United States, 1960
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
With Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), Janet Leigh (Marion Crane), Vera Miles (Lila Crane), John Gavin (Sam Loomis), Martin Balsam (Private Detective Milton Arbogast)
The movie’s first part revolves around a malaise which always tugs at Marion Crane’s conscience. Her story is about a regular person running amok but then gnawed by doubts and guilt; but the tragedy is that even if she makes up her mind to correct the wrongful course, it turns out to be too late to save her life for she has been trapped by an even more dangerous personality. The film’s first stunning element is that it carefully studies a misdemeanor and all the difficulties it implies before suddenly compelling the lead and the audience to face a greater and more chilling crime.
The use of Bernard Herrmann’s strident, pounding and cringing composition for strings regularly and right on cue highlights Marion Crane’s increasing anxiety and nightmarish journey. Stealing her boss, a Phoenix Realtor and one of his clients, has never been an easy decision – this is underlined by the odd but riveting series of shots and reverse shots inside her apartment as she gets ready to go away, her worried face alternating on screen not with another face but with the large envelope containing 40,000 dollars. Her drive to California, to get reunited with her lover Sam Loomis, puts her on the tenterhooks and the meeting with an inquisitive and stolid highway patrolman throws her in full disarray, rising the tension on screen and pushing her to make abrupt decisions that can only raise suspicion – and she is aware of that as she imagined in her head what people could say about her.
It is a thoroughly wearied woman who pulls up at the Bates motel. For the manager, Norman Bates, it is an unexpected commercial luck and he would go to great lengths to accommodate her and be on friendly terms. Their chat is off-putting but still invites Marion Crane to acknowledge how bad her actions were and how pressing is the need to correct it. But the strings once again play their queasy tune and a shocking series of jerky shots depict the grim end of her journey – the most unforgettable moment remaining the shot focused on her stupefied face against the wall as she tries to raise up her right arm before her body leans forward and falls over the floor: the camera perfectly and provokingly captures the sheer amazement and disbelief of a person savagely attacked for no reason whatsoever even as she thought her life (at long last) quietly lays before her.
But that first part also lays the groundwork for the shocking facts the would be disclosed in the second part. The inaugural, romantic, slightly raunchy sequence would explain the immoral choice of Marion Crane – she is a woman in love keen on getting married with her lover and pained by the troubles he must face – debts and an alimony to pay; she yearns for a family life of her own (unlike him, she has never been married) and would do the worst thing to do to reach her goals. But this sequence also shows how natural (the way the actors behave and are shot) and thrilling sentimental needs and sexual drive are – but these are the very elements eluding Norman Bates in his sad life.
The first thing that stuns Marion Crane and the audience as they show for the first time the office of Norman Bates is that impressive, cumbersome collection of stuffed dead birds. Norman Bates loves taxidermy – it is, indeed, dear Marion Crane, an “uncommon hobby” and that puts death firmly at the center of the narrative, foretelling the murders of human beings that would come before it takes genuinely the center stage in a hair-raising finale; this fits with the wider sense of danger that the settings have created, with that rainy night and that big house coming straight out of a Gothic tale.
A previous shot has already hinted at the eerie personality of Norman Bates. He is arriving from the nearby family house with a tray of sandwiches; she was waiting near the door of her cabin and walks up a few steps; when they meet he stands against a window of his office then in the dark and his profile, as he awkwardly but a bit over-enthusiastically talks to her, is reflected in that window – now, there are two Norman Bates intensely looking at a rather puzzled Marion Crane. The tragic theme of the double is subtly introduced before it leads to horrid events.
Norman Bates’ determined and cold-blooded gestures of after the slashing of Marion Crane upset – he seems strangely aware of the importance of each gesture and detail and is not as frantic as others would have been after such a grisly discovery. He seems to have reckoned everything – and that is remarkably ominous.
And then, there is that other, cruel, female voice, overheard by Marion Crane. It is the foundation of the second part of the film, as those looking for clues about her whereabouts would try to listen to it; what is at stake is the reality of a presence. Far into the narrative, this is a given for the audience: even if the situations and shots sound fairly odd and complicated, there is no big reason to doubt the existence of Norman Bates’ mother.
The trick is that things play out quite differently for the people inside the film. The quest for the lady leads private detective Arbogast, who has been on the payroll of the Realtor’s robbed customer, to his death in another hyper-dramatic and outrageously bloody scene. The quest is even more baffling for Sam Loomis and Lila Crane, the plucky and stubborn sister of Marion as they find out disturbing facts and eventually get to the bottom of the affair – literally, as everything is revealed by a tour in the house’s cellar (they succeed in thwarting death precisely because they were two of them; the murderer would have had an easier job with just one person; it is ironic by the way to watch Norman Bates’ double life uncovered by a duo). This leads to that shocking and wholly unexpected finale where death takes center stage, stunning both the characters and the audience whose expectations have been carefully manipulated and betrayed – making the impact even greater.
The film was a break in Alfred Hitchcock’s string of big budget and big stars productions. Shot in black and white with a small team, “Psycho” still succeeds in making a vivid and lasting impression. The way the murders, especially Marion Crane’s, are shot plays here a big part: they unabashedly and brutally highlight the killer’s amazing savagery and the horror the victim must have felt; in the case of Marion Crane, the image bluntly equals the draining off of the shower’s water with the loss of shine in the eye, as her life is going to waste in a most arbitrary way. If the first part showed how hard it is to commit a misdemeanor, the zeal and passion to commit the crimes in the second part point to the madness of the killer. Hitchcock has always made clear that killing is unpleasant and uneasy but Norman Bates is truly an uncommon case, defying the usual speculations about a killer, including in terms of behavior (he first cuts a very gentle figure) or gender, as the end would have it.
The leitmotif that Herrmann’s music is contributes critically to the movie’s disturbing impact – it sets the tone for Marion Crane’s tragedy and heralds the unsettling facts about the Bates motel (but, significantly, the score is less used in the second part; silence suits more the painstaking search for truth). The choice of lenses and framing heights cleverly matters: Hitchcock strives to convey the same optical impression as a human eye standing among the characters could have. The audience cannot but feel voyeuristic – and there is indeed a scene showing Norman Bates acting as a Peeping Tom with then the camera taking his place – which means they cannot escape the full horror of the story. (It is interesting to note that Hitchcock crafted this new tour de force in the horror genre still with the goal of wowing the audience in mind the same year Michael Powell dared to expose an unsettling view of linking cinema and voyeurism with his own “Peeping Tom” while with a completely different vision Georges Franju offered with “Les yeux sans visage” a horror tale shaped by eeriness and poignancy).