FILM

THOM SON
DAV I D
$22.95 US / $29.00 CAN

PRAISE FOR

DAVI D
THOM SON
I
t killed its star off after forty minutes. There was no

happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene

to date in American film. Punctuated by shrieking

“David Thomson is, without doubt, the greatest living film historian, archivist, and
strings that seared the national consciousness, nothing like
DAVI D T H O M S O N is the author professional fan.” — LO S A N G E L E S T I M E S
Psycho had existed before. It was the biggest hit of Alfred

TH E MOM ENT OF PSYCHO

of many books on film, including “H ve You Seen . . . ?” A
Hitchcock’s career, and propelled him to new levels of
Pers ntroduction to 1,000 Films, which the New York “Thomson is an incisive observer and a tremendously clever writer.”
international fame—never before had audiences been so
Times called “passionate, illuminating, rich, and eccentric”; — WA S H I N G T O N P O S T B O O K W O R L D
aware of the role of the director in filmmaking. The movie
and the massively influential Biogr p y of Film,

first published in 1975 and recently reissued in its fourth “What Thomson does not know or feel about films is not worth knowing or feeling. His TH E industry—even America itself—would never be the same.

MD DALIM #1047620 09/18/09 CYAN MAG YELO BLK SILVER

In The Moment of Psycho, renowned film critic David
edition, called “the best book on the movies ever written in love of the medium is coupled with a passionate intelligence; entirely jargon-free, his prose
Thomson vividly situates Psycho in Hitchcock’s career,
English” (The New Republic). Thomson regularly contributes

film commentary and criticism to the New York Times, Film

penetrates to the heart of a movie even when you find yourself disagreeing with him.”
—G UAR D IAN ( U K ) MOM ENT re-creating the mood and time when the seminal film erupted

onto film screens worldwide. Drawing on his encyclopedic

Comment, The New Republic, S lon, and the G d (UK).
knowledge of Hollywood, Thomson shows how in 1959,
He lives in San Francisco with his family. “Thomson is one of the best writers on Hollywood there is.”
— S A N F R A N C I S C O C H RO N I C L E
OF PSYCHO Hitchcock, then sixty years old, made Psycho as an attempt

to break personally with the dullness of his own settled

How ALFRED H ITCHCOCK Taught domesticity—a struggle which then mirrored the sexual,
“A first-rate critic.” —N EW SW E E K
AM ERICA to LOVE M U RDER creative, and political ferment that soon overtook the nation.

$22.95 US / $29.00 CAN Psycho was not just a sensation in film: it altered the very
ISBN 978-0-465-00339-6
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo 52295 nature of our desires. Sex, violence, and horror took on new
Jacket photograph © Universal Pictures / Collection Sunset
life. Psycho, all of a sudden, represented all America wanted
Boulevard / Corbis

12/09
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.basicbooks.com 9 780465 003396
DAV I D T H O M S O N from a film—and, as The Moment of Psycho brilliantly

demonstrates, still does.

0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page i

THE MOMENT
OF PSYCHO
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page ii

KOBAL PICTURE DESK

Strangers in the rain.

0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page iii

THE MOMENT
OF PSYCHO
H o w A L F R E D H I T C H C O C K Ta u g h t
AMERICA to LOVE MURDER

DAVID THOMSON

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page iv

Copyright © 2009 by David Thomson

Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part

of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books,
387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for

bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and
other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special
Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut
Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145,
ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

Designed by Pauline Brown

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thomson, David, 1941–

The moment of Psycho : how Alfred Hitchcock taught America to
love murder / David Thomson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-465-00339-6 (alk. paper)
1. Psycho (Motion picture : 1960) 2. Hitchcock, Alfred,
1899–1980—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Thrillers (Motion
pictures)—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN1997.P79T46 2009
791.43'72—dc22
2009030821
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page v

for Greil Marcus

0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page vi
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page vii

CONTENTS

1. 1960 1

2. Continuity 21

3. Room Service 51

4. Housekeeping 69

5. Hitch-Cock 91

6. Other Bodies in the Swamp 115

7. A Noir Society 137

8. Lonely People 151

9. On the Way to Fairvale 159

Acknowledgments 169

Credits 171

Index 175
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page viii
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 1

1960

T HE MOVIES had always encouraged the idea that we

were safe, secure, and warm in their dark. It is a com-
fortable and comforting place to be, for a nickel . . . or
$12.50. Come in out of the heat, or the cold. Come in and
forget your sorrows and the world’s hard times. Our the-
ater has its own air-raid shelter. Take a break at the end of
a long day’s drive. The cinema is a welcoming motel with
fresh linen and a hot shower.
But how far did people trust that promise? The invita-
tion was barbed: yes, we could see women undressing and
men shooting guns as if the ammunition was forever. But
only because we were not quite there, not in the screen’s
“there.” We were voyeurs, never harmed by the bullets,
but never able to handle the women. Yet there is a frisson

1
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 2

2 The Moment of Psycho

of danger, too—we feel we can’t escape from those dense

rows of seated people. What if the building burns from the
light of the arc projector? (And films did catch fire in the
early days.) What if the “controlled” or censored circum-
stances of life on-screen suddenly give way to orgy and
slaughter? (How dreadful! How delicious!) What if the lo-
comotive comes out of the screen and strikes us? What if
the knife we see before our eyes glows and grows until it
fits and fills our hand and we are striking, striking? . . .

RIGHT FROM THE START, Psycho played with these and

darker prospects. The feeling existed that this might be the
most excruciatingly skillful film ever made—if you
thought of film as a ghost train or a dream, or as an exper-
iment with suspense. Anyone with any sense of film knew
not just that Psycho changed “cinema” but that now the
subversive secret was out—truly this medium was pre-
pared for an outrage in which sex and violence were no
longer games but were in fact everything. Psycho was so
blatant that audiences had to laugh at it, to avoid the giddy
swoon of evil and ordeal. The title warned that the central
character was a bit of a nut, but the deeper lesson was that
the audience in its self-inflicted experiment with danger
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 3

1960 3

might be crazy, too. Sex and violence were ready to break

out, and censorship crumpled like an old lady’s parasol.
The orgy had arrived.

* * *

AT THE END OF THE 1950S, Hollywood seemed to be doing

its thing in the same old way. It made The Searchers, Rio
Bravo, and Man of the West, three of the best Westerns ever
done. It produced Ben-Hur, Gigi, Giant, and Around the
World in 80 Days—large entertainments boundless in bud-
get and scope, but so tame to the imagination. It delivered
musicals (The King and I, High Society, South Pacific), Bib-
lical epics (The Ten Commandments), and inspiring stories
of humanity and sacrifice (The Diary of Anne Frank, The
Defiant Ones). And all these films ended well. Most had
happy endings; even where Anne Frank died we were as-
sured that her enemies were eventually defeated and that
Anne’s virtue was an endless flame. Off to one side, there
were a few unaccountable personal visions, movies about
some inner America, full of dread and disorder—Kiss Me
Deadly, Bigger Than Life, The Night of the Hunter, Sweet
Smell of Success, Some Like It Hot—glimpses of a real but
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 4

4 The Moment of Psycho

alarming society (most of them still in black-and-white be-

cause it was “harsh”). But these were not the films Holly-
wood regarded as important.
The people who had founded the business were dying
off. Those left told themselves movies were better than
ever, and they said they were still in charge. But they were
old men who did not realize how fast public taste was
changing. There were already shrewd observers who saw
that the big thing—the golden age, the unquestioning mar-
riage of Hollywood and America—was over. Sometimes it
seemed that the ugly aftermath of goldenness, The Tar-
nished Angels (and that was a current title, too), was what
the new fragmented films were revealing.
In 1958 American box office dropped below $1 billion a
year, a figure it had held since the early 1940s. In the same
year, the average weekly attendance at the movies fell to 35
million; it had been 82 million in 1946. Another statistic
helped explain that decline. In the ’50s, the number of
American households with television went up from about
4 million to about 48 million. There wasn’t any question
about America’s, or the world’s, delight in moving picture
stories. But staying at home with them felt easier, cheaper,
and more natural. No matter how big or spectacular Hol-
lywood made the movies, the audience took the smaller
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 5

1960 5

version. One of the most brilliant people in the city saw

that light, and in the mid-1950s he augmented his theatri-
cal pictures with a new TV series. It changed him more
than he could have guessed.
When Alfred Hitchcock turned sixty on August 13,
1959, he was already the best-known film director in the
United States. People liked his films: in the fifties Strangers
on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a
Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by
Northwest had all been popular hits, suspense stories
served with the black cream of Hitchcock’s humor. There
had been other films—I Confess, The Wrong Man, The
Trouble with Harry, and Vertigo—that had not been as
successful. Still, Hitchcock’s output in the fifties had been
extraordinary, and in France, for example, he was widely
regarded as a great artist. Two critics on their way to be-
coming filmmakers, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer,
had written a book about Hitchcock in 1957. A book
about a filmmaker! It was a great novelty. In the fifties film
was still so central as an entertainment that no one thought
to write books about it.
Hitchcock had earned an uncommon reputation not just
for suspense and mystery but for artful, teasing games
played with moral responsibility. There were ways in
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 6

6 The Moment of Psycho

which he asserted or advertised himself. He had a habit of

putting himself in his own films—for a shot or a cameo
moment—and the habit had become famous if only be-
cause the round, respectable, and sedate-looking Hitch-
cock was at odds with the frantic action in his films. (You
could hardly imagine Hitch in North by Northwest racing
Cary Grant into the cornfield as the crop-dusting aircraft
turned ugly. Nor could you picture Hitch himself drawing
all those gorgeous women into embraces that seemed to go
a few inches further—and inches count—than censorship
wished for.)
But it was in the ’50s that this public recognition of
Hitchcock was deepened by his new TV show, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents. The show started playing in the fall of
1955 and would run for ten years. It was a showcase for
mystery stories, often very well written and directed.
Hitchcock even directed a few of the shows himself. But
he graced every edition with a short on-camera introduc-
tion and farewell. These highlight spots stressed his fastid-
ious, plummy way of speaking and his rather chilly, formal
humor. They offered an intriguing contrast between nasty
material and classy presentation, and they established
Hitch (coming and going to lugubrious music, Gounod’s
“Funeral March of a Marionette”) as a droll fellow who
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 7

1960 7

liked to make audiences sweat. The marketing of Psycho

would draw upon this famous framework in a striking
way—one that emphasized the fact of a Hitchcock film.
These TV shows were filmed at the premises of Revue, the
production company that had been set up by Hitchcock’s
preeminent agent, Lew Wasserman.

HITCHCOCK TOOK FILM—as a craft, an art, or a way of

controlling information—very seriously. Nothing else
mattered as much to him. He wanted to produce a great
surge of emotion in his public—but he was very vague as
to what emotion. So it became fear, or terror. And terror,
sooner or later, wants power. He was generally very mod-
est about his own artistic efforts, because he knew such
talk was frowned upon in the film industry. As a younger
man, beginning in the twenties, he had sometimes been ac-
cused of artiness. But in the fifties he was flattered by the
way young French writers took him so seriously, for at a
repressed level he had very large creative ambitions. So in
films like Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and Vertigo,
he had been pursuing the issue of moral responsibility in
voyeurism and the larger question of why “decent” people
were so interested in visions of crime and violence and sex
that they could watch in apparent safety or immunity.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 8

8 The Moment of Psycho

At the end of Rear Window, when James Stewart, by

dint of constant spying, has worked out that a man in the
courtyard he surveys has killed his wife, that man comes to
Stewart’s apartment. We expect menace and danger. In-
stead, the man asks, “What do you want of me?” And
Hitchcock clearly was fascinated by what it was the
“good” characters in films, and their audience, wanted. It
is still an abiding question, the one that asks not just what
are the movies for? But what are we for?
Moreover, it’s clear in hindsight that Hitchcock was per-
sonally caught up in that voyeurism and its consequences.
He had been fat as long as anyone remembered. He was
married to a valued assistant, Alma. They had a daughter,
Patricia. His life seemed settled. But, secretly, Hitch was in
the habit of falling in love with his actresses and making
the film speak to that infatuation—with Joan Fontaine,
with Ingrid Bergman, with Grace Kelly, with Kim Novak,
with Eva Marie Saint. This is not just gossip or specula-
tion. Throughout the fifties (his best work) the films are
charged with the lust and guilt of watching a beloved fig-
ure under stress. In Psycho another such woman—Janet
Leigh—is remorselessly studied for forty minutes and then
torn to pieces.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 9

1960 9

Hitch was a success. He had had a bad patch at the box

office in the late ’40s (Rope, Under Capricorn, Stage
Fright), but most of his films did well. He lived in Beverly
Hills in tasteful luxury (with a weekend retreat in Santa
Cruz), yet he had been the son of an East London green-
grocer, a lowly figure in the British class system. But
Hitchcock had never—and would never—win an Oscar as
Director. His first film in America, Rebecca, had won Best
Picture, but that award went to its producer, David O.
Selznick—and Hitch had a poor opinion of Selznick.
Hitch had been nominated for directing Rebecca, as he
would be for Lifeboat, Spellbound, and Rear Window. Ac-
tors might win working for him (Fontaine in Suspicion),
but even that was a rarity. And Hitch was not even nomi-
nated for Notorious, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, or
North by Northwest. Why was that so? The simple answer
is that his pursuit of suspenseful violence was deemed so
tongue-in-cheek as to lack gravity or seriousness. The
Academy has seldom been long on humor, and some felt
Hitch did not respect subject matter enough. This attitude
affected more than the Oscars. Hitchcock was never hon-
ored by the Directors Guild or the BAFTAs (the British
awards) and only once by the New York Film Critics—for
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 10

10 The Moment of Psycho

The Lady Vanishes in 1938. In time these omissions were

regretted: the Academy gave Hitchcock its Thalberg
Award in 1967, and the American Film Institute made him
its Life Achievement honoree in 1979. But the Academy
never exercised the gesture that it has made for so many
(Chaplin, Griffith, Welles, Renoir, Lubitsch, Hawks,
Keaton): the awarding of an honorary Oscar for career
achievement so as to make up for missed opportunities
over the years.
It’s not so remarkable to conclude that Hitch was hurt
or offended, as to wonder why the oversight occurred. No
one doubted his ability, technically, as an entertainer or as
a master of suspense. But the public and the Academy
alike failed to esteem his humor or to see it as part of an
earnest approach. It may have had something to do with
his perceived smugness and the way an Englishman had
dodged the war and learned the ways of the studio system
better than most Americans.
That mixture of the threatening and the sardonic (a tone
to be found in Harold Pinter, another East London artist
from lowly origins) would be put to the test in the years
around 1960. And the test fixed on the different apprecia-
tion of Hitch in France and English-speaking countries. A
key experience for Hitch was going to the French Riviera to
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 11

1960 11

shoot To Catch a Thief in 1954, for it was during that work

that he was first approached by young French critics—like
François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard.
They interviewed him for Cahiers du Cinema and devoted
an entire issue of the magazine to him, that of October
1954. They told him how great he was. And then, in the
late ’50s, they seemed to vindicate that praise by them-
selves becoming notable filmmakers. It was at the Cannes
Film Festival of May 1959 (just months before Psycho was
settled on as a project) that François Truffaut—Hitch’s
great champion in France—won the director’s prize for his
first film, Les 400 Coups.
French admiration didn’t mean too much in Hollywood
eyes—or not yet. Cahiers du Cinema had modest sales.
The films by Truffaut and Godard would play in art
houses. But it was in the ’60s that French ideas on cinema
were taken up in America as the study of film gripped
American higher education. In the space of ten years, a
subject taught, gingerly, in a handful of places became a
mainstream college major. In other words, films were no
longer just the property of the business that made them.
And it was the same younger generation, equipped with
the Pill and a new attitude toward sex, that began to chafe
at movie censorship. Psycho was ahead of those changes,
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 12

12 The Moment of Psycho

but it was ahead of everything: we should never forget

that it indulged sex (nakedness) and violence (that knife)
and told censorship to get lost. Many people condemned
that audacity; some thought it was trashy. But Hitchcock
carried discretion past all known codes and guessed that
the audience was ready. Psycho played in first-rank
theaters, it made a fortune, and quite quickly it would be
talked of as brilliant “art” by a young generation that
wanted to acclaim film and its modernity. No one had
nursed the idea that film could be art more carefully than
Alfred Hitchcock.
So the sixty-year-old had things to prove and matters of
superiority to demonstrate. I do not mean to say he was
consumed by bitterness, though he was wounded by the
halfhearted response to Vertigo. Hitch understood his own
work—there is even a case to be made that it was too thor-
oughly premeditated—and he grasped the tortured reflec-
tion of directors and actresses he had delivered in Vertigo.
It was not far from a confession, though one that very few
had seemed to understand. Its greatness had been missed,
and its narrative suspense failed at the box office. Hitch
may have reckoned that Kim Novak had proved an inade-
quate substitute for Vera Miles (his first choice for the
lead) or the regal Grace Kelly.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 13

1960 13

Like so many in the audience, Hitch adored Kelly—in

Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and To Catch a Thief,
her puree of comedy, class, and sex suited him perfectly,
and it was delivered with a cool, glassy style that he cher-
ished. It wasn’t his fault that she’d found a prince in the
South of France, and clearly he lived with the dream of re-
claiming her. But that was coupled with a raw, antagonistic
urge—to be naughty, to challenge Hollywood on nearly
every standard he could find. And, make no mistake, Psy-
cho was a piece of insurrectionary defiance.
In late 1958, to follow North by Northwest, Hitchcock
was contemplating an English novel, No Bail for the Judge,
by Henry Cecil. It turned on a judge’s daughter, to be
played by Audrey Hepburn, who sets out to prove her fa-
ther’s innocence in a murder case. Next to Psycho, it seems
nearly archaic, but there was an attempted rape scene in
the treatment that made Hepburn flinch. So that project
lapsed, and in June 1959 Hitchcock began to talk about
Psycho.
Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name had been around
in proof for a few months. It was based on the activity of a
serial killer from Wisconsin, Ed Gein, who had been cap-
tured in 1957. Like Gein, Bloch was from Wisconsin, in-
creasingly fascinated by what he learned of the murders.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 14

14 The Moment of Psycho

Bloch was a writer of horror fiction, but now he was drawn

to the real-crime aspects of the Gein story. “In my mind,”
he would say later, “the character would have been the
equivalent of a Rod Steiger type at that time, who lived
alone—a recluse more or less, who didn’t have a lot of
friends. How would he select his victims? I came up with
his being a motel-keeper because of easy access to
strangers.” Bloch also dreamed up the killing in a shower
stall. He reckoned that was the epitome of invaded privacy.
But his novel had the killer’s knife, in one stroke, slashing
through the shower curtain and beheading the woman. For
Hitchcock, that killing was all too rapid. From the outset,
he saw the shower murder as a set piece, an extended
frenzy of blows that might take a week to film.
But studios had passed because of the unwholesome
subject matter: a fellow who runs a rural motel, a guy fat
and forty who is a serial killer and keeps the stuffed body
of his mother. This was creepy “shocker” material—pulp
fiction, if you like—though it’s worth recalling that Tru-
man Capote’s In Cold Blood would be a literary rescue of
similar material. And the dates are suggestive: the New
York Times story from Holcomb, Kansas, about the
slaughter of four Clutter family members, appeared in
November 1959.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 15

1960 15

I doubt there’s any way of establishing whether the

number of wanton killing sprees in rural America picked
up in the 1950s (though a case can be made that the spread
of local television news brought extra attention to such
lurid local discoveries). It may just be that such murders
began to be more widely reported and that they struck
“tender” urban sensibilities like those of Hitchcock and
Capote as revealing of the allegedly placid hinterland.
Capote surprised his friends by finding the crime fascinat-
ing and exemplary. Hitchcock was struck by the Gein
story and with what Bloch had made of it. Not that Hitch
was a devotee of rural life. Most of his films are urban sto-
ries with sophisticated characters who seldom stray too far
from cocktails and the club. I don’t see anyone in his work
foreshadowing Norman Bates. Which is not to say that
Hitch hadn’t been struck by the way a new kind of char-
acter might loom up out of nowhere. How had Elvis Pres-
ley or James Dean become American phenomena? And
how could any observer miss the emotional anger or the
brooding violence in those country boys?
In film, or television, in the 1950s, domestic horror was
in short supply. There are only two pictures I can think of
that come anywhere near it, one of which is Charles
Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, in which a rural
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 16

16 The Moment of Psycho

“preacher” (Robert Mitchum) hunts down two children in

a dark fairy-tale landscape from nightmare. But Laughton’s
film was a disaster, in great part because there was so little
tradition of American Gothic or ugly violence and so little
attention to abnormal behavior.
The other film was Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, shot in
the rancid remains of Venice, California, and quite simply
certain that small-town America was run by monsters. Of
course, Welles did something else prescient in that film: he
chose Janet Leigh as the icon of a decent America opposed
to this filth. To the best of my knowledge, Hitchcock
never owned up to having seen Touch of Evil, but the in-
fluence is palpable (both films employed Robert Clat-
worthy as assistant set designer). And the “night man” at
the motel in the Welles film—a daring portrait by Dennis
Weaver—is a piece of work that one can imagine Anthony
Perkins studying with delight as he developed Norman
Bates.
The only other functioning crazy in American film then
was Jerry Lewis—which is not a flippant observation.
Lewis was getting at the underside of America, as Dean
and Presley were attempting. But no one would have
dared think of Presley in Psycho (until you have the idea,
and then you can’t get rid of it).
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 17

1960 17

There was just one area where trash was thriving in

American film—in the B pictures being made by Roger
Corman. Above all, Corman had seen that rock and roll
signaled a teenage audience, ready for a new level of vio-
lence, splashy, gaudy, and lip smacking. Corman worked
in other genres—music pictures, Edgar Allan Poe, and
gangster remakes—but a few of his pictures were mining
the ground for Psycho: A Bucket of Blood (notice the inso-
lence of the title) and The Little Shop of Horrors (which
was early Jack Nicholson, another intriguing Norman).

