Latest / All The Right Movies / Psycho (1960) | Ep. 79 - Part 1

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Psycho (1960) | Ep. 79 - Part 1 · All The Right Movies

• 0:06
  Cycle was released in 1960 as one of Alfred Hitchcock's
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  greatest triumphs, a low budget experiment that became an all
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  time classic. The film is the story of Marion
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  Crane $40,000 In the fateful Mortal, she checks into one
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  stormy California night. My name is John, and the guys
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  who wouldn't even harm a family are Matt.
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  Let's put it this way, she might have fooled me, but she didn't
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  fool my mother. And Westie.
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  Her son is a poor substitute for a lover.
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  It's Fairfield, CA and the ATRM are checking in to talk toilets,
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  showers and the Bates Motel. 12 cabins, 12 vacancies.
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  What could possibly go wrong? Hello and welcome to all the
• 1:03
  right movies where we all go a little mad sometimes as we tell
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  the story of Hollywood one film at a time and this time out it
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  is an absolute all timer. Isn't it?
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  Certainly is. Hitchcock screeching strings.
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  The madness of Mother. Strap in, we're telling you the
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  story behind Psycho. Massive.
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  Yeah. Huge.
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  Before we pull off the highway, though, should we talk about our
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  own little roadside operation? Let's do that, yes?
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  Not quite as creepy, hopefully. It's.
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  Perfectly safe. I mean, the way you've described
• 1:34
  it is, let's be honest. Little roadside operation.
• 1:39
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• 1:42
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• 1:50
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• 2:04
  Wow, loads more as well. So to find out more, visit
• 2:07
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• 2:11
  Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
• 2:13
  Yes you can. A better investment than $40,000
• 2:16
  in an envelope even. Oh yeah, that's much better.
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  So back to today though, it is psycho.
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  You put this one up, Matt. So why are we talking about it?
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  I mean, first of all, this is only the second time we've
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  covered Hitchcock, so if we're going to cover them again, where
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  else would we go but Psycho? Because how many films can you
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  genuinely say it just completely ripped up the real book of what
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  to expect? Because this is certainly one of
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  them for so many reasons. We'll get into cinema was just
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  never the same after this one. And it's a film where even if
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  you haven't seen it, you have seen it because it influences
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  everywhere. The music, the shower scene,
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  Norman Bates, we all know about this one.
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  And ultimately, John, to be honest, we don't even need the
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  section why we talked about Psycho, because it's Psycho.
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  Yeah, well, I'll just skip it then, should I?
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  Yeah. Yeah, skip it.
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  That miles easier. Just three 10s.
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  That's it. Wrap it up.
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  You'll find out. Sure, just whatever.
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  Yeah, I mean, this is one of those films that probably, like
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  a lot of people, I knew Lords about before I ever saw it, knew
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  about Norman Bates, his mother, the motel, the shower,
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  obviously. And when I did first watch it,
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  like in my 20s, I think it kind of felt like watching a museum
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  piece in some ways. All these images that I knew
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  that were just like burned in the popular culture.
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  I've also read the source material as well, the original
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  novel. But it's the movie that everyone
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  knows, obviously. And I mean, in terms of status
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  of a film, they say it's about as big as it gets.
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  One of Hollywood's most legendary directors at the peak
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  of his powers, possibly his most acclaimed film, massively
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  influential. One of the most famous single
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  scenes to ever come out of Hollywood and plenty of others
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  in there as well. And one of the most famous
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  villains. And for us, a great one to go
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  behind the scenes on because how Hitchcock came to be involved
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  and then the craft behind what he did.
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  It's all fascinating and I've no doubt we're going to have some
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  huge opinions on this as well, so if all that's your thing,
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  stick around for it. Definitely.
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  And Westie, how about you and Psycho?
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  Very similar to you guys. I'm just going to echo the
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  statements to be totally fair. I mean, it was huge film.
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  I watched this one when I was about 9 or 10 I think.
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  Wow, get this on cycles on right.
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  Great. And I had just remember vividly
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  just trying to guess what was going on, guess who, who was
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  going to be the psycho. And it was just like a really
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  exciting film for us to watch at that age.
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  I'd seen like Night of the Living Dead, I think around
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  about the same time. So I was like the black and
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  white films and that kind of old feel to it.
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  But I mean, it is so influential.
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  It is so brilliant. It is so accomplished.
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  It is so confident. I mean, Hitchcock's known for
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  his suspense in his horror work. This is his first horror film.
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  It's just a real RIP roar of a ride.
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  It's two films in one, if you're into that.
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  It's it's just it's got everything.
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  It's absolutely fantastic piece of work.
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  So Psycho was produced by Chamelee Productions,
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  distributed by Paramount Pictures, and released on
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  September the 8th, 1960. Filmed at Universal Studios and
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  on location around California and Phoenix, AZ.
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  It was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, written by Joseph
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  Stefano, based on Robert Block's novel of the same name, and
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  stars Janet Lee as Marion Crane, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates,
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  Vera Miles as Lila Crane, John Governors, Sam Loomis and Martin
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  Balsam as Milton Arborgast. Arbo, Gassed, as I'll be calling
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  him. Arbo, Yeah.
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  I love that sheriff, he's great. Yeah, he's amazing.
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  Let's get checked in then, shall we?
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  Let's do it. Let's do it.
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  It's a Friday afternoon in Phoenix and $40,000 is about to
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  go missing. It's the beginning of Psycho.
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  The beginning. Psycho opens with one of the
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  most famous first acts in cinema.
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  We're going to be talking about the base motel and our
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  introduction to its proprietor, Norman.
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  But first, it's the heroine side of the story.
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  It is. So we begin in a hotel room with
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  real estate office worker Marian Crane on her lunch break with
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  boyfriend Sam Loomis. Marian steals $40,000 from her
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  boss as you do, hits the highway, is tailed by a cop and
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  buys a new motor. Yeah, an eventful opening for
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  Miss Crane, Matt. So let's start at the start,
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  should we? Let's do it.
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  I mean, yeah. I mean, first of all, that
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  credit sequence, it's like you're being assaulted by the
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  music straight away. And those visuals, that credit
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  sequence, you're just pummeled into the back of your signal.
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  Like, where is this going straight away at this pace?
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  And then you just follow that up with that elaborate camera, move
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  into the hotel room where we see Marian and Sam have been having
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  some afternoon delight. And I mean, Marian, she can lick
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  my stamps every day of the week. That's absolutely.
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  Fine. Didn't know where that was going
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  there. It's a.
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  Good job. He said it really quickly.
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  Just in case you have to put it out.
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  Yeah. But so you see, this would have
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  been so shocking for a 1960s audience.
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  I mean, that is practically full nudity by those standards back
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  then, Like in the having an extramarital affair.
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  Even if Sam is technically not with his wife.
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  This is scandalous stuff. And then considering the film's
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  title, it just leaves so many possibilities of where this
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  could go. I mean, Psycho, is that going to
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  be the wife? Is it Sam?
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  So much intrigue already. And considering the day that
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  comes up on screen, Friday, December 11th, is this
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  technically a Christmas film? I know.
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  Yeah. I think it could be.
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  Yeah. I mean, it's a stunning opening
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  shot, that Phoenix cityscape. The book actually starts with
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  Norman reading a book, getting shouted at by his mother.
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  But different medium, obviously. And Hitchcock does what he does
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  all the way through. He makes it cinematic with that
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  wide shot. But, yeah, the opening scene
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  between Marion and Sam in 1960, Right, Mark?
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  This had to be one of the sexiest openers ever, surely?
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  It's sizzling. But then narratively, it's all
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  about setting up Marion's motivations.
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  I think because Sam's broke, he can't marry her.
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  He only meets her in cheap hotels on lunch breaks.
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  Sleazy fella. So when the $40,000 turns up
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  later, you kind of get why she do what she does.
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  And when that happens back at the office, Tom Cassidy, the guy
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  with the 40K, now he's a sleazy fella.
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  Stinks. Marion's got no time for his
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  shit. No, none at all.
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  She goes to say Larry, your boss to tell him she's poorly and
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  going home. And Tom, just like, interrupts
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  Larry and says, yeah, she can go.
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  What's it got to do with him? Yeah.
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  I'm taking him out drinking, he owns the place.
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  The only thing is what Marian says.
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  I'm going to spend this weekend in bed.
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  I can't believe Tom doesn't make some sleazeball comments about
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  it. She doesn't give them time to
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  straight out the door. But it's all great set up.
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  In 2 scenes we get Marian's love life, her professional life, a
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  situation and a motivation for taking the money.
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  It's great, like tight writing and always engaging as well.
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  And she's miserable everywhere. Nobody knows.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And those animated opening
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  credit sequence that was created by Saul Bass, the legendary
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  Hollywood graphic designer. He'd already worked with
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  Hitchcock and done the credit sequences for Vertigo and North
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  by Northwest. And on Psycho.
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  Bass created the titles to animate in and out with what he
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  called a shredding effect, which he said was to represent a
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  stabbing knife. And also Norman split
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  personality. Brilliant that.
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  How great. All those credits.
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  It's often like a black screen. The first thing we hear are the
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  screeching strings on the score. I'm on edge before I've ever
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  even seen anything. Yeah.
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  And the titles by Boss. It's just music, words and some
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  fairly simple animations. But somehow it's like,
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  terrifying. Just brilliant work from Boss.
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  We'll come back to him quite a bit in this episode.
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  They couldn't get rid of him. He does a bit, yeah.
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  Direct loads, isn't he? Yeah, apparently.
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  Hitchcock originally wanted the opening shot to be a sweeping
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  helicopter shot flying over Phoenix.
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  It would zoom in from above the streets, through an open window
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  and right into the bedroom where Marion and Sam are on the bed.
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  The technology didn't exist at the time, though, so Hitchcock
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  and his Day P John L Russell had the idea to shooting in a series
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  of dissolves getting closer to the hotel, which was the
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  Jefferson Hotel in Phoenix. Yeah, still works well, doesn't
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  it? Of course it does.
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  Incredible. It's a bit jittery, but I mean,
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  I'm not going to say anything about that.
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  It's 1960. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it is a bit,
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  although Gus Van Zandt pulled off in his 1998 remake, so
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  better. Obviously only thing he did pull
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  off in the remake. Also, on that opening shot, I
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  love the title cards of location and date, like sliding in and
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  out. Yeah.
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  And then the pan and zoom into the hotel window.
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  Surely that's inspired by the opening of last weekend by Billy
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  Wilder. It was so similar.
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  Yeah. Yeah.
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  Yeah, and one of Hitchcock's famous trademarks as a director
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  was that he usually appeared somewhere in his films in the
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  small cameo. And as Camio, he comes at the
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  start of the scene in Marion's office.
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  We've mentioned when Marion walks in, we see Hitchcock
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  through the window, standing on the pavement outside.
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  We do. He's wearing a cowboy hat like
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  he does. Yeah, ludicrous.
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  In there. That's great, isn't he?
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  Yeah. But so an interview with
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  Hitchcock where he said by this point in his career, people were
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  always looking for the cameo, so he'd always do it early just to
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  get it out of the way and stop distracting people from, like,
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  the narrative. Fair enough.
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  Yeah. Yeah.
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  So he's straight in. There's no way else he could
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  possibly fit in this film, let's be honest.
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  There's there's really no, no. Unless he's like buying a car or
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  something in the background. But then even at that point the
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  tensions up, isn't it? So yeah, yeah, it's the right
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  place. Yeah, it absolutely is.
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  And we see a second Hitchcock cameo in the same office scene,
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  but it's not Alfred this time. His daughter Patricia plays
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  Marion's Co worker Caroline. She does his only child and she
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  says about Tom. He was flirting with you.
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  I guess he must have known it as my wedding ring.
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  That's. Brilliant.
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  The confidence. Yeah, obviously I'm.
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  I'm gorgeous. Yeah, because I'm married.
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  You're not. Yeah.
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  Yeah. That's amazing.
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  I love her confidence. She was also in Hitchcock, Stage
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  Fright and strangers are trained Patricia three of his films.
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  Yes, yeah. In the opening scene with Sam,
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  we see Marian is wearing a white bra, then gets dressed in an all
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  white outfit with a white handbag.
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  But after she steals the money, we see her at home getting ready
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  to leave and she's dressed in a black bra with darker outfit.
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  The costume supervisor was Helen Colbig and she said the colour
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  change was to signify Marian's shift from innocence to being a
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  criminal, which is brilliant. Love that.
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  Subtle, isn't it? George Lucas.
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Black and white foam as well,
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  really subtle, no grey area. But that scene in Marion, how
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  good are the visuals? I mean, John Lee and I brought,
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  obviously, but we panned down from Marion to reveal the
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  $40,000 on the bed. So she's kept it and then away
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  to the left to show her packed suitcase.
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  So she's doing one. Love that in one shot.
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  Yeah, he does that all the way through the film, doesn't he?
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  He does. It's very similar one for that,
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  yeah, Yeah. So straight after that, she's
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  taking the money, she's on the run, and she's got to ditch this
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  car because there's a lovely moment when that cop turns up
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  and there's a little bit of back and forth.
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  But I love the kind of cat and mouse.
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  He's in the rearview mirror. He's following her.
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  She's got to get out of there. How it says Arizona on her
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  license plate, and he just turns off the road just at the right
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  time. Yeah, it's kind of tension
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  building. I love that.
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  But it's the back and forth here.
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  I mean, California, Charlie, what a boy.
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  What a name. He's some boys.
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  He just leans out of the office with his Bobo tire.
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  Who are you going to say? He's great?
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  Absolutely love him. But I love the way she gets the
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  newspaper she's reading that that's what's going to hide the
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  money in later on. So it's ramping up the paranoia.
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  That's really good. Do anything you have in mind.
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  You're a woman, you're going to it's like, well, come on, it's a
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  bit forward straight away, but she is in this hurry and it's
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  great because you've got the cop then turns up and he's standing
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  on the other side of the street. And when I watched this and I
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  was like 9 or 10 years old, I was like, that's him, that's the
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  psycho, that's the cop there. He's going to going to start
• 13:01
  killing everybody. It's going to be like maniac
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  cop, which I've seen around the same time I think, which is
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  insane. It's great because you there is
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  this tension ramp domain. She does buy that car incredibly
• 13:10
  quickly. I mean, she gets a new 1 + 700
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  dollars. Then it's just these like,
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  little questions that really work.
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  It's kind of, can you prove this car is yours?
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  Yes, I've got everything. And you just think, well, this
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  is obviously so suspicious, but she explains her way out of it
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  perfectly. Is it not all right to just be
• 13:24
  in a hurry and get another car? Like what?
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  What's the problem? So yeah, but it's not normally
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  what would happen. Everything's just so guilty, but
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  there's just no evidence, which I think is really brilliant
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  about this scene because you can't stop her.
