Celebrating Alfred Hitchcock -- and revisitng Psycho -- on the birthday of The Master of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock continues to entertain us, and sometimes astonish us, more than three decades after his death. But that doesn’t mean he ever really liked us. Indeed, there is ample evidence to the contrary — which, all things considered, might not be such a bad thing. Francois Truffaut, who famously interviewed and occasionally emulated the Master of Suspense, once spoke of his idol as “the man whom we are glad to be despised by.” And, mind you, Truffaut meant that as a compliment. 

Throughout his prolific and prodigious life, Hitchcock — whose Aug. 13, 1899 birthday we celebrate today — repeatedly preyed upon our ambivalent responses to violent death. In doing so, he slyly pandered to our baser instincts, implicating us in the machinations of his characters by exploiting our voyeuristic impulses. Thanks to him, we want James Stewart to be right when he thinks he witnessed a murder in Rear Window. We really want Farley Granger’s slatternly wife to get what’s coming to her in Strangers on a Train.

And we really, really want Anthony Perkins to dispose of that car with the fresh corpse inside its trunk behind the Bates Motel in Psycho.

Do we blame Hitchcock for bringing out the worst in us? Quite the contrary: We’re greatly amused, and grateful, for being so effectively worked over. And yet, when you remember the haughtily droll raconteur who quipped his way through countless interviews, promotional shorts and wrap-around segments for his long-running TV series, you may find yourself reading something like contempt in Hitchcock’s insolent smirk. He knew what his audiences wanted and, just as important, how to make them want more of it. And he made no secret of the ruthless methods he might employ to achieve his aims. “My love of film,” Hitchcock admitted in his book-length interview with Truffaut, “is far more important to me than any consideration of morality.” 

Which is part of the reason why he was ready, willing and able to make Psycho, arguably his most amoral movie. “I don’t care about the subject matter, I don’t care about the acting,” Hitchcock said. “But I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho, we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences... They were aroused by pure film.”

Or, perhaps more accurately, impure film. At once the granddaddy of all slasher movies and one of the blackest comedies ever concocted, Psycho was conceived and executed as something of a down-and-dirty stunt. Hitchcock wanted to see if he could make a feature film as quickly and cheaply as the B-movie moguls who produced low-budget, high-profit drive-in fare during the late 1950s. So he borrowed a production crew from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show, drew upon impolitely lurid source material — a Robert Bloch novel very loosely based on the life and crimes of serial killer Ed Gein — and made a no-frills black-and-white thriller that overcame mixed-to-hostile reviews to become the second-highest grossing film (after Ben Hur) of 1960. 

Psycho is one of Hitchcock’s most enduring and influential masterworks. It also is the most cold-blooded and mean-spirited prank that any major filmmaker has ever pulled on an audience. The graphic violence of the infamous shower scene is more apparent than real because, thanks to Hitchcock’s celebrated genius for montage, we’re tricked into thinking we see much more than we’re actually shown. But there’s an even more significant sleight-of-hand to consider: Psycho is a movie that scores its most devastating impact by playing on assumptions and expectations informed by other movies.

Hitchcock blindsided moviegoers in 1960 by daring to switch gears from sexy crime story to shocking gothic horror, by insidiously luring the audience into sympathizing with a homicidal maniac -- and, even more audaciously, by daring to kill off a well-known leading lady (Janet Leigh) 50 minutes into his story. When asked to explain why he was drawn to Bloch’s novel in the first place, Hitchcock claimed he found the central gimmick – Norman, is that you? – only modestly clever. What really sold him on the story, he said, was “the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue.” Obviously, he immediately recognized the sudden savagery as more than just a terrific device for scaring the yell out of people. The sequence also allowed him to pull the rug, and then the floor, out from under the audience. 

Ever since Hitchcock opened this trap door, dozens of other filmmakers have tried, with mixed success, to match the Master of Suspense in narrative duplicity. (The Crying Game, The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects are only the most obvious examples.) And yet, as good or great as these other films might be, they cannot match the master’s work. Two generations after its premiere, Psycho continues to loom imposingly large in our collective pop-culture conscious. So much so, in fact, that Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake never really had a chance to be judged on its own dubious merits, not even by people who never saw the original. Since everybody already knows what happens in Psycho, a shot-by-shot reprise isn’t merely redundant – it’s pointless.

