P
Profaine Angel
Guest
A truly beautiful and gracious lady.
I thought this was a nice article, a little different from the rest.
Silver Scream
By Hank Stuever
Oh, Janet Leigh -- what would it take now? (More blood? Color? Actual
slashing? Two guys with knives instead of one guy with a knife? A CGI monster
with a CGI knife?)
We can never go back and undo that first scarring of the collective cultural
consciousness in "Psycho," and that murderous moment in 1960 in the shower with
the beautifully paranoid, on-the-lam, then 32-year-old Janet Leigh. Stabbed to
death in the Bates Motel -- can there be any higher honor? She didn't think
there could be.
Leigh, who died at her Beverly Hills home Sunday at age 77 after a bout with a
vascular disease, saw clearly, in retrospect, that she had been an essential
participant in a distinct and everlasting 45 seconds of film, and so she reveled
in it. She showered and screamed forever.
We don't seem to be able to improve on it, either, though Lord knows Hollywood
has tried: After her came all sorts of shower spigots where the water suddenly
turns to pomegranate-hued blood, or shower stalls with ghosts whose unseen hands
turn the water far too hot. Or the many kinds of madmen who found a way in, just
when the hapless (and amply-boobed) are losing themselves in a soapy, unguarded
remove. Director Gus Van Sant put Anne Heche in the same shower, the same way,
in his 1998 frame-for-frame "Psycho" remake, and big whoop. In the TV spot for
her new horror flick, "The Grudge," Sarah Michelle Gellar is in the shower
prepping herself for a cream rinse when she feels the back of her head, and wha
. . . ? THERE ARE FINGERS COMING OUT OF THE BACK OF HER HEAD.
Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree . . . Ree?
Yeah. Well. You see the problem. It's never the same.
You can have all the ingredients -- the violin abuse, the kitchen cutlery, the
barely opaque shower curtain -- and it just never quite plays the way it did
when "Psycho" was released. (There were legendary, hype-worthy rules about not
admitting latecomers to screenings at theaters.)
Alfred Hitchcock is dead, Anthony Perkins is dead, and now Leigh has died. But
we'll never feel the same about taking a shower again. She made sure that the
rest of us always lock the door to the motel room -- the bolt, the chain, and
then the bolt to the bathroom door, too. Leigh considered this a small but
somehow immeasurable gift to the modern psyche and never turned away from the
horror of having one's entire career summed up in a scream. She seemed to have
never rolled her eyes at the mention of "Psycho," and never dismissed it with
"Oh, that."
"I say 'thank God,' " she told CBS News last year. "How can anyone not be
grateful for that kind of opportunity? I don't mind being bombarded by something
like that. That's what the [movie] business is all about: creating images."
And so we've come to know those 45 seconds of "Psycho" more than the rest of
the movie itself. People are born, it seems, knowing about Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree!
The trivia of it all circles the drain: The seven days it took to shoot it. (She
says she was a prune by the time they finished.) The 70 camera angles. The shock
of initial audiences, who were terrified by the scene but also floored that the
lead actress would make a mortal exit before the movie was barely half over. (On
this technicality, she got the Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting
Actress.)
She also danced up a storm in "Bye-Bye Birdie," even though that movie
popularly belongs to Ann-Margret. She had that weird exchange of non sequiturs
with Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate," even though people still think
more about Angela Lansbury in that one. What she had in the end was "Psycho."
If you were doing a retrospective, or celebrating an anniversary of the movie,
she was available. She swore over and over in repeated interviews that from the
moment she saw herself on the movie screen being murdered in the shower she was
never able to take one again. "It's not a hype, not something I thought would be
good for publicity," she insisted in one interview. "Honest to gosh, it's true."
"I don't take showers," she told another interviewer. "Or, if there is no other
way to bathe, I make sure all the doors and windows in the house are locked, and
I leave the bathroom door and shower curtain open so I have a perfect, clear
view."
So she became a bath woman. (Hollywood has done some pretty terrifying things
there, too, but this didn't involve her.)
She made the shower scene safe for all actresses, and lethal for them, too.
With the right placement of moleskin, it's not even technically a nude scene.
She helped make the shower creepy. So permanent is this moment that almost
anyone's boyfriend or husband now thinks it a laugh riot to scare the daylights
out of us in the shower.
Ree! Ree! Ree!
(That's not funny! I'm serious, David! Jeez! Go a-way. I mean it.)
Lather, rinse, repeat. She took the knife so we didn't have to. The relief of
all those pleasant and psycho-free showers you've ever taken, you owe to Janet
Leigh.
