People remember it the way they remember where they were when President Kennedy was killed. In 1960, he appealed to audiences not to spill the movie's secrets, especially the female lead's murder halfway through the film.
There are people, especially women, who still get nervous alone in the shower thinking of naked and vulnerable Janet Leigh, slashed to death in a 45-second scene of horror that took Hitchcock seven days and 70 camera setups to film. But over all, the images remind you what a monumental film achievement ''Psycho'' was. Critics may dwell on the few minor changes in the new version. The dialogue, almost unaltered, seems dated, but the double-entendres are funnier the second time around. But its scenes of violence are chaste by the standards of the slasher movies, crazed killers and shock value of today.Īt the opening on Friday, I found the new version both off-putting and seductive, like a new production of a familiar opera. Whatever the director's intent, the audience reaction today cannot help but be different from that of 1960, in part because of the movies since then that were influenced by ''Psycho.'' With its graphic depiction of sexual repression, perversion and madness, the first ''Psycho'' effectively proclaimed the end of the buttoned-up 1950's.
No doubt Universal wants the movie to make money and mop up the red ink from ''Meet Joe Black,'' ''Babe: Pig in the City'' and other recent box-office duds that led to the ouster of the studio chairman last week. Van Sant wants film buffs to have a Borgesian field day with the remake. ''Psycho'' is one of the most influential and carefully analyzed movies ever made.
Van Sant's odd enterprise, it can be found in a satiric story by Jorge Luis Borges, ''Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.'' In it, an obscure novelist produces a masterpiece consisting entirely of parts of the original ''Don Quixote.'' Analyzing the new work, scholars find many improvements over the 17th-century version, including subtle references to Nietzsche, William James and biographical details from Menard's life. The only significant difference besides casting is that the new movie is in color rather than black and white. He has replicated it shot for shot, using the same script, the same mesmerizing score by Bernard Herrmann and the same Saul Bass titles. After all, Gus Van Sant, the versatile director of ''Good Will Hunting,'' has not merely remade Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 thriller.
For Universal Pictures, troubled by a recent series of flops, remaking ''Psycho'' was risky, and weird. Hitchcock probably wouldn't tell this story if he was making films today, and he certainly wouldn't tell it this way, with internal 'voices', back projection, minimal nudity and violence.For a Hollywood studio, redoing a classic is always a risk. Appropriately, given the schizophrenia theme, you end up watching it in mental split-screen, and of course the b/w version in your head is far superior to the intermittently effective academic exercise playing before your eyes. Fascinating to watch Heche and Moore riff on Marion and Lila Crane, though Vaughn has an impossible job supplanting Anthony Perkins' indelible performance. Van Sant allows himself only about half-a-dozen fractional variations from Hitchcock's storyboard - most blatantly during the murders - though in some respects the mise-en-scène is quite distinct, and in colour (out goes the black lingerie, in comes orange nail varnish). It stands as the first truly modern American film: Hollywood movies lost their innocence here, in the ruthless brutality of Marion Crane's murder. The choice of Psycho is a shrewd one the original hasn't a shot out of place. As original, and as personal, as a Warhol screen print, Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's seminal shocker takes an established text and recontextualises it 38 years on.