A Brief Psycho Analysis

Psycho is so much more than the infamous shower scene. The real terror of the film takes place even before Janet Leigh’s character’s dies.

This Hitchcock black and white tapestry unfolds with a man [Sam] and a woman [Marion] near the end f a clandestine rendezvous in a cheap hotel. She wants respectability. He can take or leave respectability but is willing to put up with it to see her again. He needs a couple of years to pay off his debts, including alimony to his ex-wife. She doesn’t want to wait. So they both need money and now.


Back at the office where she works, Marion, sweating in the un-air-conditioned outer space where she and a colleague work, finds herself seriously tempted by a large stash of cash that needs to be parked for the weekend. $40,000. A wheeler dealer is buying a house for his daughter. Marion’s boss asks her to take the money to the bank, as he and the client go into the boss’s air conditioned office. Marion matter-of-factly says she is leaving early and going to the bank to make the deposit and then home to sleep it off. The envelope of cash is there tempting her to the still understated haunting strains of Herrmann’s soundtrack. You can feel it pulling her in towards a downward spiral from which she won’t be able to easily return.


She grabs her coat and leaves. The next scene has her in her car and the creepiness really begins. Is that her boss she sees crossing the street in front of her and giving her a perplexed look? Or is it guilt? She is obviously running away and finds herself trapped by the persistence of a patrolman who absolutely is not going to leave her alone. Her responses to his questioning about why she was sleeping in her car on the side of the road sound false and rehearsed. The cop is like a leg-hold trap that won’t let her go. The music gets faster and more tense. Poor Marion. She stops in a used car lot and too quickly buys another car, making all the wrong moves, saying all the wrong things, all while that officer is watching her.


Marion continues her way on her journey, driving at night in the rain, blinded by oncoming headlights. She ends up at that hotel, and is told by Norman she could have easily reached her destination if she had just kept on driving for a few more miles. In the course of a civil and stiff evening with Norman, Marion makes up her mind to go back and return the money. This is, when you have the film many times before and know what is coming next, is the true horror of the film. Not only has Marion just missed getting to where she was headed, and chosen the wrong hotel and the wrong room at that hotel, she has just missed her last chance at redemption. And now she is going to die.

Mis-Adventures in Remakes

Some movies we hope they never remake:

Adventures In Babysitting
1987 directed by Chris Columbus
Is it true that a remake is in the works? Why? Elisabeth Shue and the rest of the cast are perfect. What can be improved? Special Effects? Why?

Mannequin
1987 directed by Michael Gottlieb
An extremely weird film that can leave you speechless with its genuine goofiness but it should stay just as it is. Kim Catrall and the rest are just right for the time period and the weird story. Please.

Pretty in Pink
1986 John Hughes

16 Candles
1984 John Hughes

Can we just leave these films intact as some kind of time capsules of the 1980s? The story lines, premises, characters and actors are all representative of a specific time period. Don’t muck around with it.

And one they already remade:


The Day the Earth Stood Still

The question is….why? Will the use of computer graphics and green screens make this version a better film? Does every film have to have a potential video-gaming side? The premise of the original TDTESS is more cerebral, and, okay, a little preachy like films of that time period tended to be. But understated and even a bit underdone is more effective than overblown.