To Perkins, Hitchcock confided, “I’ve always been able to predict the audience’s reaction. Here, I haven’t been able to.” With his movie provoking unexpectedly vocal screams and laughter, Hitchcock petitioned studio head Lew Wasserman to let him “remix” the film to keep those reactions from running roughshod over the dialogue. Referring to the scene that immediately followed Norman’s sinking Marion’s car in the swamp, Anthony Perkins recalled, “The entire scene in the hardware store [in which a woman is buying rat poison and Lila visits Sam] was practically inaudible because of the leftover howls from the previous scene. Lew Wasserman talked Hitch out of putting more volume into some of the scenes, saying ‘You can’t do that. We’ve already made our prints.’”
Alfred Hitchcock undertook a full-scale publicity tour for Psycho only when he was convinced that he had a freak blockbuster on his hands. “Generally, once he finished a publicity tour,” Marshall Schlom explained, “Mr. Hitchcock was quite anxious to get moving into preproduction for his next film or working with a new writer. Psycho stopped everything else cold.” Relentlessly and adroitly, the director continued to promote the movie around the world. Wherever the movie played, the scene was the same: long lines, audiences on the knife-edge of screams and laughter, and Hitchcock stoking his newly minted legend as a master of shock.
To the picture’s domestic success—$9.5 million revenue from its first thirteen thousand theatrical engagements—was added another $6 million in international grosses. Only Ben-Hur made more money in America. But the location shooting, expensive cast, mammoth sets, and $15 million budget of that William Wyler epic meant it had cost about sixteen times what Psycho had. Hitchcock expected that his fellow filmmakers might acknowledge his achievement. “He gloried in economy,” cameraman Leonard South observed. “He made Psycho out of nothing and that’s what appealed to him.”
As for the first wave of mixed critical response to Psycho, Hitchcock had learned to take the “wait and see” attitude. Such previous Hitchcock films as Foreign Correspondent, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, North by Northwest, and Vertigo—today acknowledged as superior entries—had also won varied critical response at the time of their release. The “turnaround” phenomena that had occurred with several of his movies prompted the director to observe, “My movies go from failures to masterpieces, without ever being successes!” Such a reversal of critical opinion had never allowed Hitchcock to balm his ego with regard to such efforts as Jamaica Inn, The Paradine Case, or Stage Fright. Still, the director seemed to trust that Psycho would meet a happier end.
Screenwriter Joseph Stefano said: “Hitch was annoyed [that Psycho] had gotten some bad reviews based, he felt, on the fact he hadn’t let the critics see it in advance. In fact, one critic actually told me that’s why he panned the movie.” John Russell Taylor, film critic for the London Times from the early sixties through 1973, observed: “Many of the critics were alienated by being required to see the film with an ordinary audience, and being refused admission if they arrived late.” In 1978, Kenneth Tynan wrote in the London Observer: “Hitchcock’s major sin was to have antagonized the critics before they ever saw the picture. He had urged them by letter not to divulge the ending, and he had announced that nobody would be admitted to the cinema once the film had begun. Thus they went to the press show already huffy and affronted; and what they reviewed was not so much the film itself as the effect of its publicity on their egos.”
Janet Leigh, accustomed to more often being underestimated than attacked by critics, defended the Hitchcock screening strategy: “To have a few critics looking at the film in a screening room would have been a mistake.” Perhaps. Yet beyond any annoyance that critics might have felt toward Hitchcock’s promotional stunts, nothing the director had previously made had prepared critics or audiences for the black comedy or hair-raising Gothic horror of Psycho.
“A blot on an honorable career,” wrote Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who complained that Psycho was “… slowly paced for Mr. Hitchcock and given over to a lot of detail.” However, Crowther led a contingent of critics who would later revise their opinions. He ranked the movie on his ten best list of 1960 and, in 1965, praised Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as “a psychological thriller in the classic style of Psycho.’” Critic Wanda Hale, in a four-star review in the New York Daily News, found the film more to her liking: “The suspense builds up slowly but surely to an almost unbearable pitch of excitement. Anthony Perkins’ performance is the best of his career—Janet Leigh has never been better.”
