Flashback, September 1975: Redford Paranoid Thriller ‘Three Days of the Condor’ Opens

Three months after the Rockefeller Commission released its report documenting abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Three Days of the Condor was released 50 years ago this week, further heightening audiences’ fears about a secret government agency run amok.

The movie, which starred Robert Redford, brought in $27 million in box-office revenues on a budget of $20 million, cementing the actor’s status as the premier leading man of the mid-1970s after it had been temporarily disrupted by the underperforming The Great Gatsby.

The film was an adaptation of the James Grady novel Six Days of the Condor. Though there were numerous changes from page to screen (itemized in Allan MacInnis’s 2011 post from the “Alienated in Vancouver” blog), the most significant might have been the time compression indicated by the title.

Peter Yates, who worked with Redford three years before on The Hot Rock, was originally set to direct. But he was replaced by Sydney Pollack, who had collaborated with the star on The Way We Were and would make a total of seven films with him.

Pollack’s “great gift,” Redford said in a Time Magazine interview after his friend’s death in 2008, was “to cover what could have been just sort of crass commercial filmmaking with a whole artistic [approach] that was more abstracted and was more hip and was more offbeat.”

In Pollack’s filmography, the movie resembling this the most might be The Pelican Brief, another slick thriller featuring the biggest box-office star of the time (Tom Cruise) and the requisite love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

Redford’s character, Joe Turner, goes out to pick up lunch for his colleagues at the fictitious American Literary Historical Society (a CIA cover), only to discover upon his return that all his coworkers have been slaughtered. Following a planned attempt to “come in from the cold” that nearly ends with his own assassination, he goes on the run to save his life and ferret out the truth

Reflecting in some manner the film’s plot, the atmosphere on the set was “tense,” according to this recollection by photographer Terry O’Neill, “mainly because the film was very topical, New York City was a bleak place in 1974, the President [Nixon] had just resigned, and the former head of the CIA [Richard Helms] was supposedly on set talking to Robert Redford.” 

That turned out to be the case, as the actor was, with as little fanfare as possible, eliciting from Helms inside tips about his former agency.

Redford’s Turner is supposed to be bookish and slightly naïve as he pores over books in his unsecured office.

But Redford being Redford, he doesn’t look the slightest bit nerdy, an impression enhanced by his stylishly casual apparel: flared denim, a gold and gray wool tie, and a gray tweed herringbone jacket that fostered such a fashion trend that “all menswear guys have tried to copy this jacket,” said French designer Nicolas Gabard, according to Charles Teasdale’s retrospective on the film this month in The Financial Times.

I guess the filmmakers needed something to make it plausible that Faye Dunaway’s Kathy would fall for this stranger who abducts her in his frantic attempt to stay alive—not normal behavior for most women in similar circumstances.

But for all that, the plot was taut and the conspiracy details not especially far-fetched—especially so for 1970s audiences who were learning daily, through the evening news, to distrust whatever the government was telling them. 

Though Dunaway did not experience with Redford or Pollack the animosity she had encountered with Roman Polanski on Chinatown, her role was also hardly as complex or extensive as in that classic neo-noir. Nor was she able to rehearse or emotionally bond much with Redford, who was already busy with pre-production on All the President’s Men.

That adaptation of the Bob Woodward-Carl Bernstein bestseller about how they broke the Watergate story was a real-life version of the “paranoid” or “conspiracy” thriller genre that became so prominent in the Seventies.

Such movies as The Parallax View, The Conversation, Klute, and Winter Kills marked a sharp turn away from nail-biters from a few decades before, when—at least on film—the U.S. government protected its citizens from foreign agents infiltrating the U.S. (Additionally, two Godfather movies and Chinatown evinced cynicism about Law and Order, American style.)

Now, with revelations of Presidential deceit about Watergate and Vietnam—not to mention the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr.—the American government and private companies with access to high-tech equipment and secrets were being depicted as nefarious.

Unlike wartime and later “conspiracy” movies, Three Days of the Condor was neither blithely optimistic nor pessimistic. Its “open” ending about Turner’s fate was, however, deeply disquieting—in effect, leaving it up to the public to defend against attacks on the liberty of institutions as much as on individuals, from whatever quarter.

This Day in Film History (Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ Acclaimed as Masterpiece Upon Re-Release)

Oct. 28, 1983—A quarter century after it underperformed at the box office and three years after the death of Alfred Hitchcock, the director’s moody psychological thriller Vertigo went back out in limited release in the U.S., giving film fans and critics a chance to reevaluate and better appreciate a work that Time Magazine had infamously termed "another Hitchcock-and-bull story."

