All Smiles After Psycho

A moment in the theater that really stuck out to me. Norman smiling as PI Arbogast drives away

When that score from Herrmann starts up and those credit titles by Saul Bass come across the screen in the theatre, it all gave me goose bumps. I was jazzed to be in that theatre as the opening shot of the camera taking us into the cheap hotel room in Phoenix, Arizona, to get an inside peek at an affair between lovers John Gavin and Janet Leigh.

 I guess in a theatre it all is so amplified and magnified. The murder and clean up was an obvious highlight. Seeing the shower scene right there on the big screen, how Hitchcock’s camera captures it all…just magic. I was even absorbed by how the opening hotel room scene is noticeably sexy. It often sets up why Marian Crane is snatching the money. Debts Gavin’s Loomis has stifling him. I don’t what it was, but in this sitting, Anthony Perkins just looked so young. I don’t know why they came to me, but perhaps it is a detail that often gets overlooked. This is a barely adult man, one who has carried around his demons for almost an entire young life. 

One of my favorite scenes in the movie, actually. Marian smiling about stealing Mr. Moneybags' 40 thou.

Leigh’s Marian is inspired by him, though. She decides thanks to her talk with Perkins’ Norman Bates that being caught in the trap she walked herself into might can be rectified. Obviously, we know that won’t be the case. 

Because the shower murder lands such an impact (for fuck sake, there’s even a pistachio commercial which uses “mother” to knife at shelled nuts!), the second one often kind of gets less of a rub. It is also quite a well designed “bird’s eye view” camera shot that Hitchcock goes to twice to keep “mother” at a distance, from a high angle. Unexpected and a jolt, the second murder against someone perhaps paying a price for “snooping alone” in the Bates home comes right out of nowhere. It was built to this, too. 

The score for Psycho, to me, is as important as Carpenter’s was for Halloween. I think without the score, you still have a great movie, but the score just dignifies the tension and drama of everything you see. A film that uses money and gets us into the disturbed and tragic existence of Norman Bates. There’s a psycho, the title tells us. The film sweeps us into Marian’s dilemma, and then Norman’s. He has to find a way to conceal two murders by “his mother”. 

As the film shows you, one or two murders cannot keep away the inevitable. Norman’s nervy confrontation with a private investigator (Martin Balsam) who gets him all bent out of sorts, catching him in lies and hoodwinking him with the right questions that thwart his efforts of retreat from speaking too much to implicate himself. Norman Bates: Perkins’ casting along with Leigh’s was all the stars being aligned. The expressions are subtle, too. A smile when it looks as if he’ll help his mother keep from being caught. The fear of saying the wrong thing or the anger that arises when Marian mentions maybe he should put away mother. The mentioning of two other murders at the end which informs us of mother’s activities prior to Marian (this makes the long psychiatrist’s explanation at the end justified). The swamp located in a convenient spot to dispose of bodies.

What a great Sunday afternoon treat. Next month: DRACULA!!!!