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  But at the same time, you know that something is definitely
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  wrong. We know it's definitely wrong
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  because all these three guys line up when the when the
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  mechanic puts a suitcase in, you've got the mechanic, you've
• 13:45
  got California Charlie, and then you've got the the cop and they
• 13:47
  stand as like 3 bad guys. They're just blaring down on her
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  and just want to just prove something.
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  Absolutely brilliant setup. And you just, you're on her
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  side. Even though she's done
• 13:56
  everything wrong, you're still on her side.
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  And that's the setup from this, this scene.
• 13:59
  It's it's great, great stuff. Yeah, there's some beautiful
• 14:03
  motors at the car dealers, isn't there?
• 14:04
  Oh, yeah. Unreal.
• 14:05
  Yeah. But I love this whole stretch of
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  the film where Marion's got the money because it's all
• 14:09
  narratively about Marion being, like, on the run.
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  Larry sees her in the car after she said she was ill and the
• 14:14
  cops following her about she part exchanges the car.
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  I think what it's doing is building Marion's guilt and how
• 14:18
  much like, eating away at her. And that's why the cops stalking
• 14:21
  her. He doesn't know what she's done,
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  but she does, so he's like the personification of her guilt,
• 14:25
  following it everywhere. Just like genius stuff.
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  Yeah, with the black eyes as well.
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  And there's no, there's no soul there.
• 14:31
  Well, that's it. That close up with the cops face
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  when he finds Marion in the car. That's one of the creepiest
• 14:35
  moments in the film. Those like mirrored sunglasses.
• 14:37
  Yeah. And he sees to her plenty of
• 14:39
  motels in the area just to be safe.
• 14:41
  Worst advice ever in the film that surely?
• 14:44
  It's up there, yeah. Definitely, yeah.
• 14:46
  And the car dealership Marion visits is called California
• 14:49
  Charlie's, as we've said, but it was founded a real dealership
• 14:52
  called Harry May's used car lot, which was in North Hollywood.
• 14:56
  And you may have noticed that a lot of cars in the lot are made
• 14:59
  by Ford. And this is because Ford Motor
• 15:01
  Company was the sponsor of Hitchcock's TV show, Alfred
• 15:04
  Hitchcock Presents. So the car lot was intentionally
• 15:07
  packed with their cars. All right, nice.
• 15:09
  Replacement. But what's interesting is that
• 15:12
  Marion's doing nothing wrong in that moment.
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  Like you're saying Westy, but Hitchcock.
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  Someone makes us feel like she's like robbing the players blind
• 15:17
  or something. Yeah, it's they just want to
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  just just going to pull a shotgun out as a yeah, yeah,
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  yeah. I'll tell you what, a Ford
• 15:22
  sponsored that. There was not one used car in
• 15:24
  that lot. I'm sorry.
• 15:26
  Pristine. Yeah, there isn't.
• 15:29
  California, Charlie. Some of the most famous shots
• 15:32
  from the film are the close-ups on Marion as she's driving often
• 15:35
  with the voiceover could basically explain what's going
• 15:38
  on in her head which I think a fantastic moment.
• 15:39
  Very 60s though but very Hitchcock.
• 15:41
  So when the film that get a proper actions and facial
• 15:44
  expressions, Hitchcock would be behind the camera telling Janet
• 15:46
  Lee what she was doing and thinking at every point in the
• 15:49
  shot. Great.
• 15:50
  Amazing, yeah. With those scenes in the car
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  close up on channel. Yeah, the voice over where
• 15:54
  Marion's like, imagining everyone's found out what she's
• 15:56
  done. So good.
• 15:57
  The guilt just like eating away. That's such a brilliant way to
• 16:00
  do it. Didn't you do that?
• 16:01
  When you're driving and say I've got the radio on, you just start
• 16:04
  spinning everything you've done in the last 20 minutes.
• 16:06
  It's like, oh, did I say the right thing?
• 16:09
  If I'm pissed off this time, yeah.
• 16:11
  So that's Marion on the run. A white bra, $40,000 a black bra
• 16:16
  and a cop in the rearview mirror.
• 16:18
  I think she needs somewhere to stop for the night, don't you?
• 16:20
  That's the last thing she needs. Yeah, just keep on driving.
• 16:23
  Safer with California Charlie in the toilet.
• 16:30
  Caught in the downpour, Marion pulls off the highway and sees a
• 16:32
  flickering neon sign. Bates Motel vacancy.
• 16:36
  She checks in and it's here we meet the guy who runs it, Norman
• 16:38
  Bates. Actually, some of the most
• 16:39
  famous scenes in the film as Norman talks to then spies on
• 16:43
  Marion. Yeah, he's a strange chap,
• 16:45
  Norman. Isn't he mad A.
• 16:47
  Little bit, yeah. But how are the first scenes in
• 16:49
  the motel? I mean, how great is that reveal
• 16:52
  if the house on the hill just looming over the motel it's.
• 16:56
  Pretty great. Just looks malignant.
• 16:58
  And I think having the house and the motel separate, but they're
• 17:01
  still linked together really closely.
• 17:03
  I think it's just this great visual representation of Norman
• 17:06
  and his mother because he can go to the motel to work as often as
• 17:09
  he wants to, but he'll never truly escape her.
• 17:12
  She's always watching over him from that house.
• 17:14
  It's like a church in a graveyard, isn't it?
• 17:16
  It. Is it's totally got that vibe
• 17:17
  that it totally does. And then in retrospect, like
• 17:20
  it's so chilling when Marion sees mother as we think walk
• 17:24
  past the window and silhouette because it just looks so
• 17:27
  innocuous. But no one it's actually Norman
• 17:28
  dressed up. It's just spine chill and stuff
• 17:30
  when you come back. It's not Michael Jordan cut out
• 17:33
  from home alone. And then we probably meet
• 17:39
  Norman. And at first he's got all the
• 17:40
  powder and charming, all the 12 cabins, 12 vacancies thing.
• 17:44
  But it just starts to chip away slowly at this first perception
• 17:47
  that this guy's all right. I mean, the way he hesitates
• 17:49
  over the number three key before giving her number 1 so she could
• 17:53
  be next to the parlour for reasons we'll shortly talk
• 17:56
  about, and then showing around. And he, he can't bring himself
• 17:58
  to say the word bathroom. He can't even look at it.
• 18:01
  Just Jesse's at it and kind of goes right.
• 18:03
  Yeah, great introduction to him. It really is.
• 18:06
  It's just a master class in like building dread for me because
• 18:09
  you've got Marion driving in the rain, just the rain hammering on
• 18:12
  the windshield. It's such a great visual anyway.
• 18:14
  And then the music cuts, the Bates Motel sign comes into
• 18:16
  view, and suddenly it's like somewhere else entirely.
• 18:19
  And the check in itself, I find that quite tough to watch now,
• 18:22
  probably because we know what's coming.
• 18:23
  But that moment you mentioned, Matt, when Norman wishes for the
• 18:25
  key for Room 3. As he does that, Marion says
• 18:28
  she's from Los Angeles, and Norman then goes for Key 1
• 18:30
  instead. So is that the moment he decides
• 18:32
  to kill her or just the moment he decides to spy on her?
• 18:35
  I'm not sure. But either way, minding the
• 18:36
  gunner for Norman, and I mean Anthony Perkins.
• 18:39
  We'll talk about him properly, obviously, but from the first
• 18:41
  scene he is perfection as Norman.
• 18:44
  He is. So the scene after the check in,
• 18:46
  Marion goes to her room and over he's Norman arguing with his
• 18:49
  mother. We find out he's arguing with
• 18:51
  himself, obviously, but to hide the twist, Hitchcock did some
• 18:54
  things to misdirect the audience.
• 18:57
  She's got a loud voice, Missus Bates, hasn't she?
• 18:59
  Booming voice right the way down to the motel.
• 19:03
  It's funny when Norman's like mother.
• 19:04
  She's just a stranger. As if men don't desire
• 19:07
  strangers. So Hitchcock had a chair on set
• 19:12
  throughout filming which had Missus Bates written on the back
• 19:14
  of it. So anyone visiting thought that
• 19:16
  the was an act was playing the part.
• 19:18
  And he told the press that either Helen Hayes or Judith
• 19:21
  Anderson would be hired to play Missus Bates.
• 19:24
  She played in Missus Danvers in Rebecca, Judith Anderson, so
• 19:26
  there was a link there. And apparently Norma Varden, who
• 19:29
  was in Strangers on Our Train, she read those reports and
• 19:32
  thought they were real. And she got on Twitch with
• 19:33
  Hitchcock to say that she wanted to play Missus Bates.
• 19:36
  Right. Yeah.
• 19:37
  Fooled by? It and the voice of Mother that
• 19:40
  we hear was provided by three different performers, Virginia
• 19:43
  Greg and Jeanette Nolan, who had both appeared on Alfred
• 19:46
  Hitchcock Presents, and Paul Jasmine, who had been
• 19:49
  recommended by Anthony Perkins. That's right.
• 19:51
  So their voices were sometimes mixed together to give it a bit
• 19:54
  of an off kilter sound, right? A lot of it was Virginia Greg
• 19:57
  though. She delivers the famous
• 19:58
  monologue in the final scene and she also did the voice of Mother
• 20:02
  in Psycho 2 and Psycho 3 as well.
• 20:04
  Right, right. Was it not Thomas S Wilson?
• 20:07
  She did the voice of his grandmother in About the Future
• 20:08
  2. Yeah, yeah.
• 20:10
  That's. A massive RIP of.
• 20:11
  Good food tanning. Good food tanning.
• 20:17
  So from there, he offers to make us some food, you know, nothing
• 20:20
  much, just sandwiches and milk. I mean, I would like I'll leave
• 20:22
  the milk if that's all right with you.
• 20:23
  That sounds that sounds horrible.
• 20:25
  To be fair, in cling film as well.
• 20:28
  Now, going in the parlour, this should be a bit of a red flag.
• 20:31
  There's just stuffed birds everywhere.
• 20:33
  It's a massive owl leer and over his shoulder like he stuffs
• 20:36
  things. But there's so much of A reveal
• 20:38
  about the character here. I mean, you say that that Norman
• 20:41
  Bates as a character is perfect from the start, and this whole
• 20:45
  sequence just adds to it and just adds layer upon layer of
• 20:48
  confusion, but at the same time, real sympathy for him.
• 20:51
  But you know, you get everything you need to know on the second
• 20:53
  watch from this moment. They're both completely lost.
• 20:57
  They both want to find something else.
• 20:58
  They both want to disappear. They're both unhappy with the
• 21:00
  lives. She tries to move on the best
• 21:02
  way that you can, and she can't at the end of it.
• 21:04
  And she ultimately repents and wants to go back.
• 21:06
  Norman can't escape and he really wants to and the way that
• 21:10
  he talks about stuff in the birds because the passive to
• 21:12
  begin with, he just attacks the passive things that are around,
• 21:15
  which is what she is. He describes her as a bird.
• 21:18
  So you or it's already this set up that she's going to be
• 21:20
  killed. It's just absolutely fantastic.
• 21:22
  And then when he starts talking about his mother, that switches
• 21:25
  to that shot and that shot's fucking excellent where he's
• 21:27
  just in the bottom right hand corner of the flame in that
• 21:29
  owl's over his shoulder. There's a security camera which
• 21:32
  represents his mother watching over him.
• 21:35
  So, so brilliant. And what this does is it really
• 21:38
  sells the mother as a character. You then believe that this
• 21:41
  person exists. You believe that you're going to
• 21:43
  see this person. And it just ends on one of the
• 21:46
  most famous lines. You know, we all go a little mad
• 21:47
  sometimes and we're all in the same boat and we're all the same
• 21:51
  at the end of the day. It's a brilliant back and forth.
• 21:53
  Really, really creepy. Loads of red flags in there.
• 21:56
  A boy's best friend is his mother.
• 21:58
  Get the fuck out. Leave.
• 22:01
  Leave immediately from that. Like, I mean, yeah, you would
• 22:04
  probably think that, but there's no way you would say that to a
• 22:06
  girl. Well, that you're quite
• 22:07
  attracted to that. You've just met.
• 22:08
  You've given her a sandwich. Oh, me Mum's be best made by the
• 22:11
  by the way. Oh, really?
• 22:13
  Your stuffed birds and stuff. Yeah.
• 22:14
  You're here by yourself. Yeah.
• 22:15
  There's nobody else here. No.
• 22:16
  Right. I'll see you later.
• 22:18
  And the way that it's played back to him as well by Janet Lee
• 22:21
  is just incredible. Both of them are absolutely
• 22:23
  fired and all cylinders here and you buy it.
• 22:26
  Hook, line and singer. You're into this film from this
• 22:28
  point. Absolutely.
• 22:30
  I mean, it's just two people talking and barely moving it
• 22:32
  all, but it's so tense and so well put together.
• 22:35
  It's how the scene develops A narrative that blows me away
• 22:38
  because this is where the narrative starts to shift and
• 22:40
  where Hitchcock transfers the role of main character from
• 22:42
  Marion to Norman, which is basically at the start, just two
• 22:45
  static shots, one on Norm and one on Marion.
• 22:48
  But the way they develop it visually is great.
• 22:50
  The first time Marion mentioned Mother, you mentioned the West.
• 22:52
  He had cuts to a different shot of Norman, that one framed under
• 22:55
  the owl. Then it switches again when
• 22:57
  Marion suggests putting Mother in some place, I think she says.
• 23:00
  And then Norman's shot from this really weird low angle where
• 23:02
  Marion's shot at high level. So she shot from Norman's point
• 23:05
  of view, but Norman isn't shot from hers.
• 23:07
  So it's visually starting to put us in Norman's shoes.
• 23:10
  Yeah. And this is when Marion makes
• 23:11
  her decision to go back home, so her arc's basically done.
• 23:14
  And then she tells Norm her name's Crane when he knows she's
• 23:17
  written Samuels in the logbook, so he knows there's a good
• 23:20
  chance no one knows where she is.
• 23:21
  So it's all there in the writing as well.
• 23:23
  Yeah, which is also a bird. It's a formed bird.
• 23:25
  And it's weird when he's when he's leaning against it and he's
• 23:28
  like a hobby should take some of the time, not all of the time,
• 23:30
  but he's just stroking one of them.
• 23:31
  Get the fucking. Out get another red flag, yeah.
• 23:36
  Yeah. But it's all just masterful.
• 23:38
  It's like the example if I was switching narrative from
• 23:40
  focusing on one character to another and it's all done in
• 23:42
  just one scene. It's crazy.
• 23:44
  Absolutely, there's so many red flags in this.
• 23:46
  It's a good job it's a black mite.
• 23:50
  And then after this, she goes to her room and then we see Norman
• 23:53
  being a dirty little Peeping Tom.
• 23:55
  He's a peeping Tom. He's a peeping Tom.
• 23:59
  As we're saying, red flags with this guy out of the chimney, to
• 24:02
  be honest, but this is the first one.
• 24:04
  We think this is actually dangerous now and Marion is in
• 24:07
  big trouble. And just that huge close up of
• 24:10
  his eye staring at Marion. That might be the most
• 24:12
  Hitchcockian image ever. Yeah, those close up was
• 24:15
  Norman's eye. How good are those shots?
