PSYCHO (1960) B/W widescreen 109m dir: Alfred Hitchcock
w/Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin
Balsam, John McIntyre, Lurene Tuttle, Simon Oakland, Frank Albertson,
Patricia Hitchcock, Vaughn Taylor, John Anderson, Mort Mills, Virginia Gregg, Paul Jasmin, Jeanette Nolan
Alfred Hitchcock's macabre masterpiece broke all existing rules
for horror films and their makers, set the standard for a generation
of new ones, and kept uncounted numbers of filmgoers out of their
showers. Even today, it remains unexcelled in its brilliant
manipulation of audience expectations. Leigh plays a young secretary
(look for the director's daughter as her office co-worker) who
embezzles money from her firm and heads west, only to make an
unplanned stop at the lonely Bates Motel. The outstanding score,
comprised solely of the music and sounds made by stringed
instruments, is by Hitchcock's frequent collaborator, Bernard
Herrmann.
From Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films: "Psycho
was a relatively low-budget film, produced in black and white with
the methods used for shooting television serials [which the
director had perfected on his television series, Alfred Hitchcock
Presents]. However, the famous 45-second ... [shower]
murder sequence alone took seven days to create. Hitchcock says that
it was 'made with a great sense of amusement on my part. To me it's a
fun picture. The processes through which we take he audience,
you see, it's rather like taking them through the haunted house at
the fairground.' Certainly, Psycho is Hitchcock's most
visually involving film and his most successful in terms of audience
participation. Even those critics unable to find profound poetry in
Hitchcock's films accept this. For Robin Wood [A critic who
recognized early on this "profound poetry," Wood wrote the first book
in English on the director's work, Hitchcock's Films,
originally published in 1965 and updated in 1989 by the author as
Hitchcock's Films Revisited.], 'No film conveys --- to
those not afraid to expose themselves fully to it --- a greater sense
of desolation, yet it does so from an exceptionally mature and secure
emotional viewpoint. And an essential part of this viewpoint is the
detached sardonic humor. It enables the film to contemplate the
ultimate horrors without hysteria.'"
In critic Robin Wood's book Hollywood: From Vietnam to
Reagan, he identifies PSYCHO as the forerunner of the modern
horror film because PSYCHO locates the seat of the horror as being
within the family and because the monster is human. This is not true
of the vast majority of previous horror films, such as THE
CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, NOSFERATU,
or FRANKENSTEIN. Of course,
innumerable films have tried to copy PSYCHO's cinematic and
psychological intensity (including the almost shot-for-shot remake
that Gus Van Sant made in 1998), but the film remains a unique and
thrilling experience that is not to be missed.
The following contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film for the first time:
From the Bright Lights Film Journal website (www.brightlightsfilm.com),"Watch it Again! Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)":
"Psycho is a film with no present. It’s obsessed with its past to the point that on closer inspection, all of its events seem psychologically inevitable. There is no inciting incident that makes Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) steal $40,000. She does so because she is made that way, just as she will never marry Sam Loomis (John Gavin) because instead she will accidentally twinge a nerve of empathy in someone who is so abjectly terrified of losing his own past that he will become that past, even if he must kill to prevent such feelings from affecting him.
"I’m speaking, of course, of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who shocks the audience after the film is over by forcing them to remember that they identified him as another protagonist. With chummy indifference, he casts such a confident alibi that even the modern viewer could be pressed for the ending and not know it accurately until it’s in the nude, beaming in the light of his basement.
"The girls will undoubtedly be lured with Crane into Bates’ candy eyes and unassuming shyness (Bates Motel picks up on this, casting button-nosed Freddie Highmore as Norman instead of, say, Ezra Miller). The guys meanwhile will jolt guiltily to their own past when Norman peeks in on Crane as she changes clothes; they were doing the same thing when the film began. Against the hard-shadowed slats of her secret apartment, Crane sat indifferently on her bed, beaming white in her brassiere. With her, Hitchcock begins his film by creating in the audience the psychology he plans to undermine, in a film that uses a predictable structure as the lure of its own narrative con. He does so not with story, but with the camera alone.
