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Post by dem bones on May 14, 2012 18:10:20 GMT
Robert Bloch – The Couch (Gold Medal/ Frederick Muller, 1962) Blurb “Somewhere within an area of hundreds of square miles was the man. One man out of 7,000,000. No one knew whether he was young or old. He could have been the man in the next telephone booth, calling the police, telling them the only fact they knew about him – that at seven o’clock he was going to kill again …”as mentioned elsewhere, this has been cluttering up my shelf of shame for an eternity, but i never yet felt any great inclination to give it a whirl. Graham Andrews' extended review of both film and novelisation in Paperback Fanatic #22 decided me to finally catch up with the Seven O'Clock Killer and see if there was a bit more to him than Norman Bates minus the showy perversions. "Damned leather covered monstrosity. Leather. Leathery. Like wrinkles.
All at once he couldn't face it. Not tonight. Not after what he'd been through."It's seven in the evening and Charles Campbell has another appointment with his psychiatrist, Dr. Janz, another nerve-shredding session on that terrible and terrifying couch. Charles has spent an eventful day. He's been fired from the paper factory by the despised boss Myers after an altercation with the stenographer - that f**k**g cheap tramp, Edna! Dr. Janz has already been tipped off and is concerned this may indicate a relapse, that Charles may be suffering from his old trouble. Charles assures him it's nothing of the sort, but - now concentrate, man! keep your wits about you, and don't give anything away! - he knows this is not strictly true. On his way to the session, hadn't he, Charles, left an anonymous message with Lieutenant Kritzman of the LAPD homicide division, alerting him to a murder, one that would take place in less than five minutes time? How the hell could he know that? Because Charles has his trusty ice-pick tucked away in his jacket pocket. Terry Ames, Janz's beloved niece and receptionist, has sensibly decided to fall for one of her uncle's patients, even if he does drive her up top of Mulholland, and shape like he's going to shove her over the edge before coming over all maudlin about the death of his sister, Ruthie, in a car accident. It was all his fault! He can still see her now, dressed as a crone for a Halloween party, beautiful face hidden behind a hideous mask. Wrinkles. Charles can't help but call Kritzman again, gloat over the murder and tell him there will be another along tonight, same time, same district, and he's as good as his word. His dotty old landlady, Mrs. Quimby, paste's the newspaper reports in her unsolved murder scrapbook. Charles likes the look of her daughter, Jeanie, a real solid gone hep cat, always bending provocatively in front of him and asking about that girl she saw him with. Dr. Janz explains to a colleague that his "problem child" is still problematic. Janz had originally recommended Charles Campbell be committed to an asylum, was out-voted two to one, and is now re-evaluating his original assessment. But this guy worries him!
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Post by dem bones on May 20, 2012 19:36:59 GMT
Taunting Lieutenant Kritzman over the 'phone proves almost as addictive as plunging his ice pick up a stranger's heart and, with two random murders under his belt, Charles knows he's untouchable. So many people, all of them deserving death, but tonight he has a specific target. He's learned from Terry that her uncle has tickets forr tonight's ball game at the Coliseum.
Dr. Janz survives the attack - just. He's rushed to hospital and readied for emergency surgery. Charles, all concern, keeps vigil with the terminally wet Annie in the waiting room. He can't allow the shrink to pull through but Kritzman has posted a cop on the door. The situation requires a cunning disguise and Charles doesn't have far to look for an unattended surgical gown, mask and scalpel ....
Up in the lift to the top floor and .... couches! Couches everywhere!
As Graham points out in PF, Bloch was working from a story by who'd watched Psycho and liked what he'd seen, enough to attempt his own version. For Norman's mother fixation, substitute Charles' deep loathing of his bullying father who'd dared lay a finger on Ruthie. Mrs. Quimby is fun as is (very) minor character, beatnik Bo Zarto ("Dig that whole buncha hairy headline! a real swinger, on the prod with a shiv ... Too bad the cat wasn't making with the autograph bit."). It's just a shame the central characters aren't really that interesting.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 20, 2012 19:57:01 GMT
I have seen the film, which is very peculiar. But not in a good way. Unlike PSYCHO, there is no surprise twist. Or point.