Vertigo was one of five “missing Hitchcocks” withdrawn by the director from circulation for more than a decade. 

A London Times article in November 1983 offered several reasons for its disappearing act, including that Hitchcock increased the films’ value through their relative scarcity; that his hard-nosed agent had demanded steep prices for their re-release; and that the director and Paramount had faced lawsuits over the years that, in one case, complicated matters further.

Rear Window, re-released a short time before Vertigo’s, at the 1983 New York Film Festival, had been an unexpected financial success, perhaps benefiting in part from nostalgia over the death the year before of its beloved, glamorous co-star, Grace Kelly. Rope (1948) and The Trouble With Harry (1955) represented offbeat departures from Hitchcock’s higher-budget, studio fare. The fifth movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), was a color, big-budget remake of a project Hitchcock first handled before his move to the U.S.

But Vertigo may have benefited the most from the re-release. 

It had only broken even back in 1958, but over the next decade had become something of a cult classic, courtesy of French critics and American film school students about to make waves in the U.S. motion picture industry (perhaps most notably Brian DePalma, whose 1976 Obsession was—take your pick—an homage or a shameless imitation of “The Master of Suspense.”)

In a blog post from earlier this year commemorating the film’s 65^th anniversary, I mentioned that Hitchcock attributed the movie’s disappointing box-office returns to the aging appearance of the 50-year-old James Stewart, who was not an age-appropriate co-star for the 25-year-old Kim Novak.

But it’s doubtful that even a more youthful-looking Cary Grant (whom Hitch would soon cast in the considerably more successful North by Northwest) could have made the story of the acrophobic detective Scottie Ferguson and the “haunted” Madeleine Elster credible. 

So little of this film is realistic at all, including several plot developments. The audience had seen like if anything remotely like this before, including its implied necrophilia and downbeat ending.

Twenty-five years later, American filmgoers had seen far more surreal matter onscreen, as well as far more potentially risqué subject matter. 

Oddy enough, some Hitchcock fans would have been better prepared because of the publication of Donald Spoto’s biography of the director earlier that year, The Dark Side of Genius, to detect a case of art preceding life: in both instances, a lonely middle-aged man (Stewart in Vertigo, Hitchcock offscreen in the making of Marnie)  becoming dangerously obsessed with a cool blonde (on film, Novak; offscreen, Tippi Hedren fending Hitchcock in Marnie).

For a decade, Vertigo even managed to upstage Citizen Kane as #1 on the film magazine Sight and Sound’s list of the greatest films of all time. For ordinary film fans like me, long after its initial mystification has faded, it bears re-watching continually to see and ponder how Hitchcock continued to disturb us all the way to its astonishing conclusion.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Macdonald, on Illogical Thinking in Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’)

“Tippi [Hedren] warns a teacher that crows are massing outside the schoolhouse; their jointly worked-out response to the threat is not to put the kids into the cellar but to march them outside to walk home. To no one’s surprise but Hitchcock’s, the birds come shrieking like Stukas onto the helpless little column.” —American cultural critic and editor Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982), on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, in “Films: Mostly on Bird-Watching,” Esquire, October 1963

Sixty years ago this week, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds premiered in New York City. The above quote is only a sample of Dwight MacDonald’s ironic takedown of this film from the “Master of Suspense.”

A post of mine from nine years ago discussed how Hitchcock radically transformed Daphne DuMaurier’s dark, short tale of isolation and terror in a British cottage into something quite different. But I thought that Macdonald’s quote was not only worthwhile in itself to read, but pointed to the sharp critical divide that quickly developed around the film.

At the time, detractors assailed the film for a variety of reasons: a weak script, awkward acting, sadism, special effects at the expense of logic or motivation. 

Movie fans paid no heed to the naysaying reviewers, making this a financially successful follow-up to Hitchcock’s Psycho from three years before.

Even so, the film continues to split opinion, only this time Hitchcock critics call the director out for using live birds for the avian attic attack on Tippi Hedren—an experience that understandably traumatized the actress. (And that was before even  worse treatment she would suffer at his hands during the making of Marnie, when the director subjected her to sexual harassment.)

The Birds, then, is certainly controversial. Yet I hardly think I am alone in regarding it as mesmerizing and chilling, all the way down to its final, ambiguous—and deeply foreboding—image of a landscape filled with the birds, silent and watching.

