Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello

Author:Stephen Rebello [Rebello, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: C429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781453201220
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Arbogast Meets Mother

Hitchcock had particular fun with the character of the private detective, Milton Arbogast, played by Martin Balsam. The forty-year-old stage and television actor, trained at the Actors Studio, had made his screen debut for Elia Kazan in On the Waterfront (1954). A great gift of Balsam’s on the stage or screen is the instant impression that he conveys of Everyman. Hitchcock, throughout his career, maintained a healthy irreverence toward the guardians of law and order, and his view of Arbogast—smug, glib, tenacious, slightly dull—is no exception. In film after film, Hitchcock challenges his audiences to cry out “Why don’t the hero and heroine go straight to the police?” Because, implies Hitchcock in answer, all that they will find is a universe of Milton Arbogasts. As the director so often put it, “Logic is dull.”

Hitchcock was well aware that Martin Balsam was among the two or three best-trained actors in Psycho. The director admitted to only perfunctory interest in the characters of Sam and Lila, therefore the conflict between Norman and Arbogast became more crucial. Rehearsing the funny-tense scene where Arbogast interrogates Bates in the motel office, Hitchcock could not have helped but be excited by the electricity between his actors. The suspense master imposed another technical challenge on his collaborators by deciding to shoot the scene more naturalistically than originally had been planned. As had Orson Welles in his radio dramas and in Citizen Kane, Hitchcock encouraged Balsam and Perkins to find their own rhythms and subtext, to overlap each other’s dialogue. Art director Robert Clatworthy, who watched the shooting, recalled: “The first time they did it, Hitchcock just shot the inquisition in that little office straight through, no cuts. I thought it was marvelous.” The crew rewarded the players with a spontaneous outburst of applause. However kinetic the line delivery, Hitchcock wanted more. “It was the first scene Martin and Tony played together,” said script supervisor Schlom. “It was a very long scene and Mr. Hitchcock wanted staccato bantering. They did it in one take. At the end of it, this wonderful smile spread across Mr. Hitchcock’s face. Despite the comments he made about actors, he appreciated good acting, which that certainly was.”

Hitchcock got from Balsam and Perkins more than he had bargained for in the scene. But according to Schlom, “The sound man on the movie just went nuts. Today, we just ‘mike’ the actors offstage. Then, that was unheard of. And later, when George Tomasini sat down on the cutting bench, it was a nightmare because the tracks didn’t match. Tony and Martin didn’t say the same thing at the same time with the same cadence. George, who was one of the best cutters in town, worked three or four days on that to get it mechanically correct. It was masterful.”

An added headache for the sound crew in the scene was Perkins’s suggestion to Hitchcock that Norman Bates would chomp Kandy Korn when particularly flustered. As Perkins noted: “I added it a little bit late, so I don’t know how clear it is, but I kept nibbling on it through the whole picture.

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