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Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and the Issue of Remakes

On the surface, it might appear that this column is coming about 12 years too late, but after a recent big-screen showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” at New York’s Film Forum, I found my mind wandering back to Gus Van Sant’s ill-conceived 1998 “remake” of the Hitchcock film.

Van Sant’s approach – remaking the Hitchcock film shot-for-shot – is so audacious that it hardly warrants further comment.

It was roundly criticized at the time as a futile effort. Obviously, a near-perfect film like “Psycho” is virtually impossible to improve upon. But that, I think, misses the point of what Van Sant was trying to achieve with his remake.

The actual film is much smarter than that.
Hollywood cranks out enough poorly-conceived, poorly-executed and downright unnecessary remakes each year to keep theaters well supplied with “new” material.

The history of remakes, of course, goes back to the very beginning of the medium. Sigmund Lubin famously ripped off a number of Thomas Edison’s films, such as his 1904 shot-for-shot remake of the groundbreaking 1903 “The Great Train Robbery”. This dynamic of the remake was apparent from the very beginning: what was groundbreaking, fresh and original in 1903 proved to be utterly pointless to remake just a year later.

During the “studio era”, roughly mid-1920s through the late-1940s, studios made a habit of turning out films based on “properties” (usually from literary or theatrical sources) for which they owned the rights. Such staples as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch”, “Seven Keys to Baldpate” and “Charley’s Aunt” were frequently targeted for remakes.

Because the studio already owned the rights to the underlying story, it was a cheap alternative, and could often be depended on to yield good returns if the story was a particularly popular one. It wasn’t even unheard of for directors to remake their own films! Cecil B. DeMille made no fewer than three versions of “The Squaw Man” (in 1914, 1918, and 1931, respectively), and of course his 1923 version of “The Ten Commandments” was remade in 1956 (albeit with the lengthy “modern story” from the silent version cut altogether).


What has changed in the last 20 years or so is that remakes frequently take on the approach of “re-imagining” (a term coined, I believe, by Tim Burton to describe his 2001 remake of “The Planet of the Apes”, though it may have been used earlier) notable films.

Going back to the original source material, be it book, play or what have you, filmmakers are increasingly trying to bring out more “authentic” adaptations than were provided by earlier film versions of classic stories like “Alice in Wonderland”, for instance. Often this amounts to little more than just fashioning the stories for current tastes and sensibilities, which is hardly more “authentic”.

Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of “Psycho” is, then, somewhat unusual in its faithfulness to the cinematic source material.

Instead of going back directly to the Robert Bloch source novel, and doing a more “faithful” adaptation from the literary text, Van Sant instead took the cinematic text created by Hitchcock as his source. And as an adaptation of Hitchcock’s work, it is very nearly 100% faithful. There are two notable deviations that stood out to me when I saw the film in 1998: the first was the unnecessary spelling out of the sexual gratification of the Norman Bates character in the scene where he peeps through a hole in the wall of his motel office into the cabin where Marion Crane undresses. This moment, only implied in Hitchcock’s film, creates a jarring literalness that mars the psychological motivation of the scene, transforming Norman from a psychologically tormented individual into merely a voyeuristic pervert.

The second deviation from Hitchcock’s film came in the moment just before the face of Mrs. Bates is revealed. In the original film, the setting is an old fruit cellar. In the remake, there is a whole aviary of birds in the background, hardly a subtle effect.

Someone once referred to Van Sant’s film as an “experiment” in the sense that it allowed us to see what would happen when a director made a shot-for-shot remake of a film by a director with a distinct style.

It would seem that, if we view the film as an experiment, it would confirm – perhaps quite obviously – that there is just no matching Hitchcock in terms of original, unique and distinctive style. Van Sant, of course, is a distinct and interesting filmmaker in his own right, and is certainly above just creating a copy of another director’s film.

This is what I was getting at when I said his film is much “smarter” than the average remake. Even if the results don’t justify the effort, the idea of remaking a film so closely demonstrates precisely what makes the work of an artist like Hitchcock so unique.

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