Appreciations: Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Markheim,’ on Christmas Crime and Conscience

“As he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise. Poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.” —Scottish fiction writer, poet and essayist Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), “Markheim” (1885), collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887)

Certain filmmakers gravitate towards projects that run perversely counter to the traditional good cheer of Christmas. They don’t offer the kind of well-made crime fiction that Dame P.D. James offered late in her illustrious career in The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories, nor even the ghost stories that Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies offered Massey College students each Christmas (later collected in High Spirits). Nor do these dark cinematic visions turn towards redemption, as with A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life.

No, these films—“thrillers” or “horror films” would be putting it mildly—have something infinitely more gruesome in mind. You can tell by even by their titles: Violent Night; Silent Night, Deadly Night; Christmas Evil; The Gingerdead Man; and—God help us!— 13 Slays Until X-Mas.

Robert Louis Stevenson (in the image accompanying this post, a painting by John Singer Sargent) might be regarded as the literary ancestor of this species of renegade auteur. While he rejected the strict Calvinism and even Christian faith of his parents, their pessimistic outlook on the sin-touched nature of mankind left its mark in such macabre masterpieces by their son as “Thrawn Janet,” “The Body Snatcher,” and, of course, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the lesser-known “Markheim” is a study in dualism featuring a character riven by internal conflict and ultimately driven to violence. But, while respectable Henry Jekyll finds his evil doppelganger with a concoction from his chemistry lab, Markheim faces what may be a considerably more sinister force from the outside.

The voice heard in the first paragraph is not Markheim, however, but a curio dealer’s, heavy with dark insinuation:

"Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he continued, "I profit by my virtue."

That “virtue,” it immediately becomes apparent, consists not of benevolence, but candor about his sharp practices—and a lifetime of insight about what could lead certain customers to his door on this of all days:

"You come to me on Christmas Day," he resumed, "when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it."

Markheim, who has little to show for his investments in the stock market, counters that he’s seeking “a Christmas present for a lady” and intimates that “a rich marriage” may depend on the right gift. 

But the state of mind of this unexpected customer is already murky: while he’s brought a dagger with him, it is only after being unsettled by his reflection in a mirror offered by the dealer (a "hand-conscience") that Markheim kills him and begins to look for valuables he can rob from the shop.

Peter Straub, in the Library of America anthology American Fantastic Tales, referred to a dominant theme of the horror genre: “the surrender or collapse of the individual will.” Once Markheim takes the irreversible step of not merely robbing the dealer but murdering him, Stevenson takes the reader on a journey through the “individual will” of this killer that encompasses regret, panic, paranoia, and the workings of the individual conscience.

First, Markheim must come to grips with the material fact of the corpse. At first, what remains of the dealer is a rapid reduction of what the robber-murderer confronted just a few minutes before: “both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing.”

“Sawdust” is an echo of the familiar Biblical warning, “To dust you shall return.” But Markheim’s own actions are involved with this particular state: sawdust is produced by cutting, and cutting the dealer to death has produced Markheim’s current predicament.

But ultimately, the conflict in the story will turn on the question of what a human life consists of. And immediately after Markheim can only acknowledge the crumpled mass before him, far more comes to mind: “And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices.”

Fear of discovery mingles with nostalgia for the season, as he imagines those in nearby homes “sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger--every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.”

The physical world outside seems to conspire against the killer, as the tolling of the clock outside leads Markheim to long “to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God.”

The decisive turn in the story comes with a mysterious visitor to the shop. Perception and identity themselves now become fluid:

“The outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.”

The visitor, who insists that he knows Markheim “to the soul” and offers the kind of wheedling moral reasoning associated with Satan, warns that the dealer’s servant is returning early to the shop and that she, too, must be murdered to assure his escape.

When Markheim flinches from this alternative, the visitor delivers a devastating summary of his moral deterioration:

“For six and thirty years that you have been in this world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil? Five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you."

But Markheim will go no further on his path toward evil: “If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down…. I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage."

The visitor’s features change yet again, softening “with a tender triumph”—suggesting that he is not a demon but maybe a guardian angel. With that, Markheim tells the incoming servant to call the police, as he has killed her master.

At the time he wrote this tale, Stevenson was close in age to his protagonist. Though never driven to the moral extremities of his murderer, he must have recalled his own spiritual upbringing with residual regret as he evokes Markheim, on this physically and morally cold day, imagining “the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.”

Stevenson recognizes that evil does not cease to exist, even on one of the holiest days of the year. But neither do the operations of the conscience.

Christmas, as Charles Dickens demonstrates in “A Christmas Carol,” remains a time of year filled with regrets over bad choices and resulting loss and loneliness. “Markheim” operates on the same premise, but shows that some acts are too awful not to leave at least some damage. The best that can be hoped for, then, is a refusal to follow the nihilistic path that beckons.