PARAMOUNT SAID they were frightened of Psycho. The

killing was brutal yet ordinary. The setting was common-
place. The script called for a bathroom and a lavatory, as
well as an extended slaughter! The studio aligned itself
with middle-aged decorum in reckoning that Psycho was
going too far.
The talent agency MCA had purchased Universal in
November 1958—and it was through MCA that Lew
Wasserman served as Hitch’s agent. MCA bought the
rights to the Bloch novel for $9,000, but in so discreet a
way that Bloch did not realize that Hitch was after him.
James Cavanagh was hired to do a screenplay (he had
done several episodes of the Hitchcock TV show). And
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 18

18 The Moment of Psycho

Paramount started pressing Hitch on whether the project

was advisable.
This is when Wasserman made one of his master strokes.
He proposed that Psycho would be a Hitchcock picture on
which Paramount had only 40 percent of the ownership.
Hitch would defer his salary and direct the film free of
charge on a budget kept as low as possible. Indeed, Hitch
offered to do it like one of his TV shows—cut-price, very
fast, without the production values of the Paramount
films, without color or big stars. In return, Hitch would
own 60 percent of the picture himself. Wasserman even
came up with this topper: to save Paramount from embar-
rassment, the picture would be shot over at Universal on
cheaply rented sets.
This astonishing deal only occurred because top execu-
tives at Paramount—like Frank Freeman and Barney Bala-
ban (men in their seventies, unaware how far America and
the world would vote for sex and violence in the sixties)—
were so put off by Psycho and its threat of violence. But the
consequence of the deal was remarkable. For the first time
in his career, Hitch was in a position to make a fortune as a
major profit participant. The man who had served Para-
mount so well never made another picture there.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 19

1960 19

As good as his word, Hitchcock hired John L. Russell

as cameraman on Psycho (Russell was a veteran from Al-
fred Hitchcock Presents and camera operator on Touch of
Evil), and he agreed not to exceed a budget of $800,000.
The decor would be especially mean, with down-market
interiors throughout. The cast was small. The driving
scenes were all back projection. Two or three reels were
virtually silent! It was back to basics, as well as a bomb
beneath the city.
Cavanagh proved a flop as a writer, and he was replaced
by Joseph Stefano. Stefano stayed as faithful as possible to
the Bloch novel—but he was writing for Anthony Perkins,
who, far from fat and forty, had a real youth following by
then. Perkins owed Paramount a picture, and he signed on
for $40,000. Janet Leigh came later, for $25,000, after
Hitchcock had considered Eva Marie Saint, Hope Lange,
and even Lana Turner. If there was a crucial edge in the
casting, it was that both Perkins and Leigh were appealing,
and like people from next door. And it was Stefano who
found the structure in which part 1 would be Marion’s
story and part 2 Norman’s. By the third week of Novem-
ber they were shooting.
By Christmas, Marion Crane was in the swamp.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 20
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 21

Continuity

HOTEL

T HANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY, except that in this part of

America, in Phoenix, Arizona, God seems a long way
away. But Phoenix grows out of the desert, and the Bible is
a book with many desert scenes.
You can make 1960 sound comfortable, corny, and fifty
years ago. Dwight Eisenhower was president still, but he
was about to be retired because of two full terms, mount-
ing illness, and the gap between his paternal bearing and
the opportunistic times. Richard Nixon and John Kennedy
lived in that difference. They were both trickier men than
Eisenhower understood, far more prepared to do whatever
they had to do to win. In 1960 they ran a very close race in
which the fighting was nasty, dirty, and as expected. It was

21
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 22

22 The Moment of Psycho

American, and in the first forty minutes of Psycho—the

unease before its storm—it is remarkable how many
glimpses Alfred Hitchcock allows of a grasping, devious,
and ordinarily nasty nation.
Now, being nasty is not the same as cutting an unknown
woman to pieces, and Psycho’s significance is in going so
much further than filmgoers anticipated. But the nastiness
can be felt like sandpaper. Fifty years later, this abrasive-
ness or indifference is a better explanation of the film’s
central violence than the cockamamie answer it concocts
about a boy being possessed now and then by the angry
spirit of his dead mother. The central killing grows out of
the grim unkindness of the world we have seen, not from
the lurid casebook of the Bates family.
So we begin in Phoenix, Arizona, at 2:43 on the after-
noon of Friday, December 11. But while the title-sequence
verticals by Saul Bass are pure and bold, Phoenix seems
drab in its winter light. The photography has no direct
sunlight, so the grays of concrete and stone recede into the
same hues in the desert mountains. Nor are we shown a fa-
mous Sun Belt city, or the touristy views of fair Phoenix.
Instead, we close in on one furtive window in an ugly
building, open a crack with the blinds down nearly all the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 23

Continuity 23

way. The room seems gloomy, uninviting. But the camera

slips in nonetheless, as if to say that spying is normal.
Psycho would be a very different film if we came in on
Sam Loomis and Marion Crane (John Gavin and Janet
Leigh) naked, making love, in rapture. And, more or less,
we are led to suppose that that’s what we would have seen
if we’d come earlier—at 2:13, say. But the time is precise,
and it makes our visit seem appointed. So it’s important to
note that we see the aftermath of sex: a woman, a blonde,
back in her underwear, stretched out on the bed, and a man
naked above the waist standing beside her. There’s some-
thing in the air that makes sex itself seem illicit.
The two are lovers, but their love has come and gone,
without our seeing it. And without them being trans-
formed by it. Their hair is combed, and the sweat has been
wiped away. So now they are partners in a transaction, be-
ginning to go their separate ways. If there was no talk, you
might conclude from their actions and appearance that she
is a hooker and he is a client. She wears a bra and a slip—
and in the code of 1960 that is “naked,” just as it was un-
precedented in an opening “information” scene like this.
But in fact it is an erotic restriction, no less professional
when Marion Crane gets up and dresses fully. It is a bare
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 24

24 The Moment of Psycho

room—the kind they can rent by the hour—and the light

is harsh. Nothing is kind to their love or their assignation.
If sex was intended as an escape (that is often its role in
American film), the texture of this film offers no support
to the hope.
They are acting like a man and a whore, or like lovers
who must not be seen. And the talk (if we turn that on,
too) is a steady conflict between romance and money.
They are lovers. But he was married to someone else and is
trapped now by the grip of alimony and his father’s debts.
They are not as young as springtime: Janet Leigh in 1960
was thirty-three and John Gavin thirty-two. Marion says
she has never been married, but she has a ripe carnal body
and a face that seems to know about sex—even if it was sex
with Tony Curtis.
And here we need to stress one quite remarkable thing:
an American film has begun (in the famously developing
city of Phoenix—a miracle of new urban life) in which the
hopes and desires of two mature people are overshadowed
by lack of money and social freedom. Look at a hundred
other films from the ’50s and you will not find the same
cramped air. As a rule, the rooms are larger and brighter
than they would be in reality, waiting to be filled by the
hopes and energies of the era. Most films of the ’50s are se-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 25

Continuity 25

cret ads for the American way of life. Psycho is a warning

about its lies and limits.
Nor is it clear how these two are going to escape: the al-
imony is a dead weight on their prospects. When they part,
they do not have a date or a hope for the future. So there
will be more lunchtime hotel rooms, apparently. The last
image of the scene is Sam alone in the room, standing up
but bowed down, more a victim than a hero. Marion hur-
ries back to her office, and Sam goes to the airport to get a
plane to Fairvale, California, where he has a hardware
store and lives in the storeroom behind it.
So they live apart. Of course, they have occasional sex,
but we did not see it. We simply watched the assembled
parts for sex and asked ourselves what Marion might look
like without these comprehensive bras she’s wearing (I’d
guess a good 36 D-cup). But guessing is a fool’s romance.

OFFICE
When Marion gets back to the office, she has a headache
instead of the calm that might have followed sex. There’s
a lovely dissolve from the hotel room to the office (look-
ing out on the street) so that the dejected figure of Sam in
the room rhymes with another figure on the sidewalk—a
stout man made funnier by his cowboy hat, his back to
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 26

26 The Moment of Psycho

the camera. It is Alfred Hitchcock, letting us know how

indifferent he is to Sam’s mood and not noticing Marion
hurrying around behind him to enter the office. Such
cameos are supposedly playful. But this dissolve carries a
sinister edge.
Marion has a friend in the office—she is Caroline,
played by Patricia Hitchcock, the director’s daughter.
Hitch never gave his daughter a break in his films. So she
is smug, gossipy, nasty, and vain here. She may be Marion’s
friend, but you know she’d say anything behind her back.
Caroline reassures Marion: the boss of the realty com-
pany is still at his business lunch. She gloats over the way
her husband, Teddy, called her, and her mother (to see if
Teddy called). Caroline is self-satisfied, antilife, and un-
charitable, all in a few lines and twenty seconds. You never
forget her naggy voice or the aggrieved tone in all the sup-
porting parts that fill the first part of the film.
Take the boss, Mr. Lowery, who soon arrives with his
client, Cassidy. The boss is a rat and the client a bullfrog.
They have done their deal, and Cassidy is drunk, sexually
overconfident, and dead set on Marion. He sits on her
desk. He describes how his eighteen-year-old daughter is
getting married, leaving him free—for Marion. And he
talks about using money to buy off unhappiness. He
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 27

Continuity 27

waves a wad of bills—not battered singles but slick new

hundreds—under her nose. “I never carry more than I can
afford to lose,” he says, and Marion knows exactly what he
means. (She really could have been a hooker once.)
“He was flirting with you,” says Caroline, as the two
men go into an inner office for another drink. “I guess he
must have noticed my wedding ring.”
Yet flirting carries hints of romance or fondness. Cassidy
was propositioning Marion. He was seeing whether he
could buy her. And he may have been a little more pushy
because he sensed her amused resistance. So he does not
notice that his money may have invaded her imagination.
Marion takes some papers that need signing into the
inner office. She asks if she can go home early because of
her headache. Lowery consents, but Cassidy suggests a
weekend in Las Vegas instead. “I’m going to spend this
weekend in bed, thank you,” says Marion. But she agrees
to take the $40,000 in cash and deposit it at the bank on her
way home. (She still needs to be laid.)

ANOTHER ROOM
As a top secretary in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1960, let’s say
that Marion Crane earned $100 a week. In her “home,” in
Phoenix, we see her standing in the doorway to a closet,
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 28

28 The Moment of Psycho

wearing a black slip and a black bra, and looking wistfully

at the envelope of money, which is the only thing on her
bed. A close-up peeps into the envelope, and we can read
the top bill in the piles of hundreds.
The only felt sound is that of Bernard Herrmann’s
music, plucked strings or water dripping, inner music, that
of thought coming slowly toward a dire decision. The
room is just that, a single room not much better than the
hotel we saw earlier. Marion cannot really afford an apart-
ment, and she has not done much to make this room per-
sonal or her own. It feels like another nondescript room
for rent. And there is Marion, in her underwear for the
second time already—alone with the money, the music,
and the camera. Of course, she does not argue the matter
out with herself—shall I? shan’t I?—but we know she is
sliding toward the wrong decision. For she has a suitcase
that she is packing already. As well as the black bra. It is a
scene that Janet Leigh plays with absolute authority—and
I would still employ it as an audition for promising ac-
tresses, and as a test of physical presence.
Nothing is said. Her decision is folly, but the impulse is
irresistible. The decision is plainly human, but the aura of
fantasy or speculation—the overall, “Would you? . . .”—is
beautifully embodied in the stealthy, private action we be-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 29

Continuity 29

hold and gradually become complicit in. It is because we

have to work out what she is thinking that we recognize
the alluring prospect of taking the $40,000. And the obser-
vation of the decision is eroticized by the music, by the
feeling of this hapless woman alone in her room, and by
the film’s steady nagging away at her nakedness.
She decides—yet she can tell herself that she will really
make the decision later. For the moment, she can say, she
has slipped the envelope and its money into her handbag so
that it will be safe. Then she picks up the case and is on her
way. The shot of her leaving the room dissolves to the first
head-on close-up of her driving for her life and her soul.

THE ROAD
So what kind of film is Psycho so far? A theft has occurred,
though you could argue that Marion has not entirely let
the thief into the open. But that is settled for her in a
clinching touch of small embarrassment. As she is driving
out of Phoenix, she stops at a pedestrian crossing, and
Lowery and Cassidy step out to cross the road in front of
her. Only Lowery sees her, and he smiles—because it is
Marion—but then he does a slight double take because she
had told him she was going to bed. This looks like a lie,
and for a moment that is worse than theft. It is not the end
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 30

30 The Moment of Psycho

of the world, but it is as incriminating as Lowery’s anxious

gaze, straight into the camera. She will be a thief next. And
so this Arizona version of Emma Bovary has let her life
slip closer to fate and fatality. We like her. A part of us
wants her. But we behold her making her way and her mis-
takes. We are sympathetic, but we are scolding her, too,
and Herrmann’s music raises its accusatory tone.
That Friday afternoon, setting off at about four o’clock,
Marion will drive to the outskirts of Gorman, in Califor-
nia. This is some 350 miles, going on Interstate 10 or 40,
with a great stretch of Mojave Desert to cross, before she
is in the foothills north of Los Angeles. But if she goes to
Gorman, then she is headed for I-5, the highway that runs
north and south in California. We gather that she is head-
ing for “Fairvale,” where Sam lives. There is not a Fairvale
to be found in that state, though it has Fair Oaks, Fair
Play, Fairfield, Farehaven, Fairmead, and Fairview. A place
has been invented, perhaps to avoid any later thought that
the Bates family lived in this or that town. But Marion
drives a long way that first night and then a little farther on
the Saturday before night and rain stop her, and that means
that Fairvale is most likely in the area of Redding or
Shasta—northern California, deep country, not too heavily
populated, then or now.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 31

Continuity 31

Of course, Psycho is a period film, even if it makes such

use of the freeway system brought to fruition by President
Eisenhower in the 1950s. How is it period? Marion never
phones Sam to say she is coming. She has no cell phone.
She never stops to call and seek his advice. That tells us
something about their separated love life: the telephone is
likely too expensive as a way of keeping in touch.
Which makes it that much more poignant, or desperate,
that Marion is driving more than 800 miles to be with her
man and to deposit her crime in his lap or bank. And she
drives, making light of the great journey and the dissolves
that carry her on into desert, night, and the great distances
of the West.
Then it is morning. We see Marion’s car pulled off the
highway, by the roadside. Another car—a highway patrol
car—appears in the same picture. It stops, and an officer gets
out to investigate. This policeman is not nasty, like the other
small roles she meets. But he is a looming figure of author-
ity and question, the embodiment of her paranoia. He is not
named, but he is played by Mort Mills (an actor who had
just had a key supporting role in Orson Welles’s Touch of
Evil). Hitchcock treats him as a uniform, a peaked cap, a
chiseled face, and dark glasses that are never removed—he’s
like a comic-book cop. And he looks straight into the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 32

32 The Moment of Psycho

camera, into her car, and into Marion Crane. She is asleep,
but his intrusion wakes her and fills her with dread.
She tells him she pulled off the road the night before be-
cause she was afraid of falling asleep. He says there are
plenty of motels around “just to be safe.” “Have I broken
any law?” she asks, getting tougher with the impersonal
face. “No, ma’am,” he says. In truth, he is considerate and
gentle with her. But she is behaving oddly, so he asks to see
her license. She’s free to go, but as she drives off she sees in
her rearview mirror that he’s following her. This is a lovely
moment in which the strands of highway seem to make a
knot behind her.
At a junction, with roads to Bakersfield or Los Angeles,
she slips into Gorman. She has made another foolish deci-
sion. The cop has her license plate number, so she reckons
to exchange her car for another. Marion is hardly her own
best friend (in this first section of the film, “psycho” could
only apply to her). Having committed a foolish crime
(though one that might still be repaired if she drove back
to Phoenix), she now compounds it.

CALIFORNIA CHARLIE
He is a car salesman on the edge of the desert—tall, thin,
dried out, full of zigzag hype, in a polka-dotted bow tie
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 33

Continuity 33

but absolutely certain that the desert will outlast every ve-
hicle he sells. It is a one-scene performance, given to John
Anderson, a polished, contained actor. And he is so exact,
so studied and dark, that he reduces Marion Crane to
wreckage. She drives away from his premises, her fear and
energy multiplied; the exchange with Charlie is like a re-
hearsal for being cut to pieces. She has been undermined,
chopped off at the ankles.
Because one cop has seen her driving with Arizona
plates, she reckons to trade in her car for a California
model. It is a demented action, aggravated by the way the
highway patrolman pulls in to observe the transaction—an
extra that Charlie cannot miss. He’s ready to hustle her
into a deal, only to discover that her panic to swap cars is
breathless and lethal. It is as if she has an inner dream of
never going back to Arizona again, or of running without
any discretion or pretense.
She looks at another car—any other car—and decides
that’s the one. She rejects any need for a test drive. And
when Charlie proposes, “I’d figure your car plus . . .
$700,” she repeats the sum (clearly outrageous). “Ah,” he
butts in, “you always got time to argue money, huh?” She
slams the door shut and accepts the terms. He wonders
then if she has the title—can she prove it’s her car?
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 34

34 The Moment of Psycho

She goes into the ladies’ room with her handbag and a
copy of the Los Angeles Times she bought at a stand. She
can’t see anything about her theft. But in the cramped cu-
bicle, jammed up against a mirror and her reflection, she
takes out the money and peels off seven $100 bills. Ben-
jamin Franklins.
Charlie still wants her to test the car—a white Ford. The
cop is across the road watching. Charlie has a smarting con-
science about the rough deal he’s laid on this pretty woman.
But Marion won’t wait. Indeed, she very nearly drives the
new car off the lot without having her suitcase carried over
from the old car. The last shot of this magnificent trap of a
sequence is that of the three men in a line—Charlie, the
cop, and the guy who brought the suitcase—watching her
dust and her demonic need to get away. She has made her
madness clear, but three in a row—male, without under-
standing, but upright in suspicion—they are like her Furies.
Will she ever find peace, or is she about to drive off into the
northwest, driving for 40,000 miles?

NIGHTMARE
The tension is building. Marion has gone a little crazy: her
behavior with the cars was flagrant and irrational, whereas
the passage where she actually “stole” the money was a
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 35

Continuity 35

lulling fantasy. But crazy Marion becomes much more of a

person.
She drives on, northward, with that same head-on close-
up that Hitchcock used yesterday, back in Phoenix. It lets
us study Marion without her knowing it: it is a grilling and
an interrogation from a concealed vantage. And now she
cracks. Her voiceover begins to fill the picture with imag-
ined talk—talk about her, talk the Furies might exchange.
And as this tirade against her goes on, so night falls.
We hear the car dealer and the highway patrolman talk-
ing behind her back. Then the radio melodrama switches to
Phoenix where Lowery and Caroline are on the phone to-
gether working it out that Marion has run away and the
money is missing. Lowery goes to Cassidy, and we see the
anguished face of Marion smile with dark sexual knowing-
ness as Cassidy growls, “Well, I ain’t about to kiss off
$40,000! I’ll get it back, and if any of it’s missin’ I’ll replace
it with her fine soft flesh! I’ll track her, never you doubt it!”
Her smile acknowledges the cruelty implicit in
voyeurism—and, of course, it’s not just Cassidy who has
been giving her the searching eye. It’s us, the audience,
studying her as a kind of sexual offering or bait.
Then the night turns to rain: and now there is an odd feel-
ing of Marion being trapped by the aridity of the car—a
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 36

36 The Moment of Psycho

long drive is physically exhausting, yet the “pool” beats

against the car without healing or refreshing her. Put an-
other way, she is “in” a shower, yet cut off from it.
All the while, on this drive, Bernard Herrmann’s music
has been building in stress and pain, turning the screws on
folly and ordeal—no matter that for now Marion is most
threatened by the voices she imagines.
Oncoming headlights dazzle her. In the wash of light on
her windshield and through the harsh movement of her
wipers, she sees a sign, Bates Motel—Vacancy. Didn’t the
patrolman urge her to think of motels, and their safety?
Doesn’t she deserve a little rest?
It’s only later that one realizes how in this night drive, in
mounting distress, she can conjure up the voices of her
“enemies”—Charlie, the cop, Caroline, Lowery, and Cas-
sidy. But she never brings Sam’s voice in. You can argue
that she leaves him out because she knows he will berate
her for behaving so foolishly. But there’s another, sadder,
thought—that Marion’s hard life is that much worse be-
cause she may not really love Sam after all. I put it that
way because she is now about to meet someone who looks
a lot like Sam and is by far the most sensitive and kind per-
son the picture has had to offer.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 37

Continuity 37

BROTHERS
At night, in the rain, we realize something about the
motel that was not apparent from the road. It is two an-
tagonistic forms. At the road, the motel is a series of
bungalow cabins—long, horizontal, like cars themselves.
But on higher ground above these buildings there stands
a large Gothic house, almost certainly with a cellar and
attics as well as two full stories. This house was located
in some form on the Universal lot, and it was then im-
proved and decorated and put up near the low-slung cab-
ins. As such, it resembles the house painted by Edward
Hopper in House by the Railroad, from 1925—that
house is larger but on very much the same plan, and in
Hopper’s painting it stands out against a pale stretched
sky like a skull. There’s a striking contrast in the juxta-
position of the old vertical “home” and the horizontal
abode for transients. It grows odder the more you think
about it, for these two buildings are less brothers than
parent and child. But if you have the large house stand-
ing there, why not use it as a hotel? Most of the lights in
the rooms of the house are on—they seem to be burning.
The light is so intense it has flared away the outline of
the windows.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 38

38 The Moment of Psycho

Then a man comes out of the house and down the steps
that lead to the motel. He is tall and dark, and he looks like
Sam Loomis, but freer, more relaxed: Anthony Perkins
was twenty-seven, only a few years younger than John
Gavin, and coltlike. “Dirty night,” he says to Marion. He
is Norman Bates, and he lets her into the office. She asks if
there is a vacancy. “Twelve cabins—twelve vacancies,” he
admits. He has his own sad humor.
It seems that the motel has gone “dead” after they
moved the highway away. It’s the story of a good country
road being usurped by the new highways of the ’50s. “We
just keep on lighting the lights and following the formali-
ties,” says Norman. There’s self-pity there, yet he seems
uncomplaining. Norman often talks in two voices. Marion
signs the motel register as “Marie Samuels” (she does think
of Sam) from Los Angeles. Norman puts her in cabin 1,
next to the office. It’s only then that she wonders about
food. There’s a big diner up the road, he tells her, “just out-
side of Fairvale.” Fairvale, her destination, is only fifteen
miles away. And in America, fifteen miles is a moment.
But she doesn’t decide to drive on. Norman shows her
to her cabin. The rather shy boy is hesitant about men-
tioning “the bathroom.” He admits it’s stuffy in her cabin
and opens a window. There are pictures of birds on the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 39

Continuity 39

walls, but the room is nondescript—like the others in the

film so far—even if the bathroom burns very brightly (it
must have about twice the power of illumination it would
have in reality).
Norman is Anthony Perkins, and we can feel the idea
that Perkins and Leigh were the only two players in the
film whom Hitchcock liked or was interested in. Though
Norman is shy, the scene slips along on small talk and we
suddenly feel the different temperature: here are two char-
acters who want to like each other. He tells her his name,
and he guesses that the diner feels too far away for her. So
he invites her to share his supper—a sandwich and a glass
of milk—up at the big house. “I’d like to,” says Marion.
She is not stirred by this man, or attracted, except by his
civility, his decency, and his longing to be friendly.
Hitchcock had met Perkins in the summer of 1959, be-
fore there was a script for the picture. He had liked him im-
mediately. The actor had been in The Actress, Friendly
Persuasion, and Fear Strikes Out. He had tried to be the
young man opposite Sophia Loren in Desire Under the
Elms. The audience did not know that Perkins was gay, but
it was understood in Hollywood. He was also smart, hip,
funny, well read—the kind of actor Hitch enjoyed. No one
else was considered for the part, and the scriptwriter,
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 40

40 The Moment of Psycho

Joseph Stefano, was told to write for Perkins—young,

eager, nervous, insecure, maybe a touch feminine.
It was later on that Hitchcock thought of casting Stuart
Whitman as Sam Loomis. Whitman was thirty-three,
notably rugged or masculine. He could have played Sam,
but Hitchcock then yielded to the suggestion of agent Lew
Wasserman and cast John Gavin. He thought Gavin was
less interesting as an actor, but that hardly mattered since
he was not interested in Sam. Still, later on, there are scenes
between Sam and Norman where Hitch seems struck by
their resemblance and frames a scene so as to stress it.
This affinity is one of those things latent in the film
without being developed. But that doesn’t make it unim-
portant. For we the viewers see it and feel it, and it alters
our sense of the triangle. Sam may be her lover, but Nor-
man actually talks to Marion—on a first meeting—with
more sympathy than Sam seems to possess. Norman is the
more sensitive of the two. She may guess he is gay (or shy),
but that doesn’t mean that her mind is unaffected by the
meeting. Marion Crane is on a strange pilgrimage, and we
are about to lose her. But Norman is the character who al-
lows for her redemption. It’s because of that, I think, that
losing her becomes so hard. A subtler point, not really ex-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 41

Continuity 41

plored, is whether the most emotionally discerning people

in life are those who live closest to disturbance.

“NOT HERSELF”
Alone in cabin 1, Marion starts to unpack her suitcase. We
get a better look at the motel room: it is actually a rather
richer room than her place in Phoenix. There are inner net
curtains and outer heavy drapes. The light in the room
reaches up to the ceiling so that it feels comfortable and se-
cure. She looks for a safe place—somewhere to put the
money. She takes the bills out of her handbag and then de-
cides to wrap them in the Los Angeles Times. Then she
hears a voice, coming in at the window Norman opened.
It is the voice of a woman, an old woman even—yet it is
strong enough to carry from the house. “No! I tell you no!
I won’t have you bringing strange young girls in here for
supper—by candlelight, I suppose, in the cheap, erotic
fashion of young men with cheap, erotic minds?”
Norman’s voice tries to respond, “Mother, she’s just a
stranger!”
But “Mother’s” voice settles everything with prim
wordplay: “I refuse to speak of disgusting things, because
they disgust me! Do you understand, boy?”
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 42

42 The Moment of Psycho

Norman appears, downcast, like a servant, carrying a

tray with milk and sandwiches. “My mother isn’t quite
herself today,” he apologizes to Marion. It is the first clear
moment in the film that gets respect the first time we see it
and a guffaw the second. And it is a sly hint to us all that
those people who share the fun of wordplay may be dri-
ving this story. More than that, it is a moment when a film
exerting a fierce grip on us alludes to the possibility of
being artificial as well as terrifying.
This point needs more discussion, for it is vital. Alfred
Hitchcock was always a self-conscious craftsman making
his films. He had an early taste for “private” jokes; his
cameo appearances grew out of that. It was a way of say-
ing “Look, it’s me” or “I did this” in the midst of a story (a
suspension of disbelief) that is supposed to be complete.
Movies—comedies especially—had been prone to such
winks at the audience before: Groucho and Cary Grant
both seem to arch an eyebrow at the camera from time to
time, as if to say, “Get me out of here.” But in general, that
“here” in movies—the story and its place—was sacrosanct.
Pictures did not allude to their own making or process.
But now consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, first pub-
lished in 1955. Quite early in that novel, Humbert Hum-
bert (or is it Nabokov himself?) steps out of the story to
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 43

Continuity 43

advise us, “You can always count on a murderer for a

fancy style.” That’s a fair comment in that Lolita is a book
about a criminal in which the language has the radiance of
triumphal confession. And it’s a gesture to the elegant
slaughter to which Hitchcock always aspired—a sort of
killing that even the victim might appreciate. But “fancy”
also carries connotations of “show-off” or “gay.” And in
American films of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, mannered, high-
gloss style was often code for homosexuality. Think of
Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura or Casper Gut-
man (Sydney Greenstreet) in The Maltese Falcon.
The use of wordplay in the mother’s offstage voice in
Psycho seems to me the same kind of thing (the voice was
that of actor Paul Jasmin, a friend of Anthony Perkins). To
say the least, it is theatrical and literary—and very far from
what an old woman might say in rural California. It is the
voice of an authored character, and that leads us to this
point—that coming to his first great climax in Psycho,
Hitchcock could not find another voice than the one that
both admits and revels in duality. So he is teasing the first
audience and congratulating the second. Above all, he is
owning up to the idea that a film (or a book) is a game to
be played as opposed to a dream to be inhabited. The early
Arizonan naturalism of our story is gone. We are in legend
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 44

44 The Moment of Psycho

or mythology. We are in a work of art. And the artist feels

compelled to own up.

