PSYCHO Hitchcock USA 1960

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences;...[it] made the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with PSYCHO we most definitely achieved this. It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film ." 

 

That’s Alfred Hitchcock talking to Francois Truffaut about PSYCHO, in the latter’s book-length interview with the British-turned-American director. Hitchcock is famously dubbed “the Master of Suspense.” Fair enough. But it would be a more accurate label to add “and Manipulation.”

Hitchcock had developed a style of manipulating audiences, but never to the degree he did in PSYCHO.

"I was directing the viewers," the director told Truffaut. "You might say I was playing them, like an organ."

It was, in 1960, the most shocking film its original audiences had ever seen. I know. I was in one of those audiences. My parents were Hitchcock fans, having seen “North by Northwest”, “Rear Window” and “Vertigo.”

On a very cold Sunday afternoon, after church and Sunday dinner, they were going to see PSYCHO. Like millions of other Americans, they had no idea that it was probably not what you would or should take a 10-year-old to see. But I already loved movies, I wanted to go and they didn’t refuse my request.

Fortunately--because it was so cold on that Tennessee Sunday--I was wearing a car-coat as millions of kids did in those days. Luckily for me, the hood had a drawstring. When PSYCHO’s violins began to shriek during the infamous shower scene, I pulled the hood almost shut, leaving myself just enough peephole to see the center of the screen. If things got worse, I could always pull the hood completely shut—or close my eyes altogether, which, by the way, I never did. (Fascinated by film even at that age, I knew I was in the presence of something remarkable. I just didn't know what. And even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to express it.)

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Good grief! I couldn’t believe what was happening to this poor woman. Yes, she had stolen $40,000 from the bank where she worked. But hadn’t she made up her mind to return the money the next day? But even if she hadn’t, nobody deserves to be sliced to death in a shower—or anywhere—like a cantaloupe!

Hitchcock intentionally made PSYCHO look like a cheap exploitation film. He shot it not with his usual expensive crew (which had just finished the expensive “North by Northwest"). Instead he used the crew that filmed his weekly television show. Even by 1960 standards, his budget was cheap—a mere $800,000. The Bates Motel and aging Victorian-style Bates house on the hill behind it were built on Universal’s back lot. Also, to give it that quickie, exploitation look, he shot in black-and-white. This was not going to be—nor was it supposed to be—another elegant Hitchcock thriller a la “Rear Window” or “Vertigo.”

Yet, to this day—almost half a century after it was made—no other Hitchcock film has had a greater impact, on moviegoers or on filmmakers, than PSYCHO.

First, Hitchcock sets up the movie in such a way that we root for Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to successfully get away with theft. We want to see her wind up with the man she loves, Sam Loomis (John Gavin). We root for her when a policeman stops her on her way to her lover’s hometown. We pray that he won’t see the envelope full of stolen money by her side in the front seat.

Hitchcock has thus made her sympathetic. When she pulls off the road in a heavy rainstorm to spend the night at the off-the-beaten-path Bates Motel, then begins her association with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).

Norman brings her supper, which she eats in his motel office. Their late-night conversation makes them both sympathetic characters. We think their relationship will be developed during the remainder of the two-hour film.

But no. Less than forty minutes into PSYCHO, Hitchcock throws a curve-ball at the audience, something you simply don’t see coming: he kills off his heroine. Hitchcock not only kills her off, he does so in what was—and remains today—the granddaddy of all slasher-movie sequences. Movie directors have tried to top it, but no amount of gore, of up-close-and-in-your-face graphic detail has ever come close. Hitchcock doesn’t use gore. (He filmed in black-and-white, thinking audiences would be too squeamish to withstand so much blood in color.) The era, of course, would not have allowed it. But this master filmmaker didn't need gore. He used artistry to make us "think" we were seeing more than he was actually showing us.

We never see the knifepoint pierce the skin * —although people will swear they do. That’s the power of montage: with quick-cut editing—and Bernard Hermann’s shrieking violins—our mind “completes” what is merely suggested. Is Hitchcock making us see what perhaps we want to see? (Again, “manipulation.”)

Once Marion Crane is dead, Hitchcock shifts our sympathy. Right before our eyes, he shifts our sympathies for her to sympathy for Norman, whom Hitchcock has already established as a kind, if a bit odd, young man. We’ve sensed from the beginning there is something not quite right about Norman . But during the motel office conversation, when he elicits the sympathy of Marion--with whom we have already identified--he elicits ours as well.

Employing a sort of bait-and-switch sleight of hand, Hitchcock has now transferred our attention—and sympathy—from Marion to Norman . So--when Norman starts mopping up the blood from the murder, we feel sorry for him now having to protect his mother who, at this point, we think is the killer.

With no one else to care about, we pull for Norman. We root for him to mop up all the blood (actually, chocolate syrup), to leave no trace of evidence. When he puts Marion’s corpse in the trunk of her car, we pray it will sink into the pond. For a moment, the sinking car stops, half of it still above water. Our hearts stop. We’re as nervous as Norman as he nervously chews on candy-corn (a nice piece of business Perkins himself suggested and which Hitchcock allowed the actor to incorporate into his performance). Finally—thankfully—the car sinks below the pond’s surface. Whew! Norman is safe.

Once again, we’ve been manipulated.

All this manipulation, of course, has a single purpose: Hitchcock wants to shock us again. And he does when it is ultimately revealed that Marion Crane’s killer wasn’t Norman’s mother, but Norman himself; that Norman is a matricidal maniac who not only killed his mother but has kept her corpse stuffed like one of the taxidermied birds mounted on his motel office walls.

Hitchcock, indeed, played us “like an organ.” I remember adults literally screaming--"Oh, no!", "Oh, God"--during the brutal shower sequence. I never screamed. But I sure as heck stayed hunkered down in that car-coat every time those violins began to screech.

In theaters across 1960 America, Hitchcock reduced us to our last nerves and wickedly sawed away on those nerves like a violin bow scraping--staccato--on a very taut string. ---Hoyt Harris

 

* The popular "myth" about the PSYCHO shower scene is that the knife is never seen to penetrate the flesh. This is not true. A frame-by-frame examination of the shower scene shows that the knife point disappears against the actress' torso just below her navel for the last three frames of one eight-frame sequence. But In order to see the penetration, the movie must be run in slow-motion, but it actually happens, albeit only once and briefly. Because film runs at 24 frames-per-second, a mere three frames (one-eighth of a second) is brief, indeed. ----H.H.

 

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