• 24:17
  They're ridiculous. How many times have you seen
• 24:20
  those as a film makers copy that as well.
• 24:22
  Yeah, too many. Scorsese.
• 24:23
  He uses it in good feathers, doesn't he?
• 24:25
  He does, yeah. Norman spies on marrying by
• 24:28
  taking a patent off the wall to reveal the people behind it.
• 24:31
  The painting is Susanna and the Elders which is a great name for
• 24:34
  an all female punk band if you're looking for a name.
• 24:36
  It really is. That's absolutely.
• 24:39
  Which was by William Van Milleris and either 1691 or
• 24:44
  1731. It shows the Old Testament story
• 24:47
  of two elderly men spying on a young woman bathing, reflecting
• 24:50
  Norman, spying on Marion. Disgusting.
• 24:53
  Yeah, so it was from Hitchcock's own personal art collection,
• 24:55
  apparently. It was.
• 24:56
  Yeah, yeah. No idea how to use it the same
• 24:59
  way Norman does. People all behind it, who knows?
• 25:03
  And then after marrying eats with Norman, she adds up the
• 25:05
  money she has on a piece of paper and then flushes it down
• 25:08
  the toilet. Now, the haze cord was still in
• 25:11
  practice at the time and restricted toilets being flushed
• 25:13
  on screen for some reason. But the writer Joseph Stefano
• 25:17
  wanted to break that taboo. So Hitchcock told him make it
• 25:20
  integral to the plot so that it couldn't be removed.
• 25:22
  And this is the first film that shows the target being flushed
• 25:24
  on screen. Wow.
• 25:26
  Yeah, more shocking than the murder it was at the time.
• 25:29
  How mad that. Yeah.
• 25:30
  People gaspered, probably gaspered at how simple that
• 25:34
  fucking sum was for the grand -700 dead dead.
• 25:38
  Straightforward that. Terrible at maths marriage.
• 25:40
  Isn't it? Oh fucking I've ripped this up.
• 25:45
  Well, before we head for a much needed shower, we've got a
• 25:47
  question from our ATR and patrons.
• 25:49
  It's on the parlor scene and it comes from Nathan Lang.
• 25:52
  Hello, Nathan. Hello, Nathan.
• 25:54
  So Nathan says Psycho has to be my favorite Hitchcock.
• 25:57
  His use of foreshadowing and symbolism is so rich and best
• 25:59
  exemplified in the conversation between Marion Crane and Norman
• 26:02
  Bates. What are some of your favorite
• 26:04
  scenes in movies with just two people talking?
• 26:07
  It's a good question, Matt. So what are your favorite 2
• 26:10
  Honda scenes? So I've gone for three.
• 26:12
  One of them comes from boyhood, the link later film, and there's
• 26:16
  lots of talking seeds and that obviously.
• 26:17
  But the one I've gone for is where Mason, he's gone on a
• 26:20
  fishing trip with his dad, Ethan Hawke, and they're just talking
• 26:22
  about Star Wars and if they'll be any more because that when
• 26:25
  they filmed it was before the sequels.
• 26:27
  And it's a such a lovely time capsule of a moment.
• 26:31
  And it perfectly sums up that the kind of father son
• 26:33
  relationship at that age. I think that's a really
• 26:35
  beautiful scene next to be amazed at Wesley hasn't got
• 26:38
  these, but from Zodiac, obviously Tusky and Grace Smith
• 26:42
  in the diner at the end. Grace Smith outlined in this
• 26:45
  theory why it's Arthur Lee Allen and he's got an answer for every
• 26:48
  single one at Toski's questions. I walked it.
• 26:52
  Jesus Christ, just amazing. Door to door, it's great door to
• 26:56
  door. Yeah.
• 26:57
  Thank you. Thank you for breakfast.
• 26:58
  Yeah, every time you're that one.
• 27:00
  And then last one is the Shining Jack and Grady in the bathroom.
• 27:03
  How the balance of power just shifts between those two
• 27:07
  characters. Yeah, nice, because Grady sorts
• 27:09
  off all Bond and oh, sorry, Sir, because he spilled the drink on
• 27:11
  him. But he just becomes more and
• 27:13
  more evil and he gets Jack under his complete control by the end
• 27:16
  of it, when he's talking about his wife and children, killing
• 27:18
  them. I corrected them too.
• 27:22
  Yeah, it's that red on the walls.
• 27:24
  It's incredible use of colour. Yeah, yeah, amazing, brilliant
• 27:27
  ones for me. I haven't got any of them.
• 27:29
  Oh wow, really it? Isn't so I've got I've got
• 27:31
  another four that that I felt was so cliched that you might
• 27:35
  have had them anyway. So I was kind of like, we're
• 27:37
  going to cross on this. My favorite 2 hander is hands
• 27:39
  Lander. What do you think of that one?
• 27:41
  So Inglorious Basterds, the open sequence, of course, Christopher
• 27:44
  Wilson and Dennis Minoche is absolutely fantastic that.
• 27:47
  One of the best. Back and forth of power is
• 27:49
  unreal. The scene we're all waiting for
• 27:51
  was Pacino and De Niro. Button heads in heat of course
• 27:54
  in the cafe. Absolutely love that scene.
• 27:57
  It's incredible. Hopkins and Foster, the first
• 27:59
  time that she meets Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs,
• 28:03
  I think to absolutely shine in that wonderful.
• 28:07
  And another back and forth that's beautifully written by
• 28:09
  Tarantino again is Hopper and Walking and True Romance.
• 28:12
  I think that's is absolutely wonderful.
• 28:15
  Yeah. One of my favourites.
• 28:16
  Yeah, check them out. Absolutely brilliant.
• 28:18
  Some great ones there. Yeah.
• 28:20
  So Maureen has made her decision to go back to Phoenix.
• 28:23
  She's eaten her sandwich and she's worked out her maths.
• 28:26
  Time for a shower before she heads back home.
• 28:28
  Easy, right? Yeah, she'll be knackered after
• 28:30
  all that. That's skip it.
• 28:34
  The director. The director of Psycho was one
• 28:39
  of the biggest film making names in Hollywood, Sir Alfred
• 28:42
  Hitchcock. Psycho was his 51st futurist
• 28:44
  director with many classics under his belt already before
• 28:47
  this. Some titles, The 39 Steps,
• 28:50
  Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious Rope, Strangers on a
• 28:53
  Train, Dial In for Murder, Rear Window to Catch a Thief, The Man
• 28:57
  Who Knew Too Much, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North by
• 29:00
  Northwest. Wow, not a bad filmography I.
• 29:04
  Thought you're going to do all 51 there.
• 29:07
  Don't do the silent ones, that's fine.
• 29:08
  Stop. Stop for breath.
• 29:09
  I always do the famous ones, and there were just too many.
• 29:11
  Yeah. Lords, yeah.
• 29:13
  So Matt Hitch, what do we think of his work as director on
• 29:16
  Psycho? I mean, I think it's exhibit,
• 29:19
  AY, he was called the mass of suspense, isn't it?
• 29:22
  And it's the way he manipulates the audience for me, because we
• 29:25
  start off with marrying, as we said, scandalous that she's
• 29:28
  having an affair with a married man and then she becomes a thief
• 29:31
  and goes on the run. But Hitchcock makes us so
• 29:33
  sympathetic that we are complicit with her crimes.
• 29:36
  We want her to get away. And then she has this change of
• 29:39
  heart and you think, OK, that's where her orc is going until no,
• 29:42
  Hitchcock brutally murders her off our way through.
• 29:45
  But even then, he doesn't change the narrative.
• 29:47
  So we follow her grieving sister or the boyfriend or the private
• 29:50
  detective. He puts us firmly in the
• 29:53
  perspective of the guy who, as far as we know at this point,
• 29:55
  has covered the murder up. And then we end up really liking
• 29:58
  him. We don't want Orbigas to find
• 30:00
  out the truth, we want Norman to get away with it.
• 30:03
  And then he just flips it all on his head again at the end when
• 30:05
  we find out what's really been going on.
• 30:07
  And it's just sleight of hand after sleight of hand where he
• 30:10
  makes us look one way and then completely blind sides us.
• 30:13
  And the last thing that I always get from Psycho, Hitchcock
• 30:16
  thinks this is just hilarious to him.
• 30:18
  This is a black comedy. Like, the audience is shrieking
• 30:22
  and screaming. I think he's just got a big
• 30:23
  smile slowly spreading across his face.
• 30:26
  I mean, as I said, Norman dressed up as as his mother,
• 30:29
  walking back and forth talking to himself.
• 30:31
  It's the funniest thing he's ever heard of.
• 30:32
  But he's going to scare us with it at the same time.
• 30:35
  And if anyone doubts that, just go and watch the original
• 30:37
  trailer for this because it's 6 minutes long and it tells you
• 30:40
  everything you need to know about how Hitchcock viewed this
• 30:42
  film. And it is undisputedly one of
• 30:44
  his masterpieces. Yeah, yeah.
• 30:47
  When I was writing notes for this section for a while, I was
• 30:49
  like, way on earth, do I start? It's just so much, isn't there?
• 30:53
  Yeah, too much. The director who did too much,
• 30:56
  that's Hitchcock. Something that always strikes me
• 31:00
  on Psycho, though, is how lean it is as a film to compare like
• 31:03
  Vertical or North by Northwest. Both incredible, but they're way
• 31:06
  more like lavish than this cycle is.
• 31:09
  Like Usain Bolt. It's like out the gates, done,
• 31:11
  boom. There's not a wasted second, but
• 31:13
  it never feels rushed or like it's missing anything either.
• 31:16
  And I think that's because when the big scenes come, they're all
• 31:19
  very different. Like the parlour scene we talked
• 31:21
  about does take its time. That's the first time it feels
• 31:22
  like we're allowed to breathe in the film.
• 31:24
  Then the shower sequence. Absolute chaos.
• 31:26
  Arbor gas on the stage is all tension.
• 31:29
  He knows exactly when they like turn the screw and went to step
• 31:32
  off the gas a bit more. Hitchcock's just like a master
• 31:34
  at framing scenes and WADLUP as well is just his vision for the
• 31:38
  film. The most famous director on the
• 31:39
  planet by a long way at this time at a time he could be
• 31:42
  coasting. He goes, I'm going to make this
• 31:44
  on a fraction of the usual budget in black and white, huge
• 31:47
  creative choices. And I think it's because he
• 31:49
  knows the craft. He has complete confidence in
• 31:51
  his mastery of the overall skill of film making.
• 31:54
  He might be the best at that. I mean, we'll talk about some
• 31:56
  specifics as we go through the film, but it all just feels so
• 31:59
  fresh as well. I mean, Hitchcock was like 60
• 32:01
  years old when he made this, but it feels like it's still like
• 32:04
  cool and exciting feeling. It was made by a talented 30
• 32:07
  year old or something. Yeah.
• 32:08
  I mean, yeah, most great directors have probably one film
• 32:11
  where you can go. That's his masterpiece.
• 32:13
  Hitchhike has about four, and this is one of them.
• 32:15
  It's just sensational direction for me.
• 32:18
  Yeah. That first thing I've got
• 32:19
  written down is seems like it was directed by a younger man
• 32:22
  with more energy and more vigour and more.
• 32:24
  It's just the energy that's attached to this is just the
• 32:27
  confidence, like I said, at the top, but it's just the
• 32:30
  cleverness as well. And he is on top of his game at
• 32:32
  this point. I mean, 51 films, you're not
• 32:34
  supposed to be doing it this quickly or have this much
• 32:37
  confidence in what you're doing. You're supposed to be retiring
• 32:39
  by that point easily. Just thinking I cannot be
• 32:42
  bothered with this anymore. Jesus.
• 32:44
  And I've got to do it on a on a strip back budget and I've got
• 32:47
  to shoot in black and white again.
• 32:48
  It's a breath of fresh air. It's just like he's taken in a
• 32:51
  new release of life. There's a new breath of oxygen
• 32:54
  here, and he's just absolutely filling his lungs with it.
• 32:57
  And what I get from the direction of this film, it's not
• 32:59
  built around the big sequences. Then big sequences came later
• 33:03
  through audience participation, through audience reaction.
• 33:06
  He didn't go right. I need people there for the
• 33:08
  shower scene because otherwise it won't work.
• 33:10
  Doesn't matter because you've got all of them are peppered
• 33:13
  between. Then they've just got incredible
• 33:15
  scenes that bridge them all together.
• 33:17
  There's, like John said, there's not a bit of fat on this.
• 33:20
  It zips through and even if you miss a couple of scenes, it
• 33:23
  doesn't matter. You can kind of catch up with
• 33:24
  it. It's just that clever.
• 33:26
  He hits you with that shower sequence and then lets you sit
• 33:28
  with it for a long, long time, which was unbeknownst at that
• 33:30
  point in that in 1960. To sit with something like that
• 33:34
  and just see the aftermath of it was just incredible.
• 33:36
  For an audience to sit through with a hat, to sit through it
• 33:38
  and he made them do it. It's staggering.
• 33:40
  I mean, we've talked about it already, but that parlour
• 33:42
  sequence, that back and forth between them would be a
• 33:44
  standout. And pretty much any other film,
• 33:47
  that introduction of none. But it was just, it doesn't get
• 33:49
  better. Then it just goes downhill from
• 33:50
  there. But it doesn't.
• 33:51
  It goes up and it keeps going up and it keeps getting better.
• 33:54
  Literally, it goes uphill, yeah. Of course it does massively.
• 33:57
  It just, it just gets better and better and better and builds on
• 33:59
  it. But the thing about Psycho is it
• 34:01
  knows it's amazing, but it's nowhere near pretentious enough
• 34:05
  to be. And then that's the whole point.
• 34:06
  He's not being pretentious with it, he's just being clever.
• 34:09
  He knows exactly what he wants to do with the film and he knows
• 34:12
  he wants people to be scared, and that's exactly what he does.
• 34:14
  Yeah, this is so much better than it had any right to be.
• 34:17
  Oh yeah, should be so throw. Away it.
• 34:20
  It should be. You remember that cycle 1 he did
• 34:22
  wasn't. Yeah, it went on his TV show,
• 34:24
  which obviously I think he nearly did.
• 34:26
  And there was lots of elements that brought it all together.
• 34:28
  But I think he just went in this with in the excitement of a
• 34:31
  child, just like I'm going to make something scary and that's
• 34:34
  it. And that's exactly what he did.
• 34:36
  That passion is still burning there so you can see it.
• 34:39
  Even now, yeah, it's brilliant. So the novel Cycle was written
• 34:43
  by Robert Block and published by Simon Schuster in 1959.