IN THE PARLOR
Norman is not quite sure where to offer supper. There’s
his office, but “eating in an office is just too officious,” so
they go back into his parlor. If this is Norman’s room or
home (and we will find no such place in the house), then it
may remind us of the storeroom behind the hardware
store where Sam Loomis makes his wifeless “home.”
Norman’s parlor is old-fashioned and undistinguished,
but it is an aviary for stuffed birds. These figures are the
more alarming in that they throw shadows on the ceiling—
and they can only do that with a lighting scheme that is
scarcely natural or domestic. So this room is theater, too,
and the function of theater surely narrows its gaze when
Norman tells Marion (picking at her sandwich), “You eat
like a bird.” “You’d know,” she replies, looking at the taxi-
dermy. “No, not really,” says Norman. “Anyway, I hear
the expression ‘eats like a bird’ is really a falsity”—and he
stammers over that word. The stammer is the last decora-
tive bow on the costume called “shyness,” and it is some-
thing Marion feels. Norman likes her. He is attracted to
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 45

Continuity 45

her. But there is something in his life that holds him back
from a candid exploration of the attraction.
The conversation allows Norman to tell us about him-
self, and a pattern sets in—in the script, in the direction,
but in Perkins himself. He is an alarming mixture of meek-
ness and anger. He stuffs birds. It is his hobby. He sits
back in his chair telling Marion, who is smart and inter-
ested enough to realize she is with a disturbed personality,
one who makes her want to confess. He asks where she is
going, and she says she’s looking for a private island. Nor-
man gets it. He starts to talk about “private traps”: “And
none of us can ever get out. We scratch and claw, but only
at the air, only at each other. And for all of it we never
budge an inch.” He stares. The camera angle on him shifts
from three-quarters on in a full shot to profile in a closer
shot. Hitchcock is telling us that Norman’s disturbed.
But as soon as we feel that, Perkins gives one of his
deprecating chuckles or boyish smiles. He knows, too,
doesn’t he? He’s got it under control. The conversation
deepens, and it becomes a matter of crosscut close-ups.
Yes, his mother insults him and bullies him, but she’s
“ill”—her husband, his father, died, and then another man
came along who talked her into building the motel and
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 46

46 The Moment of Psycho

then he died, too. It was all a terrible strain on her. With

only a son left.
Marion and Norman are friends now—and we realize
again how little friendship there has been in the picture.
She wonders if his mother could be “put . . . someplace.”
“A madhouse?” he asks, and now he looks like a ghost in
looming close-up. He couldn’t do that, he says. It would
be like burying her. “I don’t hate her. I hate what she has
become. I hate her illness.”
Marion apologizes for sounding uncaring, and Norman
arrives at the line that—in a way—concludes the film: “We
all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?” And Marion,
or Janet, breaks into a lovely and even a loving smile. It is
as if her trap has been opened or relaxed. It is as if this
strange conversation—and there is hardly anything like it
in American film—has helped her see the folly of what she
has done. She decides to repair the mistake. “I’d like to go
back and try to pull myself out of it,” she says. And she
says, back to Phoenix.
Norman says he’ll bring her breakfast in the morning.
She admits her real name—Marion Crane. She goes to her
cabin.
One needs to see this scene several times to catch all the
nuances and to appreciate how much it is the most ordi-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 47

Continuity 47

nary, natural, and kindly event in the picture as well as the

most searching. Norman doesn’t know Marion’s “crime”
or folly, but he has an uncanny sense of how people can
go wrong and ruin their own lives. He has simply pro-
posed a way of avoiding the worst traps, but his philoso-
phy is foreboding, and it hovers between being earned
experience and neurotic anxiety. In some respects, he has
told her what Sam might have said—if he’d been asked. Be
sensible; return the money. Grow up. He has freed her,
and it’s not out of the range of cinematic logic that the
next morning he might ask if he could go along with her.
He might even indicate that he had feelings for her. She
could say she has a boyfriend already—but if she didn’t
admit that, then we’d know why. Because Norman has
moved her.
But hasn’t he also given hints of danger? Of course. But
is it a danger any greater than Marion’s yielding to the
reckless idea of going off with the money? The possibility
has been reached—in screen chemistry—that these two
people might help each other. And Hitchcock, in his time,
made important films based on the idea of emotional res-
cue (Rebecca, Spellbound, Notorious, North by Northwest)
as well as some where the rescue attempt is disastrous
(Vertigo).
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 48

48 The Moment of Psycho

SILENT CINEMA
Hitchcock began in the silent era, of course, and he never
wavered in his fondness for passages of “pure cinema” in
which the pictures tell us everything. As Marion goes to
her cabin, Norman prowls the office: he smiles at her fake
name in the register; he stands close to his stuffed birds.
And then he takes a painting off the wall—it is an eigh-
teenth-century study of a rape—to reveal a spy hole
through which he can see the interior of cabin 1.
We see what he sees. Marion, undressing, down to her
black underwear, in front of the bathroom. We see a big
close-up of his eye watching. We see her turn toward the
bathroom. He backs away from the spy hole.
He is troubled, angry, trying to be brave. He looks up
toward the house, and his jutting jaw seems to say that he
is going to give his mother a piece of his mind. He walks
up to the house. For the first time, we see its interior—
lavish, with potted plants, a huge staircase, and a banister
post as big as Norman. He is about to go upstairs, but then
he weakens and instead walks beside the staircase, his
hands in his pockets. There is a room at the end of the cor-
ridor, and he sits down there at a table, hunched up in his
loneliness. It is one of the most poignant pictures of soli-
tude in all of Hitchcock’s work.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 49

Continuity 49

In cabin 1, Marion is sitting at a table. She does a sum

that hardly speaks well of her education: $40,000 minus
$700. I’ll leave the answer to you. In fact, this is visual sto-
rytelling that was archaic by 1959. But the scrap of paper is
important. She takes the paper, goes into the bathroom,
and flushes it down the toilet.
Yes, you know what a toilet is, but in 1960, apparently,
the sight and sound of it in operation in a movie were
shocking.
She takes off her robe. She steps into the shower. This is
the moment.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 50
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 51

Room Service

P SYCHO HAS RUN ABOUT FORTY MINUTES. A crime has

been committed, though a naive one, without malice
or much damage, and we will learn later that its victims are
prepared to press no charges, so long as the missing money
is restored. There has been no overt violence, though a lot
of harsh or unkind words have been exchanged. More or
less, the film has been intent on presenting the portrait of a
woman, Marion Crane, who does a stupid thing and learns
that she needs to make amends for it. The film likes her. It
catches her relief when she comes to her moment of critical
self-awareness. But at the same time, the process of film—
the objective scrutiny, the thing that says, “Look at her”—
has been the engine for a mounting tension. And now that
tension is going to be let loose, or be rewarded.

51
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 52

52 The Moment of Psycho

In 1960, for sure, filmgoers had reason to expect rules

and reliable indicators. And so, from the first moments of
Psycho, it is clear that Janet Leigh is the star of the film.
Her actions make the plot of the film, and she (or what she
sees) is on-screen nearly all the time. Yet the credits of the
film read, “Starring Anthony Perkins, John Gavin, and
Vera Miles”—and Miss Miles has not yet appeared. Then
at the end of the cast list, the screen warns us, “And Janet
Leigh as Marion Crane.” That was a way of saying that
Leigh’s participation was not quite central or dominant,
and might even be a bright, short-lived cameo.
It’s hard to know how carefully anyone read those
credits, let alone understood them. It’s certain, I think,
that by the time we reach the Bates Motel we reckon our-
selves on board a Janet Leigh vehicle. Yet one factor ar-
gues against that. For Leigh, or Marion, has been steadily
spied on. Three times in forty minutes we have seen her
in her brassiere. More than that (much more), her attrac-
tiveness or vulnerability has been sharpened by her
“naughtiness,” her willful escape from reality or respon-
sibility, which we have seen in every detail. I think there
is an underlying psychological urge in us, the audience,
to see her stripped and ravished, to see her rebuked. In
part, that comes from a study of Hitchcock’s films where
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 53

Room Service 53

the close inspection of distressed women eroticizes them,

and because Hitchcock always had this readiness for male
punishment (you can see it explored in Notorious, Under
Capricorn, and Dial M for Murder—you can feel it nearly
everywhere).
By 1960 Hitchcock was many things: a very skilled di-
rector of suspense situations, a witty explorer of character
and situation, and an analyst of his own medium, a man
who was entranced by the way film’s mechanics could ma-
nipulate audiences and play on their feelings of fear and
desire. So we are afraid for Marion Crane, in case she is
caught or exposed, yet we want her, too—in the sense that
we want her exposed further to our desire. You can hardly
consider the first section of Psycho as anything other than
an exploration of the process of voyeurism—the building
of sexual excitement through watching.
Thus, it’s important to see that what happens—the
shower murder—is both stunningly unexpected and a log-
ical release of the pressures built up in the long, sustained
overture. Orgasm at last.
That explosion takes the form of removing our most
beloved character and the apparent star of the film in one
frenzy of violence—perhaps the most violent passage until
then in American film. There’s no doubt that Hitchcock
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 54

54 The Moment of Psycho

was intrigued by that drastic authority. It was a way of

saying that his design was more important than film’s
commercial habits or structure.
But something else has to be said: the film so far is the
fairly plain description of a series of grinding processes—
postcoital wistfulness, several sniping conversations, dri-
ving and pursuit, ordeal and fatigue, and then the action at
the motel and the way Marion seems to have bumped into
a kindred spirit and a kind soul. In the first forty minutes
we see things happen. In the next few minutes we see their
hysterical suggestion made flesh. And that is because the
picture represents a crossroads moment when a great rift
appeared in the thing called censorship.
The movies had always been based on a tension. On the
one hand, the form says, “Look, I can show you some-
thing you have never seen before”: it could be an act of vi-
olence, a sexual suggestion; it might be a beautiful man or
woman alone with their thoughts, unaware of being spied
on. Much of the charm of pictures lay in this privileged
opportunity granted to us. For instance, do you want to
look at Garbo or Harlow at your leisure so that you can
speculate over whether they are wearing underwear? Here
you are. At the same time, the business apparatus of
movies was always backed up by a guardian-like sternness
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 55

Room Service 55

that said, “Don’t expect to get a look at truly secret things.

Don’t think we’re going to let Garbo or Harlow take off
the dress—that outer cover—so that you can see whether
you were right or wrong. Yes, we’ll show you ‘murder,’
but don’t expect us to be cruel or bloodthirsty or murder-
ous about it. Because that would be too naughty—and
would put film too close to sadism or torture.”
No country lives as blithely or as uneasily with the op-
posed ideals of orgy and restriction as America. No other
country has such warring impulses toward libertarianism
and restraint. No other country required so detailed or
comical a code of what could be seen on public screens and
what could not. And no other film business so encouraged
the ingenuity of directors, photographers, and actors to see
what they could get away with.
Hitchcock had approached Psycho as a test in that spe-
cial area. I suspect that his interest in the story of the film
was always secondary to his fascination with whether he
could get certain things past the censorship code—the first
postcoital scene, the nagging sexual scrutiny, the flushing
of the piece of paper with the calculation, and what hap-
pens in the shower. There had never been a scene so blunt,
or so drab, as that sexual-aftermath opening. Apparently,
in all of American film, there had never been a scene that
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 56

56 The Moment of Psycho

showed a toilet being flushed before—it really is quite

exhilarating to see what tender creatures we were in 1960.
And there had never been a murder carried out in such de-
tail, with nakedness, repeated violence, and so much
blood. So it was a fair contest: Hitchcock against the sys-
tem. And we have seen how much this matter of “taste”
worked to separate Hitch from Paramount, the studio at
which he had made his great films of the 1950s.
Of course, Hitch had another challenge in the sequence:
he had to make us think we had seen one character commit
the murder while in truth another did it. It is predatory ge-
nius, therefore, to show the blurred outline of a tall
woman coming toward the shower through the curtain. It
is “perfect” cinema to have the upraised knife and the
scream in Herrmann’s strings. But it is pure convenience to
have the killer in close-up, with dark on his face—as if the
bathroom has not already been established as a furnace of
light. But we are so afraid on first viewing, and so startled
by what does happen, that we do not question the photo-
graphic logic of that close-up. The silhouette of Mother is
so daunting and arresting—and Marion does not seem to
recognize the man she has been talking to.
Hitchcock separated this filming from the rest of the
shoot, just as he knew that acceptance of the edited whole
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 57

Room Service 57

would require a campaign. But it’s worth stressing that his

reputation on the eve of Psycho was that of an English con-
noisseur of mystery stories. He was not regarded as a man
of violence—in the way of, say, Samuel Fuller, Anthony
Mann, Nicholas Ray, Robert Aldrich, or other American
directors who dealt in combat and conflict. In Rear Win-
dow, for example, we never saw the killing. In North by
Northwest, the crop-duster sequence was as comic or ab-
surd as it was frightening. There is very little direct vio-
lence in Vertigo or The Wrong Man, in Notorious, Rebecca,
or Suspicion. In The Trouble with Harry there is a corpse,
but we are schooled to regard it as a source of humor.
There is a great strangling in Strangers on a Train—Bruno
Anthony killing Guy Haynes’s wife and then handing the
corpse down to us (like a gift). There are pieces of sus-
pense, like the slowly tearing sleeve in Saboteur before
Norman Lloyd will plunge down from the Statue of Lib-
erty. There is a claustrophobic image of drowning in For-
eign Correspondent. But in general, the killing in a
Hitchcock film had been an opportunity for artistry or ar-
tifice—things that diluted the shock impact.
Don’t misunderstand me. There was always an odd cur-
rent of violence in Hitchcock—I think of a moment in To
Catch a Thief (a sunny film) when Jessie Royce Landis
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 58

58 The Moment of Psycho

stubs out a cigarette in an untouched fried egg. Still, there

is nothing in Hitchcock’s work prior to Psycho to match
the wounding of James Stewart’s hand in The Man from
Laramie, the knife fight in Rebel Without a Cause, or the
strutting violence of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.
Hitch conducted himself like a very plump man with more
taste for wicked thoughts than ugly deeds.
As he prepared Psycho, he often referred his crew mem-
bers to the French film Les Diaboliques, made by Henri-
Georges Clouzot in 1955 (and taken from a novel by the
team that wrote Vertigo). This is a story in which an adul-
terous couple tries to frighten the wife to death by expos-
ing her weak heart to scenes of increasing horror. It is
effective and macabre and a literal acting out of Hitch’s
urge to impose terror through “pure film.”
But he was also a master of detail, and clearly the
shower sequence was to be the most thoroughly and ex-
tensively premeditated and designed scene in his work to
that time. The shower scene was filmed just days before
Christmas, December 17–23, 1959. In the event, seventy-
eight pieces of film would make a forty-five-second se-
quence. As much as ever, Hitchcock had storyboarded the
whole thing, shot by shot, and he seems to have kept title
designer Saul Bass present, in case he had need of more ad-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 59

Room Service 59

vice. Janet Leigh was present most of the time, and she re-
called working in a skin-colored moleskin, without any
nude figure. But another stand-in, Marli Renfro, was used,
too, so that Leigh never had to work in the nude. As for
“Mother,” Anthony Perkins was excused. A stuntwoman
named Margo Epper did all his and her shots—was this a
way of shielding Perkins from the cruelty of his alter ego?
I ask that question because it’s proper to wonder
whether Perkins’s Norman—so carefully built up in the
seven or eight minutes of prior screen time—is actually ca-
pable of the onslaught that follows. Norman in the office
gives off alarming signals, to be sure. He has a dark vision.
But his kindness and tolerance are also palpable. In other
words, the film’s cockamamie inner fallacy—that Mother
can take Norman over—is under real threat just because of
all the fond details in Perkins’s performance. There is
nothing in this awkward young man that suggests the
anger of Mother—the repeated thrusts with the blade.
Rather, the energy and the malice come more from the
film’s design than from Norman’s psychotic state.
This is a profound point—despite the terror in Psycho
at first and the fun that comes later: Does any one of us
really believe in Mother’s power to possess her son? Or
are we close to the point of admitting that this picture
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 60

60 The Moment of Psycho

does violence for its own sake, and as a way of fulfilling

our voyeuristic pact with its stealth and its gradual pres-
sure? In other words, is the moment of Psycho a true
revelation of human nature or a threshold in filmmaking
that says let violence run riot and to hell with the conse-
quences? Was fear its subject, more than psychosis? That
might begin to account for why, allegedly, Janet Leigh
and many viewers of the film began to feel more doubt-
ful about the use of showers (than about their use of
mothers?).
The fact that Norman and Mother were crucially not
represented in the shooting is one sign of the stress on
technique (the scene is less acted than edited and com-
posed). But another is the way in which the crew was able
to reappraise the shower material as the execution of an
elaborate plan. For the sake of argument, suppose that in
another way of doing things, Mother/Norman comes qui-
etly and silently up to the shower stall. Suppose we see the
terrible look of anticipation and apprehension on Nor-
man’s face. And then suppose we feel Norman move for-
ward, gently, and slide the knife into an unsuspecting
body. Suppose we see that penetration as well as the look
on Norman’s face—to be followed by an agony of colli-
sion and outrage that then turns into the frenzy of stab-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 61

Room Service 61

bing. Or suppose that one stroke of the knife accomplishes

murder.
That at least attempts to make the mind process in
Mother/Norman dramatically credible, but it delivers a
quite appalling moment of premeditated violence (applied
like a kiss) that would never have got past the censor in
1960—and would have destroyed the remainder of the
film. Make no mistake, even if the murder occurred
halfway through the film, there was a balance in Psycho
that required another hour of screen time, an hour that is
as fabricated and spurious as the first hour is solid and
resonant.
Those days in a motel bathroom were all a matter of
precise camera angling, of showing nudity so briefly that it
did not register as lewdness, of filming knife thrusts in so
fragmentary a form that no blade ever pierced skin
(though some gourmets have slowed the film on a Movi-
ola and believe they can see the bulge of a blood drop).
Later, Hitchcock would be piously boastful about this
“restraint,” and one can hear him lecturing the censors in
the same tone. “Ladies and gentlemen, a knife falls. We
then see blood burst from a body. But why am I or my
film to be blamed for that sequence and our fancying that
we have seen a wound?” Why is he to be blamed when all
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 62

62 The Moment of Psycho

he used was chocolate sauce? The piety is less than warm-

ing or admirable. It’s too close to the technical pride taken
by gas-chamber engineers and too removed from the plain
and undeniable impact of that work.
There’s another point: because of the way it is shown,
the murder is far more what happens to Marion (the re-
buke visited upon her) than the lyrical expression of the
killer and murderous impulse. It’s murder set free, kicked
into ignition, without any encumbrance or muffling from
shame. It’s not nearly enough to argue that “Mother”
needs to kill to stifle Norman’s lust, or even to satisfy her
revenge. Who are we kidding? This killing is passionate.
This killer comes.
Yet the film is called Psycho, and when all is said and
done it is the story of a psychotic or aberrant killer. Mar-
ion Crane has been beautifully set up, but her destiny now
materializes as a force violently altered by the dynamic of
a chance meeting. It is not her fault what happens; it is far
out of proportion as a reward or a rebuke. She is an atom
bumped into by another atom, and thus she has to go.
Hitchcock had been fascinated by chance meetings (criss-
cross) ever since Strangers on a Train. What appealed to
him especially in Joseph Stefano’s screenplay was the sheer
bad luck of a naughty girl being caught up in a storm so
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 63

Room Service 63

much bigger than herself. And what underlines this silly

luck is the way Norman—in cleaning up the room after
the killing—does not even notice the stolen money, let
alone take it for himself. One miniaturist passes another in
the night.
And so, the shower sequence is a bizarre duel between
what is visible and what is not. In fact, the imaginary tri-
umphs over the actual (as is usually so with Hitchcock),
and the audience is left to make sense of the gap between
the ordinary and the absurd (the life on the road versus life
at the Bates house). There’s no doubt about the cinematic
quality of the shower sequence. This is an old-fashioned
montage, an impression of lethal attack, to which has been
added the utmost expressiveness of Herrmann’s music and
the soundtrack in which it is embedded. The total effect is
delirium—a finely wrought madness in which all the ele-
ments are tortured taste. The question that remains is not
just who has killed Marion Crane, but what tempest has
felt bound to overtake the film? The answer is the same—
the director, and the reason for both answers is, “To keep
this hysterical film alive.”
Every shot in the crushed minute is “beautiful” but
strained to breaking point. I include in this the several
shots of Marion (head and shoulders) posed in the water
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 64

64 The Moment of Psycho

stream like an angel in heavenly light; the blurred, out-

of-focus shots of Marion intruded upon; the thrashing
blows; the agonized face; the darkness coming to the flow
of water; the beautiful shots of Marion’s face, fainting
away, as she begins to slide down the tiled wall; the rasp of
the shower curtain; the drain in the shower stall that be-
comes like an eye (or the ultimate sexual orifice) in close-
up; and then the last shot, the zoom away from Marion’s
head, collapsed and squashed against the bathroom floor—
the shot that gave so much trouble and which became a
subject of special pride for Hitchcock.