Esquire critic Dwight MacDonald thought Psycho “merely one of those television shows padded out to two hours by adding pointless subplots and realistic detail” and believed it “a reflection of a most unpleasant mind, a mean, sly, sadistic little mind.” On the other hand, Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice judged Psycho as “[the] first American movie since Touch of Evil to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films.” Paul F. Buckley of the New York Herald Tribune found it “rather difficult to be amused at the forms insanity may take,” but added that the movie “keeps your attention like a snake-charmer.” Justin Gilbert of the New York Daily Mirror thought the film was “played out perfectly,” the performances “excellent.” “This one is forked lightning,” Gilbert wrote, calling it “a scary startler, shake ‘n’ shock brand.” The Time reviewer was persuaded that he had seen “… one of the messiest, most nauseating murders ever filmed. At close range, the camera watches every twitch, gurgle, convulsion and hemorrhage in the process by which a living human becomes a corpse.” The following year, the same magazine ranked William Castle’s Homicidal—a hilariously hambone, poor man’s Psycho—on its top ten. By 1966, Time had revised its opinion and now described Psycho as “superlative” and “masterly.”
When Psycho stormed through Europe and South America in September and October, critical opinion was also divided. Across two continents and over three months, Hitchcock, along with Paramount vice-president Jerry Pickman and advertising and publicity chief Martin Davis touted his new nerve-jangler. The first stop on the publicity tour was England, where he told an English journalist, “People are going to be shocked when they see my new picture. There are some horrible goings on. It isn’t anything like my other films. People are always saying I fall back on the old theme—the average man caught up in bizarre situations. This will show them.”
Before British censors rated the film with an “X” Certificate, they sliced a shot of Anthony Perkins studying his bloodstained hands in the bathroom. Also deleted were six frames of Mother’s taking a knife to Detective Arbogast at the foot of the stairs. [Audiences in some American cities, thanks to cuts demanded by the National Legion of Decency, never saw those shots either]. Perhaps, as some have observed, the judgment of some critics toward Hitchcock’s film may have been skewed not only because they had been invited to a showing with the paying public but also because they had to wade through thirty-five minutes of short subjects and preview trailers. “One of the most vile and disgusting films ever made,” wrote one critic. The scribe for Sight and Sound declared, “Psycho comes nearer to attaining an exhilarating balance between content and style than anything Hitchcock has done in years,” but called it “a very minor work.” V. F. Perkins in Oxford Opinion, perhaps to chide his colleague prescribed a second viewing: “The first time it is only a splendid entertainment, a ‘very minor film’ in fact. But when one can no longer be distracted from the characters by an irrelevant ‘mystery’ Psycho becomes immeasurably rewarding as well as much more thrilling.” The same critic particularly singled out as “spectacularly brilliant” the acting of Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, and Martin Balsam and the “layers of tension” Hitchcock was able to tease out of their scenes together. “Even Tennessee Williams is here outclassed,” wrote the critic, “in the business of demonstrating the presence of something unspoken.” V. F. Perkins concluded that the subject matter of the movie was “fit only for a tragedian. And that is what Hitchcock fina
lly shows himself to be.”
The critic for the Daily Express headlined his review “Murder in the Bathtub and Boredom in the Stalls” and wrote, “It is sad to see a really big man make a fool of himself.” Another reviewer observed: “When the thrill king starts dredging this kind of cesspool, it’s time for him to abdicate.” The review from the delightfully acidic C.A. Lejeune promised not to give away the ending “for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn’t stop to see it. Your edict may keep me out of the theater, my dear Hitchcock, but I’m hanged if it will keep me in.” Wrote a critic for Cahiers du Cinema, “This film is constructed like Dante’s Inferno, in concentric circles that get narrower and narrower and deeper and deeper. Every scene is a lesson in direction by its precision, its sharpness, its efficacy, but also its beauty. Perhaps Hitchcock half-abandons himself in this film; or why, between the images of Psycho, did I believe that I overheard the secrets of a man of sixty?”