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Post by ramseycampbell on May 21, 2012 11:44:02 GMT
I have seen the film, which is very peculiar. But not in a good way. Unlike PSYCHO, there is no surprise twist. Or point. In fact there is a twist, but I'd rather not spoil it for the rest of the folk here. We saw the film (now available on Warner Archive DVD) just last week and enjoyed it - it reminded me rather of the films Bob wrote for William Castle.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 21, 2012 14:56:41 GMT
In fact there is a twist, but I'd rather not spoil it for the rest of the folk here. To be honest, I only watched half the film, and then consulted a synopsis to check whether there would be a twist worth enduring the rest of it for. As there seemed to be none, I gave up.
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Post by dem bones on May 21, 2012 16:27:20 GMT
Thanks gents, i'd been meaning to ask if anybody had seen it. The novelisation is the least taxing of reads, not particularly great, but Bloch works wonders with a wafer thin storyline and somehow I think it will stay longer in my memory than Firebug which has the better critical reputation. Is Mrs. Quimby the murder ghoul in the film? He're Bloch on The Couch in Graeme Flanagan's Robert Bloch: A Bio-BibliographyThe problem with THE COUCH was named Steve Trilling. He was Jack Warren's assistant. Warren was in Europe and Trilling was playing hero while he was away - he wanted to show him how much money he could save on the budget (while wasting it on pictures like ALL FALL DOWN and THE CHAPMAN REPORT). So he. cut out all subjective "hallucination sequences" in which the protagonist fantasises a dream world - and left nothing but static talk-talk-talk which cost nothing to film. He saved money and lost the picture. The tempo, excitement, and "different" quality were all gone.
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Post by Shrink Proof on May 21, 2012 18:11:16 GMT
Ahem...as an aside to the above, speaking as a shrink who has been attacked by his patients (more than once), the ones who generated an air of unease & had a history of violence weren't the problem; everyone was alerted by their sixth senses & overwhelming help was always immediately available. The ones that actually went for it were always the weedy ones who I could easily disarm & overpower.
With one exception.
That patient was not just psychotic but was also another doctor...
Think I'll give this one a miss!
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Post by dem bones on May 21, 2012 19:03:05 GMT
Ahem...as an aside to the above, speaking as a shrink who has been attacked by his patients (more than once), the ones who generated an air of unease & had a history of violence weren't the problem; everyone was alerted by their sixth senses & overwhelming help was always immediately available. The ones that actually went for it were always the weedy ones who I could easily disarm & overpower. With one exception. That patient was not just psychotic but was also another doctor... if it's not too painful a subject, what do you make of his "psycho-logical" ((©) Sam Moskowitz) work as a rule? i'm sure the explanation at close of Hitchcock's adaptation of Psycho has been criticised as rambling and not a little iffy by those who presumably know about such matters.
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Post by Shrink Proof on May 21, 2012 19:36:28 GMT
if it's not too painful a subject, what do you make of his "psycho-logical" ((©) Sam Moskowitz) work as a rule? i'm sure the explanation at close of Hitchcock's adaptation of Psycho has been criticised as rambling and not a little iffy by those who presumably know about such matters. It's all sort-of based on theories of personality functioning that were much in vogue back then, probably until about the end of the 1960s or thereabouts, and especially in North America, but which are in large part abandoned now. At that time psychiatry stateside was very much dominated by the psychoanalysts, although British shrinks have always tended to take a much more pragmatic, eclectic, "mix & match" approach. We still do, but the Yanks have now swung very much to the other extreme with a biological approach being very much in the ascendant (i.e., pills rather than couches). The Decline & Fall of the Freudian Empire and all that. Which makes the "Psycho" stuff very much of its time. That being said, the "Psycho" explanation to which you refer is very much a simplistic, pop psychology take on what was current even then. Which makes it pretty shaky for those who are fluent in ShrinkSpeak, but easily assimilated by Joe Public. Personally I have no problem with that; just because the psychodynamic explanations have holes in big enough to deliver a fridge through, it doesn't alter the fact that "Psycho" succeeded brilliantly as a film. And Hitchcock was a film maker, not a shrink.
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Post by ramseycampbell on May 21, 2012 21:07:08 GMT
In fact there is a twist, but I'd rather not spoil it for the rest of the folk here. To be honest, I only watched half the film, and then consulted a synopsis to check whether there would be a twist worth enduring the rest of it for. As there seemed to be none, I gave up. Gosh, that surely isn't like you - expressing an opinion of work you haven't bothered to experience for yourself.