For better or worse, Psycho is the title most people think about when they hear Hitchcock’s name. The association is more than a little ironic — in many respects, the film is the least typical of Hitchcock’s works — but maybe inevitable. The Master of Suspense prided himself on his ability to manipulate audiences. And he was never more masterful than when he checked us into the Bates Motel.

(By the way: The late Anthony Perkins once told me that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t always live up to his reputation as a steadfast control freak. But maybe his experience with Hitchcock on Psycho was the exception that proves the rule? You can decide for yourself after reading this.)

The classic Saturday Night Live sketch I really wanted to see during the 40th anniversary show

"I'm Norman Bates from The Norman Bates School of Motel Management..." Anthony Perkins once told me how much he loved doing this sketch. And his delight is obvious, even as he plays it perfectly straight. Well, perhaps "straight" isn't precisely the correct term to use in this context, but you get the idea.

Flashback: Anthony Perkins on making Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock

As Fox Searchlight prepares to launch Hitchcock in this year's Oscar race with a world premiere screening at the AFI Fest, I thought it might be a good time to offer as prelude to the film -- which deals with the making of Psycho, and stars Anthony Hopkins as the Master of Suspense -- this link to an interview I did years ago with Anthony Perkins (played in Hitchcock by James D'Arcy), who had some fascinating things to say about becoming Norman Bates.

Additional dialogue: Anthony Perkins on Psycho

While preparing to introduce Psycho this Wednesday as a Culture Map Night at the Movies offering at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks, I've been reminded of how ambivalent Anthony Perkins felt about being typecast by the role of a lifetime: Norman Bates, the boyishly shy motelkeeper who loved his mother not wisely but far too well. Indeed, for more than a decade after he starred in the film, he deeply resented the lasting legacy of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterwork.

During this period, it should be noted, Perkins enjoyed a wide range of roles on Broadway, playing leads in The Star-Spangled Girl, Equus and Romantic Comedy. In films, however, he usually was hired to play some variety of neurotic, psychotic or arrested adolescent, most notably in The Fool Killer (1965), WUSA (1970), the cult-fave Pretty Poison  (1968) and (opposite no less a leading lady than Diana Ross) Mahogany (1975). It was almost enough to drive him – well, psycho.

It required a serious attitude adjustment on his part – and the encouragement of his supportive wife, photographer Berry Berenson – for Perkins to fully appreciate the upside of achieving immortality in a classic movie. By the mid-1970s, he was ready to embrace his notoriety, and even mock himself in a classic Saturday Night Live sketch. (“Here at the Norman Bates School of Motel Management….”) By 1983, three years after Hitchcock’s death, he was willing to re-open the Bates Motel in Psycho II.Two years later, he took full control of his destiny as director and star of Psycho III.

Perkins, who died of AIDS in 1992, seldom discussed his private life or sexual proclivities with interviewers. In the 1980s, however, he offered some astonishingly candid revelations in a People magazine profile. The son of film and stage actor Osgood Perkins, he was raised by his smotheringly protective mother after his father died when Anthony was 5. Inadvertently, she aroused ambivalent, sexually charged feelings in her son, feelings often accompanied by pangs of Oedipal guilt. In later years, Perkins told People, he was emotionally ill-equipped to sustain relationships with women. (That changed in 1971, he claimed, when he met Berry – who, in a horrible twist of fate, eventually died aboard one of the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.) On the other hand, Perkins’ traumatic childhood may have helped to make him a true soul mate of The Master of Suspense.

Perkins addressed the latter issue, among others, during a 1985 interview with me at his Universal Pictures production office shortly before he started work on Psycho III.

Q: Alfred Hitchcock once said actors should be treated like cattle. How do you think he would feel about cattle taking over the corral as directors?

A: That’s a good question. Actually, when we made the first Psycho, he was tremendously on my side with everything that I tried to bring to the picture. He encouraged my co-operation and collaboration with him at every turn. And I know that was not his well-known way of being. So maybe there was something between the two of us that he responded to. Or maybe he simply was tired of hearing what a dictator he appeared to be, and how actors resented his lack of communication.