I thought this was a nice article, a little different from the rest.
Silver Scream
By Hank Stuever
Oh, Janet Leigh -- what would it take now? (More blood? Color? Actual
slashing? Two guys with knives instead of one guy with a knife? A CGI monster
with a CGI knife?)
We can never go back and undo that first scarring of the collective cultural
consciousness in "Psycho," and that murderous moment in 1960 in the shower with
the beautifully paranoid, on-the-lam, then 32-year-old Janet Leigh. Stabbed to
death in the Bates Motel -- can there be any higher honor? She didn't think
there could be.
Leigh, who died at her Beverly Hills home Sunday at age 77 after a bout with a
vascular disease, saw clearly, in retrospect, that she had been an essential
participant in a distinct and everlasting 45 seconds of film, and so she reveled
in it. She showered and screamed forever.
We don't seem to be able to improve on it, either, though Lord knows Hollywood
has tried: After her came all sorts of shower spigots where the water suddenly
turns to pomegranate-hued blood, or shower stalls with ghosts whose unseen hands
turn the water far too hot. Or the many kinds of madmen who found a way in, just
when the hapless (and amply-boobed) are losing themselves in a soapy, unguarded
remove. Director Gus Van Sant put Anne Heche in the same shower, the same way,
in his 1998 frame-for-frame "Psycho" remake, and big whoop. In the TV spot for
her new horror flick, "The Grudge," Sarah Michelle Gellar is in the shower
prepping herself for a cream rinse when she feels the back of her head, and wha
. . . ? THERE ARE FINGERS COMING OUT OF THE BACK OF HER HEAD.
Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree . . . Ree?
Yeah. Well. You see the problem. It's never the same.
You can have all the ingredients -- the violin abuse, the kitchen cutlery, the
barely opaque shower curtain -- and it just never quite plays the way it did
when "Psycho" was released. (There were legendary, hype-worthy rules about not
admitting latecomers to screenings at theaters.)
Alfred Hitchcock is dead, Anthony Perkins is dead, and now Leigh has died. But
we'll never feel the same about taking a shower again. She made sure that the
rest of us always lock the door to the motel room -- the bolt, the chain, and
then the bolt to the bathroom door, too. Leigh considered this a small but
somehow immeasurable gift to the modern psyche and never turned away from the
horror of having one's entire career summed up in a scream. She seemed to have
never rolled her eyes at the mention of "Psycho," and never dismissed it with
"Oh, that."
"I say 'thank God,' " she told CBS News last year. "How can anyone not be
grateful for that kind of opportunity? I don't mind being bombarded by something
like that. That's what the [movie] business is all about: creating images."
And so we've come to know those 45 seconds of "Psycho" more than the rest of
the movie itself. People are born, it seems, knowing about Ree! Ree! Ree! Ree!
The trivia of it all circles the drain: The seven days it took to shoot it. (She
says she was a prune by the time they finished.) The 70 camera angles. The shock
of initial audiences, who were terrified by the scene but also floored that the
lead actress would make a mortal exit before the movie was barely half over. (On
this technicality, she got the Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting
Actress.)
She also danced up a storm in "Bye-Bye Birdie," even though that movie
popularly belongs to Ann-Margret. She had that weird exchange of non sequiturs
with Frank Sinatra in "The Manchurian Candidate," even though people still think
more about Angela Lansbury in that one. What she had in the end was "Psycho."
If you were doing a retrospective, or celebrating an anniversary of the movie,
she was available. She swore over and over in repeated interviews that from the
moment she saw herself on the movie screen being murdered in the shower she was
never able to take one again. "It's not a hype, not something I thought would be
good for publicity," she insisted in one interview. "Honest to gosh, it's true."
"I don't take showers," she told another interviewer. "Or, if there is no other
way to bathe, I make sure all the doors and windows in the house are locked, and
I leave the bathroom door and shower curtain open so I have a perfect, clear
view."
So she became a bath woman. (Hollywood has done some pretty terrifying things
there, too, but this didn't involve her.)
She made the shower scene safe for all actresses, and lethal for them, too.
With the right placement of moleskin, it's not even technically a nude scene.
She helped make the shower creepy. So permanent is this moment that almost
anyone's boyfriend or husband now thinks it a laugh riot to scare the daylights
out of us in the shower.
Ree! Ree! Ree!
(That's not funny! I'm serious, David! Jeez! Go a-way. I mean it.)
Lather, rinse, repeat. She took the knife so we didn't have to. The relief of
all those pleasant and psycho-free showers you've ever taken, you owe to Janet
Leigh.