THE CUTTING OF THE shower sequence was just a prelude

in the battle Hitchcock could expect with the Production
Code officials. The fate of a movie in those days depended
on how it was handled by the Code officials, and Hitch-
cock was hopeful of his perilous position. Frank Freeman
was still in a chief liaison position between the producers
and the Code office, and the real force at the Code was
Geoffrey Shurlock, an Englishman, only a few years older
than Hitch. Shurlock had taken his job in 1954, and he
and Hitch had had good relations on everything from
Rear Window to North by Northwest, pictures famous for
their “tasteful” double meanings and sexual innuendo. (In
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 65

Room Service 65

To Catch a Thief, Grace Kelly takes Cary Grant on a pic-

nic. Looking at the cold chicken, she asks him whether
he’d prefer a leg or a breast. You decide, he says. And
Shurlock had been prepared to let the audience enjoy that
point.)
Shurlock is generally regarded as a man who helped lib-
eralize the Code’s enforcement, but on a film like Psycho
he was not just the enemy in advance but a door that
needed to be worked and oiled. Hitch had established an
amiable, sophisticated relationship with Shurlock. He
knew enough to flatter the censor and to let him feel that
they were men of the world, who understood dirty jokes,
say, in a way that helped excuse them. It was calculated,
and Shurlock was at liberty to see how he was being used.
Equally, the history of such moral guardians is that they
were proud of being taken seriously and given an inside
view of the picture business.
Hitch had always figured on three main areas of dispute
with the Code: the opening scene, the flushing toilet, and
the shower murder. In the first case, he preached plot
point. He had to have the right to establish the situation
between these two people. The scene was frank, yes (in
fact it wasn’t), though nothing really happened and the au-
dience got the point.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 66

66 The Moment of Psycho

As for the toilet, well, it was crucial as a plot link: it was

only finding the slip of paper in the toilet bowl that proved
Marion had been at the motel. Beyond that, Hitch could
surmise that the average American flushed a toilet half a
dozen times a day without having conniption fits. It wasn’t
as if anyone in the film used the bathroom as plumbing in-
tended (and that taboo has hardly yet been broken fifty
years later).
As far as the shower was concerned, Hitchcock was as
cunning as could be. The editing was so fast, it was very
hard to know what had been seen. And it was not fair to
run the scene in slow-motion, because no one would ever
see it that way. Time and again, Hitchcock made his plea—
that no sexual nudity was evident, that no blade pierced
flesh. And, plainly, the scene was vital. Furthermore, Hitch
had a trump card. That big shot of Marion tipped over the
edge of the bath, with her buttocks showing—a fearsome
shot but a thing of beauty—well, that was negotiable. In
fact, Hitch had shot it and put it in his cut as a tool to be
withdrawn later if the Code would pass the rest—the film
Hitch had seen. It’s clear from their notes that the Code
functionaries were confused: they couldn’t be sure what
they had seen—and they were being lectured about “reac-
tion” by one of the greatest film and audience experts ever.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 67

Room Service 67

They caved in. Like most figures in their position, they felt
a mounting gap between what was allowed in cinema and
what audiences found acceptable. They passed the film,
and the Catholic League of Decency slid away from a cri-
sis with a “B”—“morally objectionable in part for all.”
That was less than fifty years ago. It’s not that Psycho
didn’t shock many people and didn’t acquire a reputation
for cynical sensationalism. Still, the real measure of the
breakthrough that had occurred—in the name of pure cin-
ema—is in the bloodletting, sadism, and slaughter that are
now taken for granted. In terms of the cruelties we no
longer notice, we are another species.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 68
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 69

Housekeeping

MOTHER’S HELPER

W HAT FOLLOWS THE MURDER and its shock is a pro-

longed scene of restoration in which the pace and the
meticulous detail are as calming as the entire cleansing
process. From that shot of Marion half in the shower stall,
half spread against the floor, we cut to a view of the house,
its windows burning. And now we hear Norman’s voice,
“Mother! Oh, God! Mother, mother! Blood, blood!” And
soon we see the figure of Norman running from the house.
He enters cabin 1 and is appalled, nauseated, stricken. His
large hand covers his mouth.
And then, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, he puts the
wrecked place back together again. It is another sustained
passage of silent cinema—if you forget Herrmann’s quiet,

69
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 70

70 The Moment of Psycho

assisting, sympathetic music. It is a long scene in which an

actor simply does things. There is no talk; there is very lit-
tle in the way of reflection or inward aside. Yet it may be
the best stuff Perkins delivers in the picture, for to under-
stand his perfection in the scene you have to know not just
how far you are being tricked but how innately obedient
and tidy-minded he is.
Of course, we are at the start of a fairly lengthy second
half of a movie in which Hitch wants us to stay ready to be
surprised again. But first calm must be restored. No matter
that several clues make it clear what has happened. Sec-
onds after what may be the most lavish assault and outrage
in American film, the ripples of murder are stilled by a
lengthy cleanup operation, enough to be able to say,
“Look, nothing happened.” And we are reassured by the
process: we begin to trust that there is not another demon
coming out of the wall, and we begin to like Norman—
even if cleaning up after this “Mother” is only going to in-
tensify the mess of his life. To escape the unbearable, we
need to trust Norman, and so we fall for the defense that
he is his mother’s helpless helper.
We watch Norman now as we watched Marion earlier.
In a couple of shots that wad of money folded up inside
the Los Angeles Times is evident, yet Norman never no-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 71

Housekeeping 71

tices it. Almost by habit, he goes to his office and collects

a mop and a bucket. Does he know how to do this? He
takes the dead body and wraps it in the shower curtain
(never let a prop go to waste in a tightly budgeted film).
He washes the blood off his hands—we notice, along with
Hitchcock, that Norman, or Perkins, has uncommonly
long fingers. Artistic hands.
He washes out the shower stall. There is a shot of the
sodden mop swinging down its length. He collects Mar-
ion’s slippers and her towels. He brings her Ford close to
the cabin and loads the body in the trunk. He gets her lug-
gage and her clothes. He takes a last look around and sees
the newspaper. He picks it up but never notices the money,
and he tosses it with everything else into the trunk.
He drives the car to the nearby swamp. The morning
light is coming up as he eases the vehicle down into the
mud. It starts to sink. We see him watching, munching on
small candy. Then the car halts, and his jaw stops. We are
with him—we want it to sink. We want oblivion. Then the
mud starts to work again. I wonder how far Hitchcock the
ironist smiled that this extra “flushing” shot was never no-
ticed by the censors. After all, the white Ford goes into
the black mud, with gulping sounds, too, like life passing
into a sump of shit. The swamp has not been referred to
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 72

72 The Moment of Psycho

before—it is just there, like the great stratum of sewage in

the world. Of course, seen in those terms, the car being
sucked away is repellently suggestive, all of which proves
that censors may notice the lightest things first.
As the car sinks, a flicker of a grin crosses the face of this
gaunt country boy—poor Norman! The things he has to
be ready for. What a blessing for him that he has such a do-
mestic fusspot as his director, a man who—magnificent in
violence—would still harbor such a deep respect for
restoration and order.
There’s an extra but characteristic irony in that the core
of the film should be an outrage followed by meticulous re-
ordering. Yet this is true to Hitchcock in so many ways. In
word and deed, he was a scrupulously law-abiding man.
The story he told of being briefly incarcerated in a police
cell as a child (by his father) carried a warning that lasted a
lifetime. The police are often menacing figures in his work,
and he nursed the subject of the falsely accused person—as
if it had a primal sadomasochistic appeal. He lived and
worked in an orderly middle-class way, yet he was persis-
tently drawn to illegal actions and secret guilt. Think of
Maxim in Rebecca, Scottie in Vertigo, Alicia in Notorious,
the woman in Under Capricorn—the anguish of these char-
acters is always a guilty secret and a kind of suppressed
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 73

Housekeeping 73

breakdown. Psycho is simply the most direct treatment of

this thesis, with Jekyll and Hyde as mother and son.

LILA
In the script for Psycho, the last of the Ford sinking into
the swamp cuts to a shot inside the house in which Nor-
man finds a pile of bloody clothes and shoes outside
Mother’s room and disposes of it. Such a scene would em-
phasize the existence of Mother, but it only repeats the gist
of the long cleanup sequence, and it may have been
deemed a mistake to go inside the house too soon, or too
casually. After all, the house is about to become the ulti-
mate taboo place. But deleting the clothes serves another
purpose: it allows the film to move to Sam in his hardware
store in Fairvale writing a letter to Marion, urging that
they make up their minds to live together.
This letter’s request is urgent, yet Sam does not tele-
phone Marion to hasten the decision. This underlines the
lack of immediacy in the Sam-Marion relationship. But it
also leaves us wondering why the couple weren’t living
together ages ago. “So what if we’re poor and cramped
and miserable?” Sam writes. “At least we’ll be happy.” In
fact, Sam has yielded on the alleged problem of poverty
that prompted Marion’s act of theft. Tacitly, it suggests
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 74

74 The Moment of Psycho

that the whole trap she enters has been made by Sam’s
emotional reluctance—he will not take the plunge with
the woman he says he loves because he is financially inse-
cure. In a way, Hitchcock is disowning the first part of
the film while leaving us with the impression that Sam is
not really that desirable a husband. Could he ever talk to
her the way Norman does in that brief supper, first and
last?
From Sam’s letter (being written at his desk in the living
room at the back of the store), we cut to a middle-aged
woman in the store purchasing insect repellent—it guaran-
tees to kill every insect, she notes, but is it painless? “And I
say—insect or man—death should always be painless.” On
that line (ironic? teasing? or part of the undergrowth of
hypocrisy established earlier in the film?), Marion’s sister,
Lila (Vera Miles), enters the Loomis Hardware Store. Lila
is young and moderately attractive, yet Miles plays the part
without warmth or grace. As it stands, her subdued tough-
ness is not a useful contribution to the film so much as a
sign that Hitchcock has hardly the time to make more of
her. She is suspicious. She has come to Fairvale to sort out
the matter. She will become, with Sam, one of the inquiring
agents who unravel the final mystery. But she is never as
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 75

Housekeeping 75

likable as Marion, not as warm or sexy, not as amused. She

is a drag and a numb place. Does she represent a family in
which Marion might feel chilled or alienated?
I put it that way because this situation might have been
greatly expanded. Suppose that Lila is not Marion’s sister
but her mother—she could be just under sixty, she could
be a character, and she could be an emotionally dominating
force who (once we see her) we recognize as Marion’s
problem in life. If you want a better sense of how such a
character could have been portrayed, just think of the
mother (Jessica Tandy) in Hitchcock’s next film, The
Birds. That mother could have sustained the emotional life
of Psycho in ways that are simply overlooked. She could
have been a presence who began to see weakness in Sam.
For instance, there is a shop assistant in the hardware
store. Suppose that assistant was a pretty girl, a light-
weight, but still you can see that the complacent Sam is
two-timing Marion with her. The earlier hint that the
“love” between Sam and Marion is less than intense could
come to mean so much more. That portrayal would bring
more tragedy to Marion’s story because it would let us see
that this mother has never granted Marion her indepen-
dence in life.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 76

76 The Moment of Psycho

DETECTIVE
Then Arbogast (Martin Balsam) appears—and literally so.
He is a full-frontal face, in close-up first and then big
close-up, forcing himself into the film and into the meeting
between Sam and Lila (the first, we notice). In some ways,
Arbogast fits in with the gallery of small male parts in the
film—pushy, tough, questioning, and far from sentimental.
In time, he warms up: Martin Balsam was a very appealing
actor, hard to hold at a distance for long. Still, Arbogast is
introduced as an abrasive force—albeit fresh blood that the
movie needs at this moment. Not that the emotional cen-
ter of the film shifts. It was with Marion first, and then
Norman took on the load. Lila and Arbogast, arriving late,
are never endearing, and Sam remains a cold, rather un-
pleasant man. As it emerges that Marion is dead, he shows
so little grief. I can’t see how he and Marion were going to
be happy.
Arbogast is a private detective, hired by Lowery in
Phoenix to find the money. He’s had this sort of case be-
fore, and he can’t resist the assumption that if a pretty girl
and $40,000 are missing, then they’re likely together. But
he allows in a rather patronizing way that he doubts Sam
had anything to do with it. So he proposes to make a tour
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 77

Housekeeping 77

of local hotels, motels, and rooming houses to see if he can

trace Marion’s path.
He tries a handful of places before he drives up to the
office of the Bates Motel where Norman is sitting on
the veranda with a handful of candies. Arbogast admits
he nearly missed the place, and Norman blames him-
self—“I’m always forgetting to turn the sign on.” That is
credible behavior. As a motel drops out of use, you
would forget to turn the sign on. But when Marion ap-
peared out of the night, Norman said he had forgotten to
turn the sign off. So didn’t he turn it on as bait for some
tired traveler?
A scene follows between Arbogast and Norman of spar-
ring, inquiring talk, with the private eye being fended off.
There’s a story that when they filmed it, Balsam and
Perkins were so quick on their cues and made such a deft
scene that the crew gave them a standing ovation. And it’s
talk at which the detective is so much more adept. Norman
falters. He makes mistakes. He leaves clues that Arbogast
snaps up. In a quiet way, Norman is now the hounded one,
and if we really want his guilty secret protected, then
maybe we are on his side. But if a part of us is guessing the
very far-fetched truth, then the scene plays as a dance. For
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 78

78 The Moment of Psycho

myself, I enjoy it in the way the crew might have—seeing

Mr. Tongue-tied and Mr. Glib play a fast set.
Arbogast gets Norman to say no one has stayed at the
motel lately. Then he contradicts himself. And Norman
has to show him the register—and there is “Marie
Samuels” in Marion Crane’s writing. There’s an astonish-
ing low-angle shot of Norman trying to look at the
name—from directly below, his jaw still munching, preda-
tory yet vulnerable, too. And again you feel Hitchcock
teasing us, as if to say, “This would be a lot easier if you’d
only see the truth.” Arbogast shows a picture. Norman
starts stammering. We’re in crosscut big close-ups by now,
and Arbogast is nearly stroking the story out of the help-
less youth—you can see that Arbogast would be a very
good cop. He nods at the answers and says, “If it doesn’t
jell, it isn’t aspic. And this ain’t jelling.”
They go outside, and Arbogast detects a hesitation in
Norman over cabin 1. Then he looks up at the house and
sees a figure at a window. That’s when Norman admits his
mother is there. Arbogast asks to talk to her. But Norman
won’t have it. There’s nearly a conflict, and Norman asks
him to leave. But Norman must know the game is up—this
Arbogast has guessed too much and caught Norman in too
many mistakes.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 79

Housekeeping 79

Arbogast goes to a phone, calls the hardware store, re-

ports what he’s learned, and says he’s going to try to see
Mrs. Bates. He’ll be about an hour.
Arbogast is a blessing, so beautifully played that he ob-
scures his own redundancy. Hitchcock has a mystery wait-
ing for an answer. He must know the answer is feeble or
inadequate to the great trauma that has occurred. Arbogast
is spinning out screen time in a very artful way. Here
comes his great moment, as fussy and as empty as the man
himself.

STAIRCASE
He drives back to the motel. No one is in sight, so he
makes his way up to the house. As he comes in the front
door, he takes off his fedora hat—it is a nice touch but ex-
poses his baldness. He sees the great staircase leading up.
He sees Norman’s den at the end of the back corridor. Hat
in hand, he begins to ascend the staircase. The camera
rises with him, but ahead of him, and climbs to the top
corner of the upstairs hall. Only then does a side door
open on the upper floor. A female figure appears. We can-
not see her face, but we look directly down as this figure,
knife upraised, meets Arbogast at the top of the stairs.
The knife plunges. Blood jumps up on Arbogast’s face.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 80

80 The Moment of Psycho

He begins to fall backward, but it is a rather awkward,

rigged shot. He falls, but he is clearly in a chair, gesticu-
lating, and that shot is mixed with a downward tracking
shot. He falls on his back, and the female figure is on him,
the knife striking repeatedly, urged on by Herrmann’s
music. It is the end of Arbogast, and it is Hitchcock at his
best and worst, simultaneously.
The staircase is a place of stress and ordeal in Hitch-
cock—you could say he made that terrain perilous long be-
fore he took on the shower stall. Cary Grant has to save
Ingrid Bergman in Notorious by bringing her down the
staircase. Farley Granger seeks out Robert Walker’s father
at the top of a staircase guarded by a mastiff in Strangers on
a Train. In The Birds, Tippi Hedren will have to go upstairs
to the attic. To Catch a Thief is all heights and rooftops.
And then there is Vertigo and the idea of a man suffering
from that condition electing to live in San Francisco.
The staircase crane shot in Psycho is very beautiful.
Hitch was as good on stairs as he was with agonized faces.
It can be defended, I suppose, as being vital to information
concealment. At ground level, we would have to see
Mother’s face. But when felicities of style exist to conceal
information, then they are in great danger of becoming
baroque and decadent. It is style for style’s sake, a trap not
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 81

Housekeeping 81

entirely buried by the pumping of that knife and the

frenzy of the music. Above all, the killing of Arbogast
evokes no sympathy for him. He is just the figure in a tour
de force execution. The virtuoso crane shot is all on the
side of the killer—though designed to get the best view of
his cruelty.
So the Bates house has now assumed diabolical powers.
It is a place where reality can be manipulated for murder-
ous ends.

PERIWINKLE BLUE
Sam and Lila are still waiting in the hardware store: bored
yet anxious, they make a grim picture of any loving couple
trying to live there—Hitchcock photographs the place
with heavy stress on the blades and weapons of gardening
implements. It is not a cozy site.
Sam determines to visit the motel. When he gets there
he finds no one, but Norman—at the swamp, tending his
plantings—hears Sam calling out for Arbogast and knows
his peace is over. In the middle of the night, Sam and Lila
call on Fairvale’s sheriff, Al Chambers. In dressing gowns,
he and his wife come downstairs to greet the distraught
couple. Chambers is John McIntire, his wife Lurene
Tuttle. Putting McIntire in the film now is like doubling
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 82

82 The Moment of Psycho

up on Martin Balsam, for these are two very amiable sup-

porting players, figures of trust. Moreover, McIntire was
fifty-three and looked older—he had been around, and he
was likely as old as Fairvale.
He and his wife listen to the story. They exchange
glances at the mention of the old woman. Chambers calls
the Bates Motel and talks to Norman. He says Norman
admitted that Arbogast called, but said he had left. The
wry sheriff tells them all, “Norman Bates’s mother has
been dead and buried in Greenlawn Cemetery for the past
ten years!” Mrs. Chambers adds that she picked out the
dress the woman was buried in—periwinkle blue. No, the
color doesn’t matter, but the quaint word in this woman’s
voice is a perfect example of Hitchcock’s macabre comedy.
It’s a reaching out for gentility and prettiness in a world
where the blood is black.
Ten years before Mrs. Bates had poisoned her lover
when she found he had someone else, and then she killed
herself. It was a famous case. “Norman found them dead
together,” supplies the sheriff’s wife. “In bed.” Sam and
Lila insist that Mrs. Bates is alive. “Well,” says Chambers,
“if the woman up there is Mrs. Bates, who’s that woman
buried out in Greenlawn Cemetery?”
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 83

Housekeeping 83

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

The closer mystery comes to explanation, the nearer it is to
destroying itself. That threat hangs over a great deal of sus-
pense cinema. To put it very simply: you can suggest that
something lurks at the end of a dark corridor—as part of
the suspense or the dread, you can gaze into that darkness,
you can cut to the anxious face of the explorer, you can
have the camera itself edge into the dark space. It is just
like the question mark in storytelling itself. The parent
guides and teases the child at the same time—“and then . . .
and then . . . and? . . .” But the parent wants to end the
story. Dinner is waiting, and the child needs to sleep. We
do not like to attach terror to the process of sleep. So the
suspense must end tidily and with warmth: “ . . . and do
you know what was hiding at the end of the corridor? . . .
It was a little kitten, or a doll. . . . And here’s the doll: it’s
yours.”
In the cinema, the manipulation of suspense is one of
the prime instruments of storytelling. But we all fear that
the lovely calm of questioning will give way to the babble
of explaining. And some viewers get out at that point, just
as they throw away an Agatha Christie novel when Poirot
goes into his owlish account of his own cleverness.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 84

84 The Moment of Psycho

Psycho is a course in menacing suspense. It is a roller-

coaster ride in which the gradual tightening tension of the
first forty minutes needs to explode—though the shower
sunburst is still a great surprise. The film then regathers it-
self. It has that long, nearly silent cleanup operation in
which the slower rhythms of reordering say to us, “Don’t
worry, I won’t do that to you again, at least not yet.” The
second climax is the death of Arbogast, and it’s pretty and
rueful enough in one way—for the inquirer is extin-
guished—but the manner of the crane shot is so hysteri-
cally ingenious that it stinks of fabrication. Showing off is
being used to mask a lack of content. The film has run out
of mystery, and it now hangs on the downhill run toward
the “answer,” the payoff. Hitchcock has lost interest, and
he has known all along that his payoff in Psycho is a drab
concession to the trashiness of “slasher” horror movies.
He is about to betray the fascinating Norman he offered in
the supper scene.
More profoundly, he risks betraying fascination itself,
for in a mystery film nothing is as seductive as not know-
ing. An explanation beggars the whole game. There is
nothing that mystery dreads more than the banality of ex-
planation or coming clean. Consider, by contrast, John
Boorman’s film Point Blank, made in 1967. A man, Walker
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 85

Housekeeping 85

(Lee Marvin), is betrayed on the abandoned island of Al-

catraz after a robbery and seemingly left for dead. But he
comes back from the dead, like a sleepwalker, and makes
his way through the members of the syndicate in search of
his mythic $93,000. We are not sure whether he is dead and
dreaming or really alive again. Is he man or myth? The
lovely air of that question guards him artistically, until the
end when he is apparently face-to-face with the packet of
money he has pursued. At which point, Walker vanishes.
He does not come forward for his prize. Does he with-
draw in fear of more conspiracy? Has the dreamer died?
The film is saved by a concluding note of fresh mystery.
In several other films—in Rear Window, in Vertigo, in
North by Northwest, say—Hitchcock remains gripping to
the last shot because he keeps the human drama unfolding.
The great difficulty facing Psycho is that our identifier in
the film (Janet Leigh) is gone. The only real replacement is
Norman Bates—and that isn’t going to work. So what
would you do? Is there a way of saving Psycho’s mystery
and its uncanny control?
Fifty years later or so, I suppose you could have the
sheriff, Sam, and Lila coming out of church in Fairvale and
notice a newcomer and let the movie just slide away with
that newcomer’s story. That’s how Psycho had worked
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 86

86 The Moment of Psycho

once, with Marion’s story slipping into Norman’s. What is

the third story? I don’t know—perhaps it’s the girl in the
hardware store who realizes that Sam has been tricking
her, and so she picks up straightaway with another man, a
traveling salesman passing through town, a man who has a
wife in many small towns in northern California as he
pushes his trade selling gardening tools.
You know and I know that instead of that radical second
departure from normalcy, any thorough account of Psycho
is going to have to go through the scenes—rich in specious
clues—where Lila goes into the house, explores the
mother’s room and Norman’s room, retreats down into the
fruit cellar, finds the corpse of Mrs. Bates, and so on. If I
say this stuff stinks, I mean not just amateur taxidermy—
it’s simply not worthy of the first half of Psycho. Not even
when the wig knocked off Norman’s head seems to seethe
and live in the swaying light. I mean that it’s impossible that
the mother’s corpse sits up as a living person. Above all, I
mean that I don’t credit half a second of this rigmarole
about Mother having taken over Norman.
And as is often the case, the emotional truth of it all has
been discarded or omitted. Remember, if I ask you, “Who
killed Mrs. Bates?” the answer is “Norman.” He killed his
mother and her lover once he had seen that they meant
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 87

Housekeeping 87

more to each other than the son meant to the mother. So

Norman is the killer—in which case Mother has a griev-
ance and a need for vengeance. This needs a lot of rewrit-
ing. Suppose the new inquiring figure is not Lila but
Marion’s mother, revealed as a possessive, anxiety-ridden
woman who helps us see how much she has smothered her
daughter. And it needs a Norman—a play actor more than
a psycho—who takes delight in retreating into the role of
his mother so that he can lose the guilt he feels toward her.
Here is an emotional story that might make the whole
crazed film coherent. It’s the Norman already created at
the end—in the coda, that sudden return to greatness—
where the hunched son watches the camera but speaks as
the mother. I’m suggesting Marion’s mother for two rea-
sons: Hitch was fascinated with mothers, and Marion’s
mother talking to Norman (it is an immense feat of writ-
ing) could be a scene to match the supper scene. But sup-
pose Marion’s mother is played by Marion, or suppose the
demented Mrs. Bates sees a harrowed, bloodied Marion
come back from the shower.
Are you nervous about these speculations? There’s no
need to be. This recasting of the story line is one of the
things scriptwriters do—I’m sure it’s the kind of thing Ste-
fano and Hitchcock tried as they prepared the picture.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 88

88 The Moment of Psycho

Whole excursions of narrative may be proposed and

written—only to be discarded.

“YOU NEED SOMEONE

TO EXPLAIN IT ALL”
As they worked on the script, Joe Stefano suggested to
Hitchcock that too much had been jammed into the last
minutes of suspense and action: so Mrs. Bates is a rotting
corpse, and “Mother” is Norman in a fright wig. But why?
What has happened to Norman’s mind? Hitch was ner-
vous. He said he thought too solemn an explanation might
be boring—and even unbelievable. And Stefano actually
recommended the big, bluff, garrulous Simon Oakland to
play the psychiatrist.
After the scene with the psychiatrist had been shot,
Hitchcock is reported to have put his arm around Oak-
land and thanked him for saving the picture. I suppose
what he meant was that Oakland—like all the supports in
the film—had done a good, persuasive job in a way that
stopped the audience from laughing out loud at fanciful
material. But what needed to be “saved” was the film’s
and Hitchcock’s indifference to the stated content. I
don’t think he ever believed in this idea of a character
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 89

Housekeeping 89

taking over another—only in the ways it could be filmed.

