Alfred Hitchcock

by Peter Ackroyd

  He said that “with Psycho I think I managed to do what I like best in the world: controlling the audience.” But what audience was he hoping to control? At all costs he wanted it to be a large one. He was interested in making a great deal of money from this project. That may have been his primary consideration. He knew that the market for films such as The Blob and The Fly was largely comprised of impressionable and immature young people wanting to be scared and even to become hysterical. They were obsessed with sex, even if it was primarily of a voyeuristic nature. Hitchcock fully understood their demands. They were his target together, of course, with the television audience he had attracted with Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  He wanted to make it as cheaply and as quickly as possible, so he decided to follow the model of his television series, where nine minutes of completed film could be shot in a day. He would use his television cameramen because, as he said, “they know how to work very quickly. And I want to shoot quickly: I don’t want to make an expensive movie because, in all honesty, I don’t know if it’s going to be successful or not.” The television crew were used to filming in black and white, and Hitchcock saw no reason to change. Colour would in any case be a distraction. He also had an aesthetic objection. He told one interviewer that “in colour, the blood flowing down the bathtub drain would have been repulsive.”

  As so often in the process of filming, the details of the production were running ahead of the script. He had hired a young writer, Joseph Stefano, on a weekly basis; he was not yet sure of his potential. But they worked together well, and soon fell into a routine of meeting at eleven o’clock in the morning before having lunch and then talking for some of the afternoon. Hitchcock, as always, talked about anything and everything except the film itself, but by means of hint and indirection, suggestion and counter-suggestion, the treatment went forward. Stefano was then directed to write the first scene, on which Hitchcock’s comment was that “Alma liked the scene very much.” This was the highest compliment possible. From that time forward he and Stefano rehearsed the dialogue verbally before Stefano wrote it down. The whole process took approximately eleven weeks. Hitchcock often acted out certain episodes for Stefano’s benefit. He was carefully rehearsing the scene where the murderer wraps the stabbed body of the woman in the shower curtain, when Alma suddenly walked in. Both men screamed in shock.

  Stefano said later that “he was not interested in characters or motivation at all. That was the writer’s job.” Hitchcock was always more interested in the technical challenges ahead of him, and in the visual impact of the story on the screen. He was, for example, extremely interested in the details of the murder in the shower. Stefano added in another interview that “I don’t think at any time he was making it he was knowingly or unconsciously reflecting any particular darkness from within. He simply had a script and he was shooting it.”

  The casting was not difficult. When Stefano was outlining the problems of characterising Norman Bates, the troubled proprietor of the Bates Motel, Hitchcock suddenly interrupted him. “We can get Tony Perkins.” Tony Perkins was got. Perkins was already an accomplished actor, on both stage and screen, but his profile was higher than his price. When on another occasion Stefano told Hitchcock that the film was really about the victim in the shower, Marion Crane, rather than Bates, he leaned forward. “We can get a star.” A star was got. Janet Leigh was already well known and, in 1948, she had been named as “number one glamor girl of Hollywood.” “I’m not going to direct every nuance,” he told her at an early meeting. “But if you don’t come up with what I need I’ll bring it out of you—and if you give too much, I’ll tone it down. What you do has to fit into my framework and within my camera angle.” His camera was the focal point, and she would move with it. When she visited him at Bellagio Road he showed her his miniature version of every set he would use, complete with miniature furniture and little dolls for the characters. Everything had been carefully designed in advance.

  He still had Vera Miles under contract, ever since her casting (or miscasting) in The Wrong Man, and now he gave her the relatively subdued role of the victim’s sister; the costume designer, Rita Riggs (Edith Head now being so busy that she was not always available), remarked that “Mr. Hitchcock made her look like a dowdy, old-maid schoolteacher…for most of the film we saw a lot of the back of her head.” Vera Miles’s future career lay principally in television.

