A Business Proposition
Psycho reflects Hitchcock’s dual career, in feature films, and in television (a chart-topping series of thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock Presents [1955–65]). As television took ‘the family audience’, to which ‘Old Hollywood’ (the Big Studio system) was geared, ever more cinemas resorted to hitherto ‘niche’ publics, including the teenage audience, revealed by I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and a smaller, but growing, audience for ‘art-house’ (mostly foreign-language films). Both audiences baffled ‘Old Hollywood’ thinking, especially when they overlapped, and combined libidinal tastes with quicker intelligence, a higher educational level and greater moral irresponsibility. ‘Old Hollywood’ mostly deplored the new trends, often for entirely sincere moral–cultural reasons. Hitchcock developed Psycho with the teenage, ‘sex and violence’, audience in mind, as its ‘core’ audience, while hoping also to reach the wider market spread of his previous successes. From the ‘teenage werewolf’ angle, Norman is a ‘realistic’ werewolf, geared to the increasing interest in psychology. Though pushing 30, he’s an arrested teenager, still mother-bound, and Anthony Perkins was popular with teenage girls. As for Marion and Sam, they too are socially unsettled, lonely, and to that extent psychologically ‘marginal’, and so have strong appeal for niche-market teenagers, but still interest without alienating maturer spectators. Relevant, too, was the art-house market, which, though still small, was spreading. In worldwide terms, art-house films could outgross Hollywood products, and some art-house fare had broken into the widest US markets – notably, The Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1954), And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956, with Brigitte Bardot) and Les Diaboliques (also by Clouzot, 1956). Hitchcock often referred to the last, whose structural similarities with Psycho are spelled out in the Rebello book. In the event, Psycho survived considerable hostility from within ‘Old Hollywood’, the press and moral campaigners, and more than achieved its intended market spread. It’s a woman’s film but with mayhem galore for the young, especially young males; it’s sensitive enough for mature moviegoers; it’s libidinal and intellectual; it’s Gothic adapted to a psychological age; it’s emotionally literate (as not all art is); it’s morally serious but not obviously moralistic; it’s – pleasurable and anguished.
Sources of the Story
THE CITY AND THE COUNTRY
Robert Bloch’s novel was inspired by (but not based on) one of two recent crimes which had shocked thoughtful newspaper readers, and served to epitomise threats to the ‘suburban’, middle-class norms looming newly large in the national self-image. The other case was a city incident. A woman was attacked in a fairly respectable street, and repeatedly, gradually, stabbed to death, over a ten-minute period. Though passers-by and neighbours must have heard her pleas for help, no one even called the police. It’s sometimes thought to have influenced Hitchcock’s choice of Rear Window (1954), the main theme of which is, not voyeurism, but, neighbourhood watch. If Rear Window is the ‘urban myth’, Psycho is the ‘rural myth’.
WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP
Ed Gein (1904–84) lived his lonely life in a farmhouse a little way from a tiny hamlet in Wisconsin. A quietly eccentric oddjob-man, given to enigmatic mumbling, he was generally presumed feeble-minded. Then, in 1957, his house was found to be crammed with female bodies and body parts; he sat in chairs made of human bones, and wore apparel made of women’s skins. He had tortured and disembowelled at least a dozen women, mostly vagrants, before killing them and also stolen female cadavers from local cemeteries. Part of his house, associated with his long-deceased mother, had been set aside, and never entered since. His own rooms were strewn with household rubbish.
Initially, local officials and newspapers couldn’t bring themselves to print the grisly details; but what did emerge created a national sensation. Local gossips, and psychologists, attributed the crime to an unhealthy relationship between Gein and his mother, a grimly pious woman, who had died in 1945. Committed to an asylum, Gein applied for release in 1974, insisting that he was now normal enough to lead a harmless life. Though at least one psychiatrist testified to his sensitive disposition, he was never released. He also inspired The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974); by this time the norms of cinema violence had drastically escalated, partly through cultural changes, partly through the movie market’s shifted demographics.
