First up this week is Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece about one woman's horrific stay at the Bates Motel after a theft. The movie opens on Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and her boyfriend Sam Loomis (John Gavin), having a fling before she has to go to work. She has decided this'll be the last time they meet in secret, with him occasionally coming down, and he finally agrees to a real relationship. Marion suggests they get married, but both of them know their debts are currently too deep to do so. She heads to work in a hurry, returning just before her boss George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor), who is meeting a client and enters as her friend tells her of missed calls. Lowery introduced Tom Cassidy (Frank Albertson), who is buying a $40,000 house for his daughter's wedding present, flirting with Marion by flaunting his cash and deciding to unsafely do the transaction entirely right then. Cassidy gives up after Lowery steps in, jabbing at the boss's hidden alcohol, and Lowery tells Marion to immediately put Cassidy's money in a safe deposit box. Marion puts the money in her purse, and with Cassidy's involvement, convinces Lowery to let her go home to sleep off her headache. In actuality, she decides to steal the money after packing her bags, and drives off imagining the conversation she'll have with Sam once they're together. To her misfortune, Lowery sees her at a stoplight, and she becomes paranoid when he does a double-take in confusion. She eventually pulls off to the side of the road to sleep, only for a highway patrolman to wake her up and ask why she's there. The nervous Marion says that she was tired the night before and slept there to avoid an accident, become more paranoid and anxious as the cop, asking simple questions, becomes suspicious about her strange behavior. After taking her license and checking her plates, the officer lets her go. He seems to follow for a time, increasing Marion's paranoia, but eventually takes a different path. Anxious about the officer having her plates, Marion pulls into an auto dealership to get a new car, noticing one with a California plate. The patrolman arrives and parks across the street while she reads a newspaper, watching as she talks to the dealer. She confuses the salesman with her rushed actions, immediately agreeing to trade her car for another and shrugging off the additional $700 payment. Suspicious that she stole the car, he notices her glance again at the cop, but lets her go to the bathroom, where she retrieves $700 from her purse. She gets in the car, noticing the cop now at the dealership, and tries to drive off. A worker stops her, as she forgot her stuff, and she has him hurriedly pack it up and leaves, leaving the men bewildered. Heading down the highway again, Marion's paranoia increases further as she imagines the cop talking to the salesman, as well as what her boss will say and do when she doesn't show up Monday. As she imagines Cassidy's frustration, she actually seems to become a bit gleeful and smug about the situation. It begins raining heavily, so Marion pulls over to stay at a place she finds call the Bates Motel, which is oddly empty. She notices a house out back where a female figure crosses a window, and gives her horn a honk, alerting the owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) to come down. He explains that business tanked because of the highway, and Marion, not wanting to leave evidence of herself, signs the register as "Marie Samuels." He gives her the first room and reveals she's only 15 miles from her destination and takes her to her room, where he behaves rather odd and nervously. Norman convinces her to join him for dinner and heads up to the house as she hides the stolen money in her newspaper, in the process hearing his mother (Virginia Gregg) shouting about not inviting in strange women. He soon returns with dinner and apologizes, saying his mother is having trouble tonight. She goes to her room but he suggests they eat in the office instead. He invites her back to the office parlor, which is full of stuffed birds. He starts conversation about birds, saying he likes them because they're passive. After explaining taxidermy, Norman says it takes up most of his time aside from running the motel and helping his mother. As a matter of fact, his mother is apparently his only friend, but he distracts from this by asking where she's going, which makes her nervous. Noticing that the rain let up, Norman says he believes we all have cages we can never escape from, revealing he's been in one since birth. He seems bothered when she suggests he could leave, stating that although he occasionally wants to, she is sick and needs him. When Marion suggests he put her away somewhere, he becomes angry and snaps at her apologies, assuring her that his mother is harmless; she simply "Goes a little mad sometimes." Marion gets up to lave, having decided to go back and make things right, but slips up by giving her real last name, which he notices by checking the register. Norman then gives us a closer look at a disturbed mind: he removes a painting from the wall adjacent to her room, revealing a peephole, which he uses to spy on Marion and masturbate as she strips. Afterward, he replaces the painting and leaves for the house, where he seems unable to bring himself to go upstairs with his mother. Back at the hotel, Marion counts up what she owes from the stolen money, then rips up her paper and flushes it down the toilet. While showering, however, an elderly woman enters the room and rips back the shower curtain before brutally stabbing Marion repeatedly in one of the most famous death scenes on film. The woman then runs away, and back at the house we hear Norman react in horror upon learning what his mother has done. Horrified upon seeing Marion's body, Norman retrieves a mop and cleans the bathroom, leaving the corpse on the shower curtain. With the cleaning done, Norman then wraps Marion's body in the shower curtain and