MovieChat Forums > MizhuB > Replies
MizhuB's Replies
I should have put my post in the Family Plot thread. Duh.
I also thought of that final wink to the camera. I also liked her as Kathleen Turner's mother in 'Peggy Sue Got Married'. She knew how to play it quirky and definitely had her own style.
I actually thought the shower scene was much more brutal in the original. It was more realistic. In the remake, it was more calculated. Just didn't seem as genuine. Seemed much more staged.
I agree with your assessments, but I seem to recall that for the leads, it was more a matter of who they could GET, rather than who they WANTED. I could be wrong.
One thing, I'd never even heard of Vince Vaughn before, didn't even know what he looked like, but I thought that since nobody could do what Perkins did, he did OK.
Sometimes authors drone on and on, dragging the story out longer than it needs to be.
========
This is how I felt about Misery. I'm a reader, and I love books, but Stephen King has a tendency to do that. He's hit-or-miss.
I had a hard time getting through reading Misery. I kept thinking, 'Get ON with it.' I read it when it was first published.
I thought the movie was a big improvement. I wouldn't want to watch a four hour adaptation of Misery. I saw how that went with the TV remake of The Shining.
I saw it when it was released, at a large theater in NYC. There was a lot of buzz about it among the people waiting on line, so I figured there were a lot of fellow 'Psycho' fans.
Watched the movie and when it was over, everybody just filed out. I didn't hear any complaints, just...people left. They weren't even talking about it. As if they didn't know what to think. I felt the same way. It wasn't until later that I formed an opinion.
Maybe the pecked out eyes of the farmer was just meant to be the great shocker. I don't think the censors of the time would allow things to go too overboard. Annie had some blood on her face. And I don't think Tippi would've been shown to be TOO bloodied-up. She was the beautiful, blond star. Even the bandages put on her didn't make sense. They framed her face and there was a scratch here, a scratch there.
I read about that. A sad ending to a difficult life. What that woman went through...I feel for her.
Ever notice the look she gives Mitch right before the bird attacks her, a cloying almost seductive gesture? (didn't work so well).
=========
Call us immature, but the first time I saw The Birds was the first time it was shown on TV (including the pecked-out eyes of the farmer, which was later edited out for many showings) with others. We were kids. The pecked out eyes made us scream and turn away. But to us, Tippi's 'seductive' look made us laugh because it was so ridiculous. She LOOKED like a MAD parody, before the MAD parody was done. I still smirk when I see it. I'll just say that in that shot, her inexperience really shone through.
I always wondered WHERE that blood on Norman's hands came from. He was carrying the corpse by her wrists; I suppose her hands, and maybe her wrists, had defensive cuts that bled on him.
=======
I noticed as he started to drag her out by the wrists, her palm was full of blood and it was splattered onto her lower arms. Look at her left palm. It's quick. Don't think I ever noticed that before.
Worse, when they showed Psycho, they moved the opening credits to the end, AND they superimposed "local credits" over the opening shots over Phoenix: "Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho".....Anthony Perkins....Janet Leigh.
========
I saw 'Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte' like that once. They removed the entire prologue (all 15 minutes of it, including the dang murder) and started it in the study when Victor Buono was talking to Bruce Dern. With cheesy homemade titles superimposed over it. And nothing at the end except...'The End'.
As contrived (and cheap) as Homicidal was, I always found the first twenty minutes to be very intriguing. And it amused me when I noticed that two separate car shots during that segment were shot on exactly the same street, just from slightly different angles.
THere was a godawful movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow about perverted goings on in a creepy house. For network TV, they actually reshot half the film focusing on Taylor's runaway daughter who doesn't appear in the original, since after the censors got through with it, they needed to fill a lot of time.
=========
I remember that godawful movie. 'Secret Ceremony.' As I recall, it was so heavily censored that they filmed scenes of two spinster looking ladies (psychiatrists?) EXPLAINING what was supposedly going on in the plot. Concocting a new plot that had nothing to do with the original.
The psychiatrist scene? It comes near the end of the movie. Second to last scene. The momentum is winding down anyway.
Cheers...and very interesting. Hopefully others can share their "Psycho" viewing history and what form it was in when they saw it, before finally being shown "intact and uncut."
=======
Interesting, indeed. The first versions you saw were even more truncated than the ones I did.
You said that Arbogast's murder went to commercial right at the upstairs door opening (right? Can't find it now) and that you never actually saw mother's skull.
All of those scenes were intact from my very first viewing. And to a kid, scary as hell. The only scene that was severely edited was the shower scene. It was very quick.