NORMAN MARK II
For years Robert Bloch (1917–94) made a modest living writing fiction, for lower middlebrow and ‘pulp’ magazines, often in the Poe–Lovecraft genre, suitably updated. Wisconsin-born, he was struck by, not the grisly details, for their own sake, but by everybody’s difficulty in mentally coping with the facts. Rather like Rear Window, Psycho is a ‘blind spot’ story. Norman’s own mind splits under the strain; and when the facts come to light, his neighbours misremember their own attitudes, crack sick jokes and make desultory attempts to exploit Norman’s notoriety. Lila concludes: ‘We just blundered along until we did the right thing for the wrong reasons.’ (This will become a guiding principle of Hitchcock’s film.) ‘And right now, I can’t even hate Bates for what he did. He must have suffered more than any of us. We’re not all quite as sane as we pretend to be…’ Wise words, no doubt, though Lila’s increasing absence of indignation, about murder, may seem disconcerting: is it moral alienation?
The novel anticipates many striking features of the film, and Bloch deserves credit as a co-auteur – at least of structure and substance, if not artistic quality. His novel has the office situation, Mary’s drive out (though it’s short and eventless), her soulful chat with Norman, his problems with Mrs Bates, the shockingly premature death, Sam, Lila and Arbogast teaming up, Arbogast’s untimely end, the climax in the house, the explanatory psychiatrist and Mother taking over Norman. Rarely has Hitchcock taken so much from a literary original. While respecting Bloch’s craftsmanship and his modern, sensible, observations, I was surprised to find myself completely unmoved by his, merely adequate, characterisation. For me, the story remained words well ordered on a page. Generally, ‘artistic quality’, and its power to involve the imagination, owes little to ‘structure’ or ‘concept’ or ‘correct ideas’, and much more to a ‘texture’ of fine, richly suggestive, detail, which takes the mind by surprise, and yet has resonance.
Bloch’s Norman is fat and fortyish, a soft, bookish creature, of timorous habits. Aware of Freudian theory, he understands that the Oedipus complex is his problem, but when he tries to explain that to his mother, she won’t listen to such filth. When we first meet his normal, everyday self, he’s quietly reading a book on anthropology. Its account of an Aztec victory dance, with drums made out of the stretched skins of the slaughtered enemy, gives him a comfortable shiver, and he imagines the details evermore vividly, until the drumming sound becomes rain pattering on the window and then the footsteps of his approaching mother. During their long conversation her non-existence is concealed from the reader by his never quite daring to look at her directly. Technically, the ‘sound fade’ is neat enough: we go from an imagined sound, through a realistic one, to an apparently real one. (The first two terms, suggesting a ‘return to reality’, help fool the reader.)
Bloch’s general style derives from the Hemingway–Cain–O’Hara school: plain, fast prose mixes terse statements, which imply rather than declare their dramatic implications, and a sort of ‘hard-edge impressionism’ (like the ‘sound fades’). It usually adopts some character’s perspective, while staying in the third person. Within this broad ‘POV system’, the terse description and the long passages of direct dialogue read exactly as they would in non-viewpoint writing: in effect, the two modes (POV, objectivity) are fused, with deft informality. The structure is often neat. Chapter 1 consists of Norman’s thoughts, as his reading is interrupted by his mother. It ends as he hears the buzzer from the motel desk. Chapter 2 consists of Marion’s thoughts (including the office back-story) as she’s driving towards him, and it ends as she rings the buzzer. Thus a crucial event occurs twice, each time from a different POV; and character viewpoint overrides chronology. It’s thoughtful carpentry, not just textbook formulae.
The novel’s genre ascription is debatable. Is it horror, crime, mystery, thriller, contemporary Gothic, or all of the above? Not that it matters much; most genres interbreed freely while also evolving the specialised forms which tempt certain theories to confuse genres with formulae. Although sensational, the novel is not ‘pulp’ culture. Its highly respectable publishers were Simon and Schuster, and it appeared in their hardback crime series. It did push that genre’s then bounds of good taste, and divided the critics, but the Poe connection was recognised, and some literary critics thought it frighteningly good stuff. Its references to Freud and anthropology indicate a lower-middlebrow, not a lowbrow, cultural level. Its sales were satisfactory, though not outstanding; the film has kept it in print, and brought Bloch other work, though, unfortunately for him, he had no percentage of the film’s profits.
