was too firmly entrenched by then. It's been said that the roles of Gregory Peck and Ann Todd in The Paradine Case (1947) were also a coded portrayal of the Hitchcocks' own relationship; if so, Alma deserves even more sympathy.

But Alma was no blushing violet, and she certainly gives as good as she gets in Hitchcock, which credits her with virtually rescuing Psycho when Hitchcock himself had despaired of it.

Gutless studios

The other interesting aspect of Hitchcock is its portrayal of the Hollywood studio system as it still existed in the late 1950s. Hitchcock had made a series of what are now regarded as classics in that decade, including Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959), but he still wasn't considered necessarily bankable, and Paramount, to which he owed a film, had no interest in backing one of Robert Bloch's Psycho novel, which Hitchcock had personally optioned.

He finally had to put up his own cash, with his home as security. Paramount offered no more than distribution— if it approved the product, and if Psycho passed the censors.

The chief problem was the shower scene, but it wasn't the only one. Janet Leigh's Marion has a tryst early on with her married lover Sam (John Gavin). It was shocking enough in 1960 to show adulterers in bed, even if clothed. But what proved even stickier was Marion flushing evidence of her theft down a toilet. Atlanta had burned in Gone With the Wind, but, strange to say, a potty had never before made it onto the American screen. Hitchcock had to fight for it.

One shower, 70 images

Scarlett Johansson plays the Janet Leigh role here to Anthony Hopkins's Hitchcock. In the shower scene as we're shown it being filmed, Hitchcock wants more emotion than he's getting, so he wields a knife himself, terrifying his Marion into the desired response.

No such thing actually happened. Janet Leigh said that Hitchcock was completely professional on the set, and it trivializes both her and Hitchcock to suggest that it took a stunt to get her to react properly to being stabbed to death.

Nor did Hitchcock simply shout, "Cut!" and print a single perfect take. The shower scene is actually composed of 70 discrete images spliced together— one reason why it's studied in film schools.

Parody of himself

Anthony Hopkins is too large physically, but he has Hitchcock's trademark mannerisms down pat. The trouble is that Hitchcock played the role of himself, not only projecting a persona but then parodying it. This was partly defensive and partly self-mocking, and when he began to enclose himself in that famous TV silhouette he turned himself into a trademark.

For the greengrocer's son that he was, decorum was a great shield, but there must have been a private self as vulnerable as anyone else's and perhaps more so. We don't see much of it in Hitchcock.

The film suggests that Hitchcock punished Vera Miles (Jessica Biel) with a second lead in Psycho because she rejected his advances, and it depicts his marriage in crisis as Alma tries for a last fling with a writer she's script-doctoring, Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston). When Hitch (as everyone calls him) loses his temper, he thrashes at the leaves in his pool, but when Alma confronts him with a pile of pinups he's left casually around the house, she lets him have it between the eyes.

Through Alma's eyes

Since Alma Reville spent her life largely in her husband's shadow, Helen Mirren enjoys much more freedom in exploring Alma's character than Hopkins does with Hitchcock. Mirren is, as the Brits say, smashing, though the body double who's shot from underwater doing furious pool laps (presumably to express Alma's own physical frustration) is a bit over the top.

Mirren pretty much steals every scene she's in, though, and we see Hitchcock to a considerable extent through her eyes. The script has her not only saving Psycho but, inferentially, saving Hitchcock too, for whom another box office flop, as we're given to understand (Vertigo, despite its later cachet, didn't do well in its initial release), will likely send him to the scrapheap at age 60, or at least banish him to TV. This isn't quite accurate either: Hitchcock was actually coming off a major commercial success in North by Northwest.

It's true, though, that Psycho was a professional as well as a financial gamble. Cutting up your leading lady wasn't done then, and letting most of the film rest on a psychotic mama's boy might have worked in Weimar Germany (vide Fritz Lang's M), but it was hardly a formula for success in Eisenhower's America. Anthony Perkins, the original Norman, had played the mentally disturbed Jim Piersall in Fear Strikes Out, and Kirk Douglas's Van Gogh had cut off his ear in Lust for Life; but these were stories with a redemptive twist. Nothing about Norman was going to make for uplift.

Touching a nerve

In the end, Hitchcock judged his market shrewdly. Psycho was based partly on the real-life figure of Ed Gein, a Midwest murderer who appears to Hitchcock as a Doppelgänger.

This element in Hitchcock is a rather cheap way of suggesting that the director wrestled with his own demons. No doubt Hitch was a quirky fellow, but at this point in his life he was an aging filmmaker looking to spice up his formula. He did that and more, touching a nerve that Americans found they were ready to have exposed.

Psycho began in a genre— film noir— that Hitchcock had never really worked in (except perhaps with Strangers on a Train) and then tipped into altogether new territory. The frame that held it together, rather shakily, was the detective story. But Norman's capture and the lengthy psychological explanation of his conduct is the least convincing part of the film. We remember the Grand Guignol effects, and the contortion of Janet Leigh's screaming face.

Missing element

Hitchcock lacks the critical element of any movie by Hitchcock himself: suspense. From the outset we know that Psycho will be made, and that Hitchcock and Alma will stay together.

Hopkins has to invest so much in his physical and psychological makeup that he has less room for maneuver. But to see him and Mirren playing off each other is a master class in screen acting. Sacha Gervasi himself is no Hitchcock, but his stars lift the film beyond a merely serviceable biopic.

There's something of the feel in it that we get from Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field as the Lincolns in Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln, which like Hitchcock focuses on a crucial moment to illuminate a long and difficult marriage, and is likewise swept up in triumph at the end.

Of course, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was a more consequential event than Psycho. But none of us has stepped into a shower in quite the same way since.