Psycho is a 1960 thriller about a secretary who embezzles forty thousand dollars from her employer’s client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.
Phoenix, Arizona. Friday, December the Eleventh. Two Forty-Three P.M.
That’s when and where the movie Psycho begins. For no other reason than second unit material shot in Phoenix included many Christmas decorations, so rather than reshoot or try to not show or not acknowledge them, the film begins in December making this a perfect time of year to watch this, always fresh, very non-Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock film.
Lots has been said and written about Psycho, perhaps the greatest ‘sleeper hit’ in the film world, up to that time, and one of the first summer blockbusters in a modern sense—it opened in June. I hope to not re-say all of that’s been said, but to add to your Noel time thoughts of family with a tale of a mother and son, closer than any. Closer than is healthy. “Mother killed them. That’s what he said, but it was a lie.”
If for some crazy, or Psycho, reason you have never seen it, stop reading and go do so. If you’ve never seen it on a big screen, then I’d argue you haven’t really seen it—though I know that’s subject for debate, in this case I say, see it as big as you can for the real experience. Even if you haven’t seen it you’ve probably seen or know about the shower scene and Mother. hose are the big plot twists, though there are many others. Hitchcock knew going in that he didn’t want it to be a one, or even two, joke movie, so he, and screenwriter Joseph Stefano added a lot of inside jokes to the dialogue especially for repeat viewers.
Regardless of what you know, you know more than anyone who first saw it in 1960, and hadn’t read Robert Bloch’s novel, the film still works. It’s one of those rare films that seems fresh every time you see it. This is a tribute to the entire cast and crew who brought to it a sense of breaking new ground. To help explain the impact it had at the time I want to share words from an actor friend of mine, Nick Baldasare, who saw the film upon its first release. He feels the film has a forbidden sense throughout.
“In 1960, I was 7 years old. For reasons I can’t explain, my uncle chose to take me to a downtown Dayton, Ohio, theatre to see Psycho. When we arrived, the first thing that drew my attention was the poster of Janet Leigh in her bra and slip. Even at age 7, I knew lurid when I saw it. This, I thought, was something new and forbidden. In 1960, television gave a very sanitized view of the world; married couples slept in separate beds, people never went into bathrooms or if they did a visible toilet was verboten. Yet here, in Psycho, all these things were laid bare. There was Janet in her bra, an illicit affair (which I only slightly grasped), money was stolen, a toilet was shown (and even *gasp* flushed). All this was more than my Catholic upbringing could withstand. It was hard core stuff and it being black and white made it appear all the more unseemly. Perhaps a nice, long shower could wash away the unpleasantness of the first half of this guilt-fest. But no. All that innocence…down the drain.”
Nick also got to see William Castle’s The Tingler, and got tingled first hand, and fled a theatre upon seeing the Blob attack a theatre on screen. I envy him these moments and memories. I want to add to it something else he’s said to me that seeing horror films as a young, too young at times, kid helped him grow up. Experiencing these scares and surviving them helped him gain confidence in growing up, facing a scary world. I think this is rarely stated as one of the attractions/functions of the whole genre.
Psycho’s influences in the genre have probably never fully dimmed. One trend it helped start, is the now common: BASED ON TRUE EVENTS. Though the film doesn’t begin with this phrase, the time, date and place stamp it opens with suggests what we are seeing really happened.
Bloch, the novel’s author, started his career in part as a pen pal of the now-acceptedly-great, H. P Lovecraft. Bloch lived in the Midwest and knew the infamous story of Ed Gein, perhaps the original, “He seemed like a quiet man, who kept to himself,” type. But the specifics of Gein’s case and the specifics of Psycho seem to part company pretty early on. Gein lived on a farm, shot his relatively few known victims, them dressed them out like a deer. All this is nowhere near Psycho, nor is Gein’s hoarder house decorated with homemade items fashioned from corpses, nor does Norman Bates dance in the moonlight in their dead skin. Most Gein’s compulsive ‘habits’ weren’t even capital crimes at the time, they were so unknown.
But yes, Gein lived with his mother, even after she died, and used taxidermy to further his own ends, like Bloch’s fictional Norman Bates.
