Try that with "Psycho," especially if you are looking for photos of Janet Leigh as Marion Crane. I've discussed the idea that I like to find more obscure still shots from films to use to illustrate these posts. We don't have today's standards without films like this one. And it works, if by today's standards it seems a little tame. Oh, and for good measure, our protagonist for the first portion of the film is killed a third of the way into the story. We are also shown a mummified female body, in one of the more shocking moments (and perhaps the more famous scream of those in this picture) in film. We are also shown a graphic killing (or two) with a chef's knife. Later, we are shown, for the first time in film, the inside of a flushing toilet. Showing the sexuality of a young woman in this way was highly uncommon, and showing her in the bed that she had just used.well. The authority of the film "code" was starting to slip away, and "Psycho" was one of the first films to really exploit the new freedoms. This was shocking material all by itself at the time. The woman is dressed in a white bra and a slip, and the man is shirtless, and decidedly sexy/sexual.
When the shot resolves itself, we are escorted into a hotel room, where a couple, in post coital splendor, ON THE SAME BED, discusses the merits of meeting in a seedy hotel, and whether or not they should.GET MARRIED. Except there is NO reference to any Christmas stuff at all. on a Friday afternoon, two weeks before Christmas. It opens with a long establishing shot of Phoenix, Arizona, letting us know that it is 2:43 p.m. So what is it about this film that makes it so great? Let's start with talking about all the conventions it defied. The balance of the film is spent on the search for what happened to her, by her sister Lila, Sam, and a private investigator named Arbogast. She is then brutally murdered in the shower, stabbed to death with an enormous knife by a shadowy figure. She hears Norman arguing with his mother, then, following a conversation with the surprisingly innocent/naive guy, she decides that she is going to return the money she stole. Along the way, she stops at an out of the way empty motel, run by a very odd young man named Norman Bates. Given the opportunity to deposit $40,000 of a really obnoxious customer's cash in the bank for her employer, she steals the money and heads off to use the money to start a life with Sam, her man. Marion Crane, a woman who has the temerity to sleep with a man before she's married, is in a relationship with a man who can't marry her because of his debts. I'm probably not giving away anything by talking about the story. In lieu of his standard $250,000 salary, Hitch took a 60% share in "Psycho." He netted $15 Million from the film, or approximately $150M in today's money. Having grown dissatisfied with the splashy films he'd been making, replete with major stars, Hitchcock wanted to make a small film, in black and white, to show that a highly profitable film could be made that was eat. Directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, on a shoestring budget, and with a crew of technicians more familiar with television than film, "Psycho" is the kind of "anti-film" that becomes everything film should be. I got to watch one of the greatest pieces of work in the art form known as film last night. I'll get to a bit about the scene later, but I'm setting a scene here about what I'm facing while trying to discuss this film.
You can access MANY MANY pages of frame by frame analysis of the shower scene. At the top of the page of results is another tab which takes you to a whole other wing of Google - entitled "Frame by frame." Yup. Don't believe me? Try looking up "psycho shower scene" under Google Images. The shower scene has been studied, and re-studied, and studied some more. This film contains what is unarguably one of the single most famous sequences in film history.
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