Psychos.
Created by Steven Soderbergh. Available on line at his website extension765.com. 86 mins.
Though the great Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly resigned of his own accord at the end of the 73/74 season, the following season he would regularly wander along to the training ground to see what was going on. He missed the day to day involvement and eventually he had to be politely requested to stay away because his presence was seen as disruptive for the succeeding manager. Steven Soderbergh’s retirement from film directing has been equally faltering. After his last film Side Effects, there was another last film, the made for TV Behind The Chandelier and now on his website he has put out a remix of the two Psychos, Hitchcock’s and Gus Van Sant’s scene for scene remake, a new version intercutting scenes from each version with effectively each character being played by two different actors. An interesting idea I thought, except Soderbergh’s effort is such a botch you wondering if he’ll be asked to refrain from interfering in the future.
Certainly Hitchcock’s classic has been much bothered already. There was Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho before Gus Van Sant’s decided in 1997 to make a shot for shot remake. Though widely and passionately reviled, it was a fascinating and rather disturbing endeavour: it was technically immaculate and had a great cast yet it absolutely didn’t work, it made no sense at all. Like a police re-enactment of a crime, it was the same events but shorn of any emotion or passion.
Van Sant’s remake had three things going for it: the great cast, being in colour and the almost subliminal frames, inserted into the murder scenes that seemed to represent the characters’ dying thought. The cast are still there but the other two are gone with Soderbergh having rendered it all in black and white. So all you have is a Psycho that flips back and forth between the two and the chance to compare and contrast the different performers. Even Soderbergh appears to have bored of the exercise, abruptly cutting out 20 minutes from the second half sequence towards the end.
There was a time when I’d have said the perfect mashup of the two films would have been the Van Sant one with a colourised Tony Perkins replacing Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. Vaughn comes out of this quite well though. Seen in contrast with Perkins, his comes across as quite an acceptable, if still inferior, take on the character. I wonder if the fierce resistance from audiences was as least partly down to the radically different body shapes – while the whippet thin Perkins seems like a shy repressed kid, the chunky Vaughn is like some menacing baby, or a cocky playground bully. If we are counting up the winners and losers I’d say Julianne Moore and Viggo Mortensen win over Vera Miles and John Gavin while Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam beat Anne Heche and William H Macy. Soderbergh’s editing choices and scene selection seem entirely random and often wrong. Why do we get nothing of Robert Forster and Philip Baker Hall?
The piece works as best as a contrast between acting styles. The turn-up, say-your-lines style of Hitchcock’s cast suits his way of making it a fatalistic puppet show with every character locked into their fate. The naturalistic approach of the Van Sant troupe, with their emotions that bit closer to the surface, makes it all seem like random chance.
Created by Steven Soderbergh. Available on line at his website extension765.com. 86 mins.
Though the great Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly resigned of his own accord at the end of the 73/74 season, the following season he would regularly wander along to the training ground to see what was going on. He missed the day to day involvement and eventually he had to be politely requested to stay away because his presence was seen as disruptive for the succeeding manager. Steven Soderbergh’s retirement from film directing has been equally faltering. After his last film Side Effects, there was another last film, the made for TV Behind The Chandelier and now on his website he has put out a remix of the two Psychos, Hitchcock’s and Gus Van Sant’s scene for scene remake, a new version intercutting scenes from each version with effectively each character being played by two different actors. An interesting idea I thought, except Soderbergh’s effort is such a botch you wondering if he’ll be asked to refrain from interfering in the future.
Certainly Hitchcock’s classic has been much bothered already. There was Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho before Gus Van Sant’s decided in 1997 to make a shot for shot remake. Though widely and passionately reviled, it was a fascinating and rather disturbing endeavour: it was technically immaculate and had a great cast yet it absolutely didn’t work, it made no sense at all. Like a police re-enactment of a crime, it was the same events but shorn of any emotion or passion.
Van Sant’s remake had three things going for it: the great cast, being in colour and the almost subliminal frames, inserted into the murder scenes that seemed to represent the characters’ dying thought. The cast are still there but the other two are gone with Soderbergh having rendered it all in black and white. So all you have is a Psycho that flips back and forth between the two and the chance to compare and contrast the different performers. Even Soderbergh appears to have bored of the exercise, abruptly cutting out 20 minutes from the second half sequence towards the end.
There was a time when I’d have said the perfect mashup of the two films would have been the Van Sant one with a colourised Tony Perkins replacing Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. Vaughn comes out of this quite well though. Seen in contrast with Perkins, his comes across as quite an acceptable, if still inferior, take on the character. I wonder if the fierce resistance from audiences was as least partly down to the radically different body shapes – while the whippet thin Perkins seems like a shy repressed kid, the chunky Vaughn is like some menacing baby, or a cocky playground bully. If we are counting up the winners and losers I’d say Julianne Moore and Viggo Mortensen win over Vera Miles and John Gavin while Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam beat Anne Heche and William H Macy. Soderbergh’s editing choices and scene selection seem entirely random and often wrong. Why do we get nothing of Robert Forster and Philip Baker Hall?
The piece works as best as a contrast between acting styles. The turn-up, say-your-lines style of Hitchcock’s cast suits his way of making it a fatalistic puppet show with every character locked into their fate. The naturalistic approach of the Van Sant troupe, with their emotions that bit closer to the surface, makes it all seem like random chance.