Yet the fact remains, in scenario terms, that once you’ve
chosen to go that way, you’re bound to deal with it, or
tidy it up.
Oakland’s character (speaking in front of a map of
Shasta County) does the second cleanup job. He lets us
go home with the sweet dream that this ghastly act has
been dealt with. There is an explanation, and there is even
the final Norman/Mother scene to go with it. It’s
nowhere near enough, just as Perkins’s Norman seems a
more sophisticated boy than the real Bates could ever
have been. Perkins flirts with the idea of a gay Norman,
and that plays into the scheme of him as a frenzied actor,
always putting on a different persona. That’s how he
wears “Mother” and that’s the quiet, deadly brilliance of
the last scene where Norman and Mother’s voice speaks
to us in that chilling direct stare—it is as if Norman has
always known we would be intimate. And, of course, it
ends in the coup of his looking up under his eyebrows,
dissolving through the skull of his mother to a view of
the car, the white car, being pulled up out of the shit.
Marion will be inside, still quite fresh, with the money as
good as new. And in that last meticulously controlled
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 90

90 The Moment of Psycho

optical, the skull itself seems to grin and Hitchcock him-

self seems to stare through the fussy lace curtaining of
“psychological explanation” with what is the real point
of the picture: that his pulling our leg took priority over
our minds.
Gotcha!
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 91

Hitch-Cock

P SYCHO OPENED IN 1960, in mid-June, and it’s inter-

esting to consider the tonal gap between it and the
other American films that opened in that year: Let’s Make
Love (one of the last complete films from Marilyn Mon-
roe); Otto Preminger’s Exodus; Wild River by Elia Kazan;
The Apartment by Billy Wilder; Burt Lancaster in Elmer
Gantry; The Magnificent Seven; Spartacus; Jerry Lewis as
The Bellboy; the British film Sons and Lovers; Olivier in
The Entertainer; John Wayne’s The Alamo. Of course,
that moment, 1959–1960, is the breaking of the French
New Wave. By contrast with that, so many American
films seemed set in old ways. There were just two pictures
from America in 1960 that were radical, dangerous (to the

91
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 92

92 The Moment of Psycho

system, at least), and quite new as experiences—Psycho

and John Cassavetes’ Shadows.
There had been an odd warning of the risks in Psycho.
One of Hitch’s contemporaries in British film was Michael
Powell. They were not quite friends, but far from enemies,
and they were both of them touched by genius. It hap-
pened that in March 1960, three months before the open-
ing of Psycho, Powell had opened his brave departure film,
Peeping Tom. It was as nasty as Psycho and touched with
the same kind of black humor. It was about a young film-
maker who murders women (using a leg of his camera tri-
pod as a sword stick) while filming them to capture the
look of terror. The film was so trashed by the critics—on
the grounds of its cynical bad taste and its playing with
sadism—that Powell’s career was halted for years. The di-
rector of A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and
The Red Shoes was at a standstill. Hitch only had to be
afraid of fear to have premonitions about Psycho.
Making Psycho was one part of its genius. Opening it
with aplomb was the other. In postproduction he fought
brilliant battles with the censors, until they were lost in the
film’s details and prepared to let it pass. There were pre-
views at which close associates believed the film was either
a sensation or ridiculous, but they could not decide which.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 93

Hitch-Cock 93

But Hitch had his last weapon to come—the score by

Bernard Herrmann. Just as in the past, Herrmann had
made a musical story that lifted Citizen Kane and Vertigo,
and just as he would yet again later, with Taxi Diver, so the
music carried a picture past realism and into mythology.
Very often in his career Hitch and his screenwriters ended
up at odds, envious of each other’s creative contributions.
It was a nasty habit in the director, but he knew enough—
for the moment—not to sever ties with Herrmann. It is in
the music that Psycho reaches out for the fusion of film and
opera, the most fruitful future direction for the art and
maybe the business. Time and again, it is the music that
turns doubt about seriousness into majestic effect.
One of the editors on the film, Terry Williams, recalled
the day the first score was laid in as a track. Like archaeol-
ogists retrieving shards of bone, the editors had pored over
the details of slaughter and lost sight of it. With the music,
suddenly they were screaming as if the film were new.

PARAMOUNT EXECUTIVES were still not comfortable with

the picture, but they pushed for their way of releasing it
until Lew Wasserman had to remind them that Hitch was
the majority owner of the venture. Indeed, this was very
rare: as the 60 percent proprietor, he did not have to bow
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 94

94 The Moment of Psycho

to the studio in cutting the picture or in adjusting the ad-

vertising. It is often said that Orson Welles enjoyed the
most generous contract ever in Hollywood, with Citizen
Kane, in that, providing he stayed on budget, he had free-
dom of script, casting, and cut. But Hitchcock had all
those rights, and when the picture made money he had 60
percent of the profits, a detail Welles had never bothered
with—as if he hardly anticipated profits.
It was Wasserman who advised big featured openings in
Los Angeles and New York, to be followed by the widest
possible release quickly. This was an unusual approach. In
those days, release patterns were far more gradual than is
true now. Interest in a movie was allowed to build slowly,
and tastefully. But Wasserman believed it was a vulgar
business, so why not get as many people as possible in a
state of wanting to see a movie now? He fought that battle
over the years and is generally regarded as having finally
won it with the summer opening of Jaws—a Hitchcockian
suspense film—in 400 theaters simultaneously. Of course,
today that number is well over 3,000 screens for the big
pictures. This has several consequences: most films make
their money (or they don’t) far quicker than once upon a
time, and in the first-weekend frenzy (suitably stoked by
television advertising) the critical doubts are more easily
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 95

Hitch-Cock 95

overlooked. Yes, there were some fears that critics would

attack Psycho, but the answer was to preempt such consid-
erations with a blanket opening policy.
The other coup was the trailer. Hitchcock was by then
widely known for the poker-faced intros to his television
show. So he employed the same method on a rather
grander scale for his new movie. Now he was a kind of re-
altor showing off the Bates Motel for prospective buyers.
So he was dry and dusty, and then struck by how much it
had all been tidied up since—since the blood, and then for
an instant you were into the shower mayhem and that
crude but very effective dare that still gets people to the
movies: “Can you stand to see this?” The trailer was in-
spired and characteristic, and it was a fair warning: for this
new story was itself a mockery of story, advertising, and
the whole apparatus of “coming attractions.” It was going
to cut the blonde to pieces while pulling our leg, and the
hint was in—that slaughter wasn’t really serious. The
meaning of the film was always compromised by its com-
mercial nature.
The next step was to enforce a policy that Hitch had at-
tempted on Vertigo, but which lapsed there simply because
the film was not compelling enough. Thus, the edict went
out in advance that no one would be let in to see Psycho
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 96

96 The Moment of Psycho

once the film had started. The reason given for this was
that the story had such twists, the customer would be
cheating himself if he got the ending before the beginning.
This was directly against common cinematic practice.
Films were shown continually, and many people came in
during the picture and then left when the story became fa-
miliar again. I know that sounds awful, yet the condition
prevailed—and now there were life-size cardboard-cutout
figures of Hitchcock himself in theater lobbies, wagging a
finger and insisting that no one, positively no one, would
be let in once the film had started. Of course, a weird un-
derlying frisson attached to that severity—that you might
not be allowed out of the dark, either, if the fear proved un-
bearable. Audiences were tickled, stirred, and amused—
and that balance did accurately reflect the nature of Psycho.
The tongue-in-cheek trailer was a signal of a devastating
movie yet one with a strange, sardonic flourish. The adver-
tising was intimidating, but it carried a new respect for
movies and those who made them.
The reviews never made much difference because of the
fantastic launch that the film received. The suggestion of
an uncommon flirtation with violence in a front-rank film
worked. The trailer and the tight security over admissions
inflamed word of mouth. And people who saw the film
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 97

Hitch-Cock 97

early were shattered by it. I saw it myself at the Plaza in

London in the first days of its run. I was there for the mid-
day show, and I recall seeing it with very few people in the
theater. But that wasn’t bad. Somehow the solitude added
to the intensity. Even at nineteen, it was a very scary expe-
rience. Once the terrible or unthinkable thing had hap-
pened—the slaughter of Marion—one was begging for
nothing else as devastating. One didn’t rationalize this
straightaway, but the message emerged: no screen murder
had ever been shot with such care, invention, or “perfec-
tion.” So when Lila entered the Bates house and made her
way to the fruit cellar, I was not yet in command of my
lofty theory that the second half of the film is a concoc-
tion. The tension worked, as did the cutting from tracking
shots forward from Lila’s point of view to shots backing
off in front of her where she seems to urge the camera for-
ward. People are brave in Hitchcock because of his re-
morseless command of space.
I was a directed viewer at the Plaza in 1960. I dare say
that worked for most of the early viewers, and I know that
I was desperate to get friends to see Psycho immediately.
Indeed, I had only lately started film school, where I found
myself posed against the social realist tendencies of the
teaching staff. I was certain that Psycho was the film of the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 98

98 The Moment of Psycho

year and essential material for film students, whereas the

respectable film according to my teachers—it had been
produced by the man who headed the film school—was
Guy Green’s The Angry Silence, a story of union troubles
in British industry. This comparison seems fatuous now,
but this really was the current argument.
The range of opinions on Psycho was fascinating. In the
New York Times, Bosley Crowther’s opinion built
through the summer. At first he had found the film crude
and old-fashioned. But he looked again and thought it
“fascinating” and “provocative.” By the end of the year, he
rated it one of the year’s ten best. This was despite a run-
ning argument in the paper’s letters to the editor where
Psycho was often called “morbid” and “sickening.” In Es-
quire, Dwight Macdonald said it came from “a mean, sly,
sadistic little mind.” Time said it was just a “creak-and-
shriek movie.” In London, in Sight and Sound, the maga-
zine’s editor, Penelope Houston, went to the length of
calling it a minor, unimportant film, though unfortunately
characteristic of the new French attitude to film. And in an
unlikely place, Oxford, a student, V. F. Perkins, wrote,
“The first time it is only a splendid entertainment, a ‘very
minor film.’ But when one can no longer be distracted
from the characters by an irrelevant ‘mystery,’ Psycho be-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 99

Hitch-Cock 99

comes immeasurably rewarding as well as much more

thrilling.”
All of which was a portent of things to come. But, still,
Psycho made its own rules and was regarded as a cunning
but nasty exploitation film. That is the only way of reading
the best-director nomination for Hitchcock, while the film
was ignored. Today, that split is exposed as a travesty. The
Academy looks foolish, but so do we—because we were
apparently incapable of admitting to, let alone explaining,
the true film sensation of the year. It would gross some-
thing like $15 million in its first release, and that meant
eventual earnings of at least $4 million to Hitchcock him-
self. It was a lot more successful than his recent hits: Rear
Window grossed $5.7 million, North by Northwest $6 mil-
lion, To Catch a Thief $4.5 million, and The Man Who
Knew Too Much $4.1 million.
Psycho had helped make Hitchcock one of the most
consistently successful picture makers in America of the
last decade—if you liked gruesome thrills. The fact that
Psycho was not nominated that year by the Academy is
shocking. The five candidates for Best Picture would be
The Apartment, The Alamo, Elmer Gantry, Sons and
Lovers, and The Sundowners (today, it’s hard to believe the
last four were rated ahead of Psycho). The Apartment, by
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 100

100 The Moment of Psycho

Billy Wilder, would win the Oscar, and it grossed $6.7 mil-
lion. It was regarded as a smart, sour comedy and a por-
trait of modern America. Yet its appetite for nastiness is
not too far from the tone of Hitchcock’s film.
Hitch got his fifth nomination as best director—along
with Wilder, Jack Cardiff for Sons and Lovers, Jules
Dassin for Never on Sunday, and Fred Zinnemann for
The Sundowners. It was Wilder’s second win and sixth
nomination. And The Apartment is a good picture, witty,
intelligent, pessimistic. It may have been the film that fit-
ted in best with what America reckoned it should think of
itself at the time.
Anthony Perkins was not nominated! Could nobody in
the movie establishment read his startling balance of camp
and pathos? Janet Leigh got a nod for best supporting ac-
tress (the award went to Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry).
There was no nomination for screenplay, nor for editing.
There was no nomination for Bernard Herrmann’s score,
one of the most decisive in the history of film—the prize
went to Ernest Gold for his score for Exodus. Instead,
there were nominations to Joseph Hurley, Robert Clat-
worthy, and George Milo for black-and-white art direc-
tion. That seemed like a limp joke in that the decor had
been treated with strategic disrespect throughout the pro-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 101

Hitch-Cock 101

ject. John L. Russell was nominated for cinematography.

In hindsight, that is achingly deserved. Russell changed the
way we look at things in Psycho. You can say he did his
master’s bidding—his master would have said that. But
whereas the photography on The Apartment is effective,
the look of Psycho is a new acid-rural poetry and a
medium that was plainly under threat. So there are a few
black-and-white pictures that are not just beautiful but
warnings to a careless age—Psycho, Raging Bull, Anto-
nioni’s La Notte. But Psycho was the only one that had had
a television cameraman.
The Academy Awards aside, Hitchcock was in tri-
umph. In the spring of 1961, in Paris, he was feted, not
just by critics and cineasts but by wine enthusiasts. He
was given a great honor—that of tastevin—and the claims
for his genius at film mounted. Clearly, in addition,
Hitchcock was thrilled to see that his young followers had
become filmmakers themselves. And although the intense
and self-preoccupied theorizing of Cahiers had stayed a
largely French matter through the ’50s, it was now break-
ing on foreign shores. In Britain, there was an eager con-
troversy going on over the nature of film itself in which
Hitchcock and Psycho were employed by both sides as
ammunition. And in America it was becoming apparent
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 102

102 The Moment of Psycho

that a new young generation was taking film and writing

about it very seriously. There were signs that film might
even penetrate the walls of academe. And to the extent
that Hitchcock made films that were like theory in
demonstration, he was an ideal figure in teaching as well
as a new example of the “auteur.” Psycho was a test case in
the debate as to whether “crass” commercial films could
be art.
At another level, it was clear that the maneuvers over
Psycho between Paramount and Universal had determined
Hitchcock’s commercial future. Since he had benefited so
much from the deal done by Lew Wasserman, there was
little doubt about which way he would go. He was given a
building of his own at Universal, the biggest of the studio
bungalows. It included offices for his storyboarding work,
editing rooms, a kitchen, a cocktail lounge, and a private
dining room. It was the world according to Norman Bates,
but on an unimaginable scale of luxury and prestige. Nat-
urally enough, Wasserman and Universal wondered what
he would do next.

HITCHCOCK USUALLY HAD a gang of projects, in his head

or on his bookshelf. He toyed with the idea of a blind jazz
pianist who solves crimes. He had noticed a short story by
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 103

Hitch-Cock 103

Daphne Du Maurier, “The Birds.” But he was most inter-

ested in a novel by Winston Graham, Marnie, about a
woman who is a chronic thief and whose husband takes
her cure in hand. He also liked that project because Grace
Kelly, or Princess Grace of Monaco, liked it. In the spring
of 1961, Hitch met every day with Joseph Stefano to make
a treatment from the Graham novel that was sent to Grace
Kelly. We don’t know what was happening in Monaco, but
it seems clear that Kelly herself wanted to go back to work
and believed it would be possible. If only from wishful
thinking, Hitch clung to this hope, and as he worked on
Marnie he saw Kelly in the role of the tortured young
woman who has to balance respectability and a need to
steal things that is directly aligned with her sexual frigidity.
But then word came from Monaco that Kelly could not
possibly film Marnie in 1962. There were prior engage-
ments. Would Hitch wait a year? There was no doubt that
he would: Kelly’s return would have been a commercial
coup, but it was also a chance to grill the greatest of his
screen loves.
In “The Birds,” first published in 1952, a remote farm-
ing community in England is overtaken by an invasion of
birds. The characters in the story are not well delineated or
given any depth. Rather, the story is a fable, perched on the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 104

104 The Moment of Psycho

edge of science fiction and ruminations about the end of

the world. “I only read the story once,” Hitch would say
later. “I couldn’t tell you what it was about today.” But he
had been reminded of the story in the early ’60s by
reports—from California—of unusual bird behavior and
what might be interpreted as attacks.
Hitchcock looked for a writer. He tried novelist James
Kennaway but was terribly put off when Kennaway had a
brainstorm—of doing the film without showing a single
bird. Clearly, Hitch was committed to a full treatment of
the birds—it was why he was doing the picture. He con-
sidered Wendell Mayes and Ray Bradbury before falling in
with Evan Hunter, a novelist, screenwriter, and the creator
of the Ed McBain thrillers. In the second half of 1961, in
close cooperation and good spirits, the two men wrote The
Birds for the screen—and as a complete departure from the
Du Maurier story.
Their script reflects on Psycho in fascinating ways.
Melanie Daniels is a madcap heiress and a very unhappy
young woman. She has broken ties with her parents. One
day in a pet shop in San Francisco, she meets Mitch Bren-
ner and his young sister, Cathy. Melanie and Mitch flirt,
and she decides later to buy a pair of lovebirds for the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 105

Hitch-Cock 105

younger sister and deliver them personally to the Brenner

home in Bodega Bay, about an hour north of San Francisco.
Having made that journey, she discovers that Mitch and
his sister live with their mother, Lydia, an emotionally
controlling person. Lydia is hostile to Melanie. But anyone
can see that Mitch and Melanie are falling in love—further,
anyone can see that Lydia and Melanie look alike (it is a re-
semblance played upon without ever being fully defined,
like the pairing of Sam and Norman in Psycho). As this in-
terplay proceeds, so the birds make small forays against
people in Bodega Bay, until their larger campaign is clear.
The birds attack. Melanie breaks down after suffering an
immense ordeal and almost total attack on her personally
by the birds. Mitch drives the family away, but the birds
are left in charge of the world.
Melanie hardly knew her own mother. She has been as
neglected as Mitch has been watchdogged by his mother.
The Brenner house is to the north of the city, and it is in
the upstairs of the house that the greatest threat will be
found. It is late in the film that Melanie hears a noise in the
besieged house and goes upstairs—rather as Lila dares to
explore the Bates house in Psycho. What she finds is an
attic full of waiting birds—and they descend on her. The
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 106

106 The Moment of Psycho

actress who played Melanie had a week of shooting in

which she was the object of pecking, thrusting, swooping
birds, and in which she was nearly catatonic. That bird as-
sault is akin to the shower savagery.
Who would play Melanie? In conversation with Evan
Hunter, Hitch had smiled and said, “Well, of course, Grace
would have been perfect”—smart, classy, teasing, brittle,
and then breaking. He looked at footage of several young
actresses—Pamela Franklin, Sandra Dee, Carol Lynley,
Yvette Mimieux. And in the hunt he saw some footage of a
fashion model named Tippi Hedren. She was thirty, of
Swedish descent, but born in Minnesota. She was ash
blonde, unusually pale, beautiful, but with a faint streak of
potential victim. She wore clothes perfectly and moved
very well. She was a divorced mother, and she had a
daughter of her own named Melanie (that child would be-
come Melanie Griffith, the actress).
Hitchcock put her under personal contract at five hun-
dred dollars a week. He had a couple of other actresses
under personal contract, but not much happened with their
careers. He talked to Hedren and gave her advice on clothes
and her looks. He even asked her to screen a lot of his old
films, and he prepared a kind of anthology of great scenes
with actresses in his work. Then he called for a screen test.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 107

Hitch-Cock 107

With Robert Burks, Hitch’s regular cameraman, doing the

photography, and with Martin Balsam (Arbogast) standing
in as all the men in the scenes, Tippi passed the test as an
ideal actress for Hitchcock. At Chasen’s restaurant, in Los
Angeles, a few nights later, with his wife, Alma, and Lew
Wasserman present, he gave Hedren a brooch featuring
birds in flight and said the part was hers.
The Birds began shooting in the early spring of 1962,
with Hedren and her costars, Rod Taylor (as Mitch) and
Jessica Tandy (as Lydia). It saw Hitchcock revert to his
standard crew: cameraman Robert Burks, art director
Robert Boyle, editor George Tomasini, and Bernard Her-
rmann again as composer. In addition, he had hired veteran
animator Ub Iwerks to do some of the trick-shot anima-
tion of the birds. At about the same time, François Truf-
faut was dining in New York with Bosley Crowther, film
critic of the New York Times, and Herman G. Weinberg,
head of film at the Museum of Modern Art. He was star-
tled at their low estimate of Hitch and realized once again
how the British director was a test case. He wondered
what to do that might raise Hitchcock’s reputation—and
his own, too.
On June 2, 1962, he wrote a personal letter to Hitch-
cock, reminding the great man of their previous meetings
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 108

108 The Moment of Psycho

and of the “propaganda” work carried out on Hitch’s be-

half by Cahiers du Cinema. What Truffaut now proposed
was a book, for as Truffaut had himself become a director,
so his admiration for Hitch had grown: “There are many
directors with a love for the cinema, but what you possess
is a love of celluloid itself and it is that which I would like
to talk to you about.” Truffaut proposed a book based on
interviews—perhaps eight days’ solid work—to cover all
of Hitchcock’s career. “If the idea were to appeal to you,
and you agreed to do it, here is how I think we might pro-
ceed: I could come and stay for about ten days wherever it
would be most convenient for you. From New York I
would bring with me Miss Helen Scott who would be the
ideal interpreter; she carries out simultaneous translations
at such a speed that we would have the impression of
speaking to one another without any intermediary and,
working as she does at the French Film Office in New
York, she is also completely familiar with the vocabulary
of the cinema. She and I take rooms in the hotel closest to
your home or whichever office you might arrange.”
The letter reached Hitchcock while he was still shooting
The Birds. But he cabled back immediately: “Dear Mon-
sieur Truffaut. Your letter brought tears to my eyes and I
am so grateful to receive such a tribute from you. I am still
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 109

Hitch-Cock 109

shooting The Birds and this will continue until 15 July and
after that I will have to begin editing which will take me
several weeks. I think I will wait until we have finished
shooting The Birds and then I will contact you with the
idea of getting together around the end of August. Thank
you again for your charming letter.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s formal education ended when he
was only thirteen. His self-education in film, or celluloid,
and storytelling never stopped. But he was a working-class
boy impressed by learning all the more because he had had
so little. The invitation from Truffaut must have seemed
overwhelming and rewarding. I doubt that the reference to
tears is mere politeness. Here was a moment at which a
significant part of the outer world had stepped forward to
substantiate Hitchcock’s self-esteem and his view of
movies. He was valuable. He might be a genius. In Britain
and America, his world, that label had hardly been used
before, except perhaps for Chaplin.
More or less, this letter came to him as he was shooting
the most intense week of The Birds, the week that had
been set aside on a special set to cover the ordeal of
Melanie and the ultimate bird attack (the equivalent of the
shower murder in Psycho—shot as lovingly as a romantic
scene). This time there was no fear of nudity or “personal
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 110

110 The Moment of Psycho

violence.” But Tippi Hedren had assumed the birds would

be fake. Hitch said no, they were going to have to use real
creatures. “Another special set had been built for the scene,
surrounded by a huge cage to keep the birds from soaring
into the rafters. Inside the cage were a crew of propmen,
wearing thick leather gloves to their elbows to protect
themselves. Although the gulls were trained, they quickly
learned to avoid Hedren, and had to be hurled at her by
the propmen. Air jets kept the birds from flying into the
camera lens. This extraordinary scene, which occupies
roughly one minute of screen time, took an entire week to
shoot, and it became a grueling physical ordeal—but espe-
cially for the leading lady.”
By the end of the week, Hedren was cracking. She had
been pecked near her eye. Hitchcock was so distressed that
he kept to his office while they were preparing. But he was
there for every shot. And somehow or other, in the crisis,
he seemed able to justify what he was doing because he
was Hitchcock, and because he was falling in love with the
actress and the power he held over her. In the end, what
Psycho had been about was a strange kind of permission
that comes with voyeurism—if you let me see you, then I
can destroy you, or spare you.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 111

Hitch-Cock 111

Imagine this Psycho: Marion is in the shower. Norman

arrives, with his frenzy of stabbing motions. But she is not
touched, let alone pierced. The whole thing is like a mating
ritual. But she faints, and when she wakes up, there she is,
in Mother’s bed, with Norman watching her and smiling.
Because he has won her.

TRUFFAUT’S BOOK was agreed upon. Éditions Robert

Laffont would publish it in France and Simon and Schus-
ter in New York. In August 1962 Truffaut and Helen
Scott arrived in Los Angeles. They stayed at the Beverly
Hills Hotel and spent the next days working with Hitch-
cock in his offices on the Universal lot. It was a detailed
conversation about a working life, and later chapters
would be added to cover both The Birds and Marnie. In
addition, Truffaut went to the National Film Archive in
London to get frame illustrations so that key sequences
(like the shower scene) could be done as autopsies. The
book was published in Paris in 1966 and in New York a
year later.
That publication process was so slow that another
shorter interview reached print first: that was conducted by
Peter Bogdanovich in 1963 for the Museum of Modern Art.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 112

112 The Moment of Psycho

Its reach was far less, and it lacked the lavish illustration of
the book. But there could be no doubt: Hitchcock had be-
come a subject in American culture.
In which case, we have to marvel at the ugliness of the
way Hitchcock now sought to impose himself on his
world. The Birds was not nearly the success that Psycho
had been, but people were amazed by how this aging di-
rector had used new effects (of picture and sound) to
sharpen the malice of the birds. The screenwriter, Evan
Hunter, who had witnessed Hitch’s indifference to what
the birds might mean firsthand, was now amused, yet dis-
tressed, by the way the director was available for any and
every parable of significance. Hunter had known that
Hitch had no other aim except to frighten the audience.
But the subject of earnest interviews needed more weight.
And so The Birds—which was in postproduction during
the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962—became a story
about the end of the world and man’s complacency. In
truth, of course, it was a strange sadomasochistic transfer-
ence between actress and director.
Briefly, the old song was sung—that Grace Kelly might
return for Marnie—but it was not clear now that Hitch-
cock wanted her. Nor should anyone diminish the qual-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 113

Hitch-Cock 113

ity of Tippi Hedren just because the director had become

obsessed with her. The heroine has a wan, invalid-like
personality in both films, and it comes from the relative
insubordination of Hedren. She was trying so hard to do
what Hitchcock wanted, and then she was late in the day
in appreciating that she was fulfilling his sick fantasy.
When he admitted his feelings, she was horrified. There
was no chance of his dream coming true. But she could
also see how vulnerable this hitherto masked man had be-
come in letting his true feelings show so much. He was
humiliated; he was old and utterly unsuited to a romantic
role. But the power of film had carried him away, and he
had thought that miracles—like Grace becoming a real
princess—might be repeated. Hedren is touching in
Marnie, but its looming rape sequence (which horrified
Evan Hunter and finally drove him from the picture) is
all too palpably significant. Hunter said that it was a
scene that preoccupied Hitch to an unhealthy degree.
Once upon a time, the voyeur had had an expert, mis-
chievous, self-controlling restraint. But with Psycho he
had started to indulge it, and now in Marnie it began to
look like prurience. What’s more, Hedren accused Hitch-
cock of enforcing her contract (five hundred dollars a
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 114

114 The Moment of Psycho

week) for another two years without giving her anything

to do.
It is hardly clear what Hitchcock intended. Would he
have settled for mere sex with Hedren? Or did he plan to
discard his wife, Alma, and readjust his entire life—to
match the fantasy lives of the great Hollywood moguls?
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 115

Other Bodies
in the Swamp

T HE EXTENDED SIGNIFICANCE of “the moment of

Psycho” is not just the impact of an isolated sensation
but the spreading influence it exerted on other films, espe-
cially in the treatment of sex and violence, and the room it
opened up for the ironic (or mocking) treatment of both.
Thus, “My mother’s not herself today” is a taster for so
many Clint Eastwood lines, like, “Do you feel lucky?
Well, do you, punk?” Such lines encouraged our habit of
talking back to the screen and making a game out of death.
The list that follows is not exhaustive. It does not in-
clude every remake of Hitchcock material, and it passes
over the forlorn sequels to Psycho itself where a rare actor,
Anthony Perkins, was squeezed dry. Still, the desperation

115
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 116

116 The Moment of Psycho

in those films was a telling commentary on invention in

the 1980s and ’90s and how psycho had gone from being a
warning to a term of caustic endearment.

