About ‘Psycho,’ Hollywood and Great Acting

An agreeable diversion, yes, but “Hitchcock” is not much of a movie. There is little plot; we already know how the major story line will play out; and the screen play might as well be a PowerPoint presentation of bulleted sentences. Yet two magnificent actors, Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins, show how to craft great performances out of featherweight material. Hopkins, fat-suited and sporting a prosthetic nose, doesn’t try to imitate Hitchcock. Instead he creates the illusion of him. Mirren, of course, has an easier task, since hardly anyone knows what Alma Reville, Hitch’s wife and producing partner, looked like. (In fact she was tiny, which Mirren is not.) And she only has to wear a wig of bangs. Basically the movie is a superficial take on the making of “Psycho,” the film that changed horror movies forever and probably caused many of us to give up showers in favor of baths. It is also a superficial look at the Hitchcock marriage — ultimately a true love story for both partners — and at Hitch’s deep-seated emotional problems. The first 30 minutes of the film are almost charming: Coming off the success of “North by Northwest,” Hitchcock is at loose ends with no new project in mind. The studio offers him a James Bond movie (“I’ve already made that. It was called “North by Northwest,” he responds.) When suggestions are made that perhaps he is too old and should retire on his laurels (he was the most famous director in the world at the time) Hitchcock is determined to find something to shoot. And Ed Gein and Robert Bloch come to the rescue. Gein had been arrested some years earlier for murdering two women and for digging up dead bodies to decorate his house with skin and body parts. Bloch, who lived only 30 miles from Gein, began to imagine the story of a monster living next door, doing unspeakable, horrible things just out of the neighbors’ view. His novel, “Psycho,” grabbed Hitchcock. He decided to film it with a screenplay by Joseph Stefano. No surprise when the studio says no to the story of a man who sleeps with his dead mother’s body and murders and dismembers women who happen to stay at his forlorn Bates Motel. But surprise when Hitch, with Alma’s uneasy agreement, decides to finance the movie himself by mortgaging their house. The casting of the film, seemingly easy and quick, and the actual filming are fascinating, especially the personally and famously terrifying Janet-Leigh-in-the-shower scene when she wasn’t frightened of Tony Perkins in his dress and wig. Not so fascinating is the subplot of Hitch’s interest in young blondes and Alma’s entirely platonic relationship with a screenwriter that arouses her husband’s barely controlled jealously. Watch Hopkins’s eyes as he watches Alma get into the writer’s sports car, or Mirren as she places a single earring on top of a stack of photographs of blondes she has found in Hitch’s study, and you will see great film acting. The cast is uniformly good. Scarlett Johansson’s Janet Leigh is superb, an actress, wife and mother who drives a Volkswagen Beetle, not a convertible. Toni Collette and Jessica Biel are just right as Peggy Robertson, Hitch’s assistant, and Vera Miles, the actress who let the director down, or so he thought, by choosing marriage and motherhood over stardom. (“I would have made you a bigger star than Grace Kelly,” he laments.) John Huston’s son, Danny, brings suavity to the screenwriter who wants to sleep with Alma but can’t persuade her. And English actor James D’Arcy is a dead ringer for Anthony Perkins. “Hitchcock” is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington, MA. The film is rated PG-13, though I cannot imagine any teenager who would sit through it, and runs 98 minutes.