Picture this: The shots included in that scene were of Marion turning around and screaming, then ONLY the close ups of Marion's face and a few head-on shots of the knife slashing toward the camera. Nothing else.
One thing that was kind of a joke around here, to those who'd already seen the film was...
For a while it was shown edited 'for time'. During a commercial break. They removed the entire section from before Marion pulled over to sleep, right to when she's driving along the highway with the voice overs and the rain.
The problem was that to many seeing it for the first time, they thought it was a huge continuity error.
Why did Marion leave Phoenix in a black car, yet arrive at the Bates motel in a white one?
Also, just as an FYI, after the first time it was shown on TV here (back in 67 or 68), they re-ran the title sequence after 'The End' was shown. I guess to give it a closing title sequence. Or something.
Yep. This is interesting to me. I was never aware of how much local TV stations could pick and choose how they wanted to broadcast a movie. I'd thought that once an edit was decided upon, that's how it would be for everybody. Naive.
Hah! My parents, although conservative, never saw any reason to censor what movies we could see. They took us to see Rosemary's Baby when it was deemed a sin by the Catholic church. And it had (gasp!) some nudity.
They always thought, 'They're going to see it anyway, they might as well see it with us.'
Regarding the shower scene, we'd heard all about it. When the scene started mom was glued to the screen. When she saw how chopped and shortened it was, she said 'Oh, I see what they're doing. This is nothing like the real scene.' That only intrigued us more to see the REAL scene.
I don't remember the year, but the next time it was on TV -- late night movie -- it was intact. Every shot included. Including all the ambient sounds EXCEPT Janet Leigh's screams. They were missing. Even though I'd seen the whole scene, I still felt it was missing something.
And the next time I saw it, about a year later, it was all there. Screams intact. I'd seen the whole movie for the first time.
So it was interesting to me how I'd seen the movie progress from its initial showing (including a comment from an out of town aunt who, when we we told her we'd seen a scary movie on TV, said something like 'Oh! It was ON? It was cancelled in my area because some senator's or something's daughter had been killed'. We'd told her we saw Homicidal, not Psycho. Homicidal/Psycho... to her, the same.
So I'd seen Psycho four times before I ever saw it in the theater. On TV. The first 2 times chopped to pieces, the third time intact but without Leigh's shower screams, then finally including all. Don't know how that fits in with your remembrances but just wanted to tell you how it went around here. Cheers.
I think the whole truncated psychiatrist scene by Forster was specifically because Van Sant knew it had always been a hat grabber and many found it boring.
So he figured he'd spit out a few facts, quickly rush by it, and get it over with. Audiences, even in 1998 were not known for their patience.
Of course I don't know, but that's the way the scene always came across to me.
Man, I don't want to sound like a pain in the butt, but that's exactly why I like the first part all about Marion. I LIKE the fact that we're involved in Marion's story in the beginning, then the attention shifts to Norman after she's gone. I need to see the whole story, not just the story about Norman. True, it's almost like two different stories, but I enjoy them both.
Herrmann's "Psycho" score ended up on a few albums (ENTIRE albums given over to the score) and this piece of music was entitled(by Herrmann): "Temptation." One expects that either Hitchcock asked for it, or Herrmann viewed the scene and understood it was necessary.
========
I was never aware of any albums of the Psycho score (but I used to record it while I watched the movie years earlier). Even though I never knew of 'Tempation', it at least makes me feel good that I picked up on that whole thing. ;)
A 'fan fiction' movie is an excellent way to describe Psycho II. I worked with a guy who knew I was into Hitchcock movies, and especially Psycho. He was also a movie fan.
When II was released, he'd read a few reviews of it before I'd seen any. The day after it was released. He WARNED me that they were saying that now, Universal(?) was claiming it was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, semi comedy all along, because it had none of the seriousness of the original. So based upon that, I really believed Universal was covering up, like he told me.
The next day I saw the movie. Of COURSE it had its tongue firmly in its cheek throughout. Who would ever have thought that scene of Perkins crying in Meg Tilly's arms about...'Except those toasted cheese sandwiches!' was anything but farce?
Not to mention the Friday the 13th initial attack on the teenagers getting stoned and making out in the basement.
And 'I just got back and don't have any cu-hu-hutlery yet'.
So when the movie started, I wasn't sure what to expect. But it didn't take long before I realized it was mostly a joy ride.
Vera Miles' killing was only the shocker (and not for nothing, but I always thought she was one of the most underrated/underused actresses back in the day).
I have the DVD.