How a movie impacts an ordi­nary fan? Some extra­or­di­nary movies shake us and the impact con­tin­ues for days together. If we can rec­ol­lect the entire song, it’s not because of our mem­ory power rather it’s the impact the song made us to do so. Sim­i­larly, movies. Though I am ama­teur film blog­ger, the way peo­ple search the details about the film ‘The Birds’ aston­ished me. That’s why I call Alfred Hitch­cock as the movie mav­er­ick and not just as a sus­pense mas­ter. Let’s see one more clas­sic ‘land­mark movie’ in his series. I’m not con­cerned about the 32 folds of profit money it swin­dled back to the pro­duc­tion house.. 0.8 M$ yielded 32 M$ !!

 It’s not true that a film­maker always lives rich — retain­ing the fame and money is tougher than earn­ing them. After the costly movie “North by north west” [ Cary Grant was costly ! ] and less acclaimed [ in box office ]  ‘Ver­tigo’, Hitch­cock wanted to try out just a plain low-budget movie. The result is ‘PSYCHO’ — mother of all sus­pense n horror movies.

 PSYCHO

 Young lady Mar­ion is work­ing cheer­lessly in a real estate office [ finan­cially unhappy ] and has a love rela­tion­ship with Sam Loomis. One day, she gets a sur­prise chance to deposit client’s money [ $40,000 ] in the bank. She makes up her mind to steal the money, leave the state and set­tle some­where else. After a very long tire­some drive with con­fused mind, she ends up in a high­way motel called BATES MOTEL. The motel in charge is a guy named Nor­man Bates who has a lit­tle chat with her and pro­vides some food. He eagerly shares his story and hap­pen­ing s about her mother.

 ” There’s hardly a film fan alive who doesn’t know what hap­pened next  !! ” — This is not to hurt the friends who are yet to watch but just to encourage.

 View

 You know what Alfred Hitch­cock was highly afraid of ? Bore­dom. Nei­ther he liked it nor he imposed it to his audi­ences. Imma­te­r­ial of the genre of the film, that’s what I feel as good movie which holds us to watch. Hitch­cock reminds us the com­plete mas­tery skills that are needed for a film maker.. right from select­ing the story, extract­ing the script, actual shoot­ing, cast­ing, edit­ing, music and of course, direc­tion. Thought it’s a team work, Hitch­cock was pri­mar­ily respon­si­ble for his works.

Macguf­fin means drift­ing from the ini­tial plot to some­thing else. This was the tech­nique used by Hitch­cock in this film. Of course, he didn’t cheaply cheated the audi­ence by shift­ing the focus of the story. Instead he aston­ished the audi­ences with the hid­den story.

This film engages almost all the ele­ments like sus­pense, finan­cial needs, sit­u­a­tions when one steals money, mur­der, con­fu­sions etc., He used some themes like stuffed birds, eyes [ close-ups ], mir­rors, hands, shad­ows and rain. For me, rain increases the impact in a film [ not the Telegu film rain songs :) ]. In Rashomon, Kuro­sawa [ Neeyu­maadaa ! ] used the heavy rain as a back­drop — He mixed Indian ink in the water used for rain sequences to increase the impact of the rain.  That’s why they are called as mas­ters ! .. not because of using Indian ink but impro­vis­ing the shot.

Psy­cho was bril­liantly edited, inten­sively scored and intri­cately directed. The shower sequence is very famous in this film and so it’s edit­ing [ mul­ti­ple cut shots ]. After North by north­west and Ver­tigo [ costly n color ven­tures ] , he proved that he could make suc­cess with a sim­ple low-budget b/w movie.

Some­times, I split the movie watch­ing into 2 days [ 1 hour per day ]. This may be applic­a­ble for old movies of Woody Allen, court­room dra­mas and a movie which I watch for 2nd time. It’s impos­si­ble for me [ of course any­one ] to stop/pause the films of Hitch­cock. That’s the beauty of his films !

:)

Toto

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