Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

If there was ever a case of struggling to imagine what a film must have been like to see if you didn’t know what happened in it, it’s Psycho, now re-released to mark its fiftieth birthday.  I’ve always found it hard to credit that people were shocked to discover that Norman Bates was the eponymous psychopath of the story (adapted, by Joseph Stefano, from a novel of the same name by Robert Bloch) – but I missed my chance to watch the film with an open mind.  When I first went to see it at York University’s film theatre in around 1974, I’d just read The Great Movies by William Bayer, whose selection of (sixty) great movies included Psycho.   Bayer claims that, once Marion Crane has been murdered in the shower:

‘… Every convention of storytelling has been defied.  Our heroine is dead and the film is only half done.   Hitchcock experimented with killing off a heroine in Vertigo, where we see Kim Novak killed twice!  But because our main identification is with Jimmy Stewart, the effect is not so strong as in Psycho, where our total attention is on Janet Leigh.  … With Janet Leigh gone, we must transfer our loyalties to Anthony Perkins, the pleasant, modest, charming young man, who gains our sympathy, Truffaut insists, by the way he cleans up the bathroom and protects his mother.  Yes, incredible as it may seem, when Perkins mops up the shower stall we begin to root for him.   … It never occurs to us that [Mrs Bates] is a mummy, preserved by her friendly young taxidermist son, the matricidal maniac.  And when he is revealed as the killer, our world is shattered again. …’

I’m exceptionally hopeless at solving whodunnits and I’m sure that, if I’d not read  Bayer’s piece, I wouldn’t have worked out that Norman Bates was preserving his mother as a mummy (although the knife-wielding Mrs Bates is remarkably tall and strong-looking and seems to be wearing a wig).  But I’ve never been able to believe that Norman is above audience suspicion until the climax of Psycho.  It’s very evident from his first conversation with Marion, in the parlour behind the motel reception desk and office, under the eye of his stuffed birds, that Norman Bates is emotionally disturbed (and disturbing).  I don’t think either that, once we’ve encountered Norman, our attention continues to be on Marion exclusively.  Anthony Perkins interprets Norman with considerable sympathy and brilliant detail.  His physical movement – the odd combination of a jerky, rangy boyishness and a mincing walk – seems hardly noticeable at first (without your realising how, it becomes gradually more insistent as the film goes on).  But, as a talking head, Perkins has an electric, ingratiating neuroticism that makes Norman spellbinding from the word go:  within a very few minutes, Janet Leigh has been nearly eclipsed by him.

Of course there’s a disorienting aspect to Marion Crane’s death that goes beyond the fact she’s been on the screen almost uninterruptedly for the first three-quarters of an hour.  Hitchcock famously insisted that people who didn’t arrive at the start of the film shouldn’t be allowed in until the beginning of the next show.  (Is it true that this diktat changed single-handedly and for ever the then standard practice of showing films continuously rather than as distinct programmes?)  In his interview with François Truffaut (extracts from which the BFI are using as their programme note), Hitchcock explained that, if latecomers had taken their seats after Janet Leigh had departed the scene, it would have deprived him of one of his biggest audience manipulation coups – killing off the best-known name in the cast.     Because this is an essential part of cinema lore, it’s unarguable, but I still wonder what audiences in 1960 inferred from the fact that Leigh’s name appears after those of the other leading players on the film’s poster.  The list of names ends with ‘and Janet Leigh as Marion Crane’, a time-honoured way of indicating that a big name has a significant role that isn’t the main one.

Perhaps, since Leigh in a bra and slip is the dominant figure on the poster, no one was expected to notice the text at all, and voyeurism is a recurring aspect of Psycho.  Talking with Truffaut, Hitchcock is candid about the appeal of the film’s opening sequence, as John L Russell’s camera moves through the Venetian blinds of a window high up in an apartment block to find Marion and Sam Loomis in a state of undress, coming to the end of one of the brief bouts of lovemaking they snatch during Marion’s lunch hours.  The way we get inside the room, says Hitchcock, ‘allows the viewer to become a peeping Tom’.  Norman Bates removes a picture from the wall of his parlour to watch Marion taking off her clothes.  And the shower scene – where Marion’s nakedness intensifies her terrible vulnerability – is, of course, spectacularly voyeuristic.  Perhaps that’s subliminally acknowledged in the celebrated (though garish) shot that fades out on the plughole, down which mingled blood and water are disappearing, and fades in the murdered woman’s eye in its place.

As well as disposing unforgettably with the star of the show, Hitchcock violates another convention:  he also kills off the private detective who suddenly appears on the scene and whom we’re primed to see as a deus ex machina, a man who can bring justice and restore normality.  Martin Balsam’s Arbogast has a warmth, a common sense and a reality which are both reassuring and engaging.  So when he meets the same fate as Marion Crane on the staircase of the Bates house, it’s a shocking moment not just because of the terrific staging but because it ruptures audience expectations – and also, of course, because you’re less prepared for this than for what happens in the shower.  I remember being more horrified and scared, when I first saw the movie, by the killing of Arbogast than by the murder of Marion.  You could hear from reactions in NFT1 half a century on from the first release of Psycho that people there were feeling the same way.