PSYCHO’S FILM LEGACY

Films are not intended as a stepping-stone path, but so
many new films follow a direction and an energy that have
worked in the past. Psycho uncovered new clues about that
journey: that we did not care too much about the “nice”
people, the ones we liked; that we were determined not to
be surprised by blood and its flow—we know these things
will come; and that we are mesmerized by some of the
people who do damage. It is as if the medium itself—
sitting in the dark and looking at the shining light—was
meant to teach us that. The new tone in cinema said, “Be-
lieve less in the story and its characters, but study the game
being played.”

1962: Dr. No and the Bond Franchise

The first of the Ian Fleming 007 books was published in

1953; it took several years and a substantial reappraisal of
the material to make those taut but inert novels work on-
screen. The immense franchise would depend on tongue-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 117

Other Bodies in the Swamp 117

in-cheek attitudes toward sex and violence and toward

the superhero himself, a descendant of the Richard Han-
nay figure Hitch had once enjoyed in The 39 Steps
(1935). That comic edge was created for the films to
make Bond’s brutal opportunism more palatable. The
films were full of double entendres that helped soften or
excuse the sadism and the erotic objectification of
women. It’s clear in hindsight that Hitchcock was a point
of reference in the discovery of a tone that would let
the audience laugh at things that were once beyond
laughter, because of cruelty or sexual exploitation. Even
if Hitch had not cast Sean Connery as one of his heroes
(Mark Rutland, the husband in Marnie), the linkage is
inescapable.

1962: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Robert Aldrich’s gruesome mockery of a Hollywood

ghost story was an important addition of macabre comedy
to the horror genre, as well as a further play on the new
“gotcha”—that old ladies can be frightening and danger-
ous. You can feel the picture enlisting the cruel energies of
the audience and hurling them at the stricken characters.
As for the grand old movie stars Bette Davis and Joan
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 118

118 The Moment of Psycho

Crawford, the business could do whatever it chose to them

after the unexpected dispatch of Janet Leigh.

1962: Lolita

Hitchcock and Nabokov were correspondents who actu-

ally thought of working together. But Lolita is a love
story in which the reader/viewer is often enlisted on the
side of the villain’s wordplay and pointed point of view.
The shocking sexual content of the material had a great
deal to do with the comic erudition of that voice. More-
over, James Mason’s Humbert is very little removed from
his suave Vandamm in North by Northwest, another
crazy chase film in which the pursuit will redefine the
love story. Nabokov sometimes praised himself for the
cleanliness of his sexual narrative, just as Hitch led
the applause for the lack of flesh piercing in the shower
sequence.

1962: The Manchurian Candidate

It’s true that Hitchcock seldom took politics seriously, but

the complex setup in the first half of Candidate is not un-
like Hitchcock’s shift from one picture to another in the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 119

Other Bodies in the Swamp 119

middle of Psycho. Moreover, the scheme of deranged he-

roes and richly portrayed villains is also in the Hitchcock
tradition. Angela Lansbury is not just the mother a son is
going to have to shoot; she is confirmation that the milk of
American motherhood has turned sour. When her Mrs.
Iselin kisses zombie son Raymond (Laurence Harvey) on
the mouth, we know that some mothers grip their numb
sons by their gonads.

1963: The Nutty Professor

Jerry Lewis’s film is a grab bag for many American dreams

and nightmares. Its use of the Jekyll and Hyde motif is en-
couraged by the dainty ways in which Norman Bates can
step over his own line. Lewis was owning up to enormous
hostilities within the American dream and the sudden way
in which a goofy nerd could become a rat with teeth. The
paradox in Lewis would last decades: drumming up
money for damaged children while playing one for laughs.

1965: The Collector

This film comes from a best-selling novel by John Fowles,

but the situation of the lovely young woman held prisoner
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 120

120 The Moment of Psycho

by a disturbed youth is too close to Psycho to be casual.

Equally, the setup of The Collector is a story that plays
into our mounting habit of voyeurism. Do we want the
girl to escape, or is the setup begging for her submission?

1965: Repulsion

Roman Polanski is one of those filmmakers most fond of

and affected by Hitchcock. His film Repulsion is a clever re-
play of the lovely blonde under duress who turns nasty as
she breaks down. Moreover, her anger burns exactly those
cruel upper-class Brits that Hitch liked to abuse. Polanski is
obsessed with prison as a condition—and his world reminds
us of the traps that Marion and Norman discuss together. In
Polanski, the walls have limbs and lungs, but the kitchen is
the most dangerous place. Moreover, the idea of total blind
panic (like repulsion) is at the heart of Psycho’s analysis of
Norman. Neither director really believes in common
sense—but perhaps the movies prefer life that way.

1966: Blow-Up

Here is an elegant existential mystery that casually uncov-

ers pubic hair. As such, it was a landmark in the steady re-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 121

Other Bodies in the Swamp 121

treat of the tide of censorship. You can see that breakdown

in hundreds of films, but Blow-Up is intriguing because
most of its coups have a funny side. But, of course, finally,
Antonioni had made one of the great voyeuristic traps, and
no one so bent on watching can work without Hitchcock
looking over his shoulder.

1967: Bonnie and Clyde

Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn had little thought of fol-

lowing in Hitchcock’s steps. But the script for this film,
and the violent association of comedy and murder, was
originally intended for François Truffaut after the impact
of films like Tirez sur le pianiste. What alarmed viewers
of Bonnie and Clyde was the good time they were having
(or being allowed to have) with violence. There was a
public outcry, but the onset of violence made the censor-
ship anxieties of Psycho look ancient. In fifty years, our
capacity for seeing pain has increased beyond all reason.
Does that mean we have become more cruel, or more
voyeuristic?
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 122

122 The Moment of Psycho

1969: Le Boucher

Remember Chabrol, coauthor of that first book on Hitch-

cock in 1957? No one has made more films so subtly in-
fluenced by the themes and situations in Hitchcock as
Chabrol, and if I select Le Boucher here for observation, it
is not to rule out many others worth consideration.
Stéphane Audran is a schoolteacher living in the Dor-
dogne. She is nearly perfect, but she is cold. There is a
killer loose in the savage natural beauty of that part of
France. We suspect the butcher (Jean Yanne). He in turn
adores Audran but cannot reach her except through the
living myth of being a great murderer. This is an extraordi-
nary character study and an analysis of what murder can
mean in sterile lives. The two actors play as if in a trance.
The “beauty” of the world drifts by like a great lost ship.
The small tremor of terrible violence, of murder, knits the
film, and all the sex and violence are repressed—a testa-
ment to how thoroughly Chabrol grasped Hitchcock.

1969: Mississippi Mermaid

How could Truffaut not have his Hitchcock period, influ-

enced by the book they had done together? People point
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 123

Other Bodies in the Swamp 123

to The Bride Wore Black as its apotheosis, but I find that

film intellectually forced. The real Hitch film by Truffaut
is Mississippi Mermaid, in which a wealthy tobacco farmer
(Jean-Paul Belmondo) on the island of Reunion receives
his mail-order bride. But she looks not so much like her
photograph as she does Catherine Deneuve (always a
Hitchcockian blonde). They marry. They seem happy.
Then she is gone, with his money. He follows her to
France. He tracks her down. She is contrite. She had a ter-
rible life. Truly, she loves him. He relents. It all happens
again. Where does rescue join hands with self-destruction?
Here is a film that could go on forever.

1971: A Clockwork Orange

Kubrick and Hitchcock had a lot of things in common: an

extreme appetite for technique that sometimes forgot
“content”; a recognition of watching as perhaps the central
expression of modern intelligence and a surgeon’s interest
in the eye; a very cold, sociological gloominess; and a
strange confusion of America and Britain that can leave
them both looking very unworldly. Alex, in A Clockwork
Orange, is a psychotic thug who harbors noble aspira-
tions—and, like Norman, he enjoys Beethoven. We find a
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 124

124 The Moment of Psycho

record of the Eroica Symphony in Norman’s room in the

Bates house, though of course that’s also a clue as to the
source of some of the Herrmann music.

1971: Klute

A psychological thriller about a woman who needs to

overcome her attraction to self-destruction and a detective
who has a habit of passive watching. The links to Vertigo
in Alan Pakula’s film are obvious (except that by now the
actress can go naked indefinitely without censorship inter-
vening). Does the evidence proudly borne by Jane Fonda
support the superstition that Janet Leigh also once had
breasts (as opposed to things we could not see)? Klute ends
with the killer killed, but there are so many other things to
be afraid of, not least the climate of paranoia.

1972: Frenzy

Frenzy is a Hitchcock film, of course, and in some ways

his most disturbing. It is a return to England, to the
Covent Garden produce market where he must have
worked with his father. Glaringly archaic, it is a story
about one man being mistaken for and pursued as a serial
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 125

Other Bodies in the Swamp 125

sexual killer. But Hitchcock knows that this is a world in

which a film is obliged to show nudity and sexual violence.
The killings are set pieces again, but their “candor” is ugly
and brutalizing. The old man was making a picture that re-
ferred nostalgically to his own past but left people gasping
at his nastiness. Frenzy is the hardest film to digest for
those who want to see Hitch as a great artist instead of a
stranded engineer and Englishman.

1973: Don’t Look Now

This is the Daphne Du Maurier story that Hitchcock did

not take up. A married couple, having lost a child through
an accidental drowning, go off to Venice in winter. He is
helping in the restoration work on an old church. They are
trying to recover. But there is a serial killer in Venice, and
then the couple start to see a child in a red hooded coat—a
figure that reminds them of their lost daughter. This
strange horror film, with a half-crazy psychic helping the
couple, is loaded with doom. Yet there in the middle it has
one of the most uninhibited love scenes ever filmed (Don-
ald Sutherland and Julie Christie). In its warmth and ten-
derness, and in its solace for two wounded people, it is not
just unlike anything in Hitchcock, it is beyond him. Alas,
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 126

126 The Moment of Psycho

it all ends badly: the figure in red is a little old lady with a
knife. Let’s just say that this sidelong evocation of Hitch-
cock is a definitive lesson—for him to study.

1974: The Conversation

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) in The Conversation is a

Hitchcockian private detective, chronically alone—the
habit of pursuit is not so much his job as his neurotic call-
ing. He is in direct line with Scottie in Vertigo, and, like
him, he runs the risk of doing more harm than good. But
there is precise point of reference. As he suspects a murder
has been done in a hotel, Caul discovers—by flushing the
toilet—that all the blood and horror is in the pipes. The
overflowing toilet is a clear reference to Psycho as well as
an admission that the censors have all gone home.

1974: The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, et cetera

This must stand for the inexhaustible rural slasher genre

that has done so much to make the American hinterland a
gothic haunted house for paranoids on the road. As the
bloodletting becomes less inhibited, so the domestic cham-
ber of horrors unleashed by the kids whose car breaks
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 127

Other Bodies in the Swamp 127

down grows wilder. It leaves us filled with rueful nostalgia

for the days when Norman Bates could put an elegant sen-
tence together, and it requires that we regard such danger-
ous nonsense as “good, clean fun.”

1976: Taxi Driver

Just over fifteen years after Psycho, screen violence had

taken over and found tasteful, modern offsetting factors.
So when the ratings board found the blood at the end of
Taxi Driver too flagrant, it was printed less red. After all,
it’s only a movie. Moreover, the source of the violence,
Travis Bickle, goes free. The easy explanation is that film
(and its society?) have become so much more sympathetic
to the lone-wolf outsider. That has to be not just because
we have come to like such people as Norman but because
more of us see a glimpse of ourselves in him.

1976: Obsession

Scripted by Paul Schrader and directed by Brian De Palma,

Obsession is a remake of Vertigo and a measure of how
much the new generation of filmmakers was intent on
Hitchcock as a schooling.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:23 PM Page 128

128 The Moment of Psycho

1978: Halloween

The first in a long series, this low-budget mystery/horror

film involves a youth escaped from an asylum and bent on
terrible revenge and is essentially aimed at terrorizing
pretty young girls. In the 1980s and ’90s, such franchises
became standard fare. They were called slasher films, and
all the long knives came from Mrs. Bates’s kitchen drawer
(Halloween even had a fumbling doctor named Sam
Loomis!). Of course, the series coincided with and under-
lined the emerging demographic—that filmgoing had
become a private playground for sixteen- to twenty-four-
year-olds. As the Scream films would try to suggest: don’t
take the terror to heart, because it is only a movie—and the
heart is where the knife fits.

1980: Dressed to Kill

The most complete homage De Palma would make to

Hitchcock and a film with several set pieces worthy of the
master himself, such as the intricate pursuit passage where
Angie Dickinson thinks she is being flirted with. There is
also Miss D in a shower and a bloody murder by a killer
dressed in drag. But De Palma worked at his task with the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 129

Other Bodies in the Swamp 129

understanding that, by now, there was a large audience

that could pick up all the Hitchcock references and accom-
modate the rather lip-smacking humor in all the physically
outraging scenes. It was camp Hitchcock, a summer-
vacation Psycho for rich kids.

1980: The Shining

The Shining comes from a Stephen King novel, but King

believed that Kubrick had wasted or missed much of his
written terror. That theory held only until King’s televi-
sion remake—a dud. So what stands out now about The
Shining is a family going back to an unflushed past where
the husband has more footing or status than he ever knew.
He goes to write his story in the empty Overlook Hotel,
but the Overlook is creepy-crawling with stories and char-
acters, like Lloyd the bartender, who are waiting for him,
waiting to make old hay again. And if this bad boy Jack
may be killed, so what? The house knows that game: it un-
derstands precise timetables, and it knows that an elevator
shaft is mainlined with blood, walls of blood, breaking in
slow motion. But what is really handled is the end of mar-
riage and family. Hitchcock always kept a slight smile on
his face, the smile that knows not to trust such groupings.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 130

130 The Moment of Psycho

1986: Blue Velvet

The reason to include David Lynch’s great film could be sex

or violence (it is well supplied with both). But in truth it’s
his ability to render the screen’s flow as a dream—as an un-
questionable and immaculate process for which there must
be a secret meaning—that most coincides with Hitchcock’s
momentum. Hitch’s steady stress on screen space and cellu-
loid indicates how little interest he had in reality. It’s not the
road north to Fairvale he follows but a dream trail that is
unfolding like back projection behind the sleepwalking
sway of Marion’s car. It’s always the case with Hitchcock
that we wait for the spurious details of real places to be lost
in the soaring inwardness of dream. So, in Blue Velvet, a
boy finds an ear and wonders where the rest of the body is,
and along the way he will come of age, realize that evil lurks
in his hometown, and be confronted by the great white
whale of a woman’s body. Is that Isabella Rossellini in the
front garden, rising up, naked and pale? It’s only a movie.

1987: Fatal Attraction

Here’s a title Hitch might have liked and a story that had
his kind of urbane, urban people—though Hitch would
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 131

Other Bodies in the Swamp 131

have us anticipate from Glenn Close’s hair that she might

go crazy. When Michael Douglas has a brief fling, the sex-
ual passion gets out of control. (Like any voyeur, Hitch
knows that attraction can be fatal—the eyes read too much
into it. Desire wants too much, like happiness or paradise.)
But the woman’s need is so great that, once abandoned, she
becomes a killer. There was no need to play this one for
laughs, but a lethal irony operated throughout, and in the
end Hitchcock would surely have liked the pressure on
people to take responsibility for their own actions. You
shouldn’t fuck with fucking, the film says—though, of
course, films everywhere were by then encouraging just
that.

1991: The Silence of the Lambs

Here was a slasher film turned into an A production by

Jonathan Demme, and winning the Oscar for Best Pic-
ture—just a little story about a birdlike student at the
FBI academy, Clarice Starling, on the track of a grisly se-
rial killer, with an awful uncle figure tucked away in
prison who may help her because he likes her smell. It’s
cannibalism-turned-gourmet, and the film plainly ends
with Hannibal Lecter and his Diners Club card on a
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 132

132 The Moment of Psycho

spree, and good luck to them. What was most indicative

of the new standards was how such peeled skin, sensa-
tionalism, and sadism could be cooked and served as a
Best Picture dish instead of a concession to grim times.
By the sequel, Hannibal Lecter was nearly a great lover—
the star authority of Anthony Hopkins had rehabilitated
the role and the cannibal. So children all over America
(they can see an R-rated film if they are “with” a moral
guardian) were doing the fava beans and Chianti line and
fluttering their tongues.

1995: Pulp Fiction

The story keeps shifting, but in the end it will come back
with a vengeance, like a snake ready to eat its own tail. Yes,
we can believe that Quentin Tarantino had seen every
Hitchcock film in the video store before he was grown up.
The real question is when is he planning to be grown up,
and has the regimen of Hitchcock delayed that great day?
Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel), that chatty specialist in rapid
tidying-up operations, obviously has a lot of Norman
Bates in him.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 133

Other Bodies in the Swamp 133

1998: Psycho

This is the remake, in color, but from the same script and
often shot for shot. This fatuous duplication is very handy,
for Gus Van Sant’s per-shot pressure is scarcely measur-
able, whereas in Hitchcock it is unbearable. (Van Sant was
only eight when Psycho opened—too young to be allowed
to see it.) Anne Heche is Marion, Viggo Mortensen is Sam,
Vince Vaughan is Norman, Julianne Moore is Lila, William
H. Macy is Arbogast, Philip Baker Hall is the sheriff, and
Robert Foster is the psychiatrist. Of course, we can see
productions of Hamlet, The Cherry Orchard, and The
Homecoming all our lives, pointing out the differences,
whereas to see just one remake like this teaches us that the
amalgam of casting, atmosphere, and the moment is always
unique. Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins are so missing
(not to mention missed) that you begin to realize anew just
what an indirect love story Hitchcock had left in 1960:
$40,000 has become $400,000, Norman has lost his Eroica
Symphony recording (he has a Tammi Wynette and
George Jones album instead), and he has a pornographic
magazine—as if Mother would have let that in the house.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 134

134 The Moment of Psycho

2009: Red Riding

There’s something appropriate in this return to England, if

only because, prodded along by George Orwell, Agatha
Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, and a long line of serial killers,
the English have developed a great interest in murder, in
part scholarly, in part grisly, in part at the level of specula-
tive gossip about the neighbors. Red Riding is a three-
movie TV series adapted from four novels by David Peace
that are based loosely on the case of the “Yorkshire Rip-
per,” a man named Peter Sutcliffe who killed a series of
prostitutes before he was captured and then confined at
Broadmoor, the country’s prison for the criminally insane.
Like the novels, the TV series is a work of fiction,
strongly augmented by local knowledge and rooted in a
sense of massive police corruption—politically, indeed, it
is an attack on Yorkshire as a kind of private but wild
kingdom where the police do as they wish. Directed by
three different people, the TV series is not easy to follow.
Its mood is grim in the extreme, but it does not really
dwell on the killings of women and children, and overall it
is a superb attempt to treat psychotic crime in the context
of a dysfunctional society. Thus, it tends to spell out some-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 135

Other Bodies in the Swamp 135

thing only hinted at in Psycho: that troubled societies may

breed psychos. Of course, that idea can be read as a senti-
mental interpretation by dismayed liberals—so far, the
rambunctious, guilt-free serial killer is still an oddity. But
this is bloodied territory, and there’s money in the blood.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 136
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 137

A Noir Society

I N WAYS OVER WHICH Alfred Hitchcock had little aware-

ness, the world was ready for him in 1960. Television
was a medium that could cut instantaneously and without
sentiment or irony from the lavishly engraved stylization
of commercials to the rawest of documentary footage of an
automobile disaster, the scene of a murder, or the trail of
warfare. In the ’60s, television “taste” yielded to increas-
ingly graphic violence from Vietnam, Biafra, and so many
other places and put them in its own dramas. The world be-
came a montage, or a collage, easily perceived as madness
even though a piece of ordinary furniture kept it in place.
There was no way that television could pretend to be in
control, or protecting us. The old Hollywood had been
dead long enough for its code of security and happiness to

137
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 138

138 The Moment of Psycho

be not just ruined but mocked. Disaster was in the air, and
coast-to-coast live coverage waited to eat it up. Being a
movie star was no protection: ask Janet Leigh.
November 22, 1963, produced a fragment of film that
would be more scrutinized than anything since the Odessa
steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. A man named
Abraham Zapruder had been in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, as
the president drove by. His super 8mm camera was pho-
tographing the John F. Kennedy motorcade, and in less
than four hundred frames he recorded something that
would be pored over by experts and scholars for decades.
Within the blur of those frames there was a man being
killed, over and over again, with pieces of his head blown
into the air. But technicalities obscured the tragedy, as the
Zapruder film became the time line for what had occurred
in Dealey Plaza and the footage itself was the means of a
debate over when people were struck by bullets and where
the shooter or shooters might have been. The filmstrip al-
lowed a daylight robbery of life and history; it was dark-
ness at noon as noir took over the news.
This was film analysis made available, and urgent, for
everyone. It was also a lesson in the nature of television
and its openness to so many styles or genre assumptions.
The same television screen could show fantasy and unim-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 139

A Noir Society 139

peachable actuality without a blink. Young people (learn-

ing in the 1960s to doubt America) began to ask questions
about the reliability of what they were seeing. The sudden
stylistic anthology made available (by a medium that early
on turned to old movies to fill its hours) was a terrific
stimulus to questions on the nature of film, on criticism
and history. In the space of a few years in the early sixties
the readership for serious writing on films increased. Kids
going to college looked at the curriculum and asked why
there were no courses on film.
As censorship relaxed, and as more graphic versions of
sex and violence reached the screen, so another new exper-
tise got under way. It was called “special effects,” and it
meant using the resources of the medium to show things
not previously seen. Some of this seemed harmless, and
beautiful—like the first dissolves. You could show bodies
falling—actors pretending to be shot—in slow motion,
and it seemed “balletic.” If you then sewed sachets of veg-
etable dye into the actors’ costumes and set tiny charges to
explode this “blood,” why, then, you could give the im-
pression of bodies broken by bullets, of blood spurting
out, of gobbets of flesh breaking away. This is the cinema
of Sam Peckinpah (among others), and there was a poet in-
side him as well as a man drunk on destruction. But some
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 140

140 The Moment of Psycho

who followed Peckinpah forgot or were incapable of any

balancing need for poetry, for compassion for those char-
acters shot to pieces.
In time, the ingenuity of special effects soared ahead—it
is the fundamental creative explosion in modern filmmak-
ing, made at the expense of deeper imaginative thought,
and it left the human context way behind. The movies
had always loved new special effects, and sought them—
Citizen Kane, for example, is full of them. (Remember, as
it began, movie was itself a very special effect; story came
later.) But in the years after about 1970, the ability of these
effects, culminating in computer-generated images, to re-
lease violence was beyond question and out of control. All
too often, it was a “fun ride” separated from pain, damage,
and consequence.
There is no need to blame Alfred Hitchcock alone for
this development—it is rooted in the culture as a whole.
But Psycho more than any one film had said, “Forget the
consequences of a case study if the end product is thrilling
enough.” Thus, a substantial thing had been posited—
Norman Bates as the deranged killer—but only to make
another kind of killing.
What was lost in that process was Hitchcock’s unique
jaundiced vision—the thing stressed in the first forty min-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 141

A Noir Society 141

utes of Psycho: his sense of the unkind society. And surely

this charge is just, or at least hard to dismiss: in the end,
Hitch had not cared enough for his own creation, for Nor-
man. In 1965, talking of his own film Pierrot le Fou and de-
fending himself against charges that it had too much
blood, Jean-Luc Godard said, “That’s not blood—it’s just
red.” It was a smart-ass remark, showing how limited
young intelligence can be. To rephrase Godard himself, the
aesthetics of cinema rely on a sense of its ethics. But Go-
dard’s gloss was not far from Hitchcock’s own noncha-
lance when challenged with gruesomeness or tragedy. He
would say, “It’s only a movie,” and thus the chic coverlet
of “noir” was drawn up to conceal the human pain.
Alfred Hitchcock had yearned to make movie impor-
tant, respectable, and artlike. He had achieved an interna-
tional sensation and helped establish the power of the
director as auteur. But he had also isolated films from the
larger horizons of meaning.