  The preparations for filming went ahead very quickly in conditions of the utmost secrecy. He did not want anyone to know what he was doing. The film was given no title but was known as “production 9401”; Hitchcock was photographed next to a camera slate marked “Wimpy,” to disguise his intentions. Wimpy was in fact the surname of the second-unit cameraman, but it was used as the title of the film in all communications. Vera Miles recalled that, before they began work, cast and crew had to raise their right hands and promise not to reveal any details of the story. This of course soon became common gossip and, as was intended, raised even more interest in the secret project.

  The famous Bates mansion, the prototype for the location of many later horror films, was built on the set. Many supposed progenitors have been suggested, including the cartoons of Charles Addams and a painting by Edward Hopper, but Hitchcock explained that in northern California “that type of house is very common. They’re either called ‘California Gothic’ or, when they’re particularly awful, ‘California gingerbread.’ ” The building was authentic. Everything in the film had to bear the stamp of reality—the billboards, the motel, the neon signs, the car dealership, the highway, all the persiflage of “small town” or suburban America that would encourage the audience’s deep involvement.

  The filming was supposed to be completed within thirty-six days in a smooth and carefully calculated fashion; in fact it took forty-two days. He said that he wanted to film it quickly and cheaply, and so he did. Rita Riggs observed that “Psycho was a very reserved set, very formal. The male crew all wore shirts and ties.” Hitchcock never went beyond three or four takes so that he could retain the immediacy of the first encounters. Every move and every camera shot were carefully measured. The actor stood on the mark. An actress who played a small part recalled that “he staged scenes like blueprints. He told me ‘If you move one inch either way, you’ll be out of my light.’ ” He might say, “Now on that line you look down, you wait a beat, and then you look back up at him, and hold.”

  He arrived each morning at eight thirty. At five thirty he would glance at his watch and turn to the assistant director, Hilton Green.

  “Are we finished?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hitchcock.”

  “I think that will be all for today.”

  He reserved most of his attention for Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh who were, of course, the principal performers. They were all soon on very good terms, and Leigh in particular became the object of his practical jokes. He was experimenting with the mummified body of Mrs. Bates and would put one grotesque model or another into Leigh’s dressing room while she was at lunch, and then measure the quality of her scream when she returned. He wanted to get it right. She wrote that he “relished scaring me.” In retrospect, however, she wondered whether it was “an effort to keep me a bit on edge, thus more in Marion’s jittery state of mind.” She also said that “he couldn’t have been more considerate, or thoughtful, or respectful, or agreeable, or companionable.” He would also regale her with his fund of dirty stories just before she went on camera.

  He was perfectly at ease with Perkins also, and the actor advanced in confidence enough to suggest changes to his script. It was not the kind of behaviour Hitchcock generally accepted, but with Perkins he seemed more generous. Perkins recalled taking some rewritten passages to Hitchcock’s dressing room, where the director was studiously reading The Times of London.

  “Are they any good?”

  “I don’t know. Shouldn’t we be saving time if you would go over them now?”

  “I’m sure they’ll be v
ery good.”

  “Don’t you want to see them now?”

  “Enchant me later.”

  The most important episode in the film is that of the stabbing in the shower, and indeed it has some claim to being the most memorable scene in the history of cinema. The music helps with the screaming intensity of the violins, but the most powerful effects were achieved by minute and adroit editing. This was a sequence in which speed of execution was not the point. Instead of nine minutes a day, it took seven days to shoot forty-five seconds of screen time. More than seventy camera set-ups were employed and seventy-eight pieces of film were somehow to be assembled; Hitchcock stated that in the laborious process of editing “we tightened it up and got the tempo going” and, as he put it later, “all the excitement of the killing was done by the cutting.”

  The irony of “cutting” would not have been lost on him. Each thrust was filmed at a different angle. The repeated stabbing of the body was reproduced on the soundtrack by a knife being driven into a casaba melon; chocolate syrup was used for the blood. It was believed on the set that the sequence would not pass the censor, but in fact nothing was actually seen on the screen that required erasure. The victim was never shown nude because nudity was forbidden. He always claimed that the knife was never seen entering the body, but in one short segment of film the knife is seen to enter what must have been a dummy torso. It was effectively hidden in the frenzy of cutting in post-production.

