Previously in this series in The Classics Shelf:
Part One – Introduction: Anthony Perkins
Part Two – The Fifties: Teen Idol
THE SIXTIES: CONTINENTAL GENTLEMAN
Norman Bates is synonymous with Anthony Perkins. The character cast so large a shadow over his career that he had to move away from Hollywood to try and escape it. He shot Psycho while starring in Greenwillow on Broadway, working with Frank Loesser who, like many of the authoritative men Perkins worked with, hated his homosexuality and even went so far as writing a song to shame him about it. The high notes in “Never Will I Marry,” a song later made famous by Barbra Streisand’s cover, were intended to make Perkins look foolish, but he pulled the number off and received a Tony nomination for it. (The show also led to his eventual friendship with Stephen Sondheim.)
After buying out his own Paramount contract, Perkins began his European decade with Goodbye Again (aka Aimez-Vous Brahms), based on the novel by Francoise Sagan, for which he earned the Best Actor prize at Cannes. Following this were collaborations with Orson Welles, who loved him, Melina Mercouri, who called him “dangerous to women” and “very attractive,” and another jaunt with Sophia Loren, with whom he continued to have no end of fun. By the end of the decade he was moving back and forth between continents, his first Hollywood film after Psycho the 1968 thriller Pretty Poison. On stage, he starred in Sondheim’s Evening Primrose and was announced as the lead in the original production of Company but later bowed out. The closest that Perkins came to shaking of the spectre of Norman Bates was his European period, the character lying in wait to reclaim him as a moneymaking opportunity once he settled into supporting roles in the seventies.
Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960
A scene in Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock shows the master of suspense, played by Anthony Hopkins under heavy, Oscar-nominated latex, lying awake in bed terrified about the prospects of his next project failing. “What if I have another Vertigo on my hands?” he wonders, having sunk a lot of personal effort and money into a risky project that constituted a left turn from the films he was making in the fifties. Today, Vertigo is seen as one of the greatest movies ever made but, at the time, it was received with lukewarm enthusiasm, seen as rather an overdone, and an ornate take on Hitchcock’s usual plots with the addition of some unsavoury themes (particularly necrophilia). North By Northwest was successful but hardly innovative in its narrative, a culmination of elements from The Thirty-Nine Steps and Saboteur at the zenith of his skills as a filmmaker. This new project, Psycho, was territory unknown and the result, a stripped down horror film loosely inspired by the real-life murders of Ed Gein, would change the face of the genre forever. Shot with a television crew to keep costs down, the lack of Hitchcock’s usual plush style is probably more shocking than its content, which today still manages to thrill even though it doesn’t quite have the effect on the desensitized modern viewer as it would have had at the time. (It’s always hard to appreciate a film in retrospect that invented a genre.) Audiences who had never even seen a toilet on screen, let alone a woman being stabbed in the shower, reacted with varying degrees of anxiety to the film’s content but never let that get in the way of it being an extraordinary success, one that would create commonly known terms in pop culture including the name Norman Bates, the idea of remotely located motels, and the noise we make based on Bernard Herrmann’s stripped down music in the shower scene. To watch it now, when its more baroque elements no longer prompt, as was reported at the time, women to miscarry their babies or faint in the aisles, is to try to explain aspects of filmmaking that unseat the viewer so thoroughly. Psycho has a B-movie look using A-level talent, but it also plays with narrative conventions by never allowing you get too comfortable with a protagonist before dispatching them from the screen. We thrill to see naughty Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steal money, with which she hopes to run away with her lover John Gavin, but she’s out of the picture at 49 minutes, after which Bates (Perkins) becomes the star, cleaning up his mother’s nasty mess. Martin Balsam takes over as the nosy detective Arbogast, but when he’s no longer needed, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) becomes our heroine. Each time we switch protagonists, we also become more vulnerable to the possibility that anything could happen and nothing can be predicted. By the time Lila is looking at the slightly ajar basement door while hiding from Norman in his house, we are both terrified of what could happen if she goes through it. We’re also really hoping she will. Perkins became a movie legend with this performance, proven by the fact that by the end of his career he couldn’t get any projects greenlit without returning to it (which he did twice more on the big screen and once more on the small), and revisiting the original film makes it very easy to see why. Hitchcock has a marvellous time playing up the actor’s more delicate qualities, the visual embodiment of what the era would have called a “mamma’s boy” taken to the explicit, hilarious extreme. Norman doesn’t enter the film until 28 minutes in, but he gives us a series of layers to the character as soon as he does. He first transmits boyish charm when he meets Marion. (“Eating in an office is just too…officious!”) However, once he turns dark, he starts talking about mommy dearest, stops bobbing his head, and fixes her with a predator’s gaze. When Arbogast appears, so does Norman’s stutter. The character’s spirit seems to slowly crumble, all the while suggesting a dark family history of we can only imagine the horrific details. It seems ridiculous to even discuss this film as if a film lover hasn’t already seen it, but if you haven’t, then watch it. If you don’t find it scary, you’re missing the point. It’s a necessity either way.