As a result of playing Marion Crane, Janet Leigh is one of the most famous female images in cinema history.  Leigh’s acting is conventional, prosaic in the opening scene – yet Marion’s presence already has a troubled weight to it:  perhaps that’s because Leigh is doing something subtle, perhaps it’s because of your awareness of what’s coming.  Leigh is best looking and listening – she skilfully dramatises Marion’s state of mind both as she stares from the driving seat of her car into the camera and as Norman Bates sits chatting to her in the motel parlour.  Psycho contains naturalistic acting much superior to what you often get in Hitchcock – from Perkins and Balsam, especially in the absorbing scene in which Arbogast is questioning Norman, and also from John Gavin, who does well in the difficult role of Sam.  As Marion’s sister Lila, Vera Miles’s playing is standard issue Hitchcock:  it’s unkind to say so but there are moments when you regret it wasn’t her in the shower.

Watching Psycho in 2010, you’re in no doubt that you’re watching a classic movie.  It’s classic in the sense of definitive and enduring rather than classic in the sense of highest quality – but it’s classic nonetheless.  When we think of a haunted house, the image of the one that looms above the motel will come into many minds.  The illuminated lights of ‘Bates MoteI’ that Marion sees through the driving rain on the windscreen of her car are certainly the most notorious welcome sign in cinema history.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who, when they step into the shower, often think of Marion Crane (I occasionally  do).   But it’s not just the horror highlights that stay with you.  I think this may have been only the third (at most the fourth) time I’d seen Psycho in its entirety and I’ve not read a great deal about it – yet it’s remarkable how uniquely familiar it all seems.   There are the minor characters, played by actors whose names I don’t know but whose appearance in Psycho has immortalised them – especially Mort Mills, as the highway patrol man in shades who questions then follows Marion Crane on her guilty flight from Phoenix.  Others whom you don’t forget include:  Frank Albertson, as Tom Cassidy, the revolting slob rancher whose money Marion steals to try and make a better life for her and her boyfriend Sam; John Anderson, as the car dealer with whom Marion trades in her motor; Lurene Tuttle, as the homey wife of the deputy sheriff in the country where Bates Motel is located; and Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, as the office junior who works with Marion.  Vaughn Taylor, as Marion’s boss, is a face I think I recognise from other pictures but it’s the shots of him in this film – acknowledging Marion as he crosses the road and sees her in her car, then doing a double take as he worriedly remembers she’d said she had a headache and was going home to bed once she’d banked Cassidy’s cash – that define him for ever.  (John McIntire, as the deputy sheriff, is perhaps the only member of the cast whom I associate more strongly with a different role, that of the paterfamilias he played in the long-running television Western series The Virginian.  Norman Bates’s ‘mother’ voice was supplied by a trio of actors, including McIntire’s wife Jeanette Nolan.)  Small things – like how Marion folds the envelope containing the stolen money and hides it in her handbag – are inscribed in my memory.  So are the names of the characters:  Arbogast and Sam Loomis, as well as Marion Crane and Norman Bates.

The opening titles sequence, designed by Saul Bass, is also brilliantly memorable – and introduces the famous Bernard Herrmann score.   The fractures in what we see and hear at the start are grippingly ominous; the short, yearning interlude between the blocks of helter-skelter dissonance in the score is eerily powerful.  Once into the narrative, Hitchcock uses Herrmann’s music very effectively to convey the gathering momentum of Marion’s guilt and desperation.  The whole story of her journey to Bates Motel is wonderfully exciting and for well over an hour the film is hard to fault – but, in the final twenty minutes, I think it starts coming to bits.  At first, there’s the odd tiny, careless detail.  When Lila tells the deputy sheriff the name of the private detective, she pronounces it in a way that means it could be either ‘Arbogast’ or ‘Arbergast’:  the deputy sheriff, who can’t know which it is, then pronounces it on the telephone ‘Arbogast’ with a very definite ‘oh’.  Lila and Sam go hunting for clues in Bates Motel and she finds a bit of paper in the toilet bowl beside the shower:  Lila immediately identifies it as a fragment of Marion’s shredded calculations about the $40,000 she’s stolen and has decided to return – yet the scrap of paper is too tiny for her to do that.  Then there are larger blunders:  Sam keeps Norman talking so that Lila can go to the house to talk with Mrs Bates but the men’s conversation goes on far too long before Norman’s edginess boils over into realisation that Lila is on the loose.   This all leads up to the finale in which, after Norman Bates’s arrest, his state of mind is explained, ludicrously and lengthily, by a police psychiatrist (Simon Oakland).   The BFI audience was laughing by this stage:  and the scene is ridiculous in more ways than one – Lila and Sam seem more interested in hearing about Norman’s psychosis than they are distressed to be told that Marion is dead.   The director was no doubt well aware of the naff bathos of all this but does that make it any less naff?    (I imagine there are those who regard Lila and Sam’s dispassion as a witty comment on a film audience’s fickle allegiances but I’m not convinced.)

In the very last minute of Psycho, Hitchcock redeems the situation in a sequence of famous images.  Norman/Mother watches a fly that’s settled on his hand (this nicely resonates with Bates’s will-you-come-into-my-parlour invitation to Marion earlier on).  Anthony Perkins looks up from the fly to face the camera and the skeleton’s grin is superimposed on his face as he smiles.  Marion Crane’s submerged car comes up from the swamp where Norman disposed of it.  I’m not sure if William Bayer was right to include Psycho in his sixty greatest movies book (getting on for forty years ago).  But it is a great entertainment, made by a master entertainer at his peak.

13 April 2010