"Hitchcock follows Crane closely when her paranoia sets in, the kind that any of us would feel if we flew from our better upbringing to take what we wanted without considering the outcome. Hitchcock shows us in the frame the importance of the money, which Crane hides conspicuously in a newspaper on her nightstand at the motel. He reminds us where it is because this movie is about who knows where the money is, about a woman’s redemption in the face of a hasty impulse, to return to the familial normalcy that Hitchcock protagonists always value, or face the consequences of her actions.
"And then she is dead.
"A shot from 78 camera set-ups and seven days of filming, known for its penetrating score as much as for its gruesome intimacy, ends with the sink drain of Marion’s unblinking eyes and a cruelly steady pan (I imagine such silence in the theater) from the corpse of a limp sex icon laid on tiles as blindingly white as her hotel’s bedsheets.
"What’s more, the money goes down with her into the swamp and with it, all that we had held as important in the intrigue, all of our expectations for a resolution. Suddenly, the typical Hitchcock protagonist’s plea for a romantic ending becomes, not just in Psycho but for all of his films, its own farce. Love becomes a sickening irony after the shower scene, so often written on that I could scarcely do so again redeemably. I’ll take on a single detail instead. Sam writes her a letter. 'So what if we’re poor and cramped and miserable, at least we’ll be happy!' But she’s already dead. His love is a farce on itself, a plea to a corpse. This isn’t the film’s only reference to necrophilia, but it’s the first. At this point we’re still wondering, 47 minutes in, who the protagonist is.
"As Norman sanitizes the death scene, we end up taking him in. We know what a shady prospect that is, but the camera leaves us no other choice.
"Perhaps the critic Slavoj Zizek had something when he equated the structure of Bates’ house, and his ascent and descent through it, with Norman’s mind. The second floor, where he keeps his mother at the height of his preservative delusions, is his superego; the first floor, where he keeps himself in a stasis within his only present, is his ego; and the basement, to which he flees when his delusion is challenged by the film’s plot, is his deep id.
"This is a notion interesting in its creativity, to use a film as an example of itself. But I believe it over-intellectualizes, and so misses, the real structural purity of Psycho, which is not to have a clear psychic or moral structure but to take the structure of its views at even greater priority than a moral message. Did Hitchcock plan to have the manor illustrate the superego, ego, and id, terms that few would have been able to define accurately in the psychosocially newborn 1960s? No more, I suspect, than Orson Welles planned to have a Napoleon complex evoked by young Charles’ distance from the frame, playing in the snow within the window of his childhood in the beginning of Citizen Kane. That is to say --- these are planned to the extent that they are instances of human states in pictures, framed around an emotion, but not that they’re literally demonstrative psychology or morality (Kane’s yard, for instance, is not his hippocampus, and the interior of the house is not his thyroid).
"Bates’ descent into the manor may be viewed as a descent into psyche or memory, but let’s take symbols out of it (as Hitchcock seems to). The layers in the house are the layers in images of our depth in the film’s more crucial purpose: to twist the plastic of the audience’s expectations. The second floor is filled with lofty bird’s-eye views that breed uncertain images, slipping in from the side of the frame. The first floor is level and never explored, transitory because the plot represses the present impulses for the past of Norman’s inherent nature. The basement is close-angled, harshly lit, the portrait of what a terrifying resolution feels like, not to a schizophrenic, but to an audience.
"Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal fear of oneself being a rapist or thief deep down, stopped only by useless proprieties like law and marriage and the delusion of being the protagonist in one’s life. Psycho makes a farce of these rules. Since Hitchcock values such rules in any of his Technicolor epics the likes of Rear Window and Vertigo, in its stark monochrome morality Psycho plays as a mirror image, not just of decency, but of Hitchcock himself. It is a sheer economy of views, where Hitchcock would normally have dwelled on drama. Where he would have strived to develop a character into normalcy, Psycho offers them only its own technical purity in perfectly suspended animation. Every movement becomes a feeling mummified by its own irony. For all its gratuity, nothing in it is beyond understanding.
"Could anything be scarier than that?"
Notes collected for a lecture on the film:
PSYCHO: TV show:
Hitchcock filming it like that:
cheap
/ same crew / B&W / little fuss:
PSYCHO:
an elaborate version of TV show
DP:
John Russell, rather than Robert Burks
who regularly shot his films
opening sequence: large to small /
surfaces
to depths
/ daylight
to darkness
/ most
public view to most private view
camera travels over landscape to
windows:
introduces
visual motifs that will predominate film:
1. camera begins from high angle:
broken
lines from credits superimposed over natural landscape:
movements
of camera: all are movements to right:
fact
that they are horizontal pans:
emphasized
by way words appear: along horizontal line: first
2 words: “Phoenix” & “Arizona”:
nondiegetic:
come from opposite sides of frame: emphasizes "coming together": horizontals
played off vs. verticals
windows
of buildings:
prepare
us visually for key line of dialog:
“We’re
all in our own private traps ... none of us can get out”
camera
moves down to one of little boxes: window:
Wood:
random selection: just any window
series
of dissolves thru which camera descends to window:
DESCENT: visual motif:
also: important theme:
entire trajectory of film is a descent:
Marion’s blood washed down drain
/ 2
cars descending into swamp
/
Arbogast’s
murder a descent
Norman
taking mother into cellar / Lila going into cellar:
all
these descents:
released by
final shot of car being raised:
only
shot of coming back / retrieval:
camera
coming down: also panning:
sense
of QUEST: another central
theme of film:
film
about people looking for something / someone
clip: PSYCHO:
chapter 2: then pause on window
grid
pattern comes up again: grid
of keys behind desk: Bates Motel:
Norman
goes for key to room for Marion: hesitates,
but settles on #1:
this
is moment when Marion’s fate is sealed:
does
Norman have a choice?
chain
of causes goes back to infinity
parallel
between Norman going for #3 key then getting #1 key:
and us going to window: he has no more choice than we do
2.
going from brightly lit space into darkness (inside room):
explicitly
voyeuristic:
camera:
invites us to look:
when
we look thru that window:
we
do what Norman does later in film:
watching
Marion get ready to take shower
Hitchcock
has trapped us as voyeurs:
in
this shot & in next few shots:
another
theme of film: VOYEURISM
PSYCHO:
not as explicitly voyeuristic as REAR WINDOW
but
audience wants something sensational
to be happening inside that window
movement
of whole film is descent towards blackness:
has
camera chosen to single out this window?
or
is it drawn to window?
