Danny Elfman and Steve Bartek. Two names that you probably don’t know, but keys to immortalize with their music one of the most remembered suspense scenes in cinema and one of the most identified with Psycho. Not the original 1960 feature film, but the remake released 38 years after Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece.
That music that accompanies Anne Hechewho played Marion Crane in the 1998 version of Psychosis, is from the seal of the “Master of suspense”. The music, the close-ups, the subjective shots and two cars: one followed and the other behind without missing a beat. Resources of the trade that we saw in films like Vertigo and North by Northwest.
In the case of the film directed by Gus Van Sant, when Marion Crane is driving with the stolen $400,000 and is discovered by her boss, when an Arizona police officer drives his patrol car to stop her on the highway, the suspect takes the urgent decision to exchange your vehicle at a used dealer.
There, the character of Heche change your Ford Taurus 1993 for a 1989 Volvo 740, a model from the Swedish firm that hit the market that year with innovations for the range. Inside the luxurious bodywork, as indicated by the “4” in its name, a four cylinder enginewhich had meant an evolution in relation to the 760 at the beginning of the ’80s.
But the novelty, in that 1989 Volvo, was the resounding change of its engine. That “red block”, because of the color of the engine” was now manufactured with 16 valves and produced 155 horsepower. Thus, the Volvo 740 GTL 16V 1989 was incorporated into the 740 range until 1992, the year in which the model was replaced by the firm by the 940.
It is true that Anne Heche, with her performance in Psycho, managed to introduce Volvo to the list of the most iconic scenes in cinema. However, Van Sant’s film received negative reviews to the point of obtaining two Golden Raspberry Awards -Anti-Oscar Awards-, one of them for Gus Van Sant as Worst Director. Heche, meanwhile, was nominated for Worst Actress. How will Volvo have reacted to it? Only the Swedes know.