IN THE GREAT RAGE FOR HITCHCOCK and his droll state-

ments about himself, Psycho was a central piece of cool.
You could say the film was exploitation: trash and sex and
violence. But no one seeing it for the first time ever felt
that was a sufficient description. Psycho was the new
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 142

142 The Moment of Psycho

American film, and the assurance in its maker of having a

bit of fun with so much blood seemed like a new attitude
for what would soon be regarded as the swinging and in-
souciant sixties.
The change was sharpened by controversy. The French
regard for Hitchcock had washed up on English-speaking
shores very slowly. In London the Cahiers writers were
thought to be too young, often incoherent hero wor-
shipers. The English liked to think they knew their Hitch-
cock and his amiable fraud. In England an attitude had set
in that Hitch was an “entertainer”—not a serious film-
maker. He was excluded from gravity by such things as
nuns in high-heeled shoes, the wicked use of national mon-
uments, and that old sneaking habit of dainty murder—
dainty in that the violence was offset by the meringue of
style. It was like the divide Graham Greene made in his
own fiction, between entertainments and novels.
But Andrew Sarris in America was a much happier
reader of the French. In the spring 1963 issue of Film Cul-
ture, Sarris arranged a hierarchy of American directors in
which the top group was “Pantheon.” It included Hitch-
cock. The article on Hitchcock (later a part of Sarris’s book
The American Cinema) began, “Alfred Hitchcock is the
supreme technician of the American cinema. Even his
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 143

A Noir Society 143

many enemies cannot begrudge him that distinction. Like

[John] Ford, Hitchcock cuts in his mind, and not in the
cutting room with different set-ups for every scene. His is
the only contemporary style that unites the divergent clas-
sical traditions of Murnau (camera movement) and Eisen-
stein (montage). . . . Unfortunately, Hitchcock seldom
receives the visual analysis he deserves in the learned
Anglo-American periodicals devoted ostensibly to the art
of the cinema.”
At almost the same time, in London, Penelope Hous-
ton, the editor of Sight and Sound, wrote a lengthy essay,
“The Figure in the Carpet,” which addressed the rising
passion for Hitchcock (and French ideas). This was epito-
mized by the appearance in London, in June 1962, of a
lively new magazine, Movie, the forum for several writers
(like V. F. Perkins) who had met at Oxford Opinion.
Movie had published its own “Pantheon,” and there were
just two directors in the “great” category—Howard
Hawks and Hitchcock (actually it came out “Hitchcocl”
because of a deflating misprint).
Penelope Houston’s essay began by gathering reviews
of The Birds: Pauline Kael had called it “a bad picture at
every level,” Ernest Callenbach regarded it as “disappoint-
ing . . . made on two mistaken assumptions,” but Andrew
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 144

144 The Moment of Psycho

Sarris said it was “Hitchcock at the height of his artistic

powers.” Houston took off from that with great skill to
point out the potential follies in the auteur theory—not a
difficult task—and the dangers of taking Hitchcock too se-
riously. She was astute enough to quote Hitchcock some-
times as a way of bringing airy admiration down with a
bump: “One of the Movie writers found traces of tragedy
in Psycho. Hitchcock’s own comment when interviewed
recently by the magazine: ‘It was made with quite a sense
of fun on my part . . . It’s rather like taking the audience
through the haunted house at a fairground. After all, it
stands to reason that if one were seriously doing the Psy-
cho story it would be a case history.’”
I have tried to argue that Psycho is undermined by its
own failure to believe in the case history, let alone deliver
an explanation for it. But it’s clear how much Hitchcock’s
own case dramatized his increasing significance in acad-
eme, where he was being taught by dejected English pro-
fessors who had found that their students, while lacking
the stamina for Middlemarch or Proust, might have fun
with Psycho. And in academe everything is turned into
politics: thus, the diminution in English departments that
begins around 1960 is accelerated by film or “media” pro-
grams, and then by business and computer studies (the
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 145

A Noir Society 145

two disciplines that have most depleted English and the

“humanities”).
It’s notable that Pauline Kael never picked on Hitch-
cock as a hero. She was the best writer and the most ambi-
tious ideologue in the new critical movement. Her
aggressive writing style could surely have made a feast of
Hitchcock, just as Kael personally was not far from Hitch
the tease and the barbed conversationalist. But Kael was
wary, and in 1966 she wrote, “There are movie directors
who try to plan out every detail in advance: Hitchcock, for
example, conceives the movie visually from the beginning
of the script preparation, designing the production like a
complicated mouse-trap, then building it. His script is a set
of plans representing the completed film, including the
editing, and if he doesn’t need to depart from it, that is be-
cause he works for exactly calculated effects of suspense
and perversity. He is an ingenious, masterly builder of
mousetraps, and more often than not, the audience is
caught tight; his techniques, however, probably have more
to do with gamesmanship than with art, and they are al-
most the opposite of the working methods of most great
directors for whom making the movie is itself a process of
discovery.” (In the early ’70s, those comments were fair.
The future of the movies seemed to rest in the hands of
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 146

146 The Moment of Psycho

more open-minded stylistic explorers: Godard, Antonioni,

the school of Renoir, Ophuls, Welles, and others open to
the accidental moment. Today, cold-blooded planning—
Hitchcockian blueprints—has taken the movies back, with
a vengeance.)
In the four or five years after Psycho, there was more
thinking (and writing) about Hitchcock than in the twenty
years before. And some of it was outstanding. It was in
1965 that the English critic (and Leavisite) Robin Wood
published a short book, Hitchcock, and a great step for-
ward in serious film criticism coming from England. Wood
was devoted to Hitchcock, and he broached fascinating
territory—of real relevance in film studies—in arguing that
sometimes a filmmaker didn’t know what his work was all
about. For example, here is Wood on Psycho: “Psycho is
one of the key works of our age. Its themes are of course
not new—obvious forerunners include Macbeth and Con-
rad’s Heart of Darkness—but the intensity and horror of
their treatment and the fact that they are here grounded in
sex belong to the age that has witnessed on the one hand
the discoveries of Freudian psychology and on the other
the concentration camps. I do not think I am being callous
in citing the camps in relation to a work of popular enter-
tainment. . . . But one cannot contemplate the camps with-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 147

A Noir Society 147

out confronting two aspects of their horror: the utter help-

lessness and innocence of the victims, and the fact that
human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some mea-
sure share, were their tormentors and butchers.”
This doesn’t heal the wounds in the second part of the
film, but it is superb insight on the first part. And for the
moment, I return to the points I made earlier, that this was
an America not seen or felt before on-screen and that the
humor by which the film’s most demented character un-
derstands that society is not funny enough to take off the
chill. The thing I have called “nastiness”—a noir disillu-
sion with the dream of happiness—was about to overtake
not just the American movie but the nation’s way of life.

THE SLIPPAGE in Hollywood’s power could not be ignored

as the ’60s advanced: average weekly attendance in Ameri-
can theaters dropped from 30 million in 1960 to 18 million
in 1969. In the same years the percentage of American
households with television increased from 87 to 95. The
first moguls (from Mayer to Selznick, from Zanuck to
Zukor) were dead or dying. Eighteen million tickets a
week was a parlous number when more than 100 million
were watching TV for at least six hours a week. The indus-
try, to the extent that it could be located, was suddenly
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 148

148 The Moment of Psycho

alarmed by the question of what to do. Still, for the mo-

ment at least, this logic was offered: if television is soaking
up the viewing energies of the ordinary American, then
maybe cinema remains available for dark, tough, difficult
pictures, films that portray the real America and not just
the fantasy idea, films that are there for new young people,
for directors with more ambition than budget, for people
who perhaps deserve to be treated as auteurs or artists.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, American film experi-
enced a new halcyon age—call it the silver years. This new
mood certainly didn’t cover everything being made. But it
gave big jobs to film buffs, to kids just out of film school,
to people who were as expert in the history of film as Truf-
faut and Godard had been.
The films were often dark. They seldom had happy end-
ings. But they were pictures of an authentic American
paranoia, something trained in us by the events of the ’60s,
but something also instilled by abstract expressionist
painting; the novels of Mailer, Bellow, and Styron; the un-
covering of dysfunction in the plays of Williams and
O’Neill; the lament in the voice of Miles Davis; and the
sense of wasteland that I have talked about in Psycho, to
say nothing of the terrible American failure in Vietnam
and the domestic agony over civil rights.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 149

A Noir Society 149

Hitchcock is amazingly unaware of these things. He has

no black characters in his films. He hardly believes in any
social groups. But you can feel the beating pulse that is
afraid of disorder, or the lack of order. It is not too great a
step to go from birds ready to attack mankind to a shark fit
to swallow the camera and its crew.
Jaws is a key picture in the transitions we are looking at.
It starts out as a jaded look at a resort community where
the local authorities will downplay shark fears to protect
their tourist business. This is the new realism of the ’70s,
and you can see how Psycho helped bring it into being. But
then the film shifts. It says giant sharks (as hostile as birds)
do exist—look, isn’t that a fin over there? Gotcha!
There have been isolated shark attacks off American
shores as long as people have gone into the water. It’s wise
to take care—after all, the ocean claims more lives than the
sharks. But there are not giant predators such as might eat
a small boat or a ham actor. There are not monsters of
which you should “Be Afraid—Be Very Afraid!” That is
the language of sensationalist entertainment, cheerfully
promoting unreal threats.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 150
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 151

Lonely People

T HERE ARE LONELY PEOPLE with small, hopeless roles

in Hitchcock films, and they linger in our memory.
They spring from a fear that may be graver than the one
that dreads knives in the shower. They are what are called
“supporting” parts, yet support is what they lack most.
Take the wife in The Wrong Man as played by Vera Miles.
At first she is the wife and mother who cannot understand
why her husband, Manny Balastrero, has been arrested for
a few local robberies. She rallies to his side. But as their or-
deal is prolonged, the stress is too much for her. Manny’s
lawyer sees that the wife is having a breakdown. It had
seemed like Manny’s story, because he is the wrong man
(falsely accused). But finally it is a film about a woman, so
Manny is wrong again, and helpless with his wife’s illness.

151
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 152

152 The Moment of Psycho

There is “Miss Lonelyhearts” in Rear Window, whose

suicide attempt nearly gets in the way of the adventure.
There is Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) in The Birds, the victim
of Mitch’s arrogance, Lydia’s need to control, and Annie’s
own depressive passivity. There is Lila in Psycho—
whatever is going to happen to her? There is Barbara Bel
Geddes in Vertigo, always waiting for Scottie, yet hardly
noticed. You could say there is Judy in Vertigo—the other
Novak role—hired in as a stooge but never able to lay hold
on her own life.
And there is Lars Thorwald in Rear Window. Thor-
wald hardly speaks in his film, let alone testifies on his
own behalf. But we can see how nagged and alienated he
is. It’s not that he has another woman, it’s just that he
longs to be free of his wife’s tirade. So he kills her and
then hopes for peace to settle on him as he smokes a ciga-
rette in the dark. Instead, he is hounded and tormented by
Jimmy Stewart’s cold gaze. And that suspicion proves
correct: Thorwald is the murderer. But when he confronts
Stewart with the pathetic question “What do you want of
me?” we can see that the murder accusation is hardly an
adequate explanation of or solution to Thorwald’s un-
happy life. He wanted quiet and rest—and it cannot be.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 153

Lonely People 153

But Thorwald’s hope stays with you, and Norman Bates

brings it back to life.
In the last analysis, that loneliness is more interesting
in Psycho, and more pioneering, than the violence, the
sex, or the terrific assertion of “pure” cinema. For the
first fifty or so years of film’s history, the quality that had
kept it short of art was the fabulous, positive together-
ness of its mood. It was an entertainment for crowds—
the largest, least-discriminating crowds the world had
ever known. The “we” in the dark laughed, cried, and
shuddered in concert. And there was constant reassur-
ance in the medium—that everything will be all right,
that “they” lived happily ever after, that humanity is a
shared bond and duty. This was something wonderful, as
witnessed by the collective response to Chaplin and the
clowns, to musical creations like Astaire and Garland, to
ninety minutes of silly bliss, to such giddy romances as
Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz,
or even The Best Years of Our Lives, where the word
Our means something directly related to the United in
“the United States.”
So movies strove to let us think well of ourselves. They
wanted to promote the crowd in the dark as a neat model
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 154

154 The Moment of Psycho

for society. Yet in the first fifty years of the twentieth cen-
tury (the halcyon years of movie) the older arts moved to-
ward an almost inescapable condition of existential
loneliness or isolation in which the artwork was both an
expression of and a tribute to private experience.
As I have tried to show, Hitchcock and Psycho spear-
headed an uncertain but heartfelt urge in some popular
filmmakers to be regarded as lonely artists. That is why I
stressed the abrasive indifference that Psycho uncovers in
its first forty minutes—not just the nagging hostility in the
small roles, but the fatalism that hangs over Sam and Mar-
ion. That is why Norman’s attempt to be decent and com-
municative is unexpectedly humane and valiant.
But the thread of personal alienation runs all the way
through the film. For instance, remind yourself to what
extent Psycho is a rural or pastoral film—something rare in
Hitchcock’s work. So the latter part of the film is set in the
country town of Fairvale; the name is chosen carefully, and
its irony has time to sink in. Fairvale is the sort of place
that had been steadily idealized in American films, no mat-
ter that, at the same time, those towns and areas may have
run out of population. It is the world of some Frank Capra
films, of many comedies and romances. It is the “home”
called Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. It is the Santa Rosa,
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 155

Lonely People 155

California, where Hitchcock set Shadow of a Doubt, and

he imagines a close, if not claustrophobic, community on
the edge of gossip and a barely contained hysteria. (He
finds the same mood in the town diner in The Birds, set in
Bodega Bay.)
In Psycho, the community is sketched in briefly but ex-
pertly in the form of the sheriff and his wife, the grim
hardware store and the Sunday morning churchgoing.
Casting John McIntire as the sheriff was a way of saying,
“Surely you know this place and these people—you can
trust them.” The sheriff and Norman are on a first-name
basis. The sheriff knows he can call Norman on the phone.
He trusts what he hears in that talk. Yet the sheriff knows
nothing about the private world of Norman Bates, and he
has no notion of the kind of life he has been leading for
years. (We learn later, in the explanation scene, that two
other girls disappeared in recent years—without any satis-
factory conclusion.)
The idea of community is hollow. That is why the inte-
rior of the Bates house and its tomblike bedrooms feel re-
moved from any other world. What makes Norman so
eloquent in that nighttime talk with Marion is the instinct
that he may never have another chance to speak naturally
to anyone. That’s what the film is about: not just that
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 156

156 The Moment of Psycho

madmen lurk in houses on country roads but that loneli-

ness can drive you mad.
That’s why it’s so important to feel so little prospect of
marriage between Sam and Marion in Psycho, as well as the
eerie indicator that Marion has just met her most under-
standing man as she steps into the shower. That’s why she
looks like an angel in the stream of water from the shower,
purified and transcendent. Of course, she’s mistaken. She
hasn’t read the meeting quite right. But that happens a lot
in Hitchcock. In Vertigo, at Ernie’s restaurant Scottie mar-
vels that “Madeleine” stands so close to him so that he
drinks in her beauty and her mysterious presence without
ever realizing why she is standing so still and so close to
him. He can look and see and have the ring in his nose for-
ever afterward.
Hitchcock knew that a system locked into watching and
seeing can misread its surroundings and can even lose its
identity and ordinary human sympathies because of the
pressure of voyeurism. The voyeurism is so heavy, so
forceful, it can smother real human nature. Psycho is the
conclusion to a set of films beginning with Rear Window,
and for me that is Hitchcock’s best film in that the smile of
satisfaction at the end covers without hiding the loneliness
that affects the people. Rear Window is a romance, a com-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 157

Lonely People 157

edy, and a thriller, but a portrait of alienation, too. The

apartments and the windows are screens, of course, but
they are traps, or cells—in that entire courtyard no one
seems to “know” anyone else; neighborliness has not been
invented.
One way to read Psycho is be careful, be afraid, for every
time you set out on the road you run the risk not just of
finding your destination but of being waylaid by chance,
and then of being swept away by it. That’s the impulse that
began with Strangers on a Train, the intuition that the glib,
flimsy morality of Guy Haines cannot withstand the intri-
cate insights of the madman, Bruno Anthony. Most of
Hitchcock’s madmen are rich in understanding; it is a gift
that comes with their estrangement. And that’s part of the
pain in Vertigo—that the distraught detective sees only the
resemblance between two Kim Novaks, not that they are
the same tormenting person.
Hitchcock is vulnerable to charges of being unworldly,
of being an odd and archaic Englishman in America. And
it’s true that the rough, vast America seldom gets into his
films. But sometimes it is there—for example, in that mo-
ment in Shadow of a Doubt when Uncle Charlie crosses a
piece of urban wasteland and we realize his madness is in
the grain of a shabby nation, and on the highway in Psycho
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 158

158 The Moment of Psycho

as Marion Crane’s paranoia spills down on her car with the

rain, the rain that promises water and blood. In such mo-
ments, Hitchcock transcends his grimly tidy plots and
suddenly reveals the sensibility of someone lost in a waste-
land, afraid of fear and the desolation.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 159

On the Way to Fairvale

I F IT’S JUST YOU DRIVING, you can come clear across the
country in five days, averaging six hundred miles a day,
like a knife through butter. You should stop for an hour a
couple of times a day unless you’ve done work driving,
because you won’t know how tired you are getting. And
you don’t want to wake up just before you collide with
an eighteen-wheeler filled with gasoline or toxic chemi-
cals or nuclear waste. So you’ll likely want to be on the
road by six in the morning, and there’ll be time to ask
yourself—as the Texas preacher talking in tongues turns
into Navajo radio—whether you’re going mad or having
the time of your life. With the roadkill crunching under
your wheels like granola. It’ll be okay in the end because
you’ll come back into urbanization, another version of the

159
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 160

160 The Moment of Psycho

best facilities you left on the East Coast. But three or four
days of your trip you’re going to be driving through dis-
tance itself, where there seems to be just the road carrying
you along. And then you realize that in America the poetry
is often in the official signage, the poker-faced information
that you’re on the “interstate.” Think of that word in terms
of Psycho, of Marion’s face dissolving into Norman’s, of lit-
tle spurts of craziness carrying people away. The interstate
is the passion for becoming somewhere else. There are
places in America where you can be driving in nothing and
then you see the Emerald City (Las Vegas) lined up on the
horizon like bowling pins ready to be scattered. You may
not understand America, but you can drive it.
I have driven I-5 quite a lot these last few years, going
up into northern California, passing between San Fran-
cisco and Sacramento, going over the flat, burned fields
that are close to desert in summer, and then feeling the
land rise at Red Bluff and Redding and getting up to
Shasta, where the mountain has snow on its cone year-
round, like a wedding cake. And I know a lot of the mo-
tels in that area.
You must not be put off by them just because of Psycho.
It really is safer to stop at the motel instead of pulling your
car over on the soft shoulder and trying to sleep there at
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 161

On the Way to Fairvale 161

night. The people who run the motels are friendly. The
places are cheap and clean and large. And they are near
diners where you can eat well, especially if you settle for
breakfast every meal. I recommend it as a way to see the
country.
You see, divas like Norman Bates don’t actually get to
run motels. It’s too much work. You have to have the linen
changed every day. You need the bathrooms cleaned. You
don’t do it yourself. Because you’re in the office checking
the folks in and out, making sure the sachets of coffee and
the soap and the shampoo are in every room every night,
and making sure the televisions and the phones work. And
being ready to tell visitors the best place to go for white
water rafting, or to see the caves or the redwoods, or sim-
ply to talk, because sometimes if people have driven six
hundred miles a day they are just hungry for talk—
hungrier for that than for the All-American slam breakfast
which gets you three eggs cooked to your choice, with
bacon, sausage, or ham, two pancakes, hash brown pota-
toes with toast (white, wheat, rye, or sourdough), fresh
OJ, and keep-the-coffee-coming. If you’re having coffee
on the road, you get as many cups as you want, darling,
and you bet we’re going to keep calling it OJ, even if he
was a murderer. A little bit of melodrama never put us off.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 162

162 The Moment of Psycho

Oh, sure, there are motels that were bypassed when

they brought the interstate in, but those places didn’t last
as motels more than a few months. And then Norman
would have been off, joining the Marines or moving into
Fairvale to work in the pet store, or joining the police
force. If you really wanted to remake Psycho, try the idea
of Norman as that dark-glasses superhero, not even
breathless, who gets to pull some Marion over and tell her
he clocked her at 105 mph.
“Oh, officer, I must have been dreaming.”
“Really. Well, ma’am, do I look like a dream or what?”
And the folklore then likes to tell you that the lady in
the car pulls at her skirt a little and very soon has Officer
Norman in the back, and no questions asked.
Hitchhikers? Well, there are stretches by prisons
where you aren’t supposed to stop the car, let alone pick
up anyone walking. But hitchhiking is less common these
days—no matter that the movie nightmare remains very
popular, where you pick up this fellow and he’s straight
from hell. Or he’s Howard Hughes, and he’ll remember
you in his will, for just half an hour of talk. They all want
to talk.
I wouldn’t worry about the motels or the hitchhikers,
not nearly as much as the fact that at 65 mph any little dis-
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 163

On the Way to Fairvale 163

order on the highway can quickly turn into a slow section,

where the traffic coming the other way drops down to a
crawl to see how the medics are slipping the bloody bod-
ies out of the torn steel. The highway can be a war zone in
seconds, and the traffic casualties we suffer on the inter-
states have all the wars beaten flat.
Not that I’d blame the freeway system. If you’ve got a
country three thousand miles by fifteen hundred, more or
less, you’ve got to have a way of getting there. After all, it
was a brave thing for Nevada to say “Let’s have quickie di-
vorces and gambling” in 1931. But it’s hardly worth doing
without Interstate 80 getting you from San Francisco to
Reno or I-15 from L.A. to Vegas. And what made Bugsy
Siegel see the point of Las Vegas (which barely existed in
1940) was that the highway to Los Angeles could get peo-
ple there for a weekend. Sure, that highway is a bit of a
gamble, too, because everyone goes too fast and tailgates
on that road. Nevada was never founded on the idea of
taming recklessness.
So don’t be put off by the driving or the highways.
Don’t ever think as you come across I-50 in Nevada,
which just like a character in a noir movie advertises itself
as “the loneliest highway in the world,” don’t ever say to
yourself, “What if I broke down here?”
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 164

164 The Moment of Psycho

As a matter of fact, the freeways are things America

does very well. It’s as if some team of frontier scouts and
landscape architects shaped them to the country. Sure,
there are hundred-mile straightaways—there have to be—
but so much of the time the roads are a joy to drive and the
unfolding views are done with skill and taste. If only the
country could do education, welfare, health with the same
grace. So many American cities are drab—like Phoenix.
But nearly any stretch of the interstate is beautiful and
uniquely American. It’s like a great track, and you won’t
understand the appeal of NASCAR in America without
seeing that it’s a vision of driving before there was law.
I know there were hitchhikers once, like Vag in Dos
Passos’s U.S.A., or like Montgomery Clift at the start of
A Place in the Sun, where he’s out on the highway
thumbing and the great poster of a girl in a white bathing
suit stands for journey and destination. “A Place in the
Sun” was the motto inscribed on the exterior wall of the
Sands hotel/casino which opened in Las Vegas the year
after that movie came out. And, theoretically, A Place in
the Sun was the assertion that by entering the
hotel/casino you were going to win. Of course, that is
one of the lies, for anyone who is into the numbers in
Vegas will tell you that the majority of us have to lose
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 165

On the Way to Fairvale 165

and go away and be the Norman Bates of the world, car-

ing but saying we don’t care.
Do you recollect that moment in Psycho? Marion has
heard the voice of Mother—it has its own PA system, a
weak old woman crystal clear at fifty yards! And Norman
admits to Marion that Mother’s voice is his “trap.” “I was
born in mine,” he says. “I don’t mind it anymore.” And she
tells him, “Oh, you should. You should mind it.” And
that’s when Norman, or Perkins, gives one of his tiny
shrugs—heartbreaking yet lyrically self-denying: “Oh, I
do—but I say I don’t.” An alarm bell could go off there,
saying “possible psychotic reaction.” Yet the more I think
about this Norman-and-Mother thing, the more I see Nor-
man as one of those lifelong actors who just does Mother
and can’t get her out of his head now. It’s not that Norman
Bates is fleeing from some terrible wrath—he’s looking for
belief, for someone to be. He’s just one more of those dark,
solitary people living alone, the kind that Hitchcock can
hardly stop himself from showing us. The kind like him,
the kind that would never resort to the violence played
with in movies but who cannot give up the dream.