Undoubtedly to the relief of Hitchcock, surprisingly few critics—even the French—commented upon the obvious debt that Psycho owed to Les Diaboliques. The director tended to claim haughty indifference toward the work of his American contemporaries. Apparently, he felt freer in adapting the best moves of a European contemporary. Similarities between Les Diaboliques and Psycho range from surface matters—black-and-white cinematography; the grubby milieu of rented rooms and humdrum jobs; the merciless, despairing tone and careworn characters; the matching hairdos of Janet Leigh and Simone Signoret—to thematic, visual, and structural motifs. For example, like heroines Nicole Horner and Christina Delasalle in Les Diaboliques, the desperate, impulsive Marion Crane precipitates her mistaking someone else’s cash as a way out of her “private trap.” In the “second act” of both films, a soiled, Everyman-type detective—Inspector Fichet (Charles Vanel) in the earlier film, Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) in the later—arrives to bedevil the lead characters. Like Clouzot with his corpse in the bathtub, Hitchcock stages his central, horrific murder set piece in a shower. The scheming heroines in Les Diaboliques conceal a corpse in a fetid swimming pool; Psycho provides Norman Bates with a hungry, convenient swamp. Les Diaboliques features big close-ups of a gulping Adam’s apple (in the latter movie, Norman swallows the Kandy Korn when Arbogast interrogates him) and also of a bathtub drain. And clearly, the raison d’être of both films appears to be the surprise, “twist” finale.
Even the pronouncements that Hitchcock and Clouzot made about their films sound a similar note. “I sought,” Clouzot observed, “only to amuse myself and the little child who sleeps in all our hearts—the child who hides her head under the bedcovers and begs, ‘Daddy, Daddy, frighten me.’” Hitchcock said: “Psycho is a film that was made with quite a sense of amusement on my part. To me, it’s a fun picture… It’s rather like taking [the audience] through the haunted house at the fairground or the roller-coaster.”
Drawing such comparisons between films and their makers would have required that mainstream critics look more analytically than was the style of the day at “genre” or mass entertainment films. It would also have required that critics take with a grain of salt the public pronouncements such entertainers as Hitchcock made about their work. As critic Robin Wood observed of Hitchcock’s jolly, intellectually elusive public persona in 1965: “Never trust the artist, trust the tale.” Wood remarked of Hitchcock’s press statements about the “fun” aspects of Psycho: “This, needless to say, must not affect one’s estimate of the film itself. For the maker of Psycho to regard it as a ‘fun’ picture can be taken as his means of preserving his sanity; for the critic to do so—and to give it his approval on these grounds—is quite unpardonable. Hitchcock … is a much greater artist than he knows.”
Yet at the time of the release of Psycho, deep-focus critical examinations of popular “entertainment” movies had not yet come into vogue. In the early sixties, critic Andrew Sarris adapted and imported to America the politique des auteurs, or auteur theory, first espoused in Paris by Francois Truffaut in 1954. Truffaut and such other contributors to Cahiers du Cinema as Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol—each of whom would soon become filmmakers themselves—viewed the director as the “author” of the film. True auteur status was conferred only upon the director whose filmmaking style, strong personality, and preoccupations stamped movie after movie. Thus, Cahiers critics and their acolytes mined such films as Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, John Ford’s The Searchers, or Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo for nuance, theme, symbolism, and subtext as carefully as other critics might examine the offerings of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, or Alain Resnais. As Vincent Canby summed it up in the New York Times, “In the Cahiers credo, if an apple could inspire a great painting, a murder mystery—a Laura or Psycho or The Lady from Shanghai—could be a great film.”
In 1957, Rohmer and Chabrol published in France the first book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock. The soon-to-be directors examined Hitchcock’s first forty-four films, with special attention to his Catholicism and on such recurring motifs as the “transfer of guilt” between an “innocent” hero and a “less innocent” antihero or heroine. With the subsequent publication in 1966 by Truffaut of his book-length conversations with Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense could hope for no more culturally impeccable a trio of champions. Truffaut, who had made a striking transition from theorist to director, was already acclaimed as a leader of the French “New Wave” for such films as The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim. Truffaut had also helped make it possible for Jean-Luc Godard to do Breathless, another milestone of the new filmmaking movement. Such other films as Hiroshima, Mon Amour and The Lovers, from Cahiers du Cinema-influenced directors, made the “New Wave” filmmakers the toasts of the festival circuit. Truffaut argued persuasively for taking Hitchcock seriously as an artist. By the time of the publication Hitchcock/Truffaut, Psycho had been declared a work of art by many observers and Hitchcock a cult figurehead. Truffaut left to such other critics as Peter Bogdanovich, John Russell Taylor, and Robin Wood the task of elevating Hitchcock to an icon.