Production History
The production history of Psycho, with its artists’ ‘intentionality’, is richly detailed in the books by Rebello and Janet Leigh. Alerted to the novel by a favourable review, Hitchcock immediately acquired the rights, for $9,000 flat. Paramount, with which Hitchcock’s company, Shamley Productions, was contracted, disliked the subject, as small, sordid and nasty. After mutually exasperating negotiations, Paramount jumped at Hitchcock’s offer to finance the film himself, with Paramount distributing and taking 40 per cent of gross receipts.
Quite as dismayed as Paramount’s executives were some long-standing friends of Hitchcock’s, notably Joan Harrison, currently Shamley’s head of production, after starting as Hitchcock’s secretary in 1930s England, and producing two admirable film noirs, Phantom Lady (1944) and Ride the Pink Horse (1947). However, the subject found a powerful advocate in Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife, who had been his boss at Gaumont–British, and whose professional judgments, on subjects, scripts, casting and rushes he always took very seriously. It’s said she supplied the ‘woman’s angle’, the finer points of which his pessimism and sense of humour, left to themselves, occasionally roughed up – though by and large he thoroughly understood Hollywood’s ‘woman’s film’ theories. Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Psycho, apply them painstakingly, in that respect.
Another supporter was Lew Wassermann, head of MCA, the powerful talent agency. It was he who first proposed the Hitchcock TV series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour). Perkins, Leigh, Gavin and Stefano were all clients of MCA. (Miles was contracted to Hitchcock himself, though relations had turned quite sour, between two strong-minded people.) Paramount studio space being, apparently, fully occupied, Psycho was shot at Universal, then at a low ebb. MCA had just bought it, but had yet to turn its fortunes around.
A first script was commissioned from James Cavanagh, who imported some elements from his 1957 Hitchcock TV play, One More Mile to Go. (It had a corpse placed in a car boot, and dumped in a lake, and an inquisitive highway patrolman.) Hitchcock was still dissatisfied so MCA recommended Stefano, who until then had had little movie experience, although he had written Paramount’s Black Orchid (1958), starring Sophia Loren. Hitchcock was initially reluctant, as Stefano’s TV credits hinted he might just be a liberal message-monger. Conversely, Stefano was completely bored by the novel’s characters, but, when Hitchcock said he wanted a livelier Norman, maybe played by Anthony Perkins, Stefano became interested.
Though Psycho was likely to find a large audience among libidinal teenagers, its wider prospects were uncertain, and Hitch resolved to keep costs within what the smaller market would bear. He planned a 36-day shoot (about half the average ‘A’ feature length), eventually stretched to 42, and used one of his TV crews who were used to working more swiftly and cheaply than movie technicians. However, ‘old Hitchcock hands’ were given key positions (notably photography, editing and design). Where necessary, Hitchcock spent lavishly, allowing seven days for the shower scene. In the event, some elaborate shots had the TV crew in trouble – and some very elaborate shots would have had any crew in trouble. Lighting-wise, much of Psycho is rough and ready, by Hitchcock’s usual movie standards, especially in its earlier, high-key (light-toned) scenes. Saul Bass’s credits came expensive, and Hitch finally agreed Herrmann’s $17,500 fee.
Although the censors had expressed their uneasiness about the script, they passed a final print, despite, it seems, considerable confusion: apparently the censors demanded cuts, but when Hitchcock resubmitted the film without them, it was accepted all the same.
Contrary to his usual way with actors, Hitch talked long and intensely with Janet Leigh, who was more familiar with light romantic roles, and had to carry the first 45 minutes of the film, during most of which her action is ‘internal’ and non-demonstrative. Unusually too, he acted out for her the shower scene, to demonstrate her every move; he likewise ‘pre-enacted’ all Perkins’ moves with the dead body. As for Marion’s nudity in the shower scene, all conceivable rumours abound, about body doubles and so on. Janet Leigh insists that the figure in the shower is mostly herself, with strategically placed moleskin. An artificial torso was used in the occasional shot.