• 34:48
  When it came out, it got a glowing review in the New York
• 34:50
  Times. Alfred Hitchcock's PA Peggy
• 34:53
  Robertson saw the review. She read the book and then
• 34:55
  showed her the Hitchcock. Yeah, Anthony Boucher had
• 34:58
  written that review. He was a well known mystery
• 35:00
  writer and critic at the time, so his approval was like a quite
• 35:03
  a big deal I think at the time. Yeah, and then in the late 50s,
• 35:06
  Hitchcock had seen two film projects fall through.
• 35:09
  He abandoned an adaptation of a book called Flamingo Feather
• 35:13
  when it became a logistical nightmare, and he'd also been
• 35:16
  planning to make a film with Audrey.
• 35:17
  Hepburn called No Bail for the Judge, but that stopped when
• 35:21
  Hepburn fell pregnant. It was at this time Cycor
• 35:23
  dropped on his desk and he bought the rights from Robert
• 35:26
  Block for $9500. Nice.
• 35:29
  Hepburn and Hitchcock together at last.
• 35:31
  Nearly never worked together, did they?
• 35:32
  I. Know that would have been
• 35:33
  amazing, yeah. But when Hitchcock first bought
• 35:35
  the rights to Psycho, we did it anonymously.
• 35:37
  I think if Bloke had known who he was selling it to, he might
• 35:39
  have asked for quite a bit more money.
• 35:40
  Oh, you'd have. Ramped it up slightly I think.
• 35:42
  Might have been Yeah. And the Wrights report to Shamli
• 35:45
  Productions, which was Hitchcock's own company and he
• 35:48
  was inspired by William Castle and he was AB movie director who
• 35:51
  had hits in the late 50s with the likes of House on Haunted
• 35:54
  Hill and The Tingler Horrors made on shoestring budgets.
• 35:59
  Yeah, that came from the Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano.
• 36:02
  He said the first time he met Hitchcock he was praising those
• 36:04
  Castle films, but said just imagine if somebody good made
• 36:08
  one. You know, like slammed.
• 36:14
  Paramount had passed over the book when it came out, but as
• 36:17
  they had Hitchcock under contract for one more film, he
• 36:20
  took Psycho back to them. They didn't like the novel, but
• 36:22
  Hitchcock said he'd make it for cheap.
• 36:24
  He also said that he'd devote his normal quarter of a million
• 36:26
  salary and put up the 806,000 production budget himself.
• 36:31
  In exchange, he asked for 60% of the film's profits and getting
• 36:34
  the film distribution rights back.
• 36:35
  After Paramount made their money back, Paramount thought it would
• 36:38
  never be a big hit, so they agreed.
• 36:40
  Fools. Apparently, Bonnie Balaban, the
• 36:44
  president of Paramount at the time, he said about Psycho.
• 36:47
  It's unfilmable. It's about a queer killing
• 36:49
  people in his mother's dress. He aged like milk.
• 36:52
  That quote in more ways than one.
• 36:55
  Hitchcock had the last. One.
• 36:56
  You know what it's about, though.
• 36:59
  And North by Northwest had cost over $3,000,000.
• 37:01
  So working with a budget much less than he was used to,
• 37:05
  Hitchcock came up with ways of cutting costs.
• 37:07
  So instead of going with his usual feature film crew, as we
• 37:09
  mentioned, he hired crew members from his TV series Alfred
• 37:12
  Hitchcock Presents instead. Nice.
• 37:15
  Yeah. And he shot it at Review
• 37:17
  Studios, the TV arm of MCA, rather than on the Paramount
• 37:20
  stages, because it was cheaper, presumably.
• 37:22
  Yeah, Yeah. So it had all the resources of
• 37:24
  television. But this does not look like ATV
• 37:26
  movie at all. Not.
• 37:28
  One little. Bit not for one second no
• 37:31
  better. Than every other movie came out
• 37:33
  that year to be honest. And he also came up with a very
• 37:38
  short shooting schedule of about 3 months and had the script
• 37:40
  changed so that they needed as few sets as possible.
• 37:44
  Yeah, I'm not sure a scheduled man that could get the crew
• 37:46
  cheaper too. The whole crew cost $62,000.
• 37:50
  The crew that made Psycho, How much is that ridiculous?
• 37:53
  Yeah. Hitchcock knew the importance of
• 37:55
  keeping the reveal about Norman a secret.
• 37:57
  On the first day of filming, he had made each cast and crew
• 38:00
  member stand in front of him, raise the right hand and say I
• 38:04
  promise I shall not divulge the plot of Psycho.
• 38:06
  He stopped Janet Lee and Anthony Perkins doing any press for the
• 38:11
  film in case they gave anything away.
• 38:13
  And there's a famous story that Hitchcock had Penny Robertson
• 38:16
  buy up as many copies of the novel as they could so people
• 38:19
  couldn't read what happens. And he refused to release the
• 38:21
  plots and officers to the press Amazing.
• 38:24
  Yeah, secretive man. The only other director who'd
• 38:26
  ever done that was Cecil B De Mille, who apparently refused to
• 38:29
  tell a report as the plot of the 10 Commandments.
• 38:33
  I think we kind of know what happens in that one, to be
• 38:35
  honest, Cecil. Cecil's revealed there's only 90
• 38:39
  What the? Fuck yeah.
• 38:40
  Go out and buy every copy of the Bible you can find.
• 38:42
  Yeah, sure. Well, Hitchcock famously never
• 38:48
  won the Best Director of Academy Award.
• 38:50
  He was nominated for Psycho, though, his fifth and final
• 38:53
  nomination. Do you know who we lost out to?
• 38:56
  I do know this one because this one's a tough one because it was
• 38:59
  Billy Wilder for the apartment. It was indeed.
• 39:02
  Yeah, that's competition. I know that's superb One.
• 39:04
  Yeah. So no major award.
• 39:06
  But in creating one of the most iconic and influential films to
• 39:09
  ever come out of Hollywood and somehow on a budget of less than
• 39:12
  $1 million, did all right pitch, didn't it?
• 39:15
  Yeah, it's all right, isn't it? Just a bit.
• 39:16
  Yeah, the cast. I like the film.
• 39:24
  The cast of Psycho is a lean one.
• 39:26
  In this section, we're going to be discussing Anthony Perkins as
• 39:28
  Norman Bates and Veera Miles as Lila Crane, but we're starting
• 39:32
  with Norman's tragic victim. We are.
• 39:34
  So Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane, a Phoenix real estate
• 39:37
  secretary, where he watches. Marion enjoys some afternoon
• 39:40
  delight with her boss, Sam Loomis, before deciding to
• 39:42
  pocket $40,000 of her boss's money, skip town and meet her
• 39:46
  demise at the Bates Motel. A classic Hitchcock blonde mat
• 39:50
  that was Janet Leigh as Marion Crane.
• 39:53
  I feel a bit sorry for her actually, because I think when
• 39:55
  people talk about this film, they'll talk about Perkins in
• 39:58
  the shower scene and the twist. I think she just gets a bit
• 40:01
  taken for granted along the way. Like her performance only really
• 40:05
  gets talked about in relation to the shower scene, but she brings
• 40:08
  so much moderate than that. I mean, part of the reason that
• 40:11
  scene is so shocking is because of how likeable Marian is.
• 40:14
  And considering, as we've been saying, she's the thief and
• 40:17
  she's having an affair with the married man, that's all down the
• 40:19
  league's performance. How much we like her.
• 40:21
  I mean, that scene we've talked about where she's driving away
• 40:23
  and imagining all the conversations other people are
• 40:26
  having about her, so many conflict and emotions playing
• 40:29
  across her face. You know, there's regrets this
• 40:31
  fee of the consequences if she does go back, but there's also
• 40:34
  like an undeniable joy at what she's done at the same time.
• 40:37
  Like, why doesn't she deserve a better life with Sam?
• 40:40
  That businessman wasn't Uttaprixa.
• 40:42
  He deserves it. And she's kind of enjoying this.
• 40:45
  So I think that scene, the Paula scene where she treats Norman
• 40:47
  with such kindness, the all contribute what a well drawn
• 40:51
  character Marian is. And that's why her death is so
• 40:53
  impactful. And Lee's performance needs a
• 40:55
  lot more praise than he usually gets.
• 40:57
  Yeah, and once she gets the money, he says to her.
• 40:59
  Like, I never carry more than I'm prepared to lose or I can
• 41:01
  afford to lose, so he can afford to lose.
• 41:03
  Exactly. Like it's expendable stuff.
• 41:05
  Yeah, totally get why she gambles on her.
• 41:07
  Every thought in her head is totally.
• 41:09
  Believable for her performance, Yeah.
• 41:11
  Yeah, I think of all the cast members she brings to star
• 41:13
  quality. She is a classic Hitchcock
• 41:15
  blonde. She's glamorous, elegant.
• 41:17
  The camera loves her. From her very first shot, lying
• 41:19
  on the bed in the hotel, you see why Hitchcock wanted her.
• 41:22
  She looks great and it'll be a massive shock to see I get
• 41:24
  butchered, basically. But she's not just a pretty face
• 41:27
  like you're saying, Matt. Janet Lee's got the acting chops
• 41:29
  as well, for sure. She's got to sell the whole
• 41:31
  first act of the film on her own, basically.
• 41:33
  And she does. I believe Marion is a decent
• 41:35
  person who gets pushed far enough to make a mistake, and
• 41:38
  then I believe that when she comes to her senses and changes
• 41:40
  her mind. I mean, we talked about the
• 41:42
  parlor scene and I think Lee's excellent in that.
• 41:45
  She barely even moves, but you can kind of see her making the
• 41:47
  decision to go back. It's all been like a mannerisms
• 41:49
  in the face, really subtle. But then she's like gone, which
• 41:53
  I still find it quite shocking now in 1960.
• 41:56
  It must have caused meltdowns. The biggest name in the film
• 41:58
  lying dead on the bathroom floor.
• 42:00
  It's horrific. And what makes it work is the
• 42:02
  work that's been done to that point to make us relate to and
• 42:05
  care about Marion. That's in the writing, it's in
• 42:07
  the directing, and it comes from Janet Lee as well.
• 42:09
  I think it's all around great character building.
• 42:12
  Yeah, it is. Yeah, I mean, she's just, for
• 42:14
  me, really, really fantastic performance.
• 42:17
  Because it if without her, you haven't got the impact, like
• 42:20
  Matt says, you don't have a film.
• 42:22
  You need a character that you can follow, that you are just as
• 42:24
  confused as she is. You are just as guilty as she is
• 42:27
  because you're seeing this all through her point of view and
• 42:29
  you understand her back story without going too far and you
• 42:32
  kind of sympathise. And it really does work.
• 42:35
  And thinking of Janet Lee as well, at this point in my
• 42:37
  career, she's read this script. She knows what's going to happen
• 42:40
  and she's put the groundwork in here.
• 42:42
  She could have easily formed this in and nor she's going to
• 42:44
  get a really good death scene and not be in the rest of the
• 42:46
  film. And she could have been bitter
• 42:48
  and a little bit annoyed by that, but she definitely isn't.
• 42:51
  She acts in the start of this film like she's going to be
• 42:53
  there when the credits roll, and that's the best thing about it.
• 42:57
  And it really does work. It's almost like she didn't know
• 43:00
  she was going to get killed as an actress and as a character.
• 43:03
  It's just I'm in this all the way through Hitchcock.
• 43:05
  No, no, no. It almost feels like that.
• 43:07
  That's how much she brings to it.
• 43:09
  She brings this like she's the she knows she is.
• 43:12
  She convinces us that she is, and then she's wiped out
• 43:15
  spectacularly. Or I mean, that reach out to the
• 43:17
  shower curtain. There's nothing more iconic.
• 43:20
  She looks the part, She acts the part.
• 43:22
  I do think, yeah, it's criminally underrated how good
• 43:24
  this performance is because you wouldn't have a film without
• 43:27
  Janet Lee. Absolutely.
• 43:29
  Yeah. So before Janet Lee was cast as
• 43:31
  Marion, there were lots of names that Hitchcock apparently
• 43:33
  considered. So Eva Marie St.
• 43:36
  Lee Remic, Angie Dickinson, Piper Lorry, Shirley Jones, Lana
• 43:40
  Turner, Dina Merrill and Jane Simmons who all discussed.
• 43:44
  Eva Marie St. was in North by Northwest.
• 43:46
  Wasn't she? Yeah.
• 43:47
  Yeah, and Angie Dickinson, she plays a Marion Crane type in
• 43:50
  Dressed to Kill, which is kind of Brian De Palma's homage to
• 43:53
  Psycho It. Is.
• 43:54
  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah.
• 43:55
  Yeah, one of many Brian De Palma homages to Psycho.
• 43:58
  Every film that Brian De Palma made.
• 44:00
  Yeah, Far from Scarface, obviously.
• 44:04
  But Hitchcock liked the idea of casting Janet Leigh after seen
• 44:07
  it in Orson Welles Touch of Evil in 1958.
• 44:11
  So he sent out a copy of Robert Block's novel with a no team.
• 44:14
  Please consider the part of Mary Anthony.
• 44:16
  Perkins is said to play a Norman Bates and she never had her
• 44:19
  audition. Yeah, she also had one film left
• 44:22
  on her, seven pictures here with Paramount, Janet Leigh.
• 44:24
  So I imagine they put her forward to Hitchcock as well.
• 44:27
  And he actually agreed to do it for 1/4 of a usual salary, which
• 44:29
  was like $100,000. So she must have been keen on
• 44:32
  Hitch. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 44:34
  We're keen to work with him. I mean, yeah, she wasn't turning
• 44:37
  down Tony curtains for him. I doubt.
• 44:40
  Wouldn't have thought. So stranger things have
• 44:41
  happened. And Lee said that when she was
• 44:44
  cast, Hitchcock briefed her before filming By saying I hired
• 44:48
  you because you were an actress. I will only direct you if a you
• 44:51
  attempt to take more than your share of the pie, B you don't
• 44:55
  take enough, or C you are having trouble motivating the necessary
• 44:58
  timed movement. All right.
• 45:03
  Andy made her take the eye. Will not spoil Psycho auth,
• 45:05
  presumably. Yeah, that'll be it.
• 45:07
  Yeah. And Janet Leigh did say as well
• 45:09
  that she created the whole back story for Marion.
• 45:10
  She knew what she was like in school, what her favorite colour
• 45:13
  was, what made her laugh, all that kind of stuff.
• 45:15
  And it kind of shows because I'm always surprised how fleshed out
• 45:18
  she feels, like almost immediately.
• 45:21
  And other crew members fed into the character as well.
• 45:24
  Marian was dressed by the costume designer Rita Riggs and
• 45:27
  costume supervisor Helen Colvig. They bought the clothes from a
• 45:31
  Beverly Hills boutique called Jax JAX, based on photographs
• 45:35
  given to them by the assistant director, Hilton A Green.
• 45:38
  Yeah, so apparently Hilton Green found a young woman somewhere
• 45:41
  who much luck he had in his head for Marian, and he took photos
• 45:44
  of all of her clothes and gave him to the costume team.
• 45:48
  Really weird. Buffalo Bill, but.