Online Film & Television Association Award: OFTA Film Hall of Fame Character (2021); Bambi Award Nomination: Best Actor-International
Goodbye Again (aka Aimez-Vous Brahms?)
Anatole Litvak, 1961
Ingrid Bergman is divine as a Paris interior decorator who has been dating Yves Montand for five years, the both of them divorcees who are jaded about marriage and have agreed to give each other plenty of room. She insists that she is fine with the coterie of young girls he is constantly getting down with in between their classy dinners, but this determination is put to the test when a scrappy young lawyer (a delightfully spry Perkins, who deservedly took the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his performance) falls madly in love with her and insists on getting into her bed. She develops an affection for the boy, while her inability to ignore the hopelessness of her situation with Montand sees her challenged between what she has and what she wants. More important, what she doesn’t have with Montand is socially acceptable, while staying with Perkins, whose immaturity is sometimes mercurial and other times downright frustrating, means having to face the challenge of public scrutiny and ridicule. (“How old is she?” remarks one uncouth youngster when he sees them at dinner.) It’s a smart and sexy precursor to How Stella Got Her Groove Back, constantly taking place in chic restaurants and swanky nightclubs, lorded over by Litvak’s smooth direction that remains sturdy even when the ending is slightly overdue. Most to its benefit is a screenplay rife with terrific dialogue by Samuel Taylor, overflowing with the kind of acrid romantic sentiment that made Francoise Sagan’s writings so memorable.
Cannes Film Festival Award: Best Actor; David di Donatello Award: Best Foreign Actor (tie); Bambi Award Nomination: Best Actor-International
Five Miles to Midnight
Anatole Litvak, 1962
A promising combination of elements results in little worth cherishing, a beautifully shot but sluggish and forgettable thriller which pairs Perkins up with Sophia Loren for the second time after Desire Under the Elms. They play a married couple whose relationship is crumbling when she tells him that she wants a divorce, just as he is about to board an airplane on a business trip to Casablanca. She reads in the newspaper the next day that his flight crashed and killed everyone on board, then is shocked a few days later to see him arrive at their apartment, a little worse for wear but very much alive. Litvak expects us to buy the preposterous idea that Perkins survived being blown out of the airplane door before crashing and wandered halfway across Europe without being aided or identified, then has him behave in shockingly careless ways as he sets up a scheme to make off with his own life insurance money. Bullying Loren into his plans, Perkins continues his impish and abusive ways with her while making her sign papers and comply with authorities in order to receive the payment that, she hopes, will convince him to leave her forever. There’s a twist referred to by the title that is a fun push in a new direction, but where it goes from there is wholly illogical and only makes what preceded it that much more nonsensical. Loren has gained a great deal more confidence as an English-speaking movie star since their first pairing, but her and Perkins playing a couple is strange, it’s hard to believe that she would be scared of him despite Perkins doing a good job of putting a deceptively charming, lighthearted touch over a different kind of sociopath than the one he was already famous for. A huge disappointment, both critically and financially, at the time, it is mostly undone by its poorly worked out script by Peter Viertel and Hugh Wheeler.