I say other facts have an equal influence, from another Midwestern monster, a turn of the century killer, most commonly known as H.H. Holmes. It’s Holmes who built and ran a hotel – his was called The Castle, and it had peep holes to spy on his female guests and he killed them, dissected and did, god knows what else to them, after death, before cleverly disposing of them. He profited from this by mounting their skeletons for display and then selling them. Norman Bates mounts his stuffed birds for display and drove his victims cars, filled with their own bodies, into a deep-enough swamp nearby.
Holmes and Bates ran, from outside appearances, normal businesses whose clients/victims came from out of town. Both men spied on them and had secret, ‘workshops,’ where they could do what they liked with them after death. Both were outwardly normal, even charming, and those they killed were mostly never missed because, both found out enough about them, pre-murder, to know nobody knew they were there. Holmes and Bates quite literally had a skeleton in their closet, or being re-assembled in their basements. Holmes had a childhood obsession, probably fetish, with skeletons and dissecting bodies, and Bates, well, he has taxidermy as a useful hobby.
If you doubt how much interest Bloch had in Holmes, one proof is that Bloch later wrote both a fictional, and an excellent non-fiction novel length account of Holmes crimes, American Gothic and Dr. Holmes’ Murder Castle, respectively. He devoted far more words to Holmes than Gein.
Hitchcock was a voracious reader, like Stanley Kubrick and countless other directors, he spent most of his time looking for new material. Some of Bloch’s short stories may have already been purchased for future use on Hitchcock’s TV series. Hitchcock had certainly read some of Bloch’s fiction and knew his name before reading and then buying, at a lesser price as he bought it under a different name, Bloch’s new novel, Psycho. He later said, in the famous/infamous interview book (the actual audio excerpts of which are included on Psycho’s, as well as on other blu rays, releases of Hitchcock films) conducted by gentile French director/film writer Francois Truffaut, that the only thing that attracted him was the suddenness of the shower murder, but we’ll see in the film, he was attracted to almost everything about the book.
What the world expected from Hitchcock is perhaps best represented as the film North By Northwest, a successful mix of suspense and danger with romance and unexpected laughter, sound like a 1950’s film ad? That film’s greatest influence can be seen in what became, and still is, the James Bond franchise.
Psycho can be seen as allowing Hitchcock a sort of mid-life/career crisis. A chance to do a variety of things he’d wanted to do previously and was either stopped from doing, or failed, from a commercial and his own viewpoint, to pull off.
What’s always called the first Hitchcock film in a real sense is, The Lodger, itself based on a well-known book based on Jack the Ripper. But in film version, Hitchcock’s attempt to paint a picture of a charming leading man who is suspected of horrible crimes was changed, by producers and censors. In the end of the movie, not the book, The Lodger is innocent. Hitchcock would have preferred The Lodger be guilty at the end, but the film was a hit and established what became his name brand; a wrong man, type of film. Hitchcock similarly was forced to change the ending of his later film Suspicion because Hollywood would not let Cary Grant be a wife killer.
In another previous film, Sabotage, Hitchcock built up a long suspense sequence of a child innocently carrying a bomb, the payoff to which is the bomb going off and killing the child and many others. The audience turned off at this point, by Hitchcock’s view. But with Psycho he found a way to build up and pay off a nasty surprise as just the first half of a film.
In Stage Fright, he structured a whole section of the film as a flashback, which all turns out, instead, to be a lie. The film failed to find an audience, though the gimmick, if you want to call it that, was used to excellent effect, after Hitchcock’s death, in The Usual Suspects.
Psycho allowed him to finally use all these twisty audience subverting elements at the same time, but to do so in a way that shocked audiences so much that they were delighted by him doing so. There are, of course, previous hints/seeds that grew into Psycho, in Hitchcock’s 1950’s television show. The 50’s was a time when Hollywood feared television would steal its audience. Hitchcock however embraced it and became a television star as host and producer, an occasional director, on his long running anthology series.
People paying attention to the TV series could have seen some of this coming, but at the time these were not any serious film critics or writers. The show, like all early television, is shot in Black and White and features common place settings and unsettling crimes, even a warm up to Psycho’s chilling final image can be seen first in the 1958 episode Lamb to the Slaughter. (One of the series guidelines, from Hitchcock, was that all the stories were based on previously published short stories.) Likewise one of Psycho’s leading actors can be found here, Vera Miles in the disturbing 1955 episode Revenge.