It is that wintry recognition that has probably limited the number of times that “Markheim” has been dramatized, even though it is as powerfully atmospheric as any Stevenson tale. 

In 1953 Sir Laurence Olivier recorded it for the NBC Radio Anthology Series “Theatre Royal,” and three years later Fred Zinnemann presented it as a half-hour “Screen Director Showcase” 1956 episode starring Ray Milland as Markheim, Rod Steiger as the Visitor, and Jay Novello as the Dealer. (In the UK, it was remade in 1974, with Derek Jacobi as Markheim.)

More unusually, the American composer Carlisle Floyd adapted the story into a one-act opera in 1966. However, while regional opera troupes have occasionally mounted well-received revivals, more high-profile companies have not attempted to do so. They probably understand all too well that this gothic thriller is hardly warm, fuzzy holiday fare for conservative audiences.

Quote of the Day (Jordan Peele, on the ‘Jump Scare’ vs. ‘Slow-Building, Unnerving’ Terror)

“At one end of the spectrum, there’s the jump scare, and at the other end, there's slow-building, unnerving anticipation—the terror. For my money, terror is the best type of scare, because it’s the promise of horror to come. When the audience is in that state, you don’t have to do much. Their imagination is more powerful than any piece of imagery or any timing or misdirection you could do.”— African-American screenwriter-director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), quoted in Jonah Weiner, “The New Master of Suspense,” WSJ. Magazine, March 2019 (registration required for viewing)

(The image accompanying this post comes from Peele’s Get Out, with perhaps the most famous scene from that 2017 thriller: Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris as he descends into the “Sunken Place.” During these weeks leading up to Halloween, it’s well worth seeing how this Oscar-winning screenplay—with nods towards The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby—anticipated America’s unfolding real-life racial nightmare.)

Flashback, June 1960: Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ Sets New Template for Thriller Genre

Sixty years ago this week, Psycho shocked audiences in every conceivable way upon its release. Given a minimal budget by a leery Paramount Pictures, it became the most successful film in the five-decade career of Alfred Hitchcock. 

Although it did not earn “The Master of Suspense” a Best Director Oscar, the film influenced later generations of filmmakers more than the other nominees in this category, who included Jules Dassin (Never on Sunday), Jack Cardiff (Sons and Lovers), Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners), and even Billy Wilder (The Apartment). 

Hitchcock created a template for aspiring filmmakers eager to prove that a low-budget movie could be as entertaining yet artful as what the director called “glossy Technicolor baubles,” including sand-and-sandal epics of the period, such as another film released that year, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus.

To one extent or another, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Brian de Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) followed in the type of horror/suspense film that Hitchcock mined so successfully: the “slasher” genre. 

But some of these later movies would not get much beyond slavish imitation, while others descended into levels of gore that Hitchcock would never have contemplated. (Remember that the body count for Psycho is only four, and two of these killings—involving Norman’s mother and her lover—occur offscreen and in the past.)

 The following conventions of the slasher film assumed their later shape as a result of Psycho:

*A human monster, preferably one in disguise. The killer perpetrates the most horrendous, goriest crimes. While his identity will become known by the end of the film, he will appear with his face covered or otherwise obscured—the better to leave his victim (and the audience) unsure of his identity.

*Punishment of premarital or extramarital sex. As a residual element of Hitchcock’s Roman Catholic upbringing, he saw the need to make Marion pay, with her life, for her adultery with Sam Loomis. Later filmmakers working in this genre noted the primary audience for these films—adolescents—and made their victims hot-blooded teenagers.

* “The last girl.” This figure in the slasher genre is the survivor—the “scream queen” who manages to outsmart the murderer and bring him to justice or, better yet, kill him. (The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.) In Psycho, it was Marion’s sister Lila, who discovers the corpse of Norman’s mother. The quintessential “last girl” of the genre may be Laurie Strode, played by Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, in Halloween. (For an interesting but arguable ranking of the top "last girls," see this post from three months ago, on the blog "But Why Tho?", by Kate Sanchez.)

Why were contemporary audiences so shocked by Psycho? Several factors proved especially important:

*The virtually unprecedented death of the top-billed star so early in a film. Thirty minutes into the movie, Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, is killed off. One can only imagine the reaction of Paramount execs at this prospect: Can’t you keep her around for a while? But the reaction of audiences, not the studio, was what was really key here. They had expected a story of an adulterous thief and her success or failure in evading the law. Now, the narrative had switched to a timid but weird motel caretaker with mother issues. After this, filmgoers may have thought, anything was possible.