The Trial
Orson Welles, 1962
There’s rarely an Orson Welles project, completed or not, that isn’t outshone by its own production history, but The Trial is in that rare category of his films that do not require context. Its stream-of-consciousness narrative will frustrate some viewers, the film is about something overall and rarely in particular, but its visual power has only grown with time and it’s one of the most beautiful films Welles ever made. Perkins plays Kafka’s hero Josef K, an office worker who is awakened by police in his home, who announce that he is in trouble with the law but don’t specify for what. He goes through a labyrinth of spaces, his office, his neighbour’s homes, an opera house, a church, a courtroom dogged by a sense of guilt that leads to his eventual outcome without concrete accusations ever made against him. The author’s feelings about bureaucracy are famous enough to have inspired a term named after him, so there’s no need to explain the sense of paranoia that Welles taps into in telling this tale. More impressive is that, despite the film’s flaws (including bad overdubbing of everyone’s dialogue and about ten minutes more plot than it needs), it’s a dynamic and bold adaptation of what would on paper seem unfilmable and, certainly, uncommercial. Perkins, at this point gearing up for a post-Psycho career that would exploit the sinister aspects of his twitchy personality, comes across as vibrant and principled, a rare case of him giving a dynamic performance without the need to have that undercurrent of manipulation that would become his stock in trade.
Phaedra
Jules Dassin, 1962
Dassin followed his massively successful Never on Sunday by reteaming with his lady love Melina Mercouri in this update of the play by Sophocles, whose themes were also prevalent in Desire Under the Elms. Mercouri plays the wife to a wealthy Onassis-esque shipping tycoon (Raf Vallone) who asks her to go to London and bring home his wayward son (Perkins) in the hopes of dissuading him from his recently discovered passion for painting. Mercouri does and, in the process, falls madly in love with the young man which, thanks to their constantly consummating a mutual feeling, means that only disaster can follow. The melodramatic touches emphasize the ancient nature of the drama without being at odds with the ultra-modern, chic settings of early sixties Europe, with Mercouri at her most glamorous in gorgeous Dior gowns. The setback is that there is an entire cast of mostly Greek actors speaking awkwardly-accented English, and the film doesn’t have the smooth perfection that Sunday had. Still, it’s a great experience and Perkins was never more attractive.
Une ravissante Idiote
Édouard Molinaro, 1964
Among the films he made in Europe, this is one of the few that Perkins performed entirely in French, which he does particularly well. He’s lost in the madness created by future La Cage Aux Folles director Molinaro, as a recently unemployed bank worker who becomes a spy for the Soviet government, commissioned to steal a sensitive document from a high ranking NATO official. He teams up with a seemingly daffy dressmaker (Brigitte Bardot) but it turns out that the bad luck that follows their attempts to pull off this task is due to his lack of skill, while she turns out to be so much more than meets the eye. There’s a lot of buzzing energy and spirited performances, Perkins gets one of his few chances to thoroughly shatter the Norman Bates energy by pulling off slapstick, Inspector Clouseau-level comedy at every turn, but the whole thing revolves around a hollow premise and the film grows tiresome very early on.
The Fool Killer
Servando González, 1965
Perkins received sole billing before the credits, a rarity in his career, for this shoddily made Mexican production in which he actually has a small role and the real star is Edward Albert in his film debut (son of character actor Eddie Albert, and later the star of films like Butterflies Are Free). Albert is a twelve year-old living with abusive foster parents in the post-Civil War south, who runs away from home and sets out to head “west”, along the way experiencing a picaresque adventure involving a series of curious characters. An encounter with an old coot is followed by being put up in a house in a frontier town, where he befriends a little girl, but hits the road again. He meets a mysterious drifter (Perkins) who hates all mention of religion and takes him to a revival meeting where all hell breaks loose before the brimstone and fire preacher is murdered the next morning (which happens off camera). The boy is then rescued by a childless couple who take to him and provide him a home, but his reuniting with his old drifter friend places him at a crossroads as to how to decide his future. The acting is intelligent but the level of censorship in cinema at this time can’t handle the darker elements of the story properly, and the attempt to capitalize on Perkins’ Norman Bates persona (including the music turning very dark when his title card comes up) feels like a cheap trick. A poorly made film that has been rightfully forgotten.