So, in Psycho, Hitchcock found startling elements he’d yet to be able to work into a successful feature film. Many of the novels turned into Hitchcock films were ‘freely adapted’ from well known, even famous authors or books. Psycho is the most faithful, of all of Hitchcock’s film, to its source novel. Robert Bloch was a successful writer, but also considered a pulp writer. No critics for major newspapers were going to attack Hitchcock for ‘doing an injustice’ to something of literary value in adapting a Bloch novel. Hitchcock in the Truffaut interview says as much. Stephen Rebello who does the commentary track on the blu ray says Hitchcock read a review in the NY TIMES of the novel first and then sought out the novel itself to read. Rebello wrote the excellent The Making of Psycho book, which became, with a lot of fiction added in, the movie Hitchcock. Regardless of if Hitchcock read the review first or not, he would have known Bloch’s name.
No films had been made from or written by Bloch at that point, so a film audience would most likely not know Bloch by name, or really what’s more important as a brand name in his field, at that time. Of course the movie changed all that, and with the little money he got from Psycho, Bloch drove himself out to Los Angeles to see if he could make it here. He did and his family followed and all remained for the rest of his life. He would soon be adapting his own stories for Hitchcock’s television series and plenty of others.
My point? The only reason Hitchcock was faithful to the novel was that he thought it worked as is. He’d had a long career by this point and almost never felt this way before and this is significant.
Now I’m not saying Hitchcock trashed the novels, many very well known, he’d previously made into films. He would take the themes and scenes from them, but he turned them into movies, his very specific kind of movies. When Hitchcock first came to America to work for producer David O. Selznick, one of the many things that irked Hitchcock was that Selznick made Hitchcock stick to the novel, Rebecca as closely as possible—save a key change that censors demanded.
Conversely there is no evidence that Bloch was trying to write a Hitchcock movie when he wrote his novel. Unlike the writers of the 1956 novel The Living and the Dead, (Boileau & Narcejac), who very specifically wrote it hoping Hitchcock would see it and make a film from it. That film, Vertigo, uses the novel as a guide, not a blueprint, for the often great film Hitchcock made from it. And his film is better and very different from their book.
Hitchcock’s film is better than Bloch’s book as well, and to be clear I like Bloch’s writing very much, but still it’s virtually, in all important ways, the same. The book has a 3 act structure like film screenplay, but the lead character changes unexpectedly with each act. This revolutionary story structure and shocks remain, virtually everything that works in the film is in the novel.
The one key change is in the casting of Anthony Perkins though what Norman Bates says and does is all virtually the same. Bloch’s description of Bates as an unattractive fattish nearing middle age man is in reality closer to how many of these killers are, Bloch further has Bates sort of drink himself into oblivion, as did later serial killer Ted Bundy, to change into his killer persona. Perkins however resembles a young Gregory Peck, who had played, for Hitchcock, a character suspected of being a psychologically unbalanced murderer in the flawed and dated, but still interesting Spellbound.
Now Hitchcock had lots of attractive charming villains in films, Claude Rains in Notorious even has an unhealthy relationship with a domineering mother. Some of these villains were even genuine psychos, as with the excellent Strangers on a Train and Shadow of a Doubt.
In the novel, and all of Bloch’s writing, he is able to put you inside the head of these killers in ways almost no other writer has ever done. It’s the internal monologue and dialogue that feels authentic and as you read it, the word, I, puts the words into your head the same way they are in the killer’s head. You sympathize almost unconsciously as this internal ‘talk’ gives out intimate details and the feelings behind what are, from an outside perspective, moral as well as physical crimes.
In Psycho, Bloch’s internal monologue is related in third person, this being an essential part of cheating on the reader, so we don’t know the ultimate secret of Mother. We are told Norman Bates sees his mother and is talking to her, we just assume he sees and talks to her because she is really there and alive. The third person choice, and Bloch has to carefully avoid using the word I in various places, makes us witnesses, having events related to us, not suspecting it’s really a disturbed, I, whose view we are experiencing falsely as objective reality.
