78/52 movie review & film summary (2017)

That thought may well cross the minds of viewers of “78/52,” which, in providing a detailed analysis of the shower scene in Hitchcock’s horror milestone, makes a persuasive case for “Psycho” as the film that jump-started modern cinema, not just in its startling fusion of sex and violence (which anticipated much about the ‘60s, off-screen as well as on) but also in a revolutionary use of film technique that would galvanize audiences and inspire filmmakers for decades to come.

While Alexandre O. Philippe’s film is essentially a big geek-out for cine-obsessives, it’s one that makes you realize that “Psycho” is not the property of a coterie. That shower scene may be the best-known movie sequence in modern cinema. Endlessly imitated and parodied (and even remade shot-by-shot by Gus Van Sant), it’s familiar material even to many casual movie fans as well as filmgoers generations removed from its shocking advent.

That familiarity means that many viewers of “78/52” (the title refers to the three-minute scene’s 78 camera set-ups and 52 cuts) will begin the film realizing they already know a lot about what’s being discussed. The virtue of Philippe’s approach is that it organizes an intelligent, analytic discussion that expands and deepens our knowledge by drawing upon commentary from the likes of Walter Murch, Peter Bogdanovich, Bret Easton Ellis, Eli Roth, Danny Elfman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Guillermo del Toro and others, plus vintage TV clips of Hitchcock interviews.

Some of the most fascinating testimony comes from Marli Renfro, a model (and sometime Playboy Bunny) who served as Janet Leigh’s body double in the shower scene. She recalls the scene’s lengthy shooting, in which she was topless and offered to remove the “crotch patch” she wore; Hitchcock declined.

Starting out, the film makes the point that the low-budget, black-and-white “Psycho” was a deliberate antithesis to the big, glossy, Technicolor star vehicles (such as “North by Northwest,” “Vertigo” and “Rear Window”) that made the 1950s Hitchcock’s most successful decade so far. For this viewer, though, one of the most thought-provoking bits of contextualizing here comes in connecting the movie’s theme of invaded spaces and unexpected attacks to the warnings that Hitchcock provided in films like “Foreign Correspondent” and “Lifeboat” of what he saw as the U.K. and U.S.’ lack of preparedness for World War II.