strong
characteristic of film:
forward
& reverse tracking shots:
they
draw us into something we don’t want to see
within economic exposition: 1st scene
more
themes of film announced:
MONEY, SEX & DEATH:
they
all come together in hotel room:
sex
in hotel room: can’t get married:
because
Sam needs money
to pay off dead father’s debts
end clip: hotel
room scene
another
theme:
WEIGHT OF PAST ON PRESENT:
DEAD HAVE HOLD
ON LIVING:
for Sam: dead father’s debts
for Marion: reference: mama's picture turned to wall:
world of repressed sexuality: true for Norman, too
within
about 1st 5 minutes of film:
we’re
introduced to major visual motifs & themes of film:
these
oppressive forces are the same for all of us:
we’re
all going thru same kind of stuff as Marion:
we
can see that stealing money is way out for her
another
theme: appears later: double:
THE
DOUBLE/DOPPELGANGER: SELF SPLIT INTO 2 HALVES:
most
overt in Norman / Mother:
also: Marion / Lila
& Norman
/ Sam
also
connection: between Marion & Norman:
veneer
of civilization: thin:
expressions
on their faces:
driving / jail cell
music: Bernard Herrmann: score:
all strings
post-screening:
hotel room to office: chapter
3:
Pat
Hitchcock: reinforces theme of parents interfering w/children
also
important: that Cassidy’s daughter is being manipulated by him
all
chars in film caught in their own traps:
“we
scratch & claw but can’t get out”
Marion packing: chapter 4:
everything
draws our attention to money:
Hitchcock’s
red herring:
MacGuffin
camera:
takes on life of its own:
shows
us details that are not from char’s POV:
not
motivated by narrative:
shows
what’s going on inside her mind:
her
plans: no dialog necessary
“unchained”
camera:
powerful
/ omniscient:
disturbing after hotel room / office scenes:
where camera work is functional
camera:
moves to money: to suitcase:
dreamlike
quality:
every
detail has significance:
tells
us re: her
clip: PSYCHO: ch 4
these sequences:
draw us
into strong identification w/Marion:
car,
cop, auto salesman, etc.
then: shower sequence: 78 shots /
45 s:
her
murder: comes after her repentance:
she
is protagonist we are focalized on: she is star:
murder
thus triply shocking:
1.
because she’s the star
2.
because we identify so much with her
3.
because guilty woman has repented
book:
shower scene
internal monologue: chapter 6+:
Marion
imagining what is going on in Phoenix:
expressionistic
device:
seems
to be dependent on music & her “voices”:
taking
us into her mind
subjective
camera: POV: but more, too:
internal
monologue: takes us into her mind
internal
monologue sequence: if shown silent:
beautiful
rhythmically & in its construction:
lighting,
composition, length of shot, expressions on Marion’s face
shots
of road: last about 2 seconds
shots
of Marion in car: last much longer:
get
progressively closer & darker
lighting:
passage of time:
road
gets darker
car
gets darker: over & over
Marion:
more & more isolated in frame as focus of light
cuts
to road: draw Marion further in:
rain
leads to shower
everything
closing in on her
appearance
of Bates Motel:
echoed
later by appearance of mother in shower:
indistinct
shapes, threatening
as
she sees motel sign:
shots
of her intercut with motel: POV:
shots
of her get shorter & shorter:
almost
as short as shots of motel
internal
monologue: with sound:
interaction
of music & dialog
relationship
between music & action of windshield wipers:
2
speeds: most of time:
in
synch with music
expression
on Marion’s face: when she imagines Cassidy finding money gone:
parallels
with Norman / Mother at end of film: jail cell
motel: office: back room:
chapter 8:
dialog
between Norman & Marion:
S/RS:
each of them alone in frame
Marion
talks re: how Mother talked to Norman:
shot
of him is from different angle & low angle:
to
emphasize birds near ceiling:
pattern
of claws: birds / Marion’s hands /Marion’s name: Crane
then
camera is closer to Marion in reverse shots
Marion:
suggests putting Mother “someplace”:
angle
on Norman changes and camera now in c/u on him
reverse
angle on Marion in c/u, too
Marion
gets up: high & low angled shots:
as
shots alternate bet. Marion & Norman
shifting
play of sympathies: bet. Marion & Norman
once
they sit in office:
we
don’t see them in same shot together
shower scene: chapter 12:
correlation
with purification:
Marion cleansing herself
camera
doesn’t cheat: Hitchcock accepts constraints of small space:
camera
doesn’t move outside shower
montage:
created in our minds: less realistic on one level:
yet
PSYCHO started trend towards slow-motion killings: Peckinpah, etc.