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Post by jamesdoig on May 21, 2012 21:23:37 GMT
i'm sure the explanation at close of Hitchcock's adaptation of Psycho has been criticised as rambling and not a little iffy by those who presumably know about such matters. Dead of Night was on over the weekend and the psychiatrist's explanation at the end of the dummy episode was reminiscent of the similar scene in Psycho. First time I'd seen it for years and really enjoyed it, except for the stupid golfing story.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 22, 2012 8:42:01 GMT
I had experienced half of it!
I have since made my way to the end, though skipping a lot, and I still see no surprise twist.
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Post by ramseycampbell on May 22, 2012 10:27:46 GMT
I had experienced half of it! I have since made my way to the end, though skipping a lot, and I still see no surprise twist. Forgive me - I'm more easily surprised, then.
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Post by dem bones on May 22, 2012 12:08:54 GMT
Dead of Night was on over the weekend and the psychiatrist's explanation at the end of the dummy episode was reminiscent of the similar scene in Psycho. First time I'd seen it for years and really enjoyed it, except for the stupid golfing story. Damn, I'm sure we had a Dead Of Night thread somewhere, because I remember trying to establish where the stories originated. This is the gist. The Framing Story seems to have been the work of the screenwriters, John Baines & Angus McPhaill with a smidgeon of E. F. Benson's The Room In The Tower thrown in. The Hearse Driver is E. F. Benson's The Bus-ConductorThe Christmas Story is most likely John Baines & Angus McPhaill again The Haunted Mirror is E. F. Benson's The Chippendale MirrorThe Ventriloquist's Doll is a fluid adaptation of Gerald Kersh's (uncredited) The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy, and not, as is popularly believed, Ben Hecht's The Rival Dummy. Finally, H. G. Wells' The Inexperienced Ghost is usually cited as the (very loose) inspiration for The Golfing Story. Maybe it's just me, but I reckon it incorporates more than a dash of H. R. Wakefield's The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. Incidentally, thank you for reviving John Plummer's A Vulgar Neighbourhood on Wormwoodiana, a delightfully atmospheric contemporary account of a late night creepy crawl through sunny Whitechapel in the 1860's. For all the redevelopers' worst efforts it's not really changed that much except the pubs are going down like skittles, we're currently lacking the disreputable bookstall and the massed ranks of " foot sore tramps, drunken beggars, and other specimens of the refuse of society" have been whisked off the street so they don't upset anybody during the Olympics. if it's not too painful a subject, what do you make of his "psycho-logical" ((©) Sam Moskowitz) work as a rule? i'm sure the explanation at close of Hitchcock's adaptation of Psycho has been criticised as rambling and not a little iffy by those who presumably know about such matters. It's all sort-of based on theories of personality functioning that were much in vogue back then, probably until about the end of the 1960s or thereabouts, and especially in North America, but which are in large part abandoned now. At that time psychiatry stateside was very much dominated by the psychoanalysts, although British shrinks have always tended to take a much more pragmatic, eclectic, "mix & match" approach. We still do, but the Yanks have now swung very much to the other extreme with a biological approach being very much in the ascendant (i.e., pills rather than couches). The Decline & Fall of the Freudian Empire and all that. Which makes the "Psycho" stuff very much of its time. That being said, the "Psycho" explanation to which you refer is very much a simplistic, pop psychology take on what was current even then. Which makes it pretty shaky for those who are fluent in ShrinkSpeak, but easily assimilated by Joe Public. Personally I have no problem with that; just because the psychodynamic explanations have holes in big enough to deliver a fridge through, it doesn't alter the fact that "Psycho" succeeded brilliantly as a film. And Hitchcock was a film maker, not a shrink. Thank you for explaining that so concisely, Mr. Proof. Not much fussed if it is pop psychology either, don't really care how a horror story/ novel/ film gets there, just so long as it works on some level. Psycho scared me on first viewing, something too few films and stories have come near to achieving, though, of course, they can be immensely enjoyable in other regards. Two different beasts and I've not seen the film, but Bloch plays scrupulously fair with the reader in his novelisation, as opposed to the absolutely outrageous cheat in Night Of The Ripper (perversely, still among my very favourite Bloch moments.). If there was a twist, then it was so suble Ii missed it.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on May 22, 2012 17:30:22 GMT
Forgive me - I'm more easily surprised, then. Perhaps you are thinking of the fact that the plot owes a great deal to Agatha Christie's much ripped-off THE ABC MURDERS. That occurred to me already after ten minutes or so, which perhaps lessened the effect.
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