Hitchcock has to come up with other ways to cheat the audience without them suspecting and does it ingeniously, though he’s aided by the fact that few films had ever attempted this kind of thing before. Usually this kind of thing was used for humor, like Harvey the invisible giant rabbit—who wouldn’t harm a fly either.
Films, going way back in time, have used subjective camera, especially horror films. The first Friday the 13th film doesn’t show the killer’s face – it’s all done with a camera stalking in on people, who turn around way too late and get killed. Nowadays, this is more often replaced by the ‘found footage’ approach which is often the POINT OF VIEW of a camera, or cell phone in video mode, walking around etc.
Cameras are small now and can be put into places and moved between things in ways that were nearly impossible for most of the history of film. Film cameras are large and or huge and trying to move them around in a way that is at all convincing as being a person’s perspective is often more distracting than expressive. Hitchcock however was very good at this, I’d almost say the best, at using character’s point of view in films. He’d usually intercut the character/actor, with what they were seeing. He uses it in the same ways in Psycho.
Another way to have the film equivalent, I, in a film of course is through voice over. Hitchcock himself was the first filmmaker to use voice over narration to relate a character’s thoughts to an audience. But he only does that twice in Psycho, to relate our heroine’s dark internal thoughts about becoming a thief, and in the final chilling moments when we really get inside Mother’s head. In the book the nearly exact final “words” inside Mother’s head are carefully kept in the third person, unlike the film.
Hitchcock, by casting Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, can leave Bates exactly in most other ways like he is in the book and keep the audience potentially on his side and not to expect he is the real killer. In both you hope he will get away from his horrible mother. Another reason Hitchcock would want to leave Bates and the book alone was that he had faith in the book and its newness. There is value in getting there first and Hitchcock certainly found all the value in doing so in Psycho. Movies since Psycho try this, but the cat is out of the bag, you know the nicest guy or gal in the film is probably the real Psycho of the story.
One of the few scenes entirely dropped from the novel is the very first scene starting with Norman Bates and ending chillingly with saying Norman, “took his raincoat from the hanger and went out into the darkness.”
Hitchcock, in dropping this scene, makes the film feel like it’s going to be about Marion Crane. The novel plays more fairly with the reader, it’s Normal Bates story first, last and foremost. The book then deals quickly with what has led to Marion, Mary in the novel, to end up at the wrong place at the wrong time, filling a vacancy at The Bates Motel, in much less time than the film does. The opening of the novel also set up Marion/Mary’s sister from the start, rather than introducing her later on. The novel wants to avoid a slow build, Hitchcock took a gamble and milked that as much as he could.
Instead the film starts with an Afternoon Delight scene between Marion and her lover, Sam. The film’s first act is what you’d expect from Hitchcock, a suspense film about stolen money with some illicit love driving a ‘normal’ girl to become a thief, one the audience hopes will get away with it. Hitchcock film fans wouldn’t suspect that this was all in fact a slow build to something entirely different.
Much, too much, has been said of how the film kills the star 39 minutes in with the shower scene kill. But Leigh was more of a co-star figure in Hollywood, unlike say Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. And Anthony Perkins wasn’t an unknown, appearing in a number of big Hollywood movies, also as a co-star up to that time. So audiences weren’t going to see a Janet Leigh film if you get my meaning.
Hitchcock is using both of them to play characters unlike what audiences would have been used to from them. Both actors respond to this opportunity by giving career high performances, which helps Hitchcock enormously. Of course really the initial audience was going to see an Alfred Hitchcock movie and the shower scene and almost everything about this horror film were not what they expected.
The things you usually hear from Hitchcock himself about his style is that it’s about suspense, not shock and never seeing blood you imply danger in subtle sophisticated ways. That’s all absent from this film. The shower scene is much longer than in the book; Hitchcock dwells on it where in the book you are shocked but it takes only a few short sentences. So much so you actually go back and read it again. In the novel, the knife cuts off her scream and it cuts off her head. Now this seems a little preposterous, what kind of knife is this after all? But Hitchcock couldn’t get this by the censors, and would probably be concerned about doing a convincing severed head. Instead he makes it a stabbing scene. He enlisted a graphic artist, Saul Bass, under his guidance to storyboard out the scene. (Bass would, after Hitchcock’s death, claim at times he’d even directed the scene)
A Hitchcock myth is that he storyboarded everything in every film, Dan Auiler’s book, Hitchcock’s notebooks dispels this. Saying the only Hitchcock film completely storyboarded was Lifeboat, with the Birds being a close second.