  He may, however, have been trying to provoke the censor by showing a toilet bowl, down which Marion flushes some scraps of paper. It is believed that this was the first time a lavatory had been shown on screen, and suggests the ingenuity which Hitchcock employed in trying to shock his audience.

  No one was quite sure of the film’s potential. His personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, had said to one of its editors, Terry Williams, “Oh it’s just a filler. It’s not a biggy like North by Northwest.” At some point Hitchcock despaired of it and pronounced it to be a failure. The composer Bernard Herrmann recalled him “nervously pacing back and forth, saying it was awful and that he was going to cut it down for his television show. He was crazy. He didn’t know what he had.” Yet in part persuaded by Alma, who had consistently encouraged the making of the film, he persevered. It was Bernard Herrmann who suggested a score entirely for strings. As soon as Hitchcock heard what he called the “screaming violins” he was convinced. He doubled Herrmann’s fee, and was reported as having said that “thirty-three per cent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music.”

  Yet the film also conveys the intimacy and unmediated directness of television. Hitchcock insisted upon using a 50 mm lens to convey the effect of ordinary human vision. The supervisor of the script, Marshall Schlom, explained that “he wanted the camera being the audience all the time, to see…as if with their own eyes.” He also required mirrors to be placed everywhere, in order to convey the ambiguities of appearance and reality.

  The film is remarkably faithful to the short novel from which it is adapted; the main outlines of the plot are in Robert Bloch’s narrative of Norman Bates and his mother, but of course Hitchcock changed the killing out of all recognition. In the book it takes less than half a page, and the murderer beheads his victim. The shower scene was against all film protocol and all cinematic tradition; nor was it considered wise to dispose of the star actress before the picture was half over. The scene leaves the audience in doubt and suspense, as the comfort zone of watching a “movie” is suddenly taken away. They can look at the screen only with a mounting trepidation.

  The principal character of Psycho, however, is undoubtedly Norman Bates as played by Anthony Perkins. Bates is a notable Hitchcock type, the slightly fey and neurasthenic male, excitable and sexually ambiguous, who is particularly troubled by women. Hitchcock’s first exploration of this character had been with Ivor Novello in The Lodger, thirty-three years before, and he had continued it in successive films. Perkins played the role so brilliantly that he never quite managed to shake it off; he appeared in three separate remakes of the film over the next thirty years.

  Psycho is in certain respects cold, even brutal. Hitchcock was once asked “What, then, is the deep logic of your films?” and he replied that it was “to make the spectator suffer.” Yet in an interview on BBC television, four years after the film was released, he commented that “I once made a movie, rather tongue-in-cheek, called Psycho” and added that “the content was, I felt, rather amusing and it was a big joke. I was horrified to find that some people took it seriously.” He went on to say that “towards the end I had no violence at all, but by this time the audience was screaming in agony thank goodness.” Anthony Perkins confirmed that it had been conceived as a comedy, or at least a black comedy; but it is perhaps one in which the joke is on the audience.

  It has no hidden meaning at all, apart from a generalised sense of the horror of life. It has no purpose other than to shock or scare an audience. That is why the manipulation of the public began some time before the release of the film itself. In the trailer, it becomes clear that Hitchcock is complicit in sharing a joke with the audience. “And in this house the most dire, horrible events took place. I think we can go inside, because the place is up for sale. Although I don’t know who is going to buy it now…You should have seen the blood. The whole, the whole place was, well, it’s too horrible to describe.”