along
with revulsion: there is something that draws us:
after
all the montage:
camera moves from her body to newspaper to window:
spiral
back from Marion’s dead eye:
drop
of water where a tear would be
empty eye: we’ve been seeing world of film thru it:
up to this point in story
up
to this point: central issue of film is money
camera
movement tells us money is valueless
if
money were of some use:
there’d be some emotional juice left over:
as
it is: everything taken away from us
movement
of camera:
juxtaposition
of chaos & order
if time:
clip: PSYCHO
trailer: 6.5m
opening sequence: large to small:
surfaces
to depths
daylight
to darkness
most
public view to most private view
camera traveling over landscape to
windows:
introduces
visual motifs that will predominate film:
1. camera begins from high angle:
broken
lines from credits superimposed over natural landscape:
movements
of camera: all are movements to right:
fact
that they are horizontal pans:
emphasized
by way words appear:
along
horizontal line:
first
2 words: “Phoenix” & “Arizona”:
nondiegetic
elements
come
from opposite sides of frame:
emphasizing
“coming together”:
horizontals
played off vs. verticals
windows
of buildings:
prepare
us visually for key line of dialog:
“We’re
all in our own private traps ... none of us can get out”
camera
moves down to one of little boxes: window:
Wood:
random selection: just any window
series
of dissolves thru which camera descends to window:
DESCENT: visual motif:
also: important theme:
entire trajectory of film is a descent:
Marion’s blood washed down drain
2
cars descending into swamp
Arbogast’s
murder a descent
Norman
taking mother into cellar
Lila
going into cellar
all
these descents:
released by
final shot of car being raised:
only
shot of coming back / retrieval
camera
coming down: also panning:
sense
of QUEST: another central
theme of film:
film
about people looking for something / someone
clip: PSYCHO:
chapter 2: then pause on window
grid
pattern comes up again:
grid
of keys behind desk: Bates Motel:
Norman
goes for key to room for Marion:
hesitates,
but settles on #1:
this
is moment when Marion’s fate is sealed:
does
Norman have a choice?
chain
of causes goes back to infinity
parallel
bet. Norman going for #3 key then getting #1 key:
and us going to window: he has no more choice than we do
2.
going from brightly lit space into darkness (inside room):
explicitly
voyeuristic:
camera:
invites us to look:
when
we look thru that window:
we
do what Norman does later in film:
watching
Marion get ready to take shower
Hitchcock
has trapped us as voyeurs:
in
this shot & in next few shots:
another
theme of film: VOYEURISM
though
not as explicitly voyeuristic as REAR WINDOW
but
audience wants something sensational:
to be happening inside that window
movement
of whole film is descent towards blackness
has
camera chosen to single out this window?
or
is it drawn to window?
strong
characteristic of film:
forward
& reverse tracking shots:
they
draw us into something we don’t want to see
within economic exposition: 1st scene
more
themes of film announced:
MONEY, SEX & DEATH:
they
all come together in hotel room:
sex
in hotel room: can’t get married:
because
Sam needs money:
to pay off dead father’s debts
end clip: hotel
room scene
another
theme:
WEIGHT OF PAST ON PRESENT:
DEAD HAVE HOLD
ON LIVING:
for Sam: dead father’s debts
for
Marion
reference to mama’s picture turned to wall:
world
of repressed sexuality
also:
for Norman
within
about 1st 5 minutes of film:
we’re
introduced to major visual motifs & themes of film
these
oppressive forces are the same for all of us:
we’re
all going thru same kind of stuff as Marion:
we
can see that stealing money is way out for her
another
theme: appears later: double:
THE
DOUBLE/DOPPELGANGER: SELF SPLIT INTO 2 HALVES:
most
overt in Norman / Mother
also: Marion / Lila
Norman
/ Sam
also
connection: between Marion & Norman:
veneer
of civilization: thin
expressions
on their faces:
driving / jail cell
music: Bernard Herrmann:
score:
all strings
post-screening:
hotel room to office: chapter
3:
Pat
Hitchcock: reinforces theme of parents interfering w/children
also
important: that Cassidy’s daughter is being manipulated by him
all
chars in film caught in their own traps:
“we
scratch & claw but can’t get out”
Marion packing: chapter 4:
everything
draws our attention to money:
Hitchcock’s
red herring:
MacGuffin
camera:
takes on life of its own:
shows
us details that are not from char’s POV:
not
motivated by narrative:
shows
what’s going on inside her mind:
her
plans: no dialog necessary
“unchained”
camera:
powerful
/ omniscient:
disturbing after hotel room / office scenes:
where camera work is functional
camera:
moves to money: to suitcase:
dreamlike
quality:
every
detail has significance:
tells
us re: her
clip: PSYCHO: ch 4
these sequences:
draw us
into strong identification w/Marion:
car,
cop, auto salesman, etc.
