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Check out this passage from Raymond Durgnat's "A Long Hard Look at PSYCHO"
(BFI, 2002):
"THE SYSTEM'S EYE VERSUS THE NAKED CITY
Surveillance/omniscience, of a shabby, chaotic city, was a 'social realist'
focus. It loomed large in the post-war cycle of 'documentary thrillers',
like The Naked City and Call Northside 777 (both 1948) and it persisted through
TV 'police procedurals' like Dragnet (filmed 1954). Often, it balanced 'liberal
social authority/responsibility' against the unruliness of real life and
criminal subversion of society. These time-place subtitles suggest a great
precision ? yet, their skidding on and off unsettles us.
LOOK IN ANY WINDOW
Another attitude entirely inspires the interest in city windows in another
'social realist' genre: movies about the 'little lives' of 'ordinary people'
(as against glamour and escapism, Hollywood's stock-in-trade). Cameras rove
around windows in a 'populist' cycle c. 1930 (The Crowd, Street Scene, Sous
Les Toits de Paris, 42nd Street). In 1954, Rear Window harks back to it,
as a crippled photographer inspects another 'crosssection'; about this time,
the 'populist' genre makes a little comeback, with, notably, Marty (1955)
and The Wrong Man (Hitchcock, 1957).
For Psycho, Hitchcock sought a 'documentary' quality (in a very loose sense
of the word: critics then spoke of 'semi-documentary', meaning, 'social realistic
fiction with much location work and documentary trimmings').This film's first
third is steeped in 'everyday realism', in the grey details of ordinary life
? unsatisfying love-making, mean-minded point-scoring in a dreary office
. . .. Its protagonists are all 'ordinary people', 'little people' ? a secretary,
a hick-town storekeeper, a passive youth in a moribund motel. They're all
losers, locked in sad lives. To be sure, the stars imbue them with beauty,
charisma, energy and style, which from one angle is escapism. But if other
things are right, these qualities may claim 'poetic licence', as metaphors
for qualities, or potentialities, or 'soul', which 'ordinary people' often
feel they have but can't live out except in their imaginations (or at the
pictures). Much of Psycho pursues Hitchcock's on-and-off interest in 'ordinary
people', in 'little people' ? in people like the cinema audience of those
days as in Blackmail/A Woman Alone (1930), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The
Wrong Man and the first third of Rear Window.
Without claiming Psycho for neo-realism, is Marion's plight-and-flight so
very different from some Rossellini movies with Ingrid Bergman on a spiritual
journey? Or Chabrol's 'poetico-realistic' Les Bonnes Femmes (1960)?"
Best,
Henry
Dr. Henry M. Taylor
Ottostr. 7
8005 Zurich
Switzerland
Phone + 41 1 272 21 61
Mobile + 41 78 639 49 82
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