But for the time, the naked woman – and she is more naked than almost anyone in a Hollywood film would have been up to that time – being stabbed to death would have seemed to go on forever. Killings in film went by quickly. Sure violence was a staple of entertainment, but in western’s people would get shot by a bullet or an arrow and fall over and that was it, usually the death would be covered in 2 or 3 shots at most. Here you’ve got, 70 camera setups, used in a scene that lasts close to a minute.
The only thing with this kind of speed in the movie up to that point is the frantic music and jagged lines of the opening title sequence, also done by Saul Bass. Herrmann’s score, one of the greatest ever written, does work hard in the buildup section of Psycho, repeating this title music to liven up potentially boring, shot-on-a-stage, material of Janet Leigh driving in the rain.
After this shower scene Hitchcock also dispenses what a very trademark Hitchcock idea, that of the MacGuffin. The whole movie up to this point is about the girl and the money she has stolen. In the aftermath of her death, the money is kept in the foreground in one long lasting shot. We hope Norman will get the money, as we know it could help him escape his crazy mother. Near the end of the novel there is a final comment about the money being found in her car and it being completely clean—untouched by the violence it helped perpetrate.
I don’t have space here to go into the visual scheme of Psycho shot-by-shot, but of all the interesting true things written and said about it, one thing that’s not as talked about and is important to watch is the way objects often extend beyond the edge of the frame. The edges of the “frame” aren’t clean; the movie isn’t contained inside the shape of the image. We don’t see full objects or the tops of the trees outside the motel. This adds tension to the frame; at times give us a sort of voyeur’s view, as if we are hiding behind trees watching. Also watching the proceedings, along with us, are a variety of framed pictures in the film and stuffed birds and toys.
Speaking of watching, if you watch the blu ray of the film you’ll see it’s rated, retroactively R, there was at the time of release no ratings system. Despite this rating the version you’ll see is not uncut, as Universal promised it would be. Now in the theatrical release, Hitchcock actually released two versions of the final reel of the film. One includes a just barely seen superimposed skeleton over Norman/Norma Bates’ face and one that doesn’t. The skull version is what’s on the Blu ray.
But there are missing shots in the Blu ray, that I swear I’ve seen in 35mm prints over the years, and are seen as still frames in the Truffaut Hitchcock book and in a German Dvd version of the film. Hitchcock in the audio interview on a supplement from his Truffaut sessions says he learned by making Psycho you could never have enough insert shots. He give, as an example the importance of a close up of bloody hands we dolly with to the sink. Well that shot isn’t in the Blu ray version.
Also missing are shots of Janet Leigh taking off her bra and almost exposing herself, which we see intercut with an almost pornographically large extreme close up of Norman’s eye watching while she does it so. The second murder is also missing a number of stabs from one of the longest knives in film. Now this happens at the end of a reel of film. You see with film prints each time it is projected the first and last frame, sometimes many more than this, get edited out of the film so that the film can be projected with more leader needed to thread through the projector, and or to cut the short reels together into longer ones that require less, or even no, changeovers during projecting. A film as successful as Psycho would be cut at reel start and ends many times, each time it changed theatres. I’ve seen Psycho prints where this entire stabbing shot is virtually gone. In the Blu ray, the shot fades to black after one stab.
I assume the film, when playing in Europe, had all of these extra, naughty bits, intact. They should be restored into the film, especially in an R rated version, as they increase the impact of the film. In a film made by someone like Hitchcock every frame matters. While I’m complaining and explaining key things, the Blu ray and HD versions that are now shown, have for one thing, been timed too darkly in the shower scene. The famous nearly silhouette shot of ‘mother’ outside the shower is in prints, not entirely black. You can see the eyes dimly, like two silvery nickels in an almost dark closet glaring out of the dark head. It’s quite frightening, and can be seen that way also in a supplement, on the blu ray that was imported over from the standard definition dvd.