Ironically, Mrs Bates is never Perkins. She’s a variety of doubles, including a female ‘Lilliputian’ (jumping onto Arbogast). Her voice is three different people’s; one was provided by a man, another by Jeanette Nolan (who played Lady Macbeth in Orson Welles’ film of 1948). In her final scene, her voice is a ‘collage’ of different voices, even within the same sentence.
Since 1954–5 Hollywood had all but abandoned the old ‘Academy’ screen shape for ‘wide-screen’ (as distinct from CinemaScope and the other special systems). There’s a little mystery, however. Academic colleagues assure me that in some prints of the film, one shower scene shot exposes Marion’s breasts; this might explain why, in some British release prints, this area was covered by a black band, almost as if the screen had changed shape.
As usual with wide-screen, Psycho uses mostly a 28mm lens, or thereabouts. The walls around the shower were ‘wild walls’ (or could never have been filmed: cameras must be away from what they film). The track-in to a dead face staring into camera may look straightforward, but focus-pulling at this micro-distance was then a finicky process, and it seems this shot took 22 (or 26) takes. Although the camera seems to make one continuous movement from the bathroom into the cabin and to show a landscape beyond, the bathroom and the cabin were separate studio sets, and the landscape was out on the studio lot. So two camera movements were designed to edit into one, while the landscape is a back-projection within the second set. (A useful reminder that the shot taken by the camera and the shot seen on the screen may be very different things; and that most screen shots have been ‘topped and tailed’ from a very much longer take.) All the shots of Marion ‘on the road’ are process shots, using back-projection in the studio; Hitchcock was proud to have devised a contraption fitted with lights to give him finger-tip control of the headlights of the other cars.
Publicity and Presentation
Normally, publicity and presentation were delegated to distribution departments, after discussion with the producers. In this case, Hitchcock wished to devise and control the whole campaign, and Paramount was doubtless relieved to let him take over.
Those who saw the first rough cuts recognised an exceptional film, but feared hostility generated by quality press objections to ‘bad taste’, campaigns by moral pressure groups and bad ‘word of mouth’ via the better-class audiences in first-run halls. Proposals were made for a ‘saturation release’, the strategy devised for an earlier ‘bad taste’ film, the Selznick–Vidor Duel in the Sun (1946). Instead of the usual release pattern – press shows geared to first runs, with staggered release to ever less important cinemas – press shows would be replaced by heavier, cruder advertising, and the film given near-simultaneous release to a wide range of cinemas, to reach the mass of moviegoers with bad or no taste before middle-class put-downs could discourage them from going to see it. This strategy was double-edged, however. Quite apart from requiring more prints than phased release, it cut out the ‘grapevine’ – the word-of-mouth recommendations from enthusiastic spectators to their friends, which, once they get going, which takes a few days, can have ‘landslide’ effects, such as no publicity campaign can match. Psycho looked to be a ‘grapevine’ film, and needed the usual, slower release.
The press advertisements were designed to attract the ‘youth’ audience, but not so grossly that staider spectators would be repelled. They did show Marion in her underwear – a far cry from the dignity of Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly – but the names of the stars were reassuring. The cinema previews (what British English calls ‘trailers’) pursued a different line, for more ‘mainstream’ audiences. Very unusually, they showed almost no scenes from the film, but ‘starred’ Hitchcock, a household presence thanks to his TV series; he addressed the audience in his whimsical-macabre mode, but with more weight and edge. One preview was a ‘conducted tour’ of the Bates abode, in which unspecified, but evidently special, events were going to occur. This sense of ‘the house’ was astute; the Psycho house remains a highlight of the Universal studio tour.
