1960 horror, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh;:
IMDb /
allmovie. Faced with
unbearable temptation, Marion Crane steals some money from her
employer and flees the city. Tired and wrung out, she stops for the
night at a motel…
I've reviewed the book before, so I won't repeat my points about
the actual story, but I think the zeitgeist of Western horror was
shifting as people who'd seen the real human horrors of industrial war
found themselves no longer chilled by a murderous ghost or a predatory
vampire. Instead, the next wave was human horror. (Which, of course,
one may not want to read about or watch at all; it's not usually my
sort of thing, any more than true-crime stories are. But this is a
film that's regarded as a classic, and I'd never seen it, so.)
As in the book, Marion Crane is a Fallen Woman and therefore by the
filmic standards of the day; she cannot have a happy ending. Even so,
one might fairly feel, her crime is a relatively minor one, and the
film goes out of its way to explain just how temptation overtook her;
perhaps it's Hitchcock pushing the Code, but he seems in part to be
saying that being murdered in the shower is perhaps a harsh punishment
considering the gravity of her actual offence. (But my goodness we get
so many leering shots of Vera Miles in her underwear; I can only
take so much "this is a bad person so you are allowed to perv on
them".) Unlike the book, the film's Norman is not shown as an
instantly repulsive individual (and a user of pornography, shock
horror); he manages to play at least slightly sympathetic, and only
creepy around the sides (for example, his over-familiarity and lack of
emotional regulation). Perkins has a hard acting job to do, and does
it well.
This may have been the first time a toilet was seen to be flushed in
an American mainstream film. It was still pretty rare to see them on
screen at all. That may be helpful calibration for how much of a shock
this film was to its original audience.
The thing that really spoils the film for me, though, is the ending,
in which a smug white man explains what's been going on all this time
(in a way that wasn't particularly consistent with 1960's psychiatric
understanding, never mind what's been learned since). In a more modern
idiom, the film would end with Sam and Lila stumbling out of the
cellar; the plot has finished, after all.
I can't love the film. It's exploitation, for all a Great Director is
doing it. But one must concede its compelling influence on horror
directors; so many of them have ripped off elements from this that
it's a useful piece of filmic literacy just to be able to spot them.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of
Memes.