Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Because the shower and motel rooms were separate sets and the Bates house was actually on the backlot, the postproduction team was required to optically composite three separate pieces to give Hitchcock his “continuous shot.” “He designed the dolly move to come across the door that opens on the motel room,” Marshall Schlom explained. “Normally, what you could do is just run the camera past the doorjambs and not notice them. Well, nothing fake in Hitchcock’s movies—he wanted everyone in the audience to be in the room with [the heroine]. So I timed the dolly and the pan to come across that door. Then he repositioned the camera on the other side of the doorway because he couldn’t get the camera through the door. Today, you might be able to do that easily because we have smaller dollies, but in those days, we had these big machines.

  “He reset the camera from the other side, made the pan and dolly again with exactly the same movement, then went across the door. It was the same exposure in the printer. We blended that and got up to the motel room window, which was actually a screen with projection backing and a projector on the stage throwing an image of Tony running down the stairs. Again, that move to the window had to be perfectly timed because when you come up to it, the plate had to be in motion and when the camera stopped, the door [of the Bates house] had to open and Tony run out. Today, you could it mechanically with a radio and a voice-cue for the actor to come out the door. We couldn’t do that because it was already on film. Nobody but the few of us that worked on it knew it was done with two different shots ending up on a third piece of film.”

  Hitchcock and Janet Leigh frequently cited the shower sequence as having taken seven days to film. However, the daily production sheets list “INT. BATHROOM—CABIN ONE” as the site for eleven days of shooting, aside from the test footage captured on December 10. Several of the shooting days involved Anthony Perkins and the compulsive cleaning-up after Mother. By the time of the completion of the bathroom scenes, Hitchcock was four days over schedule. But assistant director Hilton Green shrugged and said, “Shooting the shower scene was never seen by us as more than getting the bits and pieces together purely for shock effect. The fragments that we photographed were sort of stored away, but Mr. Hitchcock had a general idea of how he wanted to make the idea progress.”

  If Hitchcock shot the shower murder and bathroom scenes with an air of “business as usual,” some of his collaborators felt otherwise. “There was a lot of talk on the lot that, this time, Hitchcock had gone too far,” costume supervisor Helen Colvig remembered. “Even the unit manager (Lew Leary) said, ‘He’ll never get away with this scene.’ Frankly, we all thought he’d cut it to just show Mother coming into the bathroom, the knife raising, the blood, the girl falling, and that’s it. We thought the bits-and-pieces montage approach lent itself to any censorship or editorial changes he had in mind. It was so outrageous for its time.”

  No member of the Hitchcock team of collaborators could have predicted the impact the sequence was to have in the movie or on movie history. In design and execution, the sequence was a masterstroke. Hitchcock simultaneously succeeded in titillating and shocking the viewer while concealing the nudity of the victim and the true identity of the attacker. Most crucially, the impressionistic montage so stylized and abstracted the action that the sequence was to devastate rather than nauseate the audience. When screenwriter Joseph Stefano was reminded of a statement often quoted by Hitchcock (“I could hear audience’s screaming when we planned the scene”), the writer said, “He was lying. He didn’t hear screaming. Laughing maybe, not screaming. We had no idea. We thought people would gasp or be silent, but screaming? Never.”

  Because Hitchcock customarily shot so little extra footage, editing on his pictures was often completed within weeks after the shutdown of production. But the shower sequence was of particular concern to Hitchcock—not to mention to the waiting censors—and he marked it for immediate editing. Script supervisor Marshall Schlom recalled that only he, at the invitation of Hitchcock, joined editor George Tomasini to cut the film. However, Saul Bass asserted, “When we got through shooting the sequence, I edited it with George. In those days, I judged people by what they let me do. The fact that George, with no edginess, was willing to do a rough cut with footage I shot with the IMO, [meant he was] just a nice guy, wonderful and friendly. We did it on a Saturday because he was working over the weekend to get certain stuff ready for Hitch to look at. We finished editing the thing, we showed it to Hitch and he inserted two cuts. One was a spatter of blood on Janet Leigh as she starts to go down while the blows are being struck. The other was a flashcut of the knife going into her belly. We put the knife against her belly and then pulled it back. I think it was the standin.”

