Butler's Cinema Scene

“78 / 52”  My rating: B+

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

The shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” required 78 camera setups and 52 individual cuts.

The upshot: The most famous movie sequence ever, equalling and ultimately surpassing the “Odessa steps” montage in the silent classic “Battleship Potemkin.”

Now we have “78 / 52,” a nerdgasm posing as a feature-length documentary about that four-minute shower scene. It’s like a master class in geek cinema obsessiveness.

It’s also pretty great.

Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, “78 / 52” brings together dozens of film types — directors (Guillermo del Toro, Peter Bogdonovich), composers (Danny Elfman) writers (Stephen Rubello, Bret Easton Ellis), film editors, sound artists (Walter Murch), actors (Elijah Wood, Jamie Lee Curtis) — and other “Pyscho” fanatics who analyze Hitchcock’s creepy masterpiece from every artistic, commercial, historic and social angle imaginable.

Philippe even tracked down Marli Refro, the 21-year-old model who spent days nude in the shower as star Janet Leigh’s body double.

Older interviewees remember the shock of first seeing “Psycho” in 1960 and being blown away  by Hitch’s decision to kill off his heroine early in the film.

Bogdonovich,  then  a movie reviewer, described the film as the first time in mass audience Hollywood cinema that it wasn’t safe to be in a movie theater.  He says he felt felt raped, shocked that Hitchcock had broke the covenant between filmmaker and audience.

American moviegoers were accustomed to entertainments that ended on an upbeat note. “Psycho’s” vision was of the randomness of life. It offered no explanation, suggested no security in the modern age. This could happen to anyone.

Many of the talking heads examine how “Psycho” may have predicted — and perhaps contributed to — the rise of political violence in the 1960s.

“Saw” screenwriter Leigh Whannell claims “Psycho” was “the first expression of the female body under assault.” (It was also the first time a toilet was seen in a Hollywood film.)

Ellis, the author of American Psycho, claims that the film made murder “an acceptable part of American entertainment.”

“78 / 52” is crawling with behind-the-scenes dirt. For example, Hitchcock felt the shower scene was so important that he planned and shot it independent of the rest of the film.

To capture the swish/thunk of a blade entering a human body, the sound designer recorded a butcher knife being plunged into two dozen different varieties of melon. The casaba was deemed to produce just the right effect of dense flesh being skewered.

Saul Bass, master of animated credit sequences, did story boards for the killing.

When Norman removes a framed picture to reveal his peephole into his victim’s bathroom, the print he takes down is of Susannah and the Elders, a depiction of a young woman bathing and being observed by older men.  That theme of  voyeurism ran throughout Hitchcock’s films.

And we’re even treated to a montage of shower scenes from early Hitchcock films dating back to the silent era. “Psycho” appears to have been the culmination of  a long obsession.

You don’t have to be a Hitchcock fanatic to appreciate “78 / 52,” but if you are it’s like 90 minutes of transcendental bliss.

| Robert W. Butler