Check Out the Trailer

The plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film is so ingrained in pop culture that new audience members going in already know its twists. If remarkably you don’t know the two primary twists then don’t read the rest of this review and just watch this essential film. What it must have been like to be in the audience when this film debuted? A modern equivalent would be THE CRYING GAME, which structurally is quite similar to PSYCHO. Even first time viewers will go in knowing the shower sequence and Norman Bates’s love for his mother. Though I’ve seen the film several times, I went into this viewing with only the famed scenes in the foreground of my memory. What struck me so strongly this time were the subtleties and how slyly the seemingly unconventional plot works.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, TOUCH OF EVIL) is a secretary at a real estate office. She’s getting to that age where if she owned a cat, youngsters might call her a spinster soon. She’s having a hotel room romance with Sam Loomis (John Gavin, SPARTACUS), a handsome man with a low-paying job, whose alimony payment puts another ding in his shiny exterior manhood. When Marion returns to the office after one of their lunchtime trysts, a new client pays for a house with $40,000 cash. In a desperate, rash decision, Marion decides to take the money and run. She drives from Arizona heading to California and stops one night at the Bates Motel to get out of a rainstorm. She meets Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, FRIENDLY PERSUASION), who runs the motel. When Norman goes back up the hill to his looming family house, Marion hears his mother lambasting him. While chatting over sandwiches with Marion, Norman unsettlingly reveals his love/hate relationship with his overbearing mother. When Marion’s work sends out a detective named Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam, 12 ANGRY MEN) to find her, her sister Lila (Vera Miles, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE) and Sam team to help locate their runaway loved one.

Marion Crane might be the worst criminal in movie history, and that’s what makes her story so original and compelling. In movie after movie, average citizens take on the powers of Sherlock Holmes or the Ocean’s Eleven gang when put in an extraordinary situation. Marion is like any typical law-abiding woman who is pushed by circumstance and opportunity to commit a crime. She hasn’t thought her actions through and makes mistake after mistake, only getting herself deeper and deeper into trouble. But she learns, and after a run-in with a cop while sleeping in her car on the edge of the road, she stops at a motel. The Bates Motel. Just another one of her mistakes that seal her fate.

Her conversation with Norman, character-wise, is the most important in the picture. Hitchcock, working from Joseph Stefano’s adaptation of Robert Block’s novel, lays out the parallels between Marion and Norman. Both are trapped in lives they never wanted. Both are getting to that age when they’ll pass the point of no return when it comes to finding the “normal” life — spouse, family. Irony drips like chocolate syrup (aka blood in black & white) as Marion’s fate plays out. I had forgotten what she says to Norman right before she goes back to her room for one last shower. It’s just one of the crucial elements that make the midpoint plot left-turn work.

Along with her universal desires for love and a second (even third) chance in life, Marion is a likeable character, one we hope for and then want justice for. That last part is the key to why the second half of the film works. Audiences are struck by the bizarre actions of Norman, but it’s the viewer’s love for Marion that drives the plot forward once she is gone. Lila and Sam represent that love. They become simple conduits for the audience to relate to. If they were not on the case, and say detective Arobogast was the only one hunting for Marion, would the emotional impact be the same? Not even close. Lila and Sam continue to define Marion after her body ends up in the truck of her car, which ends up at the bottom of the swamp. She was a beloved sister and lover. She was somebody.

Vying for the title with Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates is arguably cinema’s most infamous serial killer. The original 1960’s audience wasn’t really ready for him, forcing Hitchcock to tack on to the end the psychiatrist’s lengthy explanation of his warped mind. Brian DePalma would reference this ending, for some ironic laughs, in his Hitchcockian thriller DRESSED TO KILL. Norman’s love and hate for his mother is so Oedipal it would have made Freud drool. His mother’s actions appall him, and he nervously covers up her crimes. When confronted by Sam or the detective, Norman’s nervousness mirrors Marion’s earlier. He’s no better a criminal than she. His crimes are as impetuous as hers; only she is an innocent who made wrong choices and Norman is a psychopath. We remember the names Gacy, Dahmer, Bundy, but do we remember any of their victims? Marion Crane puts a face and soul to the forgotten victims of the infamous real-world “monsters.”

Hitchcock’s use of camera is always notable. Norman’s mother is introduced so many times and so quickly that one isn’t distracted by Hitchcock’s techniques to conceal her identity. We’re left with the impression that we’ve seen her, but we really haven’t. The compositions are simple throughout most of the film, until Norman’s mother bursts in with her disruptive violence, making askew the camera angles and lighting. Her actions jolt the film’s look and feel as much as they jolt the audience’s nerves.

Like JAWS put the fear of swimming into viewers, PSYCHO made people keep an eye on the bathroom door when taking their next shower. How many horror films since have had a shower scene? But all the imitations are just an excuse to show some skin. In PSYCHO, it is the turning point for both Marion and Norman. She is washing away her sins, while Norman is violently confronting his.

Support the Site

Buy “Psycho” Here!