  Hitchcock showed the edited sequence to Mrs. Hitchcock, who had acted as a cutter, screenwriter, and invaluable collaborator on virtually all of her husband’s films from the thirties onward. Alma was such a canny and observant filmmaker that on Vertigo, for example, she suggested that her husband reedit a scene in which James Stewart runs after a suicidal Kim Novak. The point of the re-edit? To mask the size of the leading lady’s feet. On Psycho, according to the accounts of several Hitchcock biographers, Alma Hitchcock spotted a glitch that her husband, Bass, Tomasini, and Schlom had missed: Janet Leigh, staring in fixed-eyed close-up on the bathroom floor, gulped. “Actually, it was a blink,” recalled Janet Leigh. “[Mrs. Hitchcock] told Hitchcock, she saw me blink in the shot that started close on my eye. The editor and I looked and neither us saw it. The lady had a very sharp eye.” Marshall Schlom said, “There were no KEMM’s at the time. Though we must have run that sequence back and forth in the Movieola a couple of hundred times, we completely missed it. So we had to take it out and insert a second cut of the shower head.”

  Hitchcock developed a fascination for an aural technique to convey the sound a knife makes when jabbing a body. “He told the prop man [Robert Bone] to go out and get a watermelon which we’d stab,” recalled Marshall Schlom. “Knowing Hitchcock, the prop man knew he had to come back not only with watermelons of all sizes, but casabas, cantaloupes, and honeydews. Mr. Hitchcock had such a wandering mind that said, ‘If this doesn’t work, what are we going to use next?’ We had to be ready.” In a recording studio, prop man Bone auditioned the melons for Hitchcock, who sat listening with his eyes closed. When the demonstration table was littered with shredded fruit, Hitchcock opened his eyes, and intoned simply: “Casaba.” The director was satisfied that he and his collaborators had married the precise sound and image for a stylized murder.

  Arbogast Meets Mother

  Hitchcock had particular fun with the character of the private detective, Milton Arbogast, played by Martin Balsam. The forty-year-old stage and television actor, trained at the Actors Studio, had made his screen debut for Elia Kazan in On the Waterfront (1954). A great gift of Balsam’s on the stage or screen is the instant impression that he conveys of Everyman. Hitchcock, throughout his career, maintained a healthy irreverence toward the guardians of law and order, and his view of Arbogast—smug, glib, tenacious, slightly dull—is no exception. In film after film, Hitchcock challenges his audiences to cry out “Why don’t the hero and heroine go straight to the police?” Because, implies Hitchcock in answer, all that they will find is a universe of Milton Arbogasts. As the director so often put it, “Logic is dull.”

  Hitchcock was well aware that Martin Balsam was among the two or three best-trained actors in Psycho. The director admitted to only perfunctory interest in the characters of Sam and Lila, therefore the conflict between Norman and Arbogast became more crucial. Rehearsing the funny-tense scene where Arbogast interrogates Bates in the motel office, Hitchcock could not have helped but be excited by the electricity between his actors. The suspense master imposed another technical challenge on his collaborators by deciding to shoot the scene more naturalistically than originally had been planned. As had Orson Welles in his radio dramas and in Citizen Kane, Hitchcock encouraged Balsam and Perkins to find their own rhythms and
subtext, to overlap each other’s dialogue. Art director Robert Clatworthy, who watched the shooting, recalled: “The first time they did it, Hitchcock just shot the inquisition in that little office straight through, no cuts. I thought it was marvelous.” The crew rewarded the players with a spontaneous outburst of applause. However kinetic the line delivery, Hitchcock wanted more. “It was the first scene Martin and Tony played together,” said script supervisor Schlom. “It was a very long scene and Mr. Hitchcock wanted staccato bantering. They did it in one take. At the end of it, this wonderful smile spread across Mr. Hitchcock’s face. Despite the comments he made about actors, he appreciated good acting, which that certainly was.”

  Hitchcock got from Balsam and Perkins more than he had bargained for in the scene. But according to Schlom, “The sound man on the movie just went nuts. Today, we just ‘mike’ the actors offstage. Then, that was unheard of. And later, when George Tomasini sat down on the cutting bench, it was a nightmare because the tracks didn’t match. Tony and Martin didn’t say the same thing at the same time with the same cadence. George, who was one of the best cutters in town, worked three or four days on that to get it mechanically correct. It was masterful.”