Yet in 1960, most of the worldwide pop-cultural and critical enshrinement for the movie and its director still lay several years ahead. For the time being, however, Hitchcock might balm any pain he felt from the stings of the critics with thoughts of the extraordinary box-office takings. In Colombia, where the movie was called Psicosis, records toppled as they did throughout South America, Portugal, Italy, Germany, India, and China. In Paris, where it was called Psychose, the movie earned $34,000 in five days, prompting a jubilant exhibitor to cable Paramount that it “far exceed[ed] anything we have ever seen.”
With the mixed notices for Hitchcock came an almost unilateral dismissal of the source novel by Robert Bloch. Many observers judged the book vastly inferior to the screenplay by Joseph Stefano. Observed Bloch, who continues to take exception to the charges decades later: “Most film ‘historians,’ particularly the British, wrote that Psycho was a short story in a cult magazine or that Hitchcock took this little thing and blew it up into something bigger. The inference being that he introduced all the things that seemed to make the film work—killing the heroine early in the story, killing her off in the shower, taxidermy—when, of course, they’re all in the book.”
What appeared to offend Bloch even more was his perception that screenwriter Stefano had done little to discourage the belief that he was the author of Psycho. In Who’s Who in America, the biographical entry for Mr. Stefano lists him as author of the “original screenplay” for Psycho, as well as of The Naked Edge (1961), a thriller directed by Michael Anderson and starring Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr. The latter is actually based on First Train to Babylon by Max Erlich. The Naked Edge was also promoted with the line “Only the man who wrote Psycho could write The Naked Edge.” In 1969, Universal advertised Eye of the Cat, based on a Stefano screenplay, with a similar tag line.
Although Hitchcock could never be accused of magnanimity in the matter o
f credit, there is some suggestion that he shared the umbrage felt by Bloch. The director told interviewer Charles Higham, “The screenplay writer contributed dialogue mostly, no ideas.” Robert Bloch said, “That Hitch himself began to give me credit for the thing was kind. Had I [written] the script, I would have known I couldn’t have had a Rod Steiger-type up there on the screen. That would have been about as ‘surprising’ as having Flora Robson puttering around and revealing her—gasp!—as the killer in the final reel. To put in a red herring by making Norman a younger, more personable man was visually correct and worked perfectly. I started the novel with Norman without going to an interlude between the heroine and her boyfriend. He also expanded the trip to the motel and introduced the possible pursuer in the form of the state trooper. Other than that, he stuck very, very closely to the novel. It’s all there, right down to the final sentence, ‘I wouldn’t even harm a fly.’”
World audiences saw slightly different versions of the picture, depending upon local censors. On November 21, censors in Singapore shortened the stabbing of Detective Arbogast and excised the second shot of the mummified corpse of Mrs. Bates. British censors, having already eliminated the shots of Norman staring at his bloodstained hands while cleaning up after the murder of Marion, made further cuts in dialogue. Despite these variations, Psycho continued to pack theaters throughout the summer and into the fall of 1960. Repeat business was strong. In the parlance of the industry, the picture had “legs.” On his return from Europe, Hitchcock received from Paramount a check for the first-quarter returns: $2.5 million. Hitchcock dutifully filed and categorized the more coherent or amusing of the thousands of letters he received about the movie. Among the letters were several from critic Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who had originally called the movie “a blot” on Hitchcock’s career. As Psycho developed into a cultural phenomenon, Crowther revised his judgment in print and called Hitchcock’s movie a worthy successor to Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques. By the time of Crowther’s August 28, 1960, piece in the Times, the critic raised his voice with those defending Psycho against censorship and outright banning. Surely Hitchcock might have savored the irony.
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho Page 19