When my nieces were small, I took them on a day trip to the Museum of the Moving Image on London's South Bank. We had fun touring a puckishly curated journey through the history of cinema, until my younger niece flushed the toilet in the noir-inflected bathroom — and set off the famous shrieking strings that amp up the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, creating the most terrifying moment in American cinema.
At age 8, my niece had never heard of Hitchcock — or the movie — so she wasn't in on the joke the museum was making at the expense of a director as obsessed with toilets as he was with symbolically whacking uncooperative blondes. But those few bars of Bernard Herrmann's score so freaked the poor child that she tore out of her stall, buried her head in my shoulder and demanded to be taken home at once. Bad Auntie!
As it turns out, attaching that particular musical fragment to that particular blonde murder was not Hitchcock's stroke of genius but that of his wife, Alma Reville, an accomplished script editor and story consultant. In Hitchcock — the second movie this year to make free with the life of a very secretive man (the first was HBO's The Girl) — Helen Mirren's Alma admonishes her husband (Anthony Hopkins) that his arty strategies of subtle suggestion are all well and good, but "you can't scare people just by going 'boo.' "
Where The Girl focused on Hitchcock's notorious abuse of actress Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock uses the couple's herculean struggle to make Psycho as backdrop to a crisis in their fraught but resilient marriage. Based on a book by Stephen Rebello, Hitchcock, directed by Sacha Gervasi (who made the hugely entertaining rock documentary Anvil!), seeks to give Reville her due as a canny wife and talented collaborator.
Hitchcock is billed as a love story, but you'd need a pretty elastic definition of the word to apply it to an apparently chaste and testy union that seemed to work best as a commercial and creative partnership. In a slight variation on her regal crankiness in The Queen, Mirren is all bossy business as Alma, which, according to most biographies, is probably about right. But in the film, at least, there's not much more to her than that.
So it's jarring that screenwriter John McLaughlin lumbers her with an extramarital dalliance that probably never happened, yet which consumes a lot of time and space and detracts from what is meant to be a portrait of a marriage.
As for the man himself, he's a visually distracting tangle of missed opportunities. On a good day, the pop-eyed Hitchcock looked like a giant goldfish staring out of its bowl; on a bad day he looked like a basset hound bereft of its bone. He ought to be a snap to imitate, but Hopkins, buried behind a stately gut and several tons of "makeup effects," looks like some nondescript fat guy doing a passable imitation of Anthony Hopkins.
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Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) had worked in Hollywood for more than a decade before Psycho and its notorious shower scene made her a legend. Her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis made her own horror-genre mark with 1978's Halloween.