  An added headache for the sound crew in the scene was Perkins’s suggestion to Hitchcock that Norman Bates would chomp Kandy Korn when particularly flustered. As Perkins noted: “I added it a little bit late, so I don’t know how clear it is, but I kept nibbling on it through the whole picture. I came to him one morning and asked him and he said, ‘Fine, fine.’ He didn’t even think, he didn’t even have to stop to think if it was right or wrong. He had the kind of mind that could instantaneously accept or reject a suggestion.” Although the sound men masked the chewing noises, Hitchcock emphasized Perkins’s innovation by adding a big close-up, shot from below, of the actor’s giraffelike neck as he nervously gulps the snack food.

  The shower murder sequence had proved to be complicated and time-consuming. However, crew members insist that Hitchcock regarded the murder of detective Arbogast on the staircase as more crucial to the picture. The scene certainly presented greater technical challenges. “This was exactly the kind of problem Hitchcock loved to work out with the technical people,” recalled directorial assistant Hilton Green. “[Mr. Hitchcock and the crew] started discussions for that scene very early in preproduction. There had been talk about using a crane, but there was no way of getting a crane into a set that you see literally from top to bottom.”

  Here is how screenwriter Joseph Stefano describes the scene:

  INT. FOYER OF BATES HOUSE—NIGHT

  Arbogast gradually eases the door closed, stands against it, waiting. He looks up in the direction of the light, sees no one. The door at the head of the stairs is closed. Arbogast listens, holds his breath, hears what could be human sounds coming from upstairs but realizes these could also be the sounds of an old house after sunset. After a careful wait, he crosses to the stairs, starts up, slowly, guardedly, placing a foot squarely on each step to test it for squeaks or groans before placing his full weight on it. CAMERA FOLLOWS, remaining on floor level but TRAVELING ALONG the stairway as Arbogast makes his way up.

  INT. STAIRWAY AND UPSTAIRS LANDING—EXTREMELY HIGH ANGLE

  Same angle as that used at the FADE OUT at the end of Scene #43. We see Arbogast coming up the stairs. And now we see, too, the door of the mother’s room, opening, carefully and slowly.

  As Arbogast reaches the landing, the door opens and the mother steps out, her hand raised high, the blade of an enormous knife flashing.

  C.U.—BIG HEAD OF AN ASTONISHED ARBOGAST

  The knife slashes across his cheek and neck. Blood spurts. The sudden attack throws him off balance. He stumbles back and staggers down the whole of the staircase. He frantically gropes for the balustrade as he goes backwards down the stairs. The CAMERA FOLLOWS him all the way down. A wicked knife keeps thrusting itself into the foreground. As he collapses at the bottom, the black head and shoulders of Mrs. Bates plunge into the foreground as the CAMERA MOVES IN to contain the raising [sic] and descending murder weapon.

  From the outset, Hitchcock and his team had designed the scene for maximum effect. “The showing of a violent murder at the beginning,” the director told Ian Cameron and V. F. Perkins, “was intended purely to instill into the minds of the audience a certain degree of fear of what is to come. Actually in the film, as it goes on, there’s less and less violence because it has been transferred to the minds of the audience.”

  The Arbogast staircase murder had been calculated to shock. Also, it had been designed to camouflage the true “identity” of Mother by featuring a showy, extreme high-angle shot. Originally, Hitchcock had intended to employ the same spectacular angle in three scenes in the narrative. [In the version of Psycho released to theaters, Hitchcock also used the high-angle shot to depict Norman’s carrying Mother downstairs to the fruit cellar.] Originally, it was to have followed Norman’s cleaning up after Marion’s murder. In that scene, detailed in three drafts of the screenplay, Norman would have been shown from this birds’-eye view as he ascended the stairs and found bloodstained clothes and shoes in a pile outside Mother’s bedroom door. The sequence, cut in editing, was to have ended with a long, silent shot of the Bates house silhouetted against the sky. Then, a slow curl of smoke was to have risen from the chimney.

