Review: Watching live TV on the go, for free
“Shower Power”
Image by brizzle born and bred
VERSATILE Hollywood actress Janet Leigh, who died 2004 aged 77, made more than 50 films in a movie career which spanned 53 years.
But she will be forever remembered for a single 48-second shower scene which, in 1960, shocked the nation’s moviegoers to the core.
It’s even been voted the most famous movie death scene of all time.
"Wherever I go," she used to say, "it’s all anyone wants to talk about."
It was, of course, the brutal moment when, playing the part of embezzling young secretary-on-the-run Marion Crane, she was stabbed to death in the creepy Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho.
Cinema audiences at the time were transfixed by Leigh’s realistic screams and went home to have nightmares about the blood swirling down the plughole.
(We learned later that Hitchcock had actually used chocolate sauce)
The sound effect used during the stabbing scene was actually the sound of a knife stabbing a melon.
Among the actresses considered to play Marion Crane were: Martha Hyer, Hope Lange, Lana Turner, Shirley Jones and Piper Laurie (who wonderfully portrayed the religious fanatic, Margaret White in Carrie [1976). Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother) ultimately landed the role.
Alfred Hitchcock received a letter from an angry father whose daughter refused to take a shower after viewing the movie. Hitchcock simply replied, "Send her to the dry cleaners."
In the "Peeping Tom" scene Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) removes a painting from the wall to watch Marion undress. The painting is called "The Lock" by Jean-Honore Fragonard and illustrates a man about to rape a woman.
If the scene left its mark on audiences, it also left its mark on Janet Leigh.
She was to say later in her autobiography: There really was a Hollywood: "When I saw it (the scene) condensed and edited in a way that only Hitchcock could do it, it was so frightening, it made me realise that it’s an extremely vulnerable position we’re in while in a shower. I couldn’t get back in a shower after that. I just thought it was stupid to put yourself in that position."
Many female movie-goers felt the same way, giving up showers in favour of baths.
She admitted that when she saw the final edited version of Psycho it "scared the hell" out of her.
"Making it and seeing it are two different things. That staccato music and the knife flashing. You’d swear it’s going into the body"
Tales circulated for years that Hitchcock turned off the hot water at the moment the actress was attacked by maniac motel owner Norman Bates to make her look more shocked. Not so, she said.
"I was in that shower for seven whole days. At least he made sure that the water was warm."
Such was Hitchcock’s mastery that the actress is never actually seen naked on screen – but neither was she nude during filming. What we DO see is a snatched glimpse of her naked silhouette through the shower curtain.
She apparently protected her modesty from the crew with well placed strips of flesh-coloured moleskin. But the end result was so realistic that the censors asked Hitchcock to cut the nudity from the film.
He agreed, but then did nothing to his already edited version. When he presented it to them a few days later, still untouched, they passed it.
Leigh was only in the film for the first 40 minutes and – failing to ask what her fee would be before filming started – got a paltry £15,000 from Hitchcock.
But the brilliant British-born director had made the film on a TV budget. It cost him just half a million to make but grossed £10 million at the box office.
Movie-goers were shocked to find that the gruesome story about a cross-dressing man who murders his mother actually had a basis in real life.
Ed Gein, an American psychopath, had murdered and mutilated women and then walked about in their skins.
During filming Hitchcock would tease Leigh by introducing her to the various mummified skeletons that his special effects department were trying out for the role of Mrs Bates, the killer’s dead mother, whose corpse he keeps in a rocking chair.
When she was out at lunch, the story goes, the director – who once said the film was "about fun" – would prop one of these scary skeletons up in her dressing room chair. The film crew thought it was a great laugh. We don’t know – but can probably guess – what Leigh’s reaction was.
2010 Ever watched a DVD copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in your home theater and wondered how it would feel like if you could be surrounded by those immortal, screeching violins while Janet Leigh’s scream blared through your glorious center channel?
Now, your dreams can come true.
To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the film, Universal Studios is releasing will be releasing a high-def Blu-Ray of Psycho, which will feature a 5.1 surround sound mix for the first time ever.
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