colin_finch

Remake a classic film scene by scene using modern film techniques and proven actors; can't fail can it? Wrong! This film is an object lesson to directors that a film is more than simply cinematography and dialogue. Somehow, the original Hitchcock Psycho is brilliant and this modern clone isn't.

I regret to have to say that the problem here is seems to be casting and performances. Antony Perkins' Norman Bates was shy, vulnerable, amiable and seemingly harmless. Vince Vaughn's version, on the other hand, is sinister, charmless and would have induced any streetwise female guest to jam a chair under her door handle. The problem with Anne Heche isn't so easy to pin down but,for some reason, she just doesn't seem to attain the right mix of vulnerable-female-but-also-scheming-embezzler.

Having said all of that, it's worth watching and, as an academic exercise, I'm glad that it was made. It really gives you a whole new appreciation of the subtlety of Alfred Hitchcock's original.

This was British TV's original police series. I'm not old enough to remember the early days of this show, but I grew up with it in the sixties and seventies. At the time, Dixon of Dock Green already seemed old fashioned compared with Z-cars or US shows like Ironside. It was a cozy and faintly sentimental representation of policing. Despite this, it retained a certain authenticity that other shows lacked. The police officers that I had met had more in common with Dixon than any other TV character. Jack Warner's perennial character George Dixon oozed calm authority and respectable self-assurance. Each programme was introduced by the whistled theme tune after which George Dixon would always begin a spoken introduction direct to camera with the words "Evening all". He would make dry observations about "villains" and the frailties of human nature. The episode's drama would then be played out. By the seventies Dixon himself rarely played a huge part in the story; he was pretty old. The programme would end with Dixon again; this time proposing a moral for the story. He invariably signed off with the words "'Night all". They don't make shows like this any more. Pity.