Why Hitch’s shower scene gave us cold chills
78/52 (15) Verdict: Insightful ★★★✩✩ Ferrari: Race To Immortality (15) Verdict: Compelling ★★★✩✩ A PAIR of engaging documentaries this week whisk us back to the Fifties, albeit to tell two very different stories.
The strangely-titled 78/52 analyses the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s great film Psycho, released in 1960, and in particular the famously alarming shower scene.
So determined was Hitchcock to get it right that it took seven days to shoot, almost a quarter of the schedule. There were no fewer than 78 camera setups and 52 cuts, hence this documentary’s title.
It includes some marvellous archive clips of Hitchcock himself talking about Psycho, in one of which he expresses horror that ‘some people took it seriously’. The film was meant, he says, to be tongue-in-cheek.
So heaven knows what he would make of this extensive deconstruction by a variety of academics and movie professionals, including directors Guillermo del Toro and Peter Bogdanovich, and actress Jamie Lee Curtis, whose mother Janet Leigh, as secretary- on- the- run Marion Crane, so memorably came a cropper in that Bates Motel shower.
Some contributions, it must be said, verge on the spurious. I don’t buy the theory that Hitchcock was still so cross about the Americans being caught unawares by the attack on Pearl Harbour that he devised the murder to show that even the safest of sanctuaries, in this case a bathroom, could be invaded at any time.
But there’s some fascinating material here, all the same, about a film which broke so many taboos and changed the whole landscape of movie-making. It even altered the way films were shown.
Before Psycho, anyone could wander into an Ameri- can movie theatre at any time, but Hitchcock gave orders that nobody was to be allowed late into Psycho, and nobody was.
FERRARI: Race To Immortality will appeal not only to anyone who loves motorracing, but also anyone in thrall to the glamour of the Fifties.
There’s loads of it here, mostly in the form of a couple of dashing British drivers for Enzo Ferrari’s fabled team. Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins were handsome, charismatic, brave and brilliant.
And they both perished before the decade was out. Motor-racing’s most glamorous age was also its deadliest. Daryl Goodrich’s film tells the story simply, but well.