So good as the Blu ray is, and better in most ways than previous releases, the future hopefully holds the promise of a still better version. Another odd and sad shame about Psycho’s otherwise wide release history is that you cannot actually legally buy the version of the music you hear in the film, composer Bernard Herrmann and others did re recordings over the years, but all these lack the intensity and some of the music as it’s heard in the film.
Hitchcock knew how important the music was to Psycho. Herrmann gets one of the best opening credit placements in film history, right before Hitchcock’s own director’s credit. Today the writer’s guild would forbid this The Psycho murder music is also, if played at the proper volume level, one of the loudest, perhaps first, music STINGERS in film. This type of extreme sudden blast of volume is used frequently by filmmaker composer John Carpenter, and by James Wan in his films, scored frequently by Joe Bishara.
Herrmann was well schooled in all types of music but composed music in film in very specific, you could say limited, ways. He felt films needed short clear, even simple, musical motifs, rather than long distracting melodies. In general he would experiment with the sound of his scores. He didn’t just use the standard instrument group in what is still considered a typical orchestra. Some critics say that Herrmann musically isn’t very interesting but it’s his orchestration that makes his music so brilliant. I think this overstates the case but proves a point of him getting different sounds for different films. Psycho being all in Black and White encouraged him to use only strings. Today what he did melodically in this film would and could be called minimalism, probably best known today from the work of composer, Philip Glass. Brilliant as the score is, it didn’t just magically pop fully formed into Herrmann’s head upon demand. The sound of the score and the ‘Madhouse’ theme, minus the murder music and main title theme, Herrmann took largely from an early unheard 1936 composition of his, Sinfonietta for String Orchestra. This music Herrmann could never get performed in a concert hall, now became a revolutionary and still almost one-off film score. It’s great because it perfectly fits and elevates the film.
Film horror allowed this music a home, as it has for other composers, for bold unusual music. (Hitchcock earlier in his career, in a rare interview, said that he chose suspense and horror as a genre to work in because he could be the most experimental within its commercial guise.)
Though Psycho has been widely promoted, and had sequels made, by Universal Studios. The home video is by Universal, but the film was made under Hitchcock’s previous studio deal with Paramount and that studio’s logo still appears at the beginning of the actual film. Universal ended up with the rights to the film, and eventually to make sequels and TV shows, as part of Hitchcock’s later career renegotiation with Universal for him to take back creative control of his own career.
Bernard Herrmann blamed Universal largely for his own firing from the film Torn Curtain, but he also said Universal made Hitchcock a has been. It also made him rich, Hitchcock’s Universal deal included a good amount of stock in the company, but Herrmann scoffed at this being a fair bargain.
Though Hitchcock made The Birds right after Psycho, and though it was successful and in as many or more ways a daring outrageous film for him to get a studio to fund, it was an expensive film and though it made money it was not the pot of gold at the end of some free rainbow that studio’s too often hope to find.
After the failure of Marnie the studio used a pretty tight fist with Hitchcock as far as what kind of films they would let him make. He was forced to make what they felt were more traditional Hitchcock films, neither successful (These being Torn Curtain and Topaze.) The first had big name stars in it. Hitchcock supposedly wanted Anthony Perkins but the studio insisted on Paul Newman and the two didn’t get along because of Newman’s method acting needs. Newman asked one day why he would come into a room and sit in a Chair. Hitchcock answered, “So your ass will be in the seat.” Julie Andrews did get some good reviews for her unusual, for her, sexy role, but it wasn’t what her audience wanted to see.
Not wanting to be burdened, again, with big name stars and their salaries, Hitchcock was allowed this by the studio, as long as he adapted a bestselling novel, for commercial reasons. Some sources say Hitchcock wanted to cancel production on it before it began, but was unable to. Though I find Topaz to be underrated, it was another commercial and critical failure. Hitchcock then wanted to make a film on location in NYC about the youth of the day, Hippies. (At first he even met with Robert Bloch to develop the screen story from a true case.)
