A Trip Out of Town with an Envelope Full of Cash

I wanted to speak on the meet-up at the hotel in Phoenix. Gavin’s Sam Loomis is in town sleeping with Marion Crane (Leigh) before returning to Fairvale (a quaint little town off the beaten path). This scene, as shot by Hitchcock has this camera just sort of like a bird swooping into a particular room in a specific city on two people. It should just be some sultry soap about two attractive people meeting up in a sweaty, unflattering room instead of dating when Sam was in town, as Marion really wants them to be official. Not just hot sex but out in the open, legit. But Sam is in debt due to his late father’s department store and the alimony from a marriage that fell apart (the ex off somewhere living the good life) so commitment to Marion when he can’t give her a life ideal for an official relationship just isn’t what he wants. She’d “lick the stamps” of the alimony checks sent to the ex…Marion willing to steal $40,000 from her boss’ client (the kind with a cowboy hat, sleazy twinkle in his eye, and a flirty nature) to help her boyfriend shows us just how far she was willing to go, even if there was no way she could ever get away with it. Hitchcock including a cop with sinister shades concealing his eyes, creeping his face into Marion’s car window wanting to know “is something wrong?” adds such a nice bit of suspense…Marion committed a crime and all we want is for her to get away from this cop who could expose and arrest her. It is just like when Norman needs Marion and her car to go down into the swamp, all the way, if the viewer is honest many want it to go down and that says something about how Marion, with her stolen money, and Norman, with that stolen life, are examples of how the Master, good actors, and a slick script-to-screen can really manipulate an audience effectively. Mad props.

And when Marion leaves town for Fairvale, trading in her car so that she wouldn’t be as suspicious, “short pressuring the salesman” at a car dealership, eventually evading the cop, she locates a hotel off the highway, the rain causing her to make a wrong turn. That wrong turn, a bad trip, an incorrect decision that Marion regretted and planned to face the music for, led to an inevitable dump in the trunk and trip into a swamp. It started as this soap opera hot sex in cheap motel story and the audience is taken for quite a ride. And while Marion’s chapter ends half-way through the film with an unfortunate stop at Bates Motel, the story in “Psycho” (1960) wasn’t even close to being over. In fact, Norman’s story, which wasn’t the focus of the film initially, takes over as those who knew Marion are thrust into quite a second chapter they couldn’t have possibly imagined.