• 45:49
  Yeah, it sounds like I'm getting Norman Bates or Buffalo Bill if
• 45:53
  you ask me. You're 12, right?
• 45:58
  Lee was only on set for three weeks, and one week of that was
• 46:01
  filming the shower scene. But the film had a big effect.
• 46:04
  After the film came out, she received some threatening
• 46:06
  letters from men detailing what they would like to do to marry.
• 46:08
  And Crane 1 was so bad she passed it on to the FBI and they
• 46:12
  investigated it and found the culprit.
• 46:14
  It's gone. It's awful, isn't it?
• 46:16
  Yeah, Yeah. She also said that the film made
• 46:19
  her feel really vulnerable in the shower from then on, and she
• 46:21
  would always as Bast, if possible, for the rest of her
• 46:23
  life. Yeah.
• 46:24
  Wow. Yeah.
• 46:26
  Well, for a performance as Marion Crane, Jana Lee was
• 46:28
  nominated for best actress in the supporting role of the
• 46:30
  Oscars. She lost out to Shirley Jones
• 46:32
  for Elma Gantry. OK, surely Jones has been
• 46:35
  running for Marion as well, like we said.
• 46:37
  Yes, right. So no Wayne, but we think
• 46:40
  generally brings the star quality as Marion and with the
• 46:42
  shock of her exit 1 of the classic Hitchcock blondes.
• 46:45
  Iconic performance, yeah. Yeah, definitely. 2nd in our
• 46:51
  cast list is arguably the most famous performance in the film.
• 46:54
  Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates. We meet Norman as the lonely
• 46:57
  young man who runs the Bates Motel and see him murder Mario
• 47:00
  and then Pi Arborgast before finding out he is mother and
• 47:03
  seeing him locked up for his crimes.
• 47:06
  You might fool him, Matt, but you won't fool his mother.
• 47:09
  All right, So how's Anthony Perkins and Norman Bates?
• 47:14
  Again, I feel a little bit sorry for him as well because after he
• 47:16
  did this, he was so typecast as Norman for the rest of his
• 47:19
  career. No one could see him as anybody
• 47:21
  else. Yeah.
• 47:22
  Having said that, the reason he's typecast is because he is
• 47:25
  so brilliant as Norman. Like, you never know where you
• 47:29
  are with this character when you first meet him.
• 47:31
  As I said, he's got this easy charm for him, He thinks very
• 47:33
  likable. Then you see that's just on the
• 47:35
  surface, and there's this whole, like, ocean of anxiety and
• 47:39
  nervousness to the character. He's so incredibly awkward in
• 47:42
  his own skin, but that's because really, that skin belongs to
• 47:45
  someone else, and there's someone else in there.
• 47:47
  And you do get these moments where I think you can see mother
• 47:50
  bubbling to the surface, like when he pushes Marian's car into
• 47:53
  the swamp to dispose of the body.
• 47:55
  That's just like the hint of a smile on his face, like he's
• 47:58
  enjoying this, which Norman isn't, but mother is, and that's
• 48:02
  what we're seeing. And it's this constant conflict
• 48:04
  between the two. And whenever he has to talk to
• 48:06
  somebody, he's a nervous wreck. And yes, it's a shame he was
• 48:08
  typecast. But if it's going to happen to
• 48:10
  you as an actor, at least make sure it's for something as
• 48:12
  memorable as this. Yeah, I mean, it's iconic, isn't
• 48:16
  it? Part of Hollywood history?
• 48:18
  I mean, as a character, Norman's interesting because he's not a
• 48:20
  cartoon. He's grounded because on the
• 48:22
  surface he's shy and awkward. He does seem like he wouldn't
• 48:25
  harm a family. But as it gets a norm, it
• 48:27
  becomes obvious he's disturbed and then had a split identity.
• 48:30
  I think what's really interesting is how we're clearly
• 48:32
  supposed to relate to him because we see how lonely he is.
• 48:35
  We're here as embarrassment with mother.
• 48:36
  The way they hand over the role of main character from marrying
• 48:39
  the Norman that's done so well that by the time he comes to
• 48:41
  clean up the murder, I kind of feel this panic.
• 48:44
  Such a complex villain, I think Still.
• 48:46
  And Anthony Perkins just takes what's on the page and makes
• 48:49
  Norman totally 3 dimensional. He does that shy, sweet thing
• 48:53
  well. 12 cabins, 12 vacancies, every single time.
• 48:56
  It's living with that. It's so good.
• 48:58
  But then when the switch flips, he's pretty terrifying.
• 49:01
  He manage his support for you. Norman's totally unhinged, but
• 49:04
  doesn't raise his voice once, just the way that he stands, the
• 49:06
  way he holds himself. And yeah, those shots next to
• 49:08
  the swamp with no words, and then that smile that he gives to
• 49:11
  Arborgast after he drives away because he thinks he's getting
• 49:13
  away with it. It's so good.
• 49:15
  I mean, what can you say? It's Norman Bates in Psycho, 1
• 49:18
  of the great characters in Hollywood, and it's in the
• 49:20
  writing and it's also in what Anthony Perkins brings as well,
• 49:23
  his old timer stuff. I love him.
• 49:26
  I love him. I love Sweetheart.
• 49:29
  He's great in the first like 30 seconds.
• 49:32
  Is there one of them people who's like you really like when
• 49:34
  you first move in and then he gets a little bit creepy as your
• 49:37
  neighbor and then you end up just waving and then you just
• 49:39
  don't come out. If he's at the car, you just
• 49:41
  wait a little bit longer. It's that kind of character.
• 49:43
  But it's just, it has this believability.
• 49:46
  And I think what you guys were talking about there, like when
• 49:47
  he's happy with himself, I always see it as like how happy
• 49:50
  his mother would be at his actions.
• 49:53
  Not necessarily her as a person, but she would be proud of him.
• 49:55
  Like he's making that proud by doing this.
• 49:57
  He hasn't got his own mind. He doesn't oversell everything,
• 50:01
  but he doesn't undersell it either.
• 50:03
  The fact that he spends all of his time just stuffing birds.
• 50:07
  And I don't mean that as a euphemism.
• 50:08
  Literally. He wishes.
• 50:11
  I think his wardrobe's great. He's just looks really clean.
• 50:13
  He's really crisp. He's really fresh.
• 50:15
  He's just really zippy as a as a guy.
• 50:17
  So he's got some good gags in there.
• 50:18
  Like you said there, John, like 12 covers, 12 vacancies, candy.
• 50:21
  And he's just got these little moments where it's just it's
• 50:23
  just so well measured and so well played through.
• 50:25
  You believe it. You believe every single step of
• 50:27
  it all the way through the film. And that's so important.
• 50:30
  But that's Perkins performance. He is fantastic.
• 50:33
  I guess the only negative, like you said there, Matt, is how it
• 50:35
  affected Perkins himself, because he did become totally
• 50:37
  typecast, didn't he, As Norman, Yeah.
• 50:39
  If you're that good though, you there's no way else you can go.
• 50:42
  Once you do this, that's it. Yeah, absolutely.
• 50:44
  It's a shame in his career so far, yeah.
• 50:46
  So in the novel, Norman is described as being a pudgy,
• 50:48
  balding, middle-aged man in glasses.
• 50:51
  Some writers who knew Robert Block have said that an
• 50:54
  inspiration for Norman was Calvin Thomas Beck, who was a
• 50:57
  publisher of a horror magazine called Castle of Frankenstein.
• 51:00
  Apparently he was a socially awkward mama's boy who was
• 51:03
  dominated by his overprotective mother.
• 51:05
  Sounds very familiar. Yeah, imagine that, though.
• 51:07
  I've based a character in you in my new book.
• 51:10
  Oh, have you? I can't wait to say that.
• 51:12
  Massively insulting. He's a massive fat wet letters
• 51:15
  of living man Oh class. Thanks for that.
• 51:18
  And it seems like there was never anybody else considered to
• 51:21
  play the part of Norman. Joseph Stefano said that he was
• 51:24
  initially reluctant to right cycle and told Hitchcock the
• 51:27
  problem was the character of Norman in the novel was just
• 51:29
  impossible to sympathise with. And Hitchcock said, well, what
• 51:32
  have we got? Tony Perkins?
• 51:35
  Yes, Stefano would recently seen Perkins on stage in a play
• 51:38
  called Look Home. What Angel?
• 51:39
  And he said. When I saw him, I thought,
• 51:41
  that's exactly who I want Norman to be.
• 51:43
  Right. Right.
• 51:44
  So he knew straight off, yeah. Fair enough.
• 51:46
  And like Janet Leigh, Perkins saw a paramount the picture
• 51:48
  under his contract, which meant his fate was well below his
• 51:51
  usual rate. He got paid $40,000 to play a
• 51:54
  Norman. In contrast, Cary Grant had been
• 51:57
  paid $450,000 for North by Northwest. 40 grand for Norman
• 52:03
  Bates is a bargain. Yeah, really is, yeah.
• 52:06
  Maybe that's why Marion stole that much.
• 52:07
  Paying for him. Exactly.
• 52:08
  Yeah. Just take it straight out of the
• 52:09
  safe. He didn't put it in the boot
• 52:11
  after all, did he? Or the Trump or whatever you
• 52:13
  want to call it. Well, Perkinsley, I said as well
• 52:15
  that on set Hitchcock would always refer to him as Master
• 52:18
  Bates of. Course he did.
• 52:21
  Hitchcock did get accused of harassing some cast members,
• 52:24
  like Tippi Hedren most famously didn't he on The Birds.
• 52:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, before we finish and
• 52:28
  Anthony Perkins and Norman Bates, we've got our next ATR
• 52:31
  and Patreon question and it comes from Gareth Binmore.
• 52:34
  Hello, Gareth. Hello, Gareth.
• 52:35
  Gareth says what makes Norman Bates one of cinema's most
• 52:38
  enduring psychological villains? And how does the film portray A
• 52:41
  dissociative identity complex one from Gareth?
• 52:44
  Matt Biz, what's your take? Why does he endure it?
• 52:48
  I think because he's so sympathetic.
• 52:50
  Like, even though we really like Marian as a character, I still
• 52:53
  don't really hate Norman for killing her.
• 52:55
  I I still feel sorry for him because we understand what an
• 52:58
  abuse of an lonely childhood he had.
• 53:00
  Now, ultimately, he's not in control of his actions.
• 53:03
  And that's what separates him from the likes of, you know,
• 53:05
  Michael Myers or Jason Foys, who go in their space because they
• 53:09
  want to. Norman doesn't want to do any of
• 53:11
  these murders. He's helpless and it's a mother
• 53:13
  who wants to do them, and he can't do anything to stop her.
• 53:16
  And the other thing about in which the two direct sequels
• 53:18
  lean into, it's that sense of knowing something is going to
• 53:21
  trigger him off, but you don't know when and you don't know
• 53:24
  what. So that's what really kind of
• 53:26
  makes him so interesting. Like, what's going to like, flip
• 53:28
  that switch in his head when he goes?
• 53:29
  You never know who's safe around him because some people are, but
• 53:32
  some people aren't. So think how does it betray
• 53:35
  their identity is something to feel a bit sorry for as well as
• 53:38
  be scared about. Yeah, I think you're right.
• 53:41
  I think Norman is written to be sympathetic because horror films
• 53:44
  before Norman were usually monsters, like literally like
• 53:46
  Frankenstein and Dracula, like the Universal stuff.
• 53:49
  Norman's the guy next door. He's really normal, normal
• 53:52
  baits. Until he's not, obviously.
• 53:54
  But by that point it's kind of too late because we're already
• 53:57
  empathising with him to some extent on the dissociative
• 54:00
  identity side Gareth asked about.
• 54:01
  I mean, psycho isn't a textbook, obviously, and the psychiatry
• 54:04
  seen at the end simplifies it massively.
• 54:07
  I think we'll get to that. But from what experts seem to
• 54:09
  say, what it does get right is the idea of one personality like
• 54:13
  swallowing another. Because Norman's not pretending
• 54:15
  to be his mother. In his head, she's real, and
• 54:17
  she's in charge. So is Norman evil, or is one
• 54:21
  part of him evil? And if that evil part of him
• 54:23
  just came about entirely through years of abuse, as the film kind
• 54:26
  of implies, where does that leave us in judging Norman?
• 54:28
  It's so great for 1960. This is villain writing, like,
• 54:31
  ahead of its time, I think. I mean, it's barely been much
• 54:34
  since I think. Yeah.
• 54:36
  I think, yeah, because he is. And you do endure it because
• 54:39
  you'd kind of in a weird way, see a little bit of yourself in
• 54:43
  him. Like if you've ever been bullied
• 54:44
  or if you've ever felt low, or if you've ever felt this lack of
• 54:47
  confidence and this frustration that you have where you just
• 54:50
  want to lash out or you just want to do something.
• 54:51
  It just you just want something to disappear.
• 54:53
  You just want something to go away.
• 54:55
  And he has that desperation. It is very black and white.
• 54:57
  It's there's no, like you said, there's no grey area for him.
• 55:00
  His man wants it to happen. He's got no say in it.
• 55:02
  He's very much in the middle of it.
• 55:03
  Again, it's the performance, whether you like it or not, you
• 55:06
  will see a little bit of yourself in that character
• 55:08
  because he does try and act as normal as society deems it to
• 55:12
  be. What is normal to act this way
• 55:14
  and how the film portrays the disassociate of identity
• 55:17
  specifically, I think it does it very cleverly through certain
• 55:20
  techniques. And one of the most obvious is
• 55:22
  that Norman is never ever seen as a reflection in the mirror.
• 55:25
  Every other character is. So you never ever see another
• 55:28
  side room. You never see that duality.
• 55:30
  You have to come up with that yourself, but ultimately I think
• 55:33
  it's just because the character is relatable, whether you like
• 55:35
  it or not. He is to probably everyone just
• 55:38
  about I would think. Yeah.
• 55:40
  For his performance as Norman Bates, Anthony Perkins received
• 55:42
  no recognition at the Oscars, not even the nomination.
• 55:45
  Now that is madness. That is mad.
• 55:47
  Yeah, yeah. But I just don't think they knew
• 55:49
  what they had at the. Time.
• 55:50
  No. Oh, not sure they didn't know
• 55:52
  Bert Lancaster won that year, also for Elma Gantry.
• 55:55
  But for us, decades later, Anthony Perkins is pretty
• 55:57
  extraordinary as Norman Bates, a performance that defined an
• 56:00
  actor, a character and one of the most influential roles in
• 56:03
  Hollywood. Absolutely.
• 56:05
  There's a lot to it, yeah. The last but by no means least
• 56:10
  member of our cast we're going all in on is Vera Miles, who
• 56:12
  plays Lila Crane, Marion's younger sister.
• 56:15
  Lila doesn't turn up until nearly an hour into the film,
• 56:18
  but ends up piercing together what's happened, Eventually
• 56:20
  finding herself face to face with mother, then Norman in the
• 56:23
  fruit seller. Yeah, Patience doesn't run in
• 56:25
  her family, Westie, So we best got to move on.