*The violation of a private, clean space. Bates Motel may have seemed creepy (12 rooms—and 12 vacancies, as Norman weakly smiles), but the shower in Marion’s room was a space of a different sort. The water coming down might have signified not just a physical cleansing, but a spiritual rebirth. (Indeed, she has flushed the $40,000 she stole from her company down the toilet, indicating that she will try to change the direction of her life from here on out.) But a peeping tom will violate her privacy—then, shortly after the glinting of a knife, her body. Critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich would remember: “Psycho is the moment in movies when for the first time movies weren't safe. I remember coming out of the screening and feeling I’d been raped or something, or mugged, it was absolutely terrifying. No one recovered from that shower scene.”

*Anthony Perkins’ boy-next-door appearance. Hitchcock didn’t change much in adapting Robert Bloch’s novel, but the alterations that were made were crucial. Turning Marion’s (or, in the novel, Mary’s) murder from a short beheading to a protracted shower-stabbing resulted in one of the most deconstructed scenes in film history. But the other change from the book was just as important. Norman in the novel is immediately off-putting: short, overweight, middle-aged, and unpleasant. No woman in her right mind would want to engage him in conversation. But casting Anthony Perkins—tall, young, good-looking—allowed Hitchcock to surmount that difficulty, with a character that, on first appearance, would be viewed as sensitive rather than sinister.

*The dissonant score. The nine-score, decade-long association between Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann ended abruptly five years after Psycho, when the stubborn composer clashed with the control-freak director over Torn Curtain. But in the case of Psycho, Hitchcock had enough sense to cancel his idea of a silent shower scene once he heard how Herrmann’s shrieking strings-only score magnified the suspense. Herrmann had conceived of an elegant aural counterpart to Hitchcock’s deceptively simple visual look: “a black-and-white score for a black-and-white movie.” According to Peter Ackroyd’s 2015 biography, Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life, the director not only doubled Herrmann’s fee but was quoted as saying, “thirty-three percent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music.”

*Shrewd pre-show audience manipulation. Hitchcock did everything he could to assure that audiences would be completely unprepared for what would occur, including: 1) reportedly instructing long-time assistant Peggy Robertson to buy up copies of the book to preserve the novel’s surprises; 2) referring to the project as "Production 9401" or "Wimpy"; 3) before production even started, securing the agreement of the entire cast and crew not to divulge any details of the story; and 4) in a brilliant stroke of marketing, telling theater owners not to admit anyone once the film had started.

Images were what obsessed Hitchcock, which explains both why he took so long to film the central shower scene (a week) and how he used 78 pieces of film in 45 seconds of screen time to imply a knife penetrating a nude body. But the contribution of his collaborator, screenwriter Joseph Stefano, should not be forgotten. 

Although Hitchcock used his usual method of intensely discussing beforehand his concept of the project with the screenwriter, he left it to Stefano to come up with motivation and nuance while the director concentrated on set pieces like the two onscreen murders. Three aspects of Stefano’s screenplay strike me as particularly worthy of comment:

*The interrogation of Norman by private investigator Milton Arbogast. First-time viewers of the film will pick up on the growing suspicions of the detective. Once he catches Norman in a lie, the tension ratchets up, as the viewers tries to figure where this is leading. Those watching the movie on subsequent viewings will watch aghast as even this enormously shrewd detective doesn’t grasp the jeopardy in which he has placed himself. (A writer at AlfredHitch Blog shares my affection for this scene.)

*The bird motif: Norman’s hobby—taxidermy—is referred to both explicitly and obliquely. Marion’s surname is that of a bird; at dinner, Norman tells her that she eats like a bird; a bird picture hangs on the wall; and the license plate on Marion’s call reads, “NFB 418.” The latter initials stand for “Norman Francis Bates,” with “Francis” referring to St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of birds.

*Mirrors: Normally, mirrors in film may symbolize schizophrenia or a fractured sense of self-worth. But in Psycho, the one figure who never appears in a reflection is Norman. This becomes a subtle way of making the viewer share the perspective and even consciousness of the killer.

Quote of the Day (Gillian Flynn, on Great Thrillers)

“Old-fashioned suspense is more engaging than immediate violence. A great thriller to me is more about creating a sense of unease, a queasiness that comes with knowing something is not quite right. It’s why I love unreliable narrators — there’s something so wonderfully unnerving about realizing midway through a book that you’ve put yourself in the hands of someone who is not to be trusted.”—Gone Girl novelist Gillian Flynn, on what makes a great thriller, in “By the Book” interview, The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2014

Movie Quote of the Day (Cary Grant, Summing Up His Importance)

"I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me."—Kidnapped ad executive Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), in North by Northwest, screenplay by Ernest Lehman, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1959)