THERE’S A DETAIL in Donald Spoto’s biography of Hitch-

cock that I can never forget. Alfred had a wardrobe with
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 166

166 The Moment of Psycho

six or a dozen versions of the same dark suit, with plain

shirts and ties and shoes to go with it. He wore just that
one costume. And he had only ever made love to his wife,
Alma, and that not for years. Of course, this fellow was fa-
mous and he lived in Beverly Hills, so the fixed limits of
his life were easily overlooked. Think of him in some kind
of Fairvale with all the same suits, turning the lights on and
off, doing his voices, running stories in his head in which
sometimes the lonely people blunder into blind-chance
meeting and all of us see motels as unlucky mortuaries.
Looking at the last days of Alfred Hitchcock is not
cheerful. One book says he had a pretty secretary and they
just sat on opposite sides of the room watching each other
masturbate. Now take another look at the supper scene in
the office. Gotcha. The loneliness he had ignored or fought
away came home to roost. And it was harder for him or
anyone to deny that community in the world had given
way to a vision of murder as the new orthodoxy. Yet it is
wrong with Hitch to be so gloomy as to yield to all of that.
His abiding character as an artist—and that survives the
man—has to do with the humor he kept in reserve. So Psy-
cho is not just a hundred screams and strikes of the knife,
it’s also, “My mother isn’t quite herself today.” It’s poker-
faced irony.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 167

On the Way to Fairvale 167

Here is that Hitch at his best, very English, suave and

detached, teasing yet truthful, at the 1974 honors given
him by the Film Society of Lincoln Center: “As you have
seen, murder seems to be the prominent theme. As I do
not approve of the current wave of violence that we see on
our screens, I have always felt that murder should be
treated delicately. And, in addition to that, with the help of
television, murder should be brought into the home where
it rightly belongs. Some of our most exquisite murders
have been domestic: performed with tenderness in simple,
homey places like the kitchen table or the bathtub. Noth-
ing is more revolting to my sense of decency than the un-
derworld thug who is able to murder anyone—even
people to whom he has not been properly introduced.
After all, I’m sure you will agree that murder can be so
much more charming and enjoyable, even for the victim, if
the surroundings are pleasant and the people involved are
ladies and gentlemen like yourselves.”
So don’t be too afraid of the motels and the road but
watch out for the ladies and gentlemen.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 168
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 169

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Of course, I want to thank those who made this book

possible—Lara Heimert, its editor; Sandra Beris, the pro-
ject editor; and Steve Wasserman, the agent who helped set
it up. I also feel I have been talking to some people about
Psycho for fifty years and I thank—among others—Kieran
Hickey, Patrick McGilligan, Janet Leigh, and my wife,
Lucy Gray, author of a fascinating play about Hitchcock
and his wife, Alma.
But I want to thank the film, too, for the way from the
start it was so clearly both a fevered hot work (terrifying)
and a very cool demonstration of the thing called movie
(comic). Being so Nabokovian, it was one of the films that
set me writing, and I still love to see it and its fellows,
including Douglas Gordon’s immense, slowed-down ver-
sion which takes about twenty-four hours to see—not that
I have yet had all that time.

169
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 170
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 171

CREDITS

1960

Psycho, 1960, a Shamley production, a Paramount release.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock; screenplay, Joseph Stefano,
from the novel by Robert Bloch; director of photography,
John L. Russell; art direction, Joseph Hurley and Robert
Clatworthy; set decoration, George Milo; unit manager, Lew
Leary; titles, Saul Bass; editor, George Tomasini; costume su-
pervisor, Helen Colvig; makeup supervision, Jack Barron
and Robert Dawn; hairstylist, Florence Bush; special effects,
Clarence Champagne; sound recording, Waldon O. Watson
and William Russell; assistant director, Hilton A. Green; pic-
torial consultant, Saul Bass; music by Bernard Herrmann.
With Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin
Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, Vaughn Taylor,
Frank Albertson, Lurene Tuttle, Pat Hitchcock, John An-
derson, Mort Mills, Paul Jasmin (uncredited), and Janet
Leigh as Marion Crane.

171
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 172

172 Credits

Reading

Anobile, Richard J., ed. Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Lon-

don: Picador, 1974. The script is illustrated by frame
enlargements.
Auiler, Dan. “Vertigo”: The Making of a Hitchcock Clas-
sic. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
Bloch, Robert. Psycho. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1959.
Chabrol, Claude, and Eric Rohmer. Hitchcock. Paris: Édi-
tions Universitaires, 1957.
Conrad, Peter. The Hitchcock Murders. London: Faber
and Faber, 2000.
Durgnat, Raymond. A Long Hard Look at “Psycho.” Lon-
don: British Film Institute, 2002.
Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected
Writings and Interviews. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1995.
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness
and Light. New York: Regan Books, 2003.
Paini, Dominique, and Guy Cogeval. Hitchcock and Art:
Fatales Coincidences. Montreal: Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts, 2001. This is a catalog to a superb exhibi-
tion, mounted first in Montreal and then transferred to
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 173

Credits 173

the Pompidou in Paris—perhaps the greatest art

gallery tribute to a filmmaker ever offered.
Rebello, Stephen. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of
“Psycho.” New York: Dembner, 1990.
Rothman, William. Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Sharff, Stefan. The Art of Looking at Hitchcock’s “Rear
Window.” New York: Limelight, 1967.
Skerry, Philip J. Psycho in the Shower: The History of Cin-
ema’s Most Famous Scene. New York: Continuum,
2009.
Spoto, Donald. The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Al-
fred Hitchcock. New York: Little, Brown, 1983.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1967.
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films. London: Zwemmer,
1965.
______. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989.
Zizek, Slavoy, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Lacan (but Were Afraid to Ask Hitch-
cock). London: Verso, 1992.
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 174
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 175

INDEX

Abstract expressionism, 148 Bel Geddes, Barbara, 152

Academy Awards, 9, 10, 11, Bellboy, The, 91
99–101, 131 Bellow, Saul, 148
Actress, The, 39 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 123
Alamo, The, 91, 99 Bass, Saul, 22, 58
Aldrich, Robert, 117 Ben-Hur, 3
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV Bergman, Ingrid, 8, 80
show), 6–7, 17, 19, 95 Best Years of Our Lives, The,
Alienation, 154, 157 153
American Cinema, The (Sarris), Biafra, 137
142–143 Biblical epics, 3
American Film Institute, 10 Bigger Than Life, 3
American Gothic, 16 “Birds, The” (Du Maurier),
103–104
Anderson, John, 33
Birds, The, 75, 80, 104–107,
Angry Silence, The, 98
109–110, 112, 152, 155
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 101,
crew for, 107
121, 146
reviews, 143–144
Apartment, The, 91, 99–100,
Black-and-white films, 4
101
Black Narcissus, 92
Around the World in 80 Days, 3 Bloch, Robert, 13–14, 15, 17, 19
Astaire, Fred, 153 Blow-Up, 120–121
Auteur theory, 144 Bogdanovich, Peter, 111
Bonnie and Clyde, 121
BAFTAs, 9 Boorman, John, 84
Balaban, Barney, 18 Box office statistics, 4
Balsam, Martin, 76, 107 Boyle, Robert, 107
Battleship Potemkin, 138 Bradbury, Ray, 104
Beatty, Warren, 121 Bride Wore Black, The, 123
Beethoven, Ludwig von, Britain, 101, 134, 142, 146
123–124 Burks, Robert, 107

175
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 176

176 Index

Cahiers du Cinema magazine, Cuban missile crisis (1962), 112

11, 101, 108, 142 Curtis, Tony, 24
Callenbach, Ernest, 143
Cannes Film Festival (1959), 11 Danger, 2, 47. See also Terror
Capote, Truman, 14, 15 Dassin, Jules, 100
Capra, Frank, 154 Davis, Bette, 117
Cardiff, Jack, 100 Davis, Miles, 148
Casablanca, 153 Dealey Plaza, Dallas, 138
Cassavetes, John, 92 Dean, James, 15, 16
Cavanagh, James, 17, 19 Dee, Sandra, 106
Cecil, Henry, 13 Defiant Ones, The, 3
Censorship, 2, 3, 6, 11, 12, 54, Demme, Jonathan, 131
55, 61, 71–72, 92, 121, 124, Demographics, 128
126. See also Production Deneuve, Catherine, 123
Code De Palma, Brian, 127, 128
Chabrol, Claude, 5, 122 Desire Under the Elms, 39
Chaplin, Charles, 10, 153 Dial M for Murder, 5, 13, 53
Cherry Orchard, The, 133 Diary of Anne Frank, The, 3
Christie, Agatha, 83, 134 Directors Guild, 9
Christie, Julie, 125 Dr. No, 116, 116
Citizen Kane, 93, 94, 140 Domestic horror films, 15–16
Civil rights, 148 Don’t Look Now, 125–126
Clatworthy, Robert, 16, 100 Dos Passos, John, 164
Clockwork Orange, A, 123–124 Douglas, Michael, 131
Close, Glenn, 131 Dread, 83. See also Terror
Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 58 Dressed to Kill, 128–129
Collector, The, 119–120 Du Maurier, Daphne, 103, 125
Computer-generated images,
140 Eastwood, Clint, 115
Concentration camps, 146 Éditions Robert Laffont, 111
Connery, Sean, 117 Eisenhower, Dwight, 21, 31
Conrad, Joseph, 146 Eisenstein, Sergei, 143
Conversation, The, 126 Elmer Gantry, 91, 99, 100
Corman, Roger, 17 Entertainer, The, 91
Crawford, Joan, 117–118 Epper, Margo, 59
Crime, 7, 15, 134. See also Esquire magazine, 98
Psycho: theft of $40,000 in Existential loneliness, 154
Crowther, Bosley, 98, 107 Exodus, 91, 100
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 177

Index 177

Fatal Attraction, 130–131 Fontaine, Joan, 8, 9

Fatalism, 154 Ford, John, 143
Fear Strikes Out, 39 Foreign Correspondent, 57
“Figure in the Carpet” Foster, Robert, 133
(Houston), 143 Fowles, John, 119
Film Culture, 142 France, 5, 7, 10–11, 91, 101, 122,
Films 142. See also Cahiers du
as art, 12, 44, 143, 145. (see Cinema magazine;
also Psycho: as art) Godard, Jean-Luc;
attendance in American Truffaut, François
theaters, 147 Franklin, Pamela, 106
Biblical epics, 3 Freeman, Frank, 18, 64
black-and-white films, 4 Frenzy, 124–125
demographics concerning, Freudian psychology, 146
128 Friendly Persuasion, 39
domestic horror films, 15–16 Fuller, Samuel, 57
from the ’50s, 3, 24–25
French New Wave, 91 Garland, Judy, 153
as game to be played, 43, 145 Gavin, John, 23, 24, 40, 52
history of, 148, 153 Gein, Ed, 13–14, 15
homosexuality in, 43 Giant, 3
James Bond films, 116–117 Gigi, 3
of late ’60s and early ’70s, Godard, Jean-Luc, 11, 141, 146,
148 148
meaning in, 141 Gold, Ernest, 100
musicals/westerns, 3 Gone With the Wind, 153
openings in 1960, 91 Graham, Winston, 103
planning of, 145, 146 Granger, Farley, 80
Psycho’s film legacy, 116–135 Grant, Cary, 65, 80
slasher films, 128, 131 Green, Guy, 98
social realism in, 97–98 Greene, Graham, 142
special effects in, 139, 140 Greenstreet, Sydney, 43
study of in American Griffith, D. W., 10
education, 11, 139, Griffith, Melanie, 106
144–145 Guilt, 8, 72
Film Society of Lincoln Center,
167 Hackman, Gene, 126
Fonda, Jane, 124 Hall, Philip Baker, 133
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 178

178 Index

Halloween, 128 and meaning in films, 141,

Hamlet, 133 145
Harvey, Laurence, 119 and mothers, 87
Hawks, Howard, 10, 143 Oscar nominations, 9, 99,
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 100
146 and ownership of Psycho, 18,
Heche, Anne, 133 93–94
Hedren, Tippi, 80, 106–107, as planning films, 145
110, 113–114 police in films of, 72
Hepburn, Audrey, 13 and Production Code, 65–66
Herrmann, Bernard, 28, 107. (see also Censorship)
See also Psycho: music in and pure cinema, 48, 58
High Society, 3 as respecting restoration and
Hitchcock (Wood), 146–147 order, 72, 84
Hitchcock, Alfred, 5–6, 12, 144 speech at Film Society of
and Anthony Perkins, 39–40 Lincoln Center in 1974,
awards/honors, 10, 167 (see 167
also Hitchcock, Alfred: staircases in films of, 80, 84
Oscar nominations) successful/unsuccessful films,
background of, 9 5, 9
biography of, 165–166 supporting parts in films of,
and book of interviews with 151
François Truffaut, violence in films of, 57–58,
108–109, 111, 122 167 (see also Psycho:
chance meetings in films of, shower scene in)
62 vision of society, 140–141
daughter of, 8, 26 (see also Psycho: and
emotional rescue in films of, nastiness of nation)
47 wife of, 8, 107
as falling in love with his writing about, 146
actresses, 8, 110, 113 Hitchcock, Patricia, 8, 26
feted in Paris, 101 (see also Hitchhikers, 162, 164
France) Homecoming, The, 133
in his own films, 6, 25–26 Homosexuality, 43, 89
last days of, 166 Hopkins, Anthony, 132
madmen in films of, 157 Hopper, Edward, 37
male punishment in films of, House by the Railroad
53 (painting), 37
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 179

Index 179

Houston, Penelope, 98, 143, Landis, Jessie Royce, 57–58

144 Lange, Hope, 19
Hughes, Howard, 162 La Notte, 101
Humor, 9, 10, 42, 57, 118, 121, Lansbury, Angela, 119
129, 147, 166 Las Vegas, Nevada, 160, 163,
Hunter, Evan, 104, 106, 112, 164
113 Laughton, Charles, 15–16
Hurley, Joseph, 100 Laura, 43
Le Boucher, 122
I Confess, 5 Leigh, Janet, 8, 16, 19, 23, 24,
In Cold Blood (Capote), 14 28, 38, 52, 60, 124, 133, 138
Interstate highways, 160, Oscar nomination, 100
163–164 Les Diaboliques, 58
Iwerks, Ub, 107 Les 400 Coups, 11
Let’s Make Love, 91
Lewis, Jerry, 16, 91, 119
James Bond films, 116–117
Lifeboat, 9
Jasmin, Paul, 43
Little Shop of Horrors, The, 17
Jaws, 94, 149
Lloyd, Norman, 57
Jones, George, 133
Lolita, 118
Jones, Shirley, 100
Lolita (Nabokov novel), 42–43
Loren, Sophia, 39
Kael, Pauline, 143, 145 Lubitsch, Ernst, 10
Kazan, Elia, 91 Lust, 8. See also Sex
Keaton, Buster, 10 Lynch, David, 130
Keitel, Harvey, 132 Lynley, Carol, 106
Kelly, Grace, 8, 12–13, 65, 103,
106, 112 Macbeth, 146
Kennaway, James, 104 Macdonald, Dwight, 98
Kennedy, John F., 21, 138 McIntire, John, 81–82, 155
King, Stephen, 129 Macy, William H., 133
King and I, The, 3 Magnificent Seven, The, 91
Kiss Me Deadly, 3, 58 Mailer, Norman, 148
Klute, 124 Maltese Falcon, The, 43
Kubrick, Stanley, 123, 129 Manchurian Candidate, The,
118–119
Lady Vanishes, The, 10 Man from Laramie, The, 58
Lancaster, Burt, 91 Mann, Anthony, 57
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 180

180 Index

Man of the West, 3 Never on Sunday, 100

Man Who Knew Too Much, New York Film Critics, 9
The, 5, 99 New York Times, 14, 98, 107
Marnie, 103, 112, 113, 117 Nicholson, Jack, 17
Marnie (Graham novel), 103 Night of the Hunter, 3, 15–16
Marvin, Lee, 85 Nixon, Richard, 21
Mason, James, 118 No Bail for the Judge (Cecil),
Matter of Life and Death, A, 92 13
Mayer, Louis B., 147 North by Northwest, 5, 6, 9, 13,
Mayes, Wendell, 104 47, 57, 64, 85, 118
MCA talent agency, 17 gross earnings, 99
Miles, Vera, 12, 52, 74, 151 Notorious, 9, 47, 53, 57, 72, 80
Mills, Mort, 31 Novak, Kim, 8, 12, 152, 157
Milo, George, 100 Nudity. See Nakedness
Mimieux, Yvette, 106 Nutty Professor, The, 119
Mississippi Mermaid, 122–123
Mitchum, Robert, 16 Oakland, Simon, 88, 89
Monroe, Marilyn, 91 Obsession, 127
Moore, Julianne, 133 Olivier, Laurence, 91
Moral responsibility, 5, 7 O’Neill, Eugene, 148
Mortensen, Viggo, 133 Ophuls, Max, 146
Motels, 160–162, 166, 167. See Orwell, George, 134
also Psycho: motel and Oscars. See Academy Awards
house in Oxford Opinion, 143
Movie magazine, 143, 144
Murnau, F. W., 143 Pakula, Alan, 124
Museum of Modern Art, 107, Paramount Pictures, 17, 18, 19,
111 56, 102
Music, 123–124, 133. See also Peace, David, 134
Musicals; under Psycho Peckinpah, Sam, 139
Musicals, 3 Peeping Tom, 92
Penn, Arthur, 121
Nabokov, Vladimir, 42, 118 Perkins, Anthony, 16, 19, 38,
Nakedness, 12, 23, 29, 56, 59, 39–40, 52, 59, 71, 89, 115,
61, 125 133, 165
NASCAR, 164 and Oscar nominations, 100
National Film Archive Perkins, V. F., 98–99, 143
(London), 111 Phoenix, Arizona, 21, 22, 164
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 181

Index 181

Pierrot le Fou, 141 novel Psycho is based on,

Pinter, Harold, 10 13–14, 17
Place in the Sun, A, 164 openings, 92, 94–95
Pleshette, Suzanne, 152 opening scene in, 22–24, 55,
Point Blank, 84–85 65
Polanski, Roman, 120 Oscar nominations, 100–101
Police corruption, 134 ownership of, 18, 93–94
Powell, Michael, 92 as period film, 31
Preminger, Otto, 91 postproduction/previews, 92
Presley, Elvis, 15, 16 problems with second half of
Production Code, 64–67. See film, 86–87
also Censorship recasting story line of, 87–88
Psycho, 2, 8, 11–12, 140 resemblance of Sam Loomis
as art, 12, 44, 93, 102, 153 and Norman Bates in, 40
reviews, 96, 98–99
budget for, 19
seating restricted after
cameraman for, 19, 101
beginning of, 95–96
casting for, 19
shower scene in, 12, 14, 17,
credits in, 52
22, 53, 55, 56, 58–64, 65,
as defying standards, 13
66, 97
gross earnings, 99
similarities with The Birds,
first forty minutes of, 51, 154
104, 105, 109
influence in other films, sinking of car in swamp,
115–135 71–72, 89
last scene in, 89—90 theft of $40,000 in, 29–30,
lighting in, 22, 24, 36, 37, 39, 34–35, 47, 51, 63, 70, 76
41 title-sequence in, 22
marketing for, 7 toilet flushing in, 49, 55, 56,
motel and house in, 37, 65, 66, 126
38–39, 41, 48, 73, 77, 79, 81 trailer for, 95, 96
murder of detective Arbogast warning of risks in, 92
in, 79–80 wordplay in, 42, 43
music in, 28, 29, 30, 36, 56, Psycho (remake of 1998), 133
63, 69–70, 80, 81, 93, 100, Psycho: A Bucket of Blood, 17
124
and nastiness of nation, 22, Raging Bull, 101
25, 100, 140–141, 147 Rape, 13, 113
Norman Bates’ parlor in, 44 Ray, Nicholas, 57
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 182

182 Index

Rear Window, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 57, Sight and Sound magazine, 98,

64, 85, 152–153, 156–157 143
gross earnings, 99 Silence of the Lambs, The,
Rebecca, 9, 47, 57, 72 131–132
Rebel Without a Cause, 58 Simon and Schuster, 111
Red Riding, 134–135 Slasher films, 128, 131
Red Shoes, The, 92 Slow motion, 139
Renfro, Marli, 59 Social realism, 97–98
Renoir, Jean, 10, 146 Some Like It Hot, 3
Repulsion, 120 Sons and Lovers, 91, 99, 100
Revue (production company), 7 South Pacific, 3
Rio Bravo, 3 Spartacus, 91
Rivette, Jacques, 11 Special effects, 139, 140
Rohmer, Eric, 5 Spellbound, 9, 47
Rope, 9 Spoto, Donald, 165
Rossellini, Isabella, 130 Stage Fright, 9
Russell, John L., 19, 101 Stefano, Joseph, 19, 40, 62, 88,
103
Saboteur, 57 Steiger, Rod, 14
Sadism, 117, 132 Stewart, James, 8, 58
Safety, 1, 7 Strangers on a Train, 5, 7, 9, 57,
Saint, Eva Marie, 8, 19 62, 80, 157
Sarris, Andrew, 142–143, Styron, William, 148
143–144 Sundowners, The, 99, 100
Schrader, Paul, 127 Suspense, 2, 83, 84
Scott, Helen, 108 Suspicion, 9, 57
Searchers, The, 3 Sutcliffe, Peter, 134
Selznick, David O., 9, 147 Sutherland, Donald, 125
Serial killers, 134, 135 Sweet Smell of Success, 3
Sex, 2, 3, 7, 11, 18, 23, 24, 25,
35, 53, 55, 64–65, 103, 115, Tandy, Jessica, 75, 107
117, 118, 122, 125, 130, Tarantino, Quentin, 132
131, 139, 141, 146, 166 Tarnished Angels, The, 4
Shadow of a Doubt, 155, 157 Taxi Driver, 93, 127
Shadows, 92 Taylor, Rod, 107
Shining, The, 129 Television, 4–5, 15, 94, 129, 134,
Shurlock, Geoffrey, 64–65 138–139, 147, 167. See also
Siegel, Bugsy, 163 Alfred Hitchcock Presents
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 183

Index 183

Ten Commandments, The, 3 See also Hitchcock, Alfred:

Terror, 7, 58, 83, 128 violence in films of;
Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, Psycho: shower scene in
The, 126–127 Voyeurism, 7–8, 35, 52, 53, 54,
Thalberg Award, 10 60, 110, 113, 120, 121, 131,
39 Steps, The, 117 156
Time magazine, 98
Tirez sur le pianiste, 121 Walker, Robert, 80
To Catch a Thief, 5, 11, 13, Wasserman, Lew, 7, 17, 18, 40,
57–58, 64–65, 80 93, 94, 102, 107
gross earnings, 99 Wayne, John, 91
Tomasini, George, 107 Weaver, Dennis, 16
Touch of Evil, 16, 19, 31 Webb, Clifton, 343
Trouble with Harry, 5, 57 Weinberg, Herman G., 107
Truffaut, François, 11, 107–108, Welles, Orson, 10, 16, 31, 94,
111, 121, 122, 148 146
Turner, Lana, 19 Westerns, 3
Tuttle, Lurene, 81–82 What Ever Happened to Baby
Jane?, 117–118
Under Capricorn, 9, 53, 72 Whitman, Stuart, 40
Universal Studios, 18, 37, 102, Wilder, Billy, 91, 100
111 Wild River, 91
U.S.A. (Dos Passos), 164 Williams, Tennessee, 148
Williams, Terry, 93
Van Sant, Gus, 133 Wizard of Oz, The, 153, 154
Vaughan, Vince, 133 Wood, Robin, 146–147
Vertigo, 5, 7, 9, 12, 47, 57, 58, Wrong Man, The, 5, 57, 151
72, 80, 85, 93, 95, 124, 126, Wynette, Tammi, 133
127, 152, 156, 157
Vietnam, 137, 148 Yanne, Jean, 122
Violence, 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, Yorkshire Ripper, 134
17, 18, 51, 67, 96, 115, 117,
121, 122, 125, 130, 137, Zanuck, Darryl F., 147
139, 140, 141, 142, 165 Zapruder, Abraham, 138
Hitchcock speaking about Zinnemann, Fred, 100
treatment of murder, 167 Zukor, Adolph, 147
0465003396-text.qxd:5.5 x 8.25 9/14/09 4:24 PM Page 184