Is Paris Burning
René Clément, 1966
The sixties saw Hollywood exploiting World War II settings as an opportunity for boisterous and exciting action, leading to a number of violent epics whose historical basis also allowed for claims of prestige. Clement expands on his Battle of the Rails with a bigger budget and longer (overly long, actually) running time, telling the tale of the French Resistance preventing occupying Nazi forces from destroying the city of Paris and, with the perfectly timed arrival of the American army, eventually liberating the French capital at the end of the war. Famous faces pepper the narrative that has no set protagonist, with cameos by the likes of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Leslie Caron, Charles Boyer, Kirk Douglas (as Patton!), Robert Stack, Glenn Ford, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and George Chakiris, but this is no The Longest Day and their presence actually contributes to a feeling that the whole thing is cobbled together at the last minute. Perkins appears at the two hour mark as an American soldier with a handy bazooka and manages more poignancy than the other visitors are given to perform, but for the most part, this is a film with a handful of incredible sequences (that have an almost documentary-like realism to how they are executed) and a lot of unnecessary filler in between. Having Gert Frobe play the German military governor, who delays his superiors’ orders to blow up the City of Lights because he already knows that his side has lost the war, adds a goofy flavour to the proceedings so soon after his having made his mark as one of the greatest Bond villains of all time, but what’s most distracting throughout the whole film is that it’s all in English and all the French actors are distractingly dubbed by poorly-matched English speakers.
The Champagne Murders
Claude Chabrol, 1967
Chabrol has often been referred to as the French Hitchcock, and in his lengthy and celebrated career he made plenty of films to justify the title, in their intentions as thrillers as well as their achieving the same levels of razor-sharp characterizations and plot turns. Then there are instances like The Champagne Murders, a rare English-language film from the auteur, which covers a great deal of Hitchcockian ground, including a Saul Bass-inspired opening sequence and a sleight of hand involving a hidden identity, but which fails to raise the pulse with a dull, convoluted script that kills the pleasures of Jean Rabier’s gorgeous, candy-coloured cinematography. Perkins and his wife Yvonne Furneaux are old-money aristocrats, she’s obsessed with the family’s bottling business and he loves spending their money on his playboy lifestyle, frequently roping his best friend Maurice Ronet into his reindeer games. Ronet is the owner of a fancy champagne label that Furneaux wants to team up with but he refuses, until a turn of events puts him in her pocket: one after another, the women he sleeps with turn up dead and he, waking up from a drunken stupor without remembering what happened, doesn’t know if he killed them or not. Furneaux offers to provide him with an alibi if he’ll make her business dreams come true, which he entertains as a possibility since he cannot find another way out of his conundrum. Perkins’ secondary role seems created solely to justify studio investment, while Chabrol never finds the pulse of any of the action here. Every image is a delight, Stephane Audran (the real-life Mrs. Chabrol) is particularly memorable in a pivotal role, but what critics at the time found “confusing” in the plot is actually a movie that seems determined to never get anywhere with its lengthy conversations and circular plot exposition.
Pretty Poison
Noel Black, 1968
“Well, sure, she’s not queer,” Tuesday Weld says to Perkins when he asks her if her mother has been messing around with a man. It’s a bold line of dialogue considering that, eight years earlier, the censor’s most vehement objection to the content of Hitchcock’s Psycho was the use of the word “transvestite”. This line is not, however, the most shocking turn of this bewitching drama that combines David & Lisa with The Honeymoon Killers to magnificent effect. Perkins plays a recently released parolee who was convicted for an offense in his youth, placed in a small town where he gets a job working for a local lumber mill. He meets a precocious teenager (Weld) and they begin a love affair that infuriates her acerbic, overprotective mother (Beverly Garland, who callously says “It’s YOUR figure!” when her daughter asks for pancakes for breakfast). Perkins’ character is a fantasist who tells Weld that he’s a CIA operative who has gone undercover in their town, which we automatically assume means she has a new version of Norman Bates to deal with and protect herself from. When he enlists her help in getting back at his employers who fired him upon discovery of his past, she good-naturedly goes along with it, further increasing our concern about the grooming narrative happening between a disturbed adult and this seemingly naive minor. Then things take a turn…and the surprises are for you to enjoy. Perkins and Weld, who would later reteam in Play It As It Lays, both give outstanding performances in a gorgeously shot, wholly enveloping film.
Read More
Part One – Introduction: Anthony Perkins
Part Two – The Fifties: Teen Idol
Coming Soon: Part Four – The Seventies: Character Actor
Coming Soon: Part Five – The Last Decade: Reclaiming the Past