  He borrowed a technique from the publicity for Diabolique, by refusing entrance to the cinema after the film had begun; he obliged the cinema managers to sign a contract to that effect. There may very well have been aesthetic grounds for this decision but its promotional worth was greater still. The decision generated enormous publicity. A pamphlet was written by Hitchcock or by the studio, “The Care and Handling of Psycho,” suggesting to managers the most appropriate way of publicising and screening the film. Large cut-outs of Hitchcock’s rotund figure were placed in the foyers, bearing the sign “Please Don’t Spoil The Ending—It’s The Only One We Have.” Taped recordings of Hitchcock’s voice were played to the spectators as they waited in line. “This queuing up is good for you. It will make you appreciate the seats inside. It will also make you appreciate Psycho.” The whole purpose was to elicit intolerable anticipation. Something terrible was about to be shown. This in turn induced a certain camaraderie in the crowds who were instructed to line up and purchase their tickets well before screening time. This was a novelty for the American public who were accustomed to turn up at any time. But the new discipline helped to instil a common fear and susceptibility. The English director Thorold Dickinson once remarked that “no film ever frightens an audience. The audience frightens itself.”

  A promotional poster for Psycho, 1960. Taped recordings of Hitchcock’s voice were also played to queuing spectators as they waited, to increase their anticipation for the film.

  After some previews in New York Psycho was formally released in the late summer of 1960. After the ending, in which a glimmering skull is superimposed upon Perkins’s smiling face, Hitchcock ordered that the lights in the cinema be kept low for another thirty seconds. The entire film created an immediate sensation for which Hitchcock and the rest of the team were not prepared. He told Perkins that “I’ve always been able to predict the audience’s reaction. Here I haven’t been able to.”

  The effect of the shower scene, in particular, reveals the extent to which Hitchcock had pierced the sensibilities of his audience. One teacher of film, Linda Williams, noted that “from the very first screenings, audience reaction, in the form of gasps, screams, yells, even running up and down the aisles, was unprecedented.” The film-maker Peter Bogdanovich recalled that “Psycho is the moment in movies when for the first time movies weren’t safe. I remember coming out of the screening and feeling I’d been raped or something, or mugged, it was absolutely terrifying, no one recovered from that shower scene, you couldn’t hear the soundtrack because the audience was screaming through the entire forty-five seconds. I never heard those violins.
” Scriptwriter Joseph Stefano recalled that “I saw people grab each other, howling, screaming, reacting like six-year-olds at a Saturday matinee.” The cinema had suffered a sea change. Psycho could not help but be a vast popular success, surmounting even Hitchcock’s previous work. The critics, who had not been given a special screening, could not make up their minds about it. But the public had. Hitchcock told Truffaut that the film “caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.”

  It was also the best investment Hitchcock ever made. For an initial outlay of $800,000 he reaped millions. His initial cheque, for the first quarter’s returns only, amounted to $2.5 million; he eventually earned approximately $15 million from the world release. He was now the richest, as well as the most famous, film director in the world. How had he done it? Stefano remembered meeting Hitchcock at a lunch just after the release of Psycho. “I walked in, seeing Hitch for the first time since all the rumpus and commotion started. He gave me this completely baffled look and just shrugged his shoulders.”

  10

  BIRDS AND BEASTS

  The morning after Psycho’s premiere Hitchcock’s agent and head of studio, Lew Wasserman, sent him a telegram: “What will you do for an encore?” Hitchcock did not know. He was normally already busy on a new project or script but, as his script supervisor Marshall Schlom put it, “Psycho stopped everything else cold.” Hitchcock needed time to digest the enormous reaction he had created and to assess his future. He was in a sense unsettled. His cheapest and perhaps quickest film had suddenly become his most successful. No one recalled Vertigo or Shadow of a Doubt or Rebecca. “Here’s this bloody piece of crap,” he told one of his cameramen, Leonard South, “and the money doesn’t stop coming in.” Suddenly he was being hailed as the great director for a work which he knew to be a modest exercise in Gothic. Could he trust his filmic judgement any more? (His unease was deepened the following spring by the fact that, at the Oscars ceremony, Psycho did not receive any awards. He could not interpret it as anything but a snub, a deliberate rejection of himself and his work by the film community.)