puts her in her car's trunk, along with all of her belongs, including the money. He then drives the car to a nearby swamp, where he anxiously waits until it sinks, bringing a smile to his face. Over in Fairvale, where Marion was going, Sam is writing her a letter suggesting they get married despite all the debt when her sister Lila (Vera Miles) comes in. He is confused as she asks about Marion, and only becomes more frustrated when Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) arrives as well, with questions of his own. Arbogast confirms that Marion is suspected of having stolen $40,000 but assures them that they only want the money back; there will be no prosecution. Sam doesn't know where Marion could be, so Arbogast, certain that Marion came here, sets out to pick up leads. He finally finds himself at the Bates Motel, where Norman explains the motel's poor placement relating to the highway and invites him into the office. Arbogast asks about Marion, and Norman backs himself into a corner by claiming no one had been there for weeks, only for Arbogast to match Marion's writing to the name she wrote in the register. As Arbogast continues his questioning, Norman's lies unravel and he becomes stuttery and anxious, finally suggesting Arbogast check all the rooms with him to be sure Marion's not still there. Outside, Arbogast sees Norman's mother in the window and asks about her, and in attempting to keep the detective out, Norman says his mother encountered Marion. Finally through with the questioning, Norman denies him access to the house, so Arbogast leaves. The detective heads to a payphone where he calls someone to report the situation, saying he feels there's more to the story than Norman is letting on so he plans to head back and speak with Norman's mother. He indeed returns, only to find the motel empty, and goes up to the quiet house, easily getting inside. Going upstairs, he is caught off guard when Norman's mother runs out and stabs him, knocking him down the stairs where she butchers him. With Arbogast gone, it's all up to Sam and Lila to find out what happened without facing the wrath of Norman's mother. Psycho is one of those classic movies that is a staple for horror fans, right from the mind of Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense.
Created on a low-budget, as many surprise masterpieces are, this movie expertly creates a sense of paranoia throughout both halves with Marion and Norman. In the first half of the movie, Marion's decision to steal Cassidy's money leads to a situation anyone would recognize if they're not used to doing anything bad. Obviously there are more stakes here since she has committed a great crime, but viewers can relate to Marion sensing danger at every turn solely because she's afraid to get caught, when in reality she would be just fine if she were calm. She's initially confident in her actions until she sees her boss on the street, at which point she starts assuming the worst, imagining getting caught. This becomes more troublesome after the cop finds her, as her assumption that she has been found out leads to her acting nervously, which the cop naturally notices. Despite him having no knowledge of her crime, her demand that he hurry things along so she can leave and being difficult is what gets the cop on her tail. She repeats these actions later with the car salesman, which makes her more suspicious to both him and the officer, and of course would give people leads if they found out about the theft and tried to track her down. As with other Hitchcock films, this essentially makes Marion her own worst enemy for a time as her mind deteriorates and betrays her with her actions. Having this paranoia while she's on the run provides tension to every scene as viewers wonder if she'll get caught at any minute. This is then turned around when Marion decides to go back, as you wonder what could possibly happen now. Norman causes an unnerving feeling then, by spying on her, and the shower scene shows us her end and the start of another plot. This aspect of the movie makes it stand out from other films, due to it destroying your expectations of where things will go. Janet Leigh was a selling point of the movie, and though she's the main character, she is suddenly killed off halfway through and the focus switches to Norman. This is rather unprecedented, as in a way you're then having to get used to an entirely new plot: suddenly the theft doesn't really matter, other than it being the reason people come looking for Marion. The characters at the start, like Cassidy and Lowery, are completely irrelevant since the focus is on Norman's desire to protect his mother at all costs. By doing this, the movie also continues the previous use of tension, as the nervous Norman is no better at trying to hide what happened than Marion was. The technical aspects like shot composition are also genius, of course, and I didn't notice some of the more important things until an event I attended in college: the dinner scene between Marion and Norman. Here, Marion is constantly surrounded by stuffed birds that are more passive, like Norman mentioned, while he is often shown with birds of prey around him. This is a subtle way of showing the danger Marion is surrounded by, along with Norman's sensitivity about his mother. The shower scene isn't even gratuitous; there are many rapid cuts between the knife, which simply comes down, and shots of Marion and the blood swirling down the drain. Obviously at the time this movie was released, rules were much stricter on what could be shown, considering that now, since in the Saw franchise you can see people getting disemboweled directly. In a way, this, along with technological limitations, makes this and Arbogast's death look rather silly, but for the time they were incredibly well done and got the job done. Even with some of it dated, Psycho stands as an excellent film with a lot of tension and paranoia-based fear from the master of suspense.
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