Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a secretary based in Phoenix, Arizona, absconds with $40,000 from her employer's client and makes a run to California to be with her lover Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Along the way, tired and caught in a storm, Marion takes a room at the Bates Motel, where she meets the owner/manager, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a shy but friendly young man who lives nearby in a large house with his domineering mother. While showering, Marion is crudely slashed to death by Norman's mother. When Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) becomes concerned after hearing nothing from Marion, she goes looking for her, eventually coming across the Bates Motel.
Psycho is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by American writer Robert Bloch (1917-1994), who was in turn inspired by the crimes of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein.
As the novel explains and the movie implies, Marion (Mary in the novel) is running out of time. She's in her late 20s, awfully late for a girl of her era to be unmarried. Sam inherited considerable debts from his deceased father. Wanting to pay them off as quickly as possible, he has pared his expenses to the bone, even living in a room at the back of the hardware store. He repeatedly tells Mary/Marion that he doesn't want to get married until he can afford a place for them to live. Circumstances conspire to deceive her into justifying the act. (1) She has a boss who air-conditions his own office but not the outer office where the secretaries work; Arizona weather can become terribly hot, and her boss even comments on how unbearable it is in the secretarial pool. (2) Her mousy coworker keeps going on and on about her marriage. (3) She steals the money from a drunken millionaire who makes a sloppy pass at her, spoils his own daughter, cheats on his taxes, and says while waving the bills in the air, "I only carry as much as I can afford to lose." (4) Her boss just stands there while a very drunk Mr. Cassidy sexually harasses her and doesn't even attempt to tell him to stop.
He has no idea that she is fleeing Phoenix after having stolen money from her boss. But her behavior is suspicious. He first takes an interest in her when he sees her car parked along the highway. He finds her asleep on her front seat. He taps on the window; she panics and makes a reflexive attempt to drive away. From that moment on, she is nervous and anxious to leave, so he follows her.
While Sam keeps Norman occupied in the office, Lila sneaks up to the house, looking to speak with Norman's mother. She looks through the bedrooms but can find only an indentation on Mrs Bates' bed. Meanwhile, Sam has begun accusing Norman of hiding the $40,000, which enrages Norman such that he knocks out Sam with a ceramic jar and runs up to the house. Having found nothing, Lila is just about to leave the house when she sees Norman running up the walk. She hides in a stairwell and notices a door leading to the cellar. She snoops through the cellar, coming upon Norman's mother sitting in a chair. When Lila turns Mrs Bates to face her, she sees only a mummified corpse. Lila screams, which brings Norman, dressed as his mother, running downstairs and brandishing a knife with which he plans to kill Lila, but Sam stops him. At a conference held several days later, psychiatrist Dr Fred Richman (Simon Oakland), after interviewing Norman, explains how Norman killed his mother and her lover ten years ago and how the guilt caused his personality to split into two sides Norman and his mother. He killed Marion because his Norman-side was attracted to her but his mother-side went into a jealous rage. Both Marion's body and the body of Detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) are buried in a swamp that borders on the Bates' property. In the final scenes, while Norman sits in his cell, locked into his mother's personality, Marion's car is pulled out of the swamp.
The scene allowed for a glimpse into Norman's mind that audiences would not necessarily have been privy to without some background information. The executives at Universal insisted on the epilogue, which is almost identical with the one in the novel. They were worried that the audience would think that Norman Bates was a homosexual or a transvestite. A character declares that Norman must have been wearing women's clothes because he was a transvestite. The psychiatrist contradicts him and makes the "real" reason clear.
Hitchcock noticed that low-budget shockers were cleaning up at the box office, and he wanted to make a low-budget shocker that outclassed all rivals. Black and white photography kept his costs down. Another reason was the blood. Hitchcock thought all that blood in the shower would be too gruesome, so he used chocolate syrup as blood in that scene. Chocolate syrup photographs as blood in black and white.
There is a version of the film, aired for some time on German TV, which is about 18 seconds longer. It has not been released on DVD. It includes Marion starting to take off her bra (while being watched by Norman), Norman washing his bloody hands, and a slightly longer version of the second murder. In contrast to this, some TV stations in the US only air a heavily censored version of the movie, like WSJU.
When the shower scene was first screened for the British censors, as John Mauceri said at a Hollywood Bowl concert of movie music, they rejected it for being too violent and graphic. Overnight Hitchcock redubbed the soundtrack with music other than the original Bernard Hermann score and resubmitted the scene. It was approved! The story is a tribute to the influence Hermann's music has in creating the atmosphere and tension in the movie.
Audiences of 1960 were shocked to see a toilet on screen, in close-up, and to see and hear it being flushed. (Marion tears up a small sheet of paper and flushes the pieces.) A precedent for the toilet scene can be found in the Warner Bros. cartoon short, Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930), in which an animate bathtub dances around the bathroom and throws toilet paper into the air like flower petals. The "camera" pans along with it, and we catch sight of the edge of a toilet and a full view of the pull-cord used for flushing it. Also, in the Van Beuren cartoon short, Piano Tooners (1932), a tuner takes a sour musical note (which cartoon magic has made into a living creature) and flushes it down the toilet. Again we see the edge of the toilet; and we clearly hear the flush.
Very little. Audiences were shocked when Marion was stabbed to death in the shower. Hitchcock had misled them to believe the film was about a woman on the run from police. Moreover, Janet Leigh was a major star. Killing her off less than halfway through the picture was unthinkable. Not even the novel is much of a precedent. We spend far less time with Mary Crane in Robert Bloch's book than we do with Marion in the movie. The City of the Dead (1960), a British horror picture that was released three months after Hitchcock's film, seems to have independently hit upon the idea of killing its protagonist before the film is half over. But even if City had been released first, its blonde was played by a minor starlet (Venetia Stevenson) and her story was less engrossing; it could never have had the same impact as Psycho.
1. They are often near highways.
No. Saul Bass, who was a visual consultant for the film and designed the title sequence for Psycho, reportedly claimed that he directed the scene. He did design and storyboard the scene, but Hitchcock shot it. Many persons on the set, including Janet Leigh, confirm that the only person directing the scene was Alfred Hitchcock. The storyboards for the scene can be found within the special features of the1999 Collector's Edition DVD.
No. In the documentary The Making of 'Psycho' (1997), Janet Leigh recalls that Mr. Hitchcock was very considerate of her comfort during that scene and that her scream was pure acting.
The chair in which Norman's mother sits is an old fashioned desk chair, not a rocking chair. The light moving back and forth on her face is not from the chair rocking but from the light bulb swinging over the corpse's head.
See Leigh as a House on Greenapple Road (1970) and as a faded star of film and stage who murders her husband in Columbo episode Forgotten Lady (1975). Vera Miles and Barbara Rush do away with a manipulative cad in The Outer Limits episode The Forms of Things Unknown (1964). Miles and her father (John Carradine), a former silent movie director, kill a car mechanic in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode Death Scene (1965). Miles is the head of a cosmetics company who kills her employee to get the formula for a wrinkle cream in the Columbo episode Lovely But Lethal (1973).
Alfred Hitchcock places himself in a small cameo in each of his movies. His cameo in Psycho occurs about five or six minutes into the movie. He can be seen as a man in a cowboy hat standing on the sidewalk outside of Marion's office. Hitchcock said he wanted his cameo to be very early in the film, otherwise the audience would be distracted constantly looking for his appearance.
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