He ended up writing a film himself called Kaleidoscope and or Frenzy—not to be confused with the film he made of the same title. He even had test footage shot of Hippies in NYC. Two factors stopped this from happening, the Studio who didn’t think Hippie films would find an audience, and Truffaut. The hip French director, and former film writer, had done that series of interviews with Hitchcock, an almost ground breaking study that all filmmakers, regardless of if they like Hitchcock or not, should read. Hitchcock admired Truffaut, in part perhaps for narcissistic reasons, but also because Truffaut was a new generation director himself and Hitchcock was looking forwards not backwards as far as where he wanted his own career to go. Well, Truffaut didn’t like the script, Truffaut hated the Psycho novel, therefore the whole idea of that film, going so far as to say he didn’t even understand why it was written! So why would Hitchcock think he’d be someone you’d expect to have a feel for dark horrific material?
So with his, perhaps, most trusted outside voice and his studio against it, Hitchcock regretfully moved on. Truffaut seemed offended by the script and told Hitchcock it was too much like Psycho, I personally think this was Truffaut being too precious, he was shocked by the script because it was meant to be shocking. Not long after this Easy Rider got made and all the studios tried to cash in on the Hippie audience that Universal told Hitchcock wasn’t there.
Hitchcock did, under the new terms of his renegotiated deal, make two final films which are steps up from his restrictive late 1960’s films. Sadly Hitchcock’s wife’s health failed and by the time he had a new script he wanted to make his own health was going.
Many have attributed Hitchcock’s career decline as being an almost Freudian reaction to the success of Psycho which he himself somehow couldn’t comprehend and so it stymied him creatively. This kind of charge has also been filed against Orson Welles’ being limited by his own Citizen Kane. Though it’s nice to portray both of these men’s later career problems from the perspective of filmmaker as being an artist who determines his own fate, this is a basically flawed idea and not substantiated in either of these director’s cases. Hitchcock’s fate can be pretty clearly seen as typically Hollywood then or now.
As far as not-so-great fallout from Psycho’s astounding success, you can however look at Anthony Perkin’s post Psycho career. He knew taking the part was a risk, he of course avoided, for as long as he could, playing in other horror films and playing other Psycho’s. Eventually he returned to playing Norman Bates in a series of flawed but not worthless sequels, one of which he directed himself.
But, had he not made Psycho would he have ended up as say, Tab Hunter did? If you immediately ask, Tab who? Well, that’s my point. Both were 1950’s confirmed bachelors who were actually homosexuals with carefully hidden and constructed studio teen heart throb publicity campaigns to keep this from view. Perkins dealt with his various psychological problems, many, he said, stemming from the early death of his father and a resulting ‘overly close’ relationship with his own mother. This left him fearing women and desiring men and hiding all this from the world at large—could there be a better background for an actor to understand Norman Bates? With therapy he eventually became convinced he should in fact not be a homosexual, his first sexual relationship with a woman being Victoria Principal in 1971. If psychotherapy leads to having sex with Victoria Principal then it’s worth considering for everybody, if you ask me.
Perkins married, had children, who are in the business now themselves, then died somewhat mysteriously of AIDS. Friends doubted he could or would cheat on his wife, nobody spoke of his having a drug problem, he was being treated for facial palsy. He refused to explain it himself, however in an open letter to the world from his deathbed he said he knew the life of one actor wasn’t worth a hill of beans in this world, but having aids had lead him to discovering more kindness than he thought was in the world and certainly more than was in Hollywood. (In an odd additional tragedy for his children, his wife, Berry Berenson, died as a passenger on one of the airliners intentionally crashed on 9/11.)
Also a therapy couch proponent screenwriter Joseph Stefano, more so than Perkins, never topped his work on Psycho. He of course became known as THE writer of Psycho which perhaps he encouraged more than he should have, he does also have cult fame for his one year involvement in the two season life of The Outer Limits series. His other features he really did write all of, tend to be pretentiously talky and unlikely and made little or no money.
Hitchcock knew Stefano was in therapy and probably knew some of Perkins secrets and therapy as well. Hitchcock wasn’t a patient or a believer in it himself but was fascinated by the whole profession and process, for all the reasons you’d assume a director might. He told Truffaut he cast actors for their own personal qualities, and faults, that they would bring to the roles. He also sought this out for some of his writers too.
So there you go, some time on the couch with Psycho for the Holidays. It’s hard to say enough good things about this film and I’ll add one final kudo to actor Martin Balsam for his role.