then: shower sequence: 78 shots /
45 s:
her
murder: comes after her repentance:
she
is protagonist we are focalized on: she is star:
murder
thus triply shocking:
1.
because she’s the star
2.
because we identify so much with her
3.
because guilty woman has repented
book:
shower scene
internal monologue: chapter 6+:
Marion
imagining what is going on in Phoenix:
expressionistic
device:
seems
to be dependent on music & her “voices”:
taking
us into her mind
subjective
camera: POV: but more, too:
internal
monologue: takes us into her mind
internal
monologue sequence: if shown silent:
beautiful
rhythmically & in its construction:
lighting,
composition, length of shot, expressions on Marion’s face
shots
of road: last about 2 seconds
shots
of Marion in car: last much longer:
get
progressively closer & darker
lighting:
passage of time:
road
gets darker
car
gets darker: over & over
Marion:
more & more isolated in frame as focus of light
cuts
to road: draw Marion further in:
rain
leads to shower
everything
closing in on her
appearance
of Bates Motel:
echoed
later by appearance of mother in shower:
indistinct
shapes, threatening
as
she sees motel sign:
shots
of her intercut with motel: POV:
shots
of her get shorter & shorter:
almost
as short as shots of motel
internal
monologue: with sound:
interaction
of music & dialog
relationship
between music & action of windshield wipers:
2
speeds: most of time:
in
synch with music
expression
on Marion’s face: when she imagines Cassidy finding money gone:
parallels
with Norman / Mother at end of film: jail cell
motel: office: back room:
chapter 8:
dialog
between Norman & Marion:
S/RS:
each of them alone in frame
Marion
talks re: how Mother talked to Norman:
shot
of him is from different angle & low angle:
to
emphasize birds near ceiling:
pattern
of claws: birds / Marion’s hands /Marion’s name: Crane
then
camera is closer to Marion in reverse shots
Marion:
suggests putting Mother “someplace”:
angle
on Norman changes and camera now in c/u on him
reverse
angle on Marion in c/u, too
Marion
gets up: high & low angled shots:
as
shots alternate bet. Marion & Norman
shifting
play of sympathies: bet. Marion & Norman
once
they sit in office:
we
don’t see them in same shot together
shower scene: chapter 12:
correlation
with purification:
Marion cleansing herself
camera
doesn’t cheat: Hitchcock accepts constraints of small space:
camera
doesn’t move outside shower
montage:
created in our minds: less realistic on one level:
yet
PSYCHO started trend towards slow-motion killings: Peckinpah, etc.
along
with revulsion: there is something that draws us:
after
all the montage:
camera moves from her body to newspaper to window:
spiral
back from Marion’s dead eye:
drop
of water where a tear would be
empty eye: we’ve been seeing world of film thru it:
up to this point in story
up
to this point: central issue of film is money
camera
movement tells us money is valueless
if
money were of some use:
there’d be some emotional juice left over:
as
it is: everything taken away from us
movement
of camera:
juxtaposition
of chaos & order
PSYCHO was nominated for Oscars for Best Director, Supporting
Actress (Janet Leigh), B&W Cinematography (John L. Russell), and
B&W Art Direction (Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, and George
Milo).