• 56:28
  Vera Miles is Lila Crane. I mean, she's fantastic,
• 56:31
  arguably the biggest star in this film at this point, but she
• 56:34
  really does bring it. I mean, she's just so, so good.
• 56:37
  And the thing that I get from her performance is you
• 56:39
  completely believe her and Marian's relationship that it's
• 56:43
  not perfect, that the kind of speak but that don't quite get
• 56:47
  on as well as they should. And you, there's this element of
• 56:49
  guilt that she has all the way through the film that they
• 56:52
  should be closer. She should know what's going on.
• 56:54
  But the performance itself, I mean, there's just such a
• 56:57
  contrast between who she's acting with.
• 57:00
  When you cut Leila and Sam in the same scene, it's like she's
• 57:04
  it's just head and shoulders above nearly everybody else.
• 57:07
  It's just fantastic. But what an actress to sell the
• 57:10
  actual point that needs to be sold.
• 57:13
  But she's just so intelligent as well as a character and totally
• 57:16
  believable within that intelligence.
• 57:18
  If just like if, if Marian had just maybe reached out a little
• 57:21
  bit, I think Lila could have helped her a lot more than she
• 57:24
  feels that you could have. I don't know how much they would
• 57:26
  have spoke gently and Vera Miles about it.
• 57:28
  Look, this is where we've come from.
• 57:29
  This is who we are. Feels like they had a
• 57:31
  conversation about the kind of blueprint of how these two grew
• 57:35
  up. And like I say, it's a wonderful
• 57:36
  performance from Janet Lee. But again, not taking anything
• 57:38
  away from Vera Miles, she picks up the baton and runs with it
• 57:42
  right till the end and succeeds. She really does.
• 57:45
  I mean, she comes into it late, but yeah, I think she's really
• 57:47
  good. She's got a bit of a thankless
• 57:48
  job here. Vera Miles, because she's
• 57:50
  playing the character, doing the investigation heavy lifting in
• 57:53
  the back half of the film. She has to essentially take over
• 57:55
  from Janet Lee, which is no small ask.
• 57:57
  Plus she has to put up with Sam for far too long.
• 57:59
  Not. Far too long.
• 58:01
  What makes my life good is how capable she is, I think.
• 58:04
  Like, yeah, all big ass gets himself killed.
• 58:06
  Sam's pretty useless, The sheriff's totally useless.
• 58:09
  So it's Lila who kind of gets us to the reveal.
• 58:11
  And Vera Miles doesn't have an easy either, because she's
• 58:13
  basically just walking from one room to another, asking
• 58:16
  questions a lot of the time. But she does bring, like,
• 58:18
  charisma and presence of the part.
• 58:20
  I like it. In Sam's hardware store.
• 58:21
  We are gasses to her. I might just believe that.
• 58:24
  And Lila, just like I don't much care if you believe me or not.
• 58:27
  Yeah, yeah. I think Miles is smart enough to
• 58:30
  make the character likeable, which means that Marion's death
• 58:32
  hits even harder because of what Lila's lost.
• 58:34
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 58:35
  Only thing, and I mean, they couldn't have done it, really,
• 58:37
  but I would love to have seen one scene in the first act
• 58:39
  between Janet Lee and Vera Miles somewhere.
• 58:41
  That would have been brilliant somehow.
• 58:43
  Yeah. But yeah, brilliant supporting
• 58:45
  performance, I think. And she kind of feels like the
• 58:47
  lead by the end. I would have liked that if she'd
• 58:50
  get, like, turned up and just given her half the money.
• 58:53
  Yeah, I'm leaving. Like, give her 20 grand.
• 58:55
  What's this for? She's like, don't ask any
• 58:56
  questions. I will not see us again.
• 58:58
  And then she takes 20, and they've got to try and, like,
• 59:00
  match it up. Yeah.
• 59:01
  To kind of bind them both together.
• 59:03
  And would it be because even though they don't share a scene,
• 59:04
  I can totally see their relationship?
• 59:06
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can. I can see them on the phone to
• 59:09
  each other just being like, well, why don't you tell us
• 59:10
  what's going on? So it's none of your business?
• 59:12
  Totally. It's it's really good, really
• 59:13
  works. Yeah, I think she's really good,
• 59:16
  but I've got Thankless written down as well, John, because
• 59:18
  there is a little bit aspect to it, you know, she's the worried
• 59:21
  sister and that's about it for most of it.
• 59:23
  I mean, her and Sam are very similar.
• 59:25
  They've got a dry fall with the plot in the second-half.
• 59:28
  Once marrying an Arbor cast are killed, but she doesn't have
• 59:31
  much of an arc to it. And I think maybe Hitchcock
• 59:33
  really wanted the more memorable performance to come from Perkins
• 59:37
  and he doesn't want anyone to take the spotlight away from him
• 59:39
  because that's the ironic twist of the film.
• 59:41
  The person you end up investing in the most is the murderer at
• 59:44
  the end. Having said that, she is great.
• 59:47
  I mean, you are screaming at her not to go into the house at the
• 59:49
  end because you don't want her to meet the same fate as her
• 59:52
  sister. So it's just instantly likeable.
• 59:54
  There's limits as to what Miles can do with his character, but
• 59:57
  she elevated a lot. Definitely, yeah.
• 59:59
  She pushes to the limits of what you'd expect the character to
• 1:00:01
  do. Definitely, yeah.
• 1:00:03
  Like we're saying about the film, I think she does more than
• 1:00:04
  you could ever reasonably expect it to do with it.
• 1:00:06
  Yeah, definitely just a little looks to Norman as well when the
• 1:00:09
  checkmate just a little. Yeah.
• 1:00:12
  Who the fucks this game? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:15
  Should be more sensible than Marion, yeah.
• 1:00:18
  So before Beer and Miles, there were other actresses in the
• 1:00:20
  running to play Leila. Felicia Far, Carolyn Jones,
• 1:00:24
  Caroline Corney, Eleanor Parker were all considered for the
• 1:00:27
  role, and Kim Stanley was offered the role but apparently
• 1:00:30
  turned it down due to reservations about working with
• 1:00:32
  Anthony Perkins. Yeah, she was known mostly as a
• 1:00:36
  staging TV actress at the time, Kim Stanley.
• 1:00:38
  And apparently she had a problem with Perkins, although it's not
• 1:00:40
  reported what that was. Right.
• 1:00:42
  Yeah. Too much candy for crunch,
• 1:00:44
  probably. Yeah, maybe.
• 1:00:45
  Yeah. But cycle wasn't the first time
• 1:00:48
  Hitchcock had came across Vera Miles.
• 1:00:50
  She'd starred alongside Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man in 1956,
• 1:00:54
  and then Hitchcock had cast her alongside James Stewart in
• 1:00:57
  Vertigo. But that didn't happen.
• 1:00:59
  As Miles pulled out when she was pregnant.
• 1:01:01
  Hitchcock replaced her with Kim Novak, and according to Miles,
• 1:01:04
  when she told him she was pulling out, Hitchcock said
• 1:01:07
  Don't you know it's a bad taste to have more than two children?
• 1:01:12
  Because he only had one. Yeah.
• 1:01:14
  Amazing. Yeah.
• 1:01:15
  I mean, I know that's bad taste, Alfred.
• 1:01:16
  Yes, that. Definitely.
• 1:01:18
  Is, yeah. But yeah, it's quite interesting
• 1:01:19
  because Grace Kelly retired from acting in 1956 and Hitchcock
• 1:01:23
  apparently saw Miles as his next main female lead and he signed
• 1:01:26
  her to a five year contract and had her Paramount stylist get to
• 1:01:29
  work on her style to turn her into a Hitchcock blonde.
• 1:01:32
  So yeah, she was lined up for Vertigo.
• 1:01:34
  Right. Wow, could it make matters
• 1:01:36
  worse? Miles had just filmed the war
• 1:01:38
  film called 5 Branded Women about Yugoslav women punished
• 1:01:43
  for consorting with German soldiers, and she'd shaved her
• 1:01:46
  head for that role. So turned up to film Psycho
• 1:01:48
  basically bald. So she's wearing a wig in the
• 1:01:51
  film? Yeah, wow.
• 1:01:51
  Wow. Could never.
• 1:01:52
  Tell Dad. Never knew that, Yeah.
• 1:01:54
  Good job wasn't here in the shower.
• 1:01:55
  No one would have got the shock of his life.
• 1:02:00
  She's going to take the wig off at the end of the film, then
• 1:02:02
  she's like a dad. Well, for a performance as Lila
• 1:02:11
  Crane, Vera Miles received no recognition in the Academy
• 1:02:13
  Awards. No great surprise given Janet
• 1:02:15
  Leigh took the supporting slot. But in carrying the second-half
• 1:02:18
  of the film and turning Lila into a role with real substance,
• 1:02:21
  some top stuff from Vera Miles. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:02:24
  Yeah, Top draw. So that's our main cast.
• 1:02:26
  We've talked about Janet Leigh as Marion, Anthony Perkins as
• 1:02:29
  Norman and Vera Miles as Lila. 3 very different performances, but
• 1:02:33
  some top casting from Hitchcock in Psycho.
• 1:02:35
  Yeah, brilliant stuff. All the right movies will be
• 1:02:44
  back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by
• 1:02:47
  listening to this episode. Sponsors.
• 1:02:51
  Thanks for listening to our sponsors.
• 1:02:53
  Now back to the show. The middle.
• 1:03:02
  Heading into the midsection of Psycho and we're going to the
• 1:03:04
  most famous moments of all. We're going to be talking about
• 1:03:07
  Arborgast's arrival of the motel and his own grizzly fate.
• 1:03:10
  But first, we've got 45 seconds of Hollywood history to get
• 1:03:13
  into. We'll do.
• 1:03:15
  Having made her decision to go back to Phoenix, Marion decides
• 1:03:17
  to have a shower before bed. Norman, though, our mother has
• 1:03:21
  other plans. He burst into the bathroom,
• 1:03:23
  butchers the tragic Marion, leaving her murdered on the
• 1:03:25
  tiled floor. One of the most famous scenes in
• 1:03:29
  all of cinema. Westie, is it for good reason.
• 1:03:32
  It absolutely is, for good reason.
• 1:03:34
  This would have been incredibly shocking.
• 1:03:36
  If you're watching this 960, you're sitting in that audience.
• 1:03:39
  It's the first time you've seen it.
• 1:03:40
  You haven't heard anything about it, but just imagine that music
• 1:03:43
  coming out. That's that silhouette creeping
• 1:03:48
  up. You've got no idea what's going
• 1:03:50
  on. The reveal from that shower
• 1:03:51
  curtain pulling by the sound design is incredible.
• 1:03:54
  The water still hitting down, you're already thinking, well,
• 1:03:58
  this is a little bit too much nudity that I've already seen,
• 1:04:01
  so you'd be bothered about that. You've already seen a bra in the
• 1:04:03
  first scene, so you're already reeling about that.
• 1:04:05
  You have no idea where this is going.
• 1:04:07
  See the toilet flushing? Toilets flush.
• 1:04:09
  At this point, it's like watching A Serbian Film, like in
• 1:04:12
  1960. But it's just the editing here,
• 1:04:17
  just the frenicity of it, just the the confusion of the whole
• 1:04:21
  scene, just the different angles that come up.
• 1:04:23
  The thing that really freaks me out is why do people in films
• 1:04:25
  just get in the shower 1st and then turn it on?
• 1:04:28
  I don't understand why that happens.
• 1:04:30
  Nobody ever does that. Ever.
• 1:04:32
  No, it's too cold again. Does it and this to do it in
• 1:04:35
  Groundhog Day he learns his lesson in Groundhog Day he
• 1:04:37
  doesn't do it again. That's probably why she gets
• 1:04:39
  stabbed to be honest. But for me it's Hitchcock here
• 1:04:42
  and how he just sits with the aftermath.
• 1:04:45
  You just that water runs and you're just sitting there going,
• 1:04:48
  can I leave now? Can I get out of here because
• 1:04:51
  I'm so uncomfortable? Can I breathe?
• 1:04:52
  There's that blood coming down and into the drain and then that
• 1:04:56
  amazing transition from the drain to the eye and then it
• 1:04:58
  pulls back and then he's still seen her on the ground.
• 1:05:00
  It's just punched you in the face.
• 1:05:02
  It's a kangaroo kicking you in the face for 30 seconds and then
• 1:05:06
  stroking your back to life for like an hour and a half.
• 1:05:09
  Really strange image that. Yeah, Kangaroo.
• 1:05:14
  Yeah, it is a strange image, but I'm sticking with it.
• 1:05:16
  I'm sticking with it. Yeah.
• 1:05:17
  It's a massive punch in the face and then a stroke of the hair.
• 1:05:20
  It's just so well done by Hitchcock.
• 1:05:21
  If I had a time machine, I would go back and watch the audience
• 1:05:24
  watch this first shown 1960. No one knew what was going.
• 1:05:27
  That would just be incredible. Yeah.
• 1:05:29
  Oh, it really would. I mean, not just one of the most
• 1:05:31
  famous scenes in Hollywood. This is one of the best pieces
• 1:05:34
  of film making I think I've ever seen.
• 1:05:36
  Literally every frame there for a reason.
• 1:05:38
  It's an extraordinary thing. Firstly, when Norman pulls back
• 1:05:41
  the shower curtain and Marian spins round, they do like a
• 1:05:43
  classic thing, an American cut, I think it's called, like when
• 1:05:46
  the monster revealed or something, and it goes wide
• 1:05:48
  shot, mid shot, close up, like, bang, bang, bang.
• 1:05:51
  Yeah, it does that. Yeah.
• 1:05:51
  Wide shot Marian to a face, screaming, but just a mouth.
• 1:05:54
  It could look really cheesy if you don't get it right.
• 1:05:57
  This one is unbelievable. It's out outrageous.
• 1:06:00
  It's the pace of it. It's perfect, isn't it?
• 1:06:02
  It is the shots themselves are just perfect and then we're in.
• 1:06:05
  It's total chaos. I think the average shot length
• 1:06:07
  of the attacks, about 3/4 of a second, which let's just get
• 1:06:10
  away with far more nudity than you would have otherwise I
• 1:06:12
  think. But the quick cutting, it's like
• 1:06:15
  an assault on us watching. It's just a barrage of all these
• 1:06:18
  horrific images. 1 after the other, the knife or marrying,
• 1:06:21
  screaming or a body being stabbed different.
• 1:06:23
  Your brains like catching up with one another.
• 1:06:25
  One gets thrown in front of you. And we often talk about breaking
• 1:06:28
  the 180 grey rule on here. Yeah, yeah, Hitchcock's breaking
• 1:06:31
  the 360° rule doesn't exist. Yeah.
• 1:06:34
  Living about all over the place. It feels frantic as hell, which
• 1:06:37
  is obviously the exactly the idea.