  Saul Bass had scrupulously storyboarded the staircase murder sequence. “This is where Hitch did a reverse on the so-called classic scare or threat scene,” the graphic designer explained. I designed and set up the sequence so that when Arbogast went up the stairs, you had close cuts of his hands on the rail, his feet shot through the vertical bars. Because when he was knocked off at the top of the stairs and fell, I wanted his hand to grab onto one of the posts and, as he went down, his hands rip those posts apart.”

  When Bass showed Hitchcock the storyboards, the director delivered a lecture on the mechanics of a suspense sequence. Bass recalled: “Hitch said, ‘No. Wrong point of view. You are telling the audience something might or will happen. He should be going up just like nothing’s going to happen. You know, you don’t get killed just for walking up the stairs. Rather, he sees a door and says, “Oh, I wonder what’s in here.” He reaches it and all hell breaks loose!” Nobody shot anything until Hitch approved it. So I restoryboarded it just the way we discussed it. I said, ‘Why don’t we shoot it from above?’ Obviously it was right. It worked. But who knows? Maybe what I was [originally] suggesting would have been even better.”

  “From my point of view,” observed script man Marshall Schlom, “Saul Bass’s contribution was more in the Arbogast murder than in the shower sequence. The [shower murder] was done purely for shock, but Arbogast’s killing was a piece of dramatics, almost a storyline that had to be very carefully followed.” Hitchcock scheduled the shooting of the scene for January 14 on the Phantom Stage. For more than a week in advance, painstaking technical rehearsals and preparations were conducted at the end of each shooting day by assistant director Hilton Green, cameraman John Russell, set designer Robert Clatworthy, script supervisor Marshall Schlom, and the standin for actor Martin Balsam.

  After many trouble-plagued rehearsals, the crew captured on film a successful rehearsal for the complex shot. Hitchcock approved it, and the film was back on schedule. For the sequence, Clatworthy and Hurley had devised a metal bipod run by pulleys that would lift a cinematographer and a relatively lightweight camera to the upper reaches of the soundstage on overhead tracks built to run parallel to the stairs. The system had a glitch: The operator simultaneously had to run the camera and manipulate the focus. “That was a very big problem to solve,” noted assistant director Green. “[Eventually] it took two camera operators and the assistant cameraman to make the shot with the ‘contraption’—that’s the only word for it—because the operator had to have someone take over on the panning. We rehearsed and rehearsed the move after Hitchcock went home so there wouldn’t be any problems on the day of shooting.”r />
  Required before the camera, aside from Martin Balsam, was Mitzi Koestner, the little person doubling for Mother. Anthony Perkins explained: “The reason she was hired was that Hitch was particularly worried that the audience was going to see through the whole thing. Remember, this scene comes a little more than halfway through the picture. In order to strengthen the illusion, he engaged a woman who was very small and, physically, totally unlike anyone else [who appeared as Mother] in the picture.”

  On the eve of shooting, from 6:30 to 7:30 P.M., the company conducted another rehearsal. However, the scheduled day of shooting—January 14—brought unforeseen woes. Hitchcock succumbed to a flu bug that had also taken actress Vera Miles and several other company members out of commission during the previous week. Marshall Schlom recalled: “Mr. Hitchcock called Hilton [Green] up at seven-thirty in the morning and said he was ill. He asked me to get on another phone and said, ‘Fellas, you know what to do. Go ahead and shoot it.’ We did all the pieces that Saul had designed so carefully on storyboard.”

  “I ‘directed’ that scene,” Hilton Green admitted, “but I directed it on the telephone to Hitchcock at his house.” Because Hitchcock was uncertain as to how he wanted to cut the scene, Green and the crew shot streamlined versions of Saul Bass’s “montage”-style angles (hands on the banister, soles on the carpet). In the absence of Hitchcock, Green and the crew shot the stairway ascent, up to and including the stabbing of Arbogast by Mother. “It worked on the first take,” Green said, beaming with relief even today.

  When Hitchcock’s indisposition lingered into the following day of production, the director shut down the company. To try to make up for being behind schedule, Green and Schlom edited a rough assemblage of the staircase murder sequence from the dailies. Although both collaborators worried when they noticed that the focus of cameraman Russell went awry when Balsam reached the halfway mark on the stairs, neither of them saw the technical glitch as fatal. Schlom commented: “We thought, ‘Well, we’ll just keep cutting away, so you’ll never see it in the finished film.’”