Screen:

...Then we learn just the opposite...

...All the makers of the new film really have going for them is a scrap of parody, and Perkins's ability to camp it up in re-creating his role as Norman...

...Jerry asks "Knew that I knew...

...Of course, one reason that Robert may seem especially so is that he already knows about Emma and Jerry at this point, which is years before the film begins...

...The stabbings are the most surreal moments in the original...

...The trouble is that the filmmakers are digging their own grave in the fruit cellar of Norman's personality Norman is a character who can only remain entertaining as long as he's in a state of suspended animation, of paralysis...

...What they have, instead of an idea of their own, is a touch-all-bases marketing strategy...

...The two stars gripped it dagger-fashion, smiled at the photographers, and, as their strobes popped all around the room, stabbed the cake...

...The violinist is going to reach the end of the bow...

...Because boys are more anxious, Jerry suggests "Now what have they got to be anxious about, boy babies...

...She just wants Jerry to know, about her and Robert, that is, and that Robert knows, about Jerry Well...

...ESTERBECK, JR...

...Later an overhead shot, a bird's eye view of the sort Hitchcock used as innuendo concerning Norman (who stuffed birds for a hobby), is adopted by Franklin only because it provides the clearest vantage point from which to see Norman bash in an old lady's skull with a shovel...

...The suspense in Hitchcock's film depends on our believing until the very end that Norman, weird though he may be, is basically innocent...

...It makes quite a difference in how you interpret what's said, doesn't it...

...The new film goes in the other direction, with the help of effects-master Albert Whitlock...

...It's all of them...

...Betrayal shows...

...I haven't a clue...

...Is it the producer, Hilton Green, who is responsible...

...Marvelous Dialogue like this really is, you know, when Pinter does it...

...The rest of it is watching Kingsley, Irons and Ms...

...Hodge exercize their considerable skills on such bright material...

...Yet the given situation is so utterly different that only a fresh, inventive approach could have succeeded...

...But we don't hear any of that, not a word...

...The first word we hear somebody utter is, "Well, " which Jerry (Jeremy Irons) says to Emma the next day, when she meets him at a pub to tell him her marriage is at an end...

...As soon as Psycho II has to go ahead and develop a plot of its own, it falls to pieces like the disinterred remains of one of Norman's victims COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Robert queries...

...The words are like leaves picked up and whirled about in a puff of wind, then suddently dropped again...

...On the other hand, they also want to appeal to that part of the current audience that likes its violence down and dirty, explicit, in a way the original Psycho never was...

...The only romance today is in getting a divorce, as the movie...

...Or writer Tom Holland...

...Every word Norman says, every gesture and expression, no matter how casual, inevitably has a double entendre Perkins imparts a great deal of ghoulish charm to his character by playing up this two-sidedness only very delicately Norman seems literally to be two-faced at times, affable and winningly shy one moment, and then, in the blink of an eye, fleetingly sinister again...

...Sooner or later, the player is going to run out of wind...

...He's like a note that is being held and held by a lone instrument...

...A little later Emma joins them Robert is trying to persuade Jerry to play squash one day Emma wants to watch Robert is against that "You see," he explains to her, "first there's the game, then there's the shower, then there's the pint, and after, the lunch...

...Everyone remembers them as terribly realistic, but that is only psychologically Hitchcock achieved the effect of actual terror through pure poetic license with editing, point of view, music, etc...

...AFTER THE PREVIEW of Psycho II, there was a party at Studio 54...

...Their Debt to Sir Alfred Hitchcock...

...At lunch, you want to talk about the game, or cricket or books...

...By the time we get to conversations like that about the squash game, we have to stop and think just what we know about who's on to whom here, and who's not...

...We watch it from outside the windows of their home...

...Betrayal starts with a terrible row, a right shouting match in which Emma (Patricia Hodge) finally slaps her husband Robert (Ben Kingsley), and Robert slaps her back...

...Or does it...

...Why do you suppose that is...

...You don't want any women about to make improper interruptions " It's all so very arch...

...We know that he knows because after the quarrel with Emma, he told Jerry he did, What's more, Emma knew he knew, despite what she says to Jerry at the time...

...It astounds me that somebody should spend who knows how many millions of dollars to do a sequel to Psycho without having a solitary new idea in his head...

...Now that most of our marriages are not working out, either, we hold out the hope that at least splitting up will be as attractive as Harold Pinter's dialogue and the acting of the Royal Shakespeare Company make it seem here...

...What then...

...Trying to decide that is half the fun...

...The fact is that we never actually see a knife stab into human flesh...

...A largish kitchen knife of the kind Norman Bates liked to wield was provided for the occasion...

...One afternoon Jerry pops in on Robert at home, and discussion turns to the fact (it's been proven medically) that boy babies are more fretful than girl babies...

...As you entered the disco with the "Bates Motel" passkey provided in the press kit, doors, as if to motel rooms, lined the foyer...

...At the end of their movie, a credit appears stating, "Producers Wish to Acknowledge...

...Inside both of those through which I got a peek, a shower was running behind a see-through curtain, and on the floor a nude body was slumped as if stabbed to death Hurrying on to the press reception itself, we arrived just in time to watch Tony Perkins and Vera Miles, both of whom re-create their roles from the original Psycho, cut an enormous cake made in the shape of the film's spooky Victorian house...

...The preview audience booed...

...Everything in Betrayal has a circularity to it - the relationships among the characters, even the dialogue...

...Many of the conversations have an elegant pointlessness, as if all life needed were a way to pass the time wittily...

...What Jerry can't fathom is why Robert didn't tell him back then that he was aware of his and Emma's affair "I thought perhaps you knew," Robert says "Knew what...

...This film picks up where the earlier one left off, with Norman's release from the mental institution to which he was being bound over when last we saw him twenty-two years ago...

...Or the director, Richard Franklin...

...When Vera Miles finally gets hers, we watch in sharp close-up as she is stabbed in the mouth...

...That means the new film begins with him already a known schizo, a deeply ambivalent character...

...Perhaps it's just that girl babies are less anxious "Yes, why do you think that is...

...On the one hand, they hope the film will work as a pre-sold property, one that appeals to everybody who remembers the Hitchcock film and knows it's a classic...

...This promotion could easily have been dreamed up by the same people who made Psycho II, which gives you some idea what the film is like...

...Everything said seems as inconsequential as that, and as fitful...

...We have a very detached view...

...This is what gives Perkins a chance to bring the role back to life, if only briefly...

...From here the film proceeds as if everyone concerned were recoiling from those slaps, reeling backwards in time to the moment when the betrayal began, which is where the film ends...