• 1:06:39
  I love how we treat it as its own short film almost, because
• 1:06:41
  we get bookend shots. The first shot of the scene,
• 1:06:44
  looking up at the shower and it ends with that same shot as
• 1:06:46
  well. Same shot.
• 1:06:47
  And it feels totally different both times you say it.
• 1:06:50
  I love that. I think as a director, having a
• 1:06:52
  vision for a moment in the film and then executing it, this,
• 1:06:56
  it's hard to top. It's horrific to watch.
• 1:06:59
  But creatively, I'm just in total, all of it.
• 1:07:01
  And I didn't even mention the score and.
• 1:07:05
  That was the fastest I've ever heard you talk about anything in
• 1:07:09
  25 years. Yeah, I mean, 45 seconds, 45
• 1:07:15
  seconds in cinema has changed forever after this.
• 1:07:18
  That's all it takes. I mean it's not lost one bit of
• 1:07:21
  it's power to shock and again, like Wesley out do anything to
• 1:07:24
  go back to 1960 and see this for an audience for the first time.
• 1:07:27
  I mean it's scandalous in itself, borderline just the
• 1:07:31
  notion of seeing the woman in the shower.
• 1:07:33
  So that's going to play you off killer and then that to lead
• 1:07:35
  into the most brutal murder probably ever in cinematic
• 1:07:38
  history. At that point, they must have
• 1:07:40
  lost their absolute minds because this plays into the fact
• 1:07:45
  that this is when someone is at their most vulnerable naked in
• 1:07:47
  the shower. But also, it's the place where
• 1:07:50
  you should be at your most comfortable, because what's
• 1:07:52
  scary about taking a shower? Everyone does it.
• 1:07:55
  Hitchcock just obliterates all that comfort.
• 1:07:57
  And it's maybe the greatest example of the suggestive power
• 1:08:01
  of cinema ever. People think the C nudity, the
• 1:08:03
  don't. People think the C the knife P
• 1:08:05
  is flesh, the don't. It's all because of the editor,
• 1:08:08
  because of that music and how Hitchcock saw this in his head,
• 1:08:12
  translated it to the edit, added the score.
• 1:08:15
  It is absolute genius of the highest order and it still
• 1:08:18
  scares the absolute shit out of me every time.
• 1:08:20
  I think it is filmmaking genius. It's about as good as it gets.
• 1:08:23
  Yeah. So the shower scene was shot in
• 1:08:25
  six days, from December 17th through December 23rd, 1959, but
• 1:08:30
  it had to be postponed twice as Janet Lee was poorly.
• 1:08:33
  It's 45 seconds long, 50 different camera angles and had
• 1:08:37
  78 setups. It was storyboarded in full, but
• 1:08:40
  Hitchcock bought a Moviola editing machine on the set so he
• 1:08:43
  could see what they were making as they were filming.
• 1:08:46
  Storyboard. What was it, a fucking flick
• 1:08:47
  boot? Yeah, it's really fast.
• 1:08:51
  That influenced what footage they would shoot on the fly.
• 1:08:54
  Amazing. Wow.
• 1:08:55
  Yeah, you need to see it. Surely don't.
• 1:08:56
  Yeah, the cooks are that quick. You can't storyboard this and
• 1:08:59
  nail it on the page. Surely it's just genius stuff.
• 1:09:02
  Yeah. Yeah, and Anthony Perkins wasn't
• 1:09:04
  present at all during the shooting of the shower scene,
• 1:09:06
  and a stand in played mother instead.
• 1:09:09
  Some reports say it Perkins was rehearsing a Broadway show
• 1:09:12
  called Green Willow in New York at the time, but that's not why
• 1:09:15
  he wasn't there. Hitchcock kept him away as he
• 1:09:17
  didn't want any chance that the audience might be able to spot
• 1:09:20
  that Norman was Mother. So instead Mother is played by
• 1:09:23
  two stunt women called Margot Eppe and Anne.
• 1:09:26
  Dore. Yeah.
• 1:09:27
  So Margot Eppe is the one who rips the shower curtain.
• 1:09:29
  Auburn. And then for the rest of it,
• 1:09:31
  apparently it's Anne Dore, right?
• 1:09:32
  I mean, we can't tell. Obviously, her face has been
• 1:09:34
  made-up because it's like, pitch black.
• 1:09:36
  There's no features there, is there?
• 1:09:37
  It's crazy. Is that an influence on Star
• 1:09:40
  Wars? Andor I got that out.
• 1:09:43
  That was the worst joke I've ever put.
• 1:09:47
  Janet Lee wore mole skin pads and strips to cover herself
• 1:09:50
  while filming the scene, and she had a body double called Marley
• 1:09:54
  Renfrow. Renfrow was a model and a dancer
• 1:09:57
  and said that when she auditioned, she had to strip
• 1:09:59
  naked for Hitchcock and Janet Lee so they could review her
• 1:10:02
  body. Ridiculous, She said.
• 1:10:04
  She spent hours a day naked on the set, and at one point
• 1:10:07
  Hitchcock attached a measuring tape to the camera and put the
• 1:10:09
  point of it on her breast just to make sure it was going to be
• 1:10:13
  in focus. Which is a normal thing for a
• 1:10:14
  focus bullet to be honest, but not the director.
• 1:10:18
  I'll do that. I'll do that one.
• 1:10:20
  You take a break. Where is this from?
• 1:10:22
  A&Q Is it? To be fair, she said he was a
• 1:10:24
  gentleman and went out of his way to make her feel
• 1:10:26
  comfortable. So I mean, that's, that's all
• 1:10:27
  very nice, but still. Yeah, fair enough.
• 1:10:30
  Well, according to Molly Renfrow, whenever we're looking
• 1:10:32
  at a shot where we can't see Janet Lee's face, it's her that
• 1:10:35
  we're seeing, right? And when Norman wrapped
• 1:10:37
  Maureen's body up and carries out of the car, Anthony Perkins
• 1:10:40
  is carrying Molly Renfrow, right?
• 1:10:42
  Yeah. She only made about $500.00 for
• 1:10:44
  the film, apparently. And she went on to become one of
• 1:10:46
  the first Playboy Bunny girls as well.
• 1:10:48
  Molly Renfrow So. Some legacy, right?
• 1:10:51
  Fair enough. And obviously, one of the most
• 1:10:53
  famous parts of the shower scene is the shrieking strings in the
• 1:10:56
  score written by Bernard Herman. Hitchcock had originally told
• 1:11:00
  Herman that he wanted the scene without any music at all, but
• 1:11:03
  Herman disagreed. So it just brought music for it
• 1:11:05
  anyway. And when Hitchcock was
• 1:11:07
  disappointed with how the scene was turning out, Herman showed
• 1:11:10
  of his composition. Hitchcock was so impressed that
• 1:11:12
  he used the score in the film. And when Herman asked why he
• 1:11:15
  hadn't wanted music in the 1st place, Hitchcock said it was an
• 1:11:18
  improper suggestion. My boy, improper suggestion.
• 1:11:23
  Yeah, I mean, to say Herman was right goes without saying.
• 1:11:26
  A. Little bit, yeah.
• 1:11:27
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another bit in the score that
• 1:11:29
  blows me away is after the attacks done and Marion's alone
• 1:11:32
  and like dying and the music is that like Babble Babble.
• 1:11:36
  Yeah. That represents Marion's
• 1:11:38
  heartbeat, surely, because it gets slower and slower, then
• 1:11:40
  stops as soon as she collapses. That is beyond genius.
• 1:11:44
  Yeah, get out. Yeah.
• 1:11:46
  Get the hell out, Bernard. Yeah.
• 1:11:49
  We mentioned Saul Bass earlier as he did the opening title
• 1:11:51
  sequence, obviously, and he was involved in the shower scene
• 1:11:54
  too. He storyboarded the scene and
• 1:11:56
  eight days before the film was shot, Bass filmed test footage
• 1:11:59
  of the shower scene with Marley Renfrow and editor George
• 1:12:01
  Tomasini as a demonstration. Hitchcock.
• 1:12:04
  Yeah. So it was like a proof of
• 1:12:05
  concept basically to show how the quick cutting would work.
• 1:12:08
  I mean, usually proof of concepts are when they're using
• 1:12:10
  new technology. This needed a proof of concept
• 1:12:12
  because they were just innovating film making itself.
• 1:12:15
  Just fantastic. But there was some controversy
• 1:12:19
  later in 1970 when Sol Bass said he didn't just storyboard the
• 1:12:23
  shower scene, he directed it as well.
• 1:12:25
  But this was denied by some crew members.
• 1:12:27
  Hilton Green, the assistant director, said Bass was never on
• 1:12:30
  set and said he later confronted Bass about it.
• 1:12:33
  And Janet Leigh went on record to say I was in that shower for
• 1:12:36
  seven days. And believe me, Alfred Hitchcock
• 1:12:38
  was right next to his camera for every one of those 70 odd shots.
• 1:12:43
  I bet he was. Yeah, with the tape measure.
• 1:12:46
  Yeah. Even when everyone had gone
• 1:12:48
  home. And Joseph Stefano called Bus's
• 1:12:50
  claim the most shocking thing about Psycho as.
• 1:12:53
  Well, I'm not surprised. Yeah, I directed the shower
• 1:12:56
  scene because Oh yeah, amazing. Bastard do the storyboard
• 1:12:59
  though. If you see nose they are
• 1:13:01
  outstanding. Oh, there will be.
• 1:13:03
  Yeah. Because that's what he's good
• 1:13:04
  at. Yeah.
• 1:13:04
  Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:13:06
  Just seeing your storyboarded. It that's still an amazing
• 1:13:08
  claim, yeah. And John mentioned how to see
• 1:13:11
  this book ended by two shots looking up at the shower.
• 1:13:13
  And these shots needed a custom prop.
• 1:13:15
  Hitchcock wanted the camera to be in the middle of The Jets of
• 1:13:18
  water, so a six foot diameter shower head was made-up and the
• 1:13:21
  central jets placed so the water sprayed past the camera.
• 1:13:24
  No wonder Gently was scared of showers after there's Six
• 1:13:26
  footers war the worlds. Trigger happy TV shower?
• 1:13:31
  No. Isn't it massive?
• 1:13:32
  Shoot. Hello.
• 1:13:33
  No, I'm in the shower. But another nice deal about his
• 1:13:39
  shot is a during the attack it seems like more, but we only
• 1:13:42
  actually see two shots of the knife touching Marion's body,
• 1:13:45
  one's where it seems to go into her stomach.
• 1:13:46
  And they did that by pressing the knife against Leigh's or
• 1:13:49
  maybe Molly Renfrow's body, pulling it away, and then
• 1:13:51
  playing that shot backwards, which is cool.
• 1:13:55
  Yeah, yeah. And with the film being shot in
• 1:13:57
  black and white, the production used chocolate syrup instead of
• 1:13:59
  blood because it showed up better on camera.
• 1:14:02
  Some reports say it was Bosco chocolate syrup, while Molly
• 1:14:05
  Renfrow said it was Hershey's. An important distinction.
• 1:14:09
  Yeah, doesn't matter. Well, you mainly see a bird
• 1:14:12
  running down the drain, don't we?
• 1:14:13
  That's what we say, I think, yeah.
• 1:14:14
  Yeah, and more food was used to create the scene.
• 1:14:18
  The sound the knife makes whenever marrying the stabbed is
• 1:14:20
  a knife stabbing A cassaba melon.
• 1:14:22
  One of the props crew called Bob Bourne lined up a Lord of Melons
• 1:14:26
  and they're all stabbed in sequence, with Hitchcock
• 1:14:29
  choosing the one he thought sounded best.
• 1:14:31
  One of the things they also tried was steak, and when
• 1:14:33
  Hitchcock didn't choose that, Bob Bourne said he just took it
• 1:14:36
  home and had it for his dinner of.
• 1:14:37
  Course he did. She would do.
• 1:14:39
  It Yeah, well, apparently Hitchcock closed his eyes and
• 1:14:42
  Bourne went along the table stabbing like melons and
• 1:14:44
  cassavas and and at the end Hitchcock just went cassava.
• 1:14:52
  Final shot is the extreme close up where we transitioned from
• 1:14:55
  the shower drain to Marion's eye and the shot has two errors.
• 1:14:58
  As Marion has died, a pupil should be dilated.
• 1:15:00
  Janet Lee was going to wear contacts to make our eyes look
• 1:15:03
  that way, but when Hitchcock was told it would take six weeks for
• 1:15:06
  our eyes to acclimatize, he ditched the idea.
• 1:15:09
  And then after filming, Hitchcock's wife Alma reveal
• 1:15:11
  spotted that Lee took a breath towards the end of the take.
• 1:15:14
  So that's why we cut away to the shower and then back to Marion
• 1:15:17
  again. Yeah, such a shame because it
• 1:15:19
  would have all been one shot. That was the plan, yeah.
• 1:15:22
  Because, yeah, he'd be. Then go straight from there back
• 1:15:23
  to the money on the night stand, don't we?
• 1:15:25
  Yeah. Just kind of feels totally
• 1:15:27
  meaningless. It does, yeah.
• 1:15:28
  They're pointless, yeah. After this has happened, Norman
• 1:15:31
  has to clear it up. And the thing about the scene
• 1:15:34
  and it took so long for it to click with me is how efficient
• 1:15:36
  Norman is to doing this. Yeah.
• 1:15:38
  Yeah, how many times has he done this?
• 1:15:40
  Exactly, this is not the first body he's had to get rid of.
• 1:15:43
  He's so like nor fuss about it. And there's this moment of pure
• 1:15:47
  Hitchcock when he's pushed the car into the swamp and it floats
• 1:15:50
  for a bit and you just think, oh God, it's not going to sink.
• 1:15:53
  You shouldn't want it to sink. But Hitchcock has put you
• 1:15:56
  entirely your Norman side in you field, just as much relief as he
• 1:15:59
  does when it does finally disappear.
• 1:16:01
  I think it's such a strong choice just showing that scene
• 1:16:03
  because it's a good 10 minutes of no dialogue, just following
• 1:16:06
  Norman round, doing not all that much really, but I can't see my
• 1:16:09
  eyes off it. It's crazy.
• 1:16:11
  Yeah, yeah. After the murder and clean up,
• 1:16:13
  Norman hides Mariano's body by putting it in the boot of the
• 1:16:16
  car and sinking it in a swamp. This was filmed on the Universal
• 1:16:19
  back lot. A hydraulic lift was submerged
• 1:16:21
  in a small lake and that's how they created the effect of the
• 1:16:24
  car stopping, sinking and then starting again.
• 1:16:26
  Yeah, and the $40,000 goes in there as well, doesn't it?
• 1:16:29
  Yeah, it does. Yeah.
• 1:16:30
  So it's like he's not just getting rid of marrying, He's
• 1:16:32
  getting rid of the entire first half of the film is like, none
• 1:16:35
  of it left. Money means nothing.
