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The title is a technical term: 78 camera setups and 52 cuts, the extraordinarily labour-intensive work that went into the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1960 shocker Psycho, a sequence which took fully seven days of a 30-day schedule.
Alexandre O Philippe’s documentary is a tribute to this extraordinary moment in film history: electrifying, audacious, a smash-and-grab raid on on territory previously considered impossible or unacceptable. Philippe assembles a mighty chorus of directors and cinephile heavy-hitters such as Walter Murch, David Thomson, Sam Raimi, Eli Roth, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis and Guillermo del Toro to rave enthusiastically about this scene – where it came from, how it was put together, and where it took cinema from then on (though disappointingly this lineup doesn’t include Gus Van Sant, the film-maker who has engaged with the scene more intensely than anyone, having directed a shot-for-shot remake in 1998).
Perhaps this is (tacitly) considered a kind of desecration or hubris, which means that Van Sant’s own opinion is now ruled out of court. Perhaps there should have been more space for noting that if this was a failure, it was an honourable failure, particularly in respect of the creative theme variations Van Sant introduced, such as restoring the “forbidden” shot from the original shower scene storyboard, the moment where Marion Crane’s body is shown slumped, with stab-wounds and buttocks visible.
There are some interesting insights here – and a fair bit of redundant and derivative waffle; it’s a much-discussed subject and this documentary doesn’t have the originality of Kent Jones’s Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015), about the great encounter of these two directors, or Johan Grimonprez’s fantastical Double Take (2010), using clips from Hitchcock’s TV show to imagine a Borgesian encounter between young Hitchcock and old Hitchcock.
78/52 has a fair few pointless shots of guys sitting watching the shower scene on TV and saying not much more than “Wow!” and “Whoah!” Which of course is fine – although there’s a kind of self-policing in this discussion, and an obvious need not to seem so uncool or unsophisticated as to appear to be criticising the scene in any way, that prevents people talking about the dark streak of misogyny which, like it or not, partly fuelled the diabolical brilliance of this scene. There’s a lot of contextualisation in this documentary, but no one talks about Tippi Hedren’s experience some years later of being abused and menaced by Hitchcock in real life. It’s quite relevant to any discussion of what was going on in the director’s head when he shot the shower scene with Janet Leigh.
But there is some engaging material, and I particularly enjoyed Del Toro’s description of the shower scene as the “perfect stainless-steel trap” and there are some very witty and aposite clips of previous Hitchcock movies, from The Lodger to Rear Window, to suggest that everything in his work had been leading up to the Bates Motel shower scene as a crowning masterpiece: all the sense of transgression, vulnerability, anxiety, denial, fear, arbitrary extinction.
The documentary puts Psycho at the very tipping point of US history, a spasm of fear after the certainties and complacencies of the 1950s and postwar prosperity – but before the Kennedy assassination, civil rights and Vietnam. Bogdanovich talks interestingly about billing in the 1920s and 30s: how women were routinely above the title before the second world war, but male stars progressively muscled them out of the way, and how the murder of Marion Crane in its way set the seal on this tendency. Sam Raimi has some funny and interesting things to say about “the American cut” popularised by Hitchcock – the practice of cutting from a wide shot to a closeup. Raimi says that if you don’t do with the master’s own flair it looks more like a “Canadian cut”.
The film notes that the shower scene perhaps didn’t take US cinema forwards but backwards, to a pre-Hays Code era when movies were in an exciting, experimental infancy with a pioneer ethos: anything goes and anything’s possible. There are some intriguing comparisons with Eisenstein, that master of editing, who had a proto-Hitchcockian predisposition for violence and chaos and pure provocation. This documentary is as good an excuse as any to return – again – to Psycho.
