October 07, 2021

A perfect pairing of sound & vision - Marion's fateful drive in Psycho


Marion Crane has just robbed $40,000 from the real estate office where she works and now she's on the run. A split second decision has changed the course of her future and as she drives west from her life in Arizona towards California all the scenarios play out in her head while Alfred Hitchcock's camera keeps her face centre of frame to allow us to watch her face as she works through every permutation of what's happening back home. Her boss, his client who owned the money, the used car salesman she bought the vehicle she's driving from, the cops questioning him, all their voices overlapping in her head. It's a maelstrom of thought. You're on edge already watching her journey and Hitchcock wants you to stay there and Bernard Herrmann's powerful score is just the ticket.


You want impending doom? You got it. You want a piece of music to put a knot in the pit of your stomach? Well here it is. Swooping, driving, propulsive, lulling and then terrifying. It won't let you relax, it puts you in Marion's shoes, gives you a sense of dread, the feeling that things aren't going to have a happy ending and just like that, just as it ends, so does Marion's  journey. Outside the Bates Motel....

Magnificent. Hitchcock and Hermann worked together many times but nothing else comes close to this.

Previous Pairings

Beetlejuice


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