Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Watch the preview. It’s great.
I’m going to have the same trouble writing about Psycho as I did writing about A Hard Day’s Night or even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What can I say to you about this film other than you should see it? Psycho is just one of those films. The horror classic that is, quite literally, a must-see. Everything has been said about this film in breathless books and deeply intelligent essays written by much more insightful critics than myself. I will try to be brief in my own assessment of the film.
Psycho follows Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a busty desk-jockey who longs of running away with her secret boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin), would that she had enough money. Marion appears skittish, but is rather bold. She works for a real estate agency that plays host to a rich Texan who insists on closing a $40,000 deal in cash. Marion, without much hesitation, steals the money, intending to skip town and contact Sam later. Much of the film’s first third is devoted to Marion’s highway-bound guilt about her great crime. Hitchcock, master that he is, squeezes every bit of mixed guilt, righteousness, justification, and outright fear that comes from a criminal’s desperate urge not to get caught. There is a sinister highway patrolman (Mort Mills) who follows Marion at a close distance, making her jittery.
When Marion turns off the highway to hide, she finds herself at the Bates Motel, an empty and somewhat sepulchral building next to a forbidding old house where the motel’s proprietor, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) lives with his dear old mother. We all know what’s coming. Marion checks in. Marion flirts. Norman gets weirded out. They exchange words about Norman’s controlling mother. Norman gets mad. Marion resolves to return the money she stole. Marion goes to take a shower. The previously unseen Mrs. Bates appears next to the bathtub and stabs Marion to death. There is then a virtuosic dialogue-free sequence wherein Norman discovers the body, and goes about mopping up all the blood. This was 1960, and audiences weren’t used to seeing as much blood or nudity as was presented in Psycho. It was a truly shocking twist. The rest of the film (and the Psycho series in general) will follow Norman.
Eventually Sam and Marion’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) will hire a detective (Martin Balsam) to find Marion. The detective will also be killed by Mother. Sam and Lila go looking for Marion themselves, and discover Norman’s secret: that he kills compulsively (he had no interest in the money, which will go unclaimed), and still has the mummified corpse of his mother in the fruit cellar of his Gothic mansion.
Did I do my critical due diligence? I gave away everything about the story. The story is one of the most notable in film history. It takes many well-worn cinematic storytelling tricks and intentionally subverts them. Kill off the main character? That one breaks all kinds of contracts. It’s been said that audiences sign an unspoken contract with the filmmakers when entering a theater. Certain things are expected from a typical Hollywood screenplay. We’re expected to be offered an opportunity to sympathize for a main character, and likewise be given some sort of catharsis, or lesson, or moral, or redemption. If a filmmaker or screenwriter fails to do these things, they’re typically labeled as a bad filmmaker or screenwriter. Psycho gleefully and sadistically breaks that contract with such glorious and shocking violence, it can only be deemed a certain kind of genius. Marion is our heroine. She stole money. Will she be a criminal? Will she be caught? Will she return the money? None of the above, sir. She ****ing dies.
Notable pieces of trivia about this flick: Hitchcock had just come off of his hit North By Northwest, and was already a celebrity the world over. In order to keep his creative chops fresh, and to rebuff the critics who were accusing him of stagnation, he chose to make a relatively smaller film, shot in black-and-white, containing new images (it’s been said this was the first feature film to show a flushing toilet). He used his smaller TV crew to shoot it. The famed Bernard Herrmann score uses only strings. Hitchcock liked drawing out the storyboards for films more than he liked filming them. The famed house and Bates Motel sets were constructed on the Universal backlot, and can still be visited to this day, although tours inside the house were banned for many years; it was said around the playground that someone fell down the stairs and died during a tour. I cannot substantiate this rumor. Oh shoot. I just looked it up. The house is a façade. Too bad. The final scenes with the shrink (Simon Oakland) explaining Norman’s particular psychosis are often dismissed by critics as being an extraneous and blunt piece of filmmaking, unnecessary to the film at large. I tend to agree with this. We don’t need it spelled out for us. Many film students itch to re-cut Psycho themselves, but I know few who have the temerity to re-cut such a well-loved film.
Psycho is often credited as being cinema’s first slasher movie, alongside Powell & Pressburger’s Peeping Tom from the same year. I resent this definition. Psycho is a psychological thriller to be sure, and a horror film, but it openly defies all the tropes of the teen slasher that would be properly codified in 1974 with Bob Clark’s Black Christmas and in 1978 with John Carpenter’s Halloween. Psycho is far more sophisticated. It’s something classy posing as something lurid. It’s not a slasher. It’s a film about a murderer and his psychosis.
Here’s the most important thing: Psycho is still terrifying. Even though I have seen it a dozen times, it still frightens me and grips me in its engrossing tension. This is a film that never gets old. Perkins is iconic as a twitchy nerd.
A sequel seems almost heretical, but years later, someone thought it would be a good idea anyway…