Psycho presented another problem: its heavy dependence on a final twist, which word of mouth, left to itself, might well have revealed. This pushed Hitchcock to his greatest risk. Not only did publicity urge spectators not to tell their friends the ending; but exhibitors were pressured to admit no spectators once the film had started. This went right against the 50-year-old practice of ‘continuous performance’, to which the whole industry was geared. Working hours being what they were, spectators could, and very frequently did, drop in whenever convenient, maybe halfway through the film they wanted to see, watch its last half first, then stay through the ‘B’ flick and other matter, watch their chosen film round to the point where they came in, and then depart. This did indeed play havoc with films’ narrative and aesthetic structures, but so many spectators found the practice satisfactory that most exhibitors clung to it. By 1960, however, patterns of leisure were changing, and Hitchcock could turn the problem into an advertising attraction. Already, in France, Clouzot had taken that tack, successfully, with Les Diaboliques, which would help explain why Paramount went along with Hitchcock’s policy.
Apart from losing the ‘drop-in’ trade, which traditionally was substantial, exhibitors and moviegoers were not accustomed to being told to turn up on time, or get locked out. Hitchcock’s advertisements were admirably tactful. ‘Please don’t tell the ending; it’s the only one we have.’ And: ‘We won’t allow you to cheat yourself …’
All in all, Psycho was quite a risky prospect. Just how risky is shown by the case of Peeping Tom, released in Britain a few months earlier, by Hitchcock’s old colleague and friend, Michael Powell. Both films have a serial sex-killer, sensitively portrayed, who murders women nastily, amidst mirrors; and they must have been in preparation simultaneously (a case of ‘Great Minds Meet’?). Powell was well regarded in the trade, and the production company doubled its normal budget for what they hoped would be a prestigious film. In the event, it provoked such hostility, from middle-class highbrow reviewers, that the distributors rapidly withdrew it.3
First Fortunes
Hitchcock didn’t show Psycho to the press. The critics immediately paid to see it, as he must have anticipated, but at least they would see it along with a normal audience, whose responses might influence theirs away from their ideas about ‘good taste’. However, he could only hope that this influence would overcome critics’ resentment at exclusion. In the event, most critical notices were hostile including those in the New York Times and Esquire. The Roman Catholic Church decreed it ‘Objectionable in part for all.’ Variety’s assessment was: ‘Shock meller, with a couple of particularly lurid scenes. Unelaborate production. Well done, doubtless will succeed.’ Hitchcock, said its reviewer, was ‘up to his clavicle in whimsicality’, and implied, more quietly, that he was indulging his libido. In the emphasis on whimsy, readers-between-lines may perceive a concern to deflect moralistic ire. Summarises Rebello: ‘No amount of explanation could have prepared anyone … for the firestorm the film was creating … [or] have predicted how powerfully Psycho tapped into the American subconscious. Faintings. Walk-outs. Repeat visits. Boycotts. Angry phone-calls and letters. Talk of banning the film rang from church pulpits and psychiatrists’ offices …’ By 1990, Psycho was the second most profitable American film ever made, maybe ‘second only to The Birth of a Nation’.
Psycho the First Time
‘Psycho came out just before my 14th birthday. Everybody wanted to see the movie, and there was a real sense of, er, anticipation, and we were all going to see something very special.’
‘This wasn’t a movie that you went to with your parents. There was always a big debate – would you be allowed to go see Psycho? You’d have to sneak out of the house…’
‘In America there was a big teaser campaign about Psycho, and the teaser campaign had to do with the ending, and it was, ‘Don’t tell the ending, whatever you do, don’t tell the ending.’
‘It was the first film where you could not just walk into the theatre … which was very novel, because moviegoing was a very casual experience in those days…’ ‘I’d seen other Hitchcock movies, I was expecting a, a good scare, and some really good film-making…’
‘I do remember turning to my wife and saying, “It’s okay, but there’s not very much happening”, and then the shower murder came and the rest of the movie to me was pandemonium…’
‘The screaming of the audience, and the shrieking of the music, sort of combined itself into this howl, that just kind of rose up and bounced off the walls…’
‘I was a bathtub person from that film forward.’
‘…we were really in shock from that, I mean, there was absolute silence in the rest of the film, people were in total mourning for the loss…’
‘I think Hitchcock broke probably every rule that the Hollywood film industry had been going along with.’
‘But the most chilling was at the end, with no murder, with just Perkins in the blanket … and … that’s what stuck with us as we were filing out, and that’s why we were so silent.’
Moviegoers’ testimony in Psycho – The First Time