Q: Do you think he may have seen a little bit of himself in you? According to Donald Spoto’s biography, The Dark Side of Genius, Hitchcock also had to contend with ambivalent feelings about a domineering mother.

A: That’s an inventive idea. I hate speculative answers, but I like that as a theory. It’s possible, I suppose. But how will we ever know? I certainly have wondered why he was so kind to me, and would accept my suggestions. It was strange: He wouldn’t even be curious about what changes I wanted to make. He’d say, “Enchant me on the set.” He didn’t want to know about them before.

At one point, when we were filming the scene where Norman finds Marion Crane’s body in the bathroom, I jump back and sort of huddle against the door. Well, when I did it the first time, a picture fell off the wall, and hit the floor. Hitch was setting something else up, so I said, “Look, this bird picture fell off the wall. Why don’t we include that? We could even do an insert shot of this picture hitting the floor…?” And suddenly, that got the entire set quiet. Because it’s one thing to fool around with the dialogue, or do your own clothes. But when you tell The Master of Suspense to shoot an insert, you may be sticking your head into the lion’s mouth.

But all he said was “Oh, lovely. We’ll do that.” So, to answer your question: Yes, it was spooky how far he went with me. And I, of course, never tried to take advantage of his generosity.

Q: Do you know why he cast you as Norman Bates?

A: Well, Hitchcock was unique in those days – and probably in these days as well. He never used to cast actors from readings or auditions of any kind. He cast them from seeing them in other pictures and previous roles. That was his way. He’d seen me in Fear Strikes Out (1957), in which I played Jim Piersall – the baseball player who had a nervous breakdown. So, by the time of my first meeting with him, I already more or less had the part.

But I didn’t realize that he would be so relaxed to the point of where he would pull $100 out of his pocket and say, “Here, now that we’ve talked, I have to be on to some other business. But why don’t you go down to a store and buy what you think Norman Bates would wear, and give it to the wardrobe man? Those can be your costumes.” I thought that was awfully good of him to trust me that way, first of all. And second of all, it was good of him to demonstrate that trust, not by just saying “I’m sure you’re gonna be wonderful, and I’m looking forward to this,” but by doing something pragmatic and evidential of his trust.

I immediately went out and bought $100 worth of – well, I don’t want to say low-class stuff. But it was definitely the slouchy early ’60s look. And Hitchcock barely looked at it when I returned with it.

Q: Despite his actions, Norman had always remained an oddly sympathetic character. Why do you think that’s so?

A: Well, I think one of the things that made the first Psycho an enduring film is that Norman’s crimes were always committed out of love, out of an excess of love, rather than an excess of hate. Norman never hated anyone. And he’s not a person who works from the emotion of hate, or even responds to it. So I think that is one thing that has kept audiences kind of on Norman’s side, because they realize he’s been pushed to these extremes out of love. Also, it’s because Hitchcock had the brainstorm to cast the role not as it was written in the original Robert Bloch novel, as an older, overweight, disconsolate sort of half-stupefied man. Instead, he made Norman a younger, more sympathetic character. I think that was a very intelligent thing for him to do.

Look, over the years, maybe tens of thousands of people have come up to me in airports and theater lobbies and hotel lobbies and restaurants. And no one has ever walked up to me with anything but a smile. That’s because they found Norman was someone they could warm up to. No one has ever seen me and cried, “Oh, my God! It’s Norman Bates!”

Q: Even so, weren’t you resentful for a long time at being so closely associated with Norman Bates? I have the impression you weren’t able to resign yourself to your image until well into the 1970s, when you spoofed Norman on Saturday Night Live.

A: I have definitely made peace with it. Years ago, my wife pointed out to me that the more resistance I had to the public association of me and Norman Bates – and vice-versa – the more people would come away from an encounter with me confirmed that their suspicions were correct. And from that very casual remark of hers on, it’s been very much easier for me to accept that people still literally say, “Hi, Norman,” when they meet me. Actually, it’s an honor to be associated with a movie that has lasted and gone on through a generation, and is still able to quicken the pulse. I think it’s great. I prefer that to walking down the street and having people say, “Oh, look, that’s… that’s… uhhhhh…”

Once Mad magazine has done you, and Saturday Night Live has done you, and once you’ve been anthologized in everything, and your sequences are shown to film schools – you’re just part of the national grain, that’s all.