• 1:16:36
  Yeah. So marrying's gone, the money's
• 1:16:38
  gone, Norman's cleaned up, sunk the car, and as far as he knows,
• 1:16:42
  he's got away with it. However, a certain private
• 1:16:44
  investigator has other ideas. Yeah.
• 1:16:47
  He certainly does. Arborgast with Marion missing
• 1:16:52
  her sister Lila gets involved. She heads to Sam's Hardware
• 1:16:55
  store where they're joined by a third party Pi, Milton
• 1:16:58
  Arborgast, hired by Tom Cassidy to find his $40,000.
• 1:17:01
  In the scenes that follow away with Arborgast as he heads to
• 1:17:04
  the Bates Motel, meets Norman, and then meets Mother Matt.
• 1:17:09
  How does the investigation go with Arborgast?
• 1:17:13
  I mean, he turns up to question Norman, and is there anyone who
• 1:17:17
  could be any worse in this situation than Norman?
• 1:17:20
  I mean, he is absolutely rubbish.
• 1:17:23
  The slightest bit of gentle questioning and he just falls to
• 1:17:26
  pieces. He becomes this stammering,
• 1:17:29
  nervous wreck and it becomes one of the funniest scenes in the
• 1:17:31
  film for me because he's chewing on his candy as usual.
• 1:17:34
  And it just gets more and more intense and you get this
• 1:17:37
  incredible shot. And it never feels to make me
• 1:17:39
  laugh when he leans over to see Marian's signature in the book
• 1:17:43
  and in the the one that Albert Gaster's got to like, compare.
• 1:17:46
  And it's this massive close up of him in his jaw is going 10 to
• 1:17:50
  a dozen just grinding that candy.
• 1:17:52
  And you can see in his head he's going fuck, fuck, fuck.
• 1:17:56
  I've been rumbled, I've given it away.
• 1:17:58
  But what love is? Albert Gaster's so amused by how
• 1:18:01
  easy this is. He's like, who is this guy?
• 1:18:03
  He's like giving this information up so easily, but
• 1:18:06
  it's all a lovely bit of sleight of hand because Norman is so
• 1:18:09
  nervous. You think, well, there's no way
• 1:18:11
  he could do a brutal murder, surely, no way, this guy.
• 1:18:14
  And like I say, I think it's such a funny scene.
• 1:18:16
  And that's a great contrast to what we know is going to happen
• 1:18:18
  to Arbogast shortly. It is another great dialogue
• 1:18:22
  scene. It's also pretty strange
• 1:18:23
  structurally as well, because we get the intros to Lila and
• 1:18:27
  Arbogast in Sam's hardware store, and it's pretty odd
• 1:18:29
  because Lila just turns up and then Arbogast just turns up.
• 1:18:32
  Like skulking in the doorway. Really weird from here.
• 1:18:36
  These are our main characters and it should feel like a really
• 1:18:38
  jarring sort of handover, but I don't think it does.
• 1:18:41
  And the tone shifts because we go from Norman cleaner with the
• 1:18:44
  swamp, which is all quiet and tense, straight into this snappy
• 1:18:47
  three-way dialogue scene. It kind of feels like the
• 1:18:49
  curtains dropped and then opened again to reveal the hardware
• 1:18:52
  store. And it works.
• 1:18:53
  It's all just really well judged by Hitchcock.
• 1:18:56
  But in Arborgas at the motel with Norman 12, Cabin 12
• 1:18:59
  vacancies, obviously. Obviously straight in there with
• 1:19:01
  that. That's the power shifts and the
• 1:19:02
  conversation that are great because Norman is all cocky at
• 1:19:05
  first, but Arborgas kind of picks his story apart.
• 1:19:07
  I think Perkins is really good because there's Norman's story
• 1:19:10
  unravels. He starts getting all nervous
• 1:19:12
  and jumpy and Norman just totally gives himself away.
• 1:19:15
  As soon as he changes his mind about not remembering Marion, he
• 1:19:17
  looks guilty as sin. Yeah, and the line that does it
• 1:19:20
  is when he says I'm not capable of being fooled, not even by a
• 1:19:23
  woman. That's a great line because it's
• 1:19:25
  like he thinks women are more intelligent than him, but also
• 1:19:28
  deceitful. So brilliant.
• 1:19:29
  From Perkins and Martin Balsam as Arborgast and great writing.
• 1:19:32
  I think it's another brilliant dialogue scene.
• 1:19:35
  Arborgast is played by Martin Balsam.
• 1:19:37
  He'd made his way up on the stage before breaking into
• 1:19:39
  films, and he was suggested to Hitchcock by Joseph Stefano, who
• 1:19:43
  knew him from the New York stage world.
• 1:19:45
  Stefano told Hitchcock that Balsam had a particularly
• 1:19:48
  unfriendly smile. Which he kind of, yeah.
• 1:19:52
  Yeah, 12 Angry Men was his first major film role, wasn't it?
• 1:19:55
  I think he's an excellent actor. Dialogue scenes especially.
• 1:19:57
  He's got this really like natural style in his delivery, I
• 1:20:00
  think, and it works really well, yeah.
• 1:20:02
  And when filming this scene between Or Bogas and Norman,
• 1:20:06
  Hitchcock directed Balsam and Perkins to overlap each of this
• 1:20:09
  dialogue to make it seem more natural.
• 1:20:11
  And the scene worked so well that the crew burst into
• 1:20:13
  applause when Hitchcock shouted Cut.
• 1:20:16
  Yeah, what they do as well, if you've noticed, is that through
• 1:20:17
  the whole scene, the camera is almost always on the listener
• 1:20:20
  rather than the speaker. Yeah.
• 1:20:22
  Which is great for an interrogation scene because the
• 1:20:24
  reactions that kind of tell the story.
• 1:20:26
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's all kinds of camera
• 1:20:28
  angles and different framing. I mean, I'm not counted, but
• 1:20:30
  apparently there's 99 cuts in this one scene, like for a
• 1:20:33
  dialogue scene. Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  Wow. So, I mean, we've been
• 1:20:36
  introduced to him, but he's out of there.
• 1:20:38
  Yeah, he's not in long. Unfortunately, I mean, you set
• 1:20:42
  up with that phone call, he's called back any kind of England
• 1:20:45
  he's got about the case. He reports it back, which is
• 1:20:47
  really good. Then that sets it up later.
• 1:20:49
  Surely he would have got back and it gives them the motivation
• 1:20:51
  to go looking for him. And he goes in, he's looking for
• 1:20:54
  him, he's not there, checks the safe and then he's going to that
• 1:20:57
  house and you're thinking hat off.
• 1:20:59
  I love that. He's just like really, really
• 1:21:01
  polite. And then he starts creeping up
• 1:21:03
  the stairs and you get that lovely cut where it goes.
• 1:21:07
  The door just cracks open and that bit of light comes out at
• 1:21:09
  the top of the stairs and then boom, you just get that overhead
• 1:21:13
  shot. The strings come back in.
• 1:21:15
  Isn't you know, there's mother, there's the knife outcomes from
• 1:21:18
  nowhere. Amazing that to have that as an
• 1:21:20
  overhead. Really love that she's gone at
• 1:21:22
  them straight down his face, right, cut down his face, which
• 1:21:26
  is quite, you know, that is quite jarring.
• 1:21:29
  But what isn't Jordan for me is that rear projection.
• 1:21:31
  But I mean, that's just unintentionally funny.
• 1:21:33
  Now he's just flailing around. But what really makes up for the
• 1:21:36
  scene is when he hits the floor and she's just on him and that
• 1:21:40
  is shocking from that angle. That really works.
• 1:21:43
  So I can kind of forgive that because it's Hitchcock thinking
• 1:21:45
  it was going to be more impactful than it actually is
• 1:21:48
  now. Maybe at the time, I think it's
• 1:21:50
  just the flailing of the arms and the kind of that looks a bit
• 1:21:52
  too close to camera. Maybe if it hadn't pushed with
• 1:21:55
  him as well. It kind of and let them just
• 1:21:58
  fall down. I don't know, but what a way to
• 1:22:00
  go out. What a great character.
• 1:22:02
  Another shocking sequence that's really well done, really well
• 1:22:04
  played through. We don't have as many cuts here.
• 1:22:06
  It's not as frantic as we have seen in the shower, but it's
• 1:22:09
  still just as impactful. It is the second murder scene
• 1:22:12
  and we talked about how good the first one was and I'm not sure I
• 1:22:15
  can say this is at that level. I mean, what is?
• 1:22:17
  But this is still incredible film making.
• 1:22:19
  Firstly, when Abergas pulls up at the motel, he gets out the
• 1:22:23
  passenger side door of his car. Have you noticed that?
• 1:22:25
  Really strange. You see Norman Walken, don't
• 1:22:28
  you? And he disappears as Abergas
• 1:22:29
  pulls up, which is a really nice move.
• 1:22:31
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't realise he gets out the
• 1:22:32
  passenger side. Yeah, he shovels across.
• 1:22:35
  So once we're in there, it's a staircase, obviously, so good
• 1:22:37
  cutting from Arbor Gas slowly creeping up the stairs to the
• 1:22:40
  door at the top, like sliding open.
• 1:22:42
  It's also measured and like, tense.
• 1:22:45
  And then it's just like, bang, we cut that over headshot.
• 1:22:47
  Looking down at the landing, his mother comes racing out.
• 1:22:50
  You don't get an angle like that anywhere before this, so it hits
• 1:22:52
  you like a truck, especially with the screeching strings.
• 1:22:55
  Again, I mean, that's short. And the closer the Barber guys
• 1:22:58
  falling down the stairs are the ones that get talked about.
• 1:23:00
  And I think they're both brilliant.
• 1:23:01
  But I'm also freaked out Westie by that moment when Mother leaps
• 1:23:03
  on him at the bottom of the stairs.
• 1:23:05
  You just see the knife. It's just horrible.
• 1:23:07
  It's. Just like the boots coming in as
• 1:23:09
  well. It's like it's just Panther,
• 1:23:11
  like it's horrible. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:12
  Brilliant though. Yeah, I mean, I think always
• 1:23:14
  worth remembering that for all it's reputation, Psycho only has
• 1:23:18
  two murders in it. But I think that's tribute to
• 1:23:21
  how brilliant and shocking the both are.
• 1:23:22
  And considering how iconic Marion's murder is, it says a
• 1:23:25
  lot about this one that it's nearly as scary.
• 1:23:28
  And I think there's just some wonderful misdirection nearby.
• 1:23:30
  Hitchcock, he can't give the game away at this point.
• 1:23:33
  So if he shot this from behind, mother, it totally would,
• 1:23:36
  because he'd be asking, well, what's he hiding?
• 1:23:38
  Why is he shooting, shooting from behind?
• 1:23:40
  But you shoot it from that angle, that bird's eye view,
• 1:23:42
  There's nothing suspicious about that.
• 1:23:44
  And even if you start thinking about it, you can tie it in with
• 1:23:47
  the fact that we've seen so many stuffed birds in the parlour.
• 1:23:50
  This is just a thematic link more than anything else.
• 1:23:53
  It's brilliantly done. And I think because you've only
• 1:23:55
  got these two murders in the entire film, it needs to
• 1:23:58
  contrast with Marian's. And I think the contrast is the
• 1:24:00
  speed of it, because with her murder, you see Mother sneaking
• 1:24:03
  up on her, so you're expecting the same AE, you're expecting
• 1:24:06
  Mother to sneak out and get over gas.
• 1:24:08
  But the speed at which he comes charged out of that room and
• 1:24:11
  then the strings kick in, that's what makes it really scary.
• 1:24:14
  Yeah. Also, surely being a private
• 1:24:16
  investigator doesn't give Arbogast the right to just
• 1:24:18
  wander into people's house. Does it go where he wants?
• 1:24:21
  Yeah. Yeah, but when the scene was
• 1:24:23
  scheduled to be shot, Hitchcock was away from set due to
• 1:24:25
  illness, so the shoot was overseen by two others.
• 1:24:28
  Hilton Green and Salt Bass were on the set managing.
• 1:24:31
  It bass in there again. Yeah, that's what he can claim,
• 1:24:34
  yeah. Ridiculous claims, no doubt.
• 1:24:35
  Apparently Hitchcock was supervising via telephone as
• 1:24:37
  well, so he was still involved. Right.
• 1:24:39
  Right. Reining in bass, I bet.
• 1:24:43
  He's everywhere. So it was all in the can.
• 1:24:46
  But when Hitchcock returned, he scrapped the whole thing.
• 1:24:49
  Bassett storyboarded insert shots like close-ups of Arbogas
• 1:24:52
  hands on the banister and his feet climbing the stairs.
• 1:24:55
  But Hitchcock didn't like them. He said that shodded to make
• 1:24:58
  Arbogas look like an intruder. Yeah.
• 1:25:00
  Which he was. Get out.
• 1:25:04
  Hand off or not? Yeah, Hitchcock said they made
• 1:25:07
  him look like the killer in the scene rather than the victim.
• 1:25:10
  He said The Telegraph that something was about to happen as
• 1:25:12
  well. OK, fair enough.
• 1:25:14
  Yeah, I mean, if you there's that many close-ups and it's
• 1:25:16
  creepy. Yeah, you don't need it.
• 1:25:18
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 1:25:19
  The close up shot of Abercast fallen backwards down the stairs
• 1:25:22
  was filmed with rear projection. As we've talked about South
• 1:25:25
  Martin Balsam was filming, sitting on a chair and waving
• 1:25:28
  his arms around as if losing his balance in front of a screen,
• 1:25:31
  projecting a Dolly shot moving down the stairs.
• 1:25:33
  Which yeah, it works, but I don't know if it really works.
• 1:25:38
  I mean, having two death scenes though this famous in the same
• 1:25:41
  film, that's just ridiculous, yeah.
• 1:25:43
  Yeah. Unreal.
• 1:25:44
  And to feel the audience by mother's identity, Hitchcock had
• 1:25:47
  yet another person play. When Arbogast is killed, he
• 1:25:50
  hired a short actor called Mitzi Kersner, who had appeared as a
• 1:25:53
  Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz, and he played his mother in the
• 1:25:56
  attack. So some sources called Mitzi
• 1:25:58
  Kersen are male and some say a female.
• 1:26:00
  So it's all a bit murky, but I mean, that's what, 6-7 different
• 1:26:04
  people playing mother in the film?
• 1:26:06
  I mean, no one that no one saw it coming.
• 1:26:07
  No. Exactly.
• 1:26:08
  Yeah. Exactly.
• 1:26:09
  So that's two main characters down.
• 1:26:11
  Norman's running out of places to hide bodies, and back at the
• 1:26:14
  hardware store, Lila's waiting for a call that's not going to
• 1:26:17
  come. She might have to go and sort
• 1:26:19
  this out herself it looks like. Yeah, thank God, the crew.
• 1:26:30
  We're getting into the crew now and there's a lot to talk about
• 1:26:32
  where Psycho was testing of achievements arguably as
• 1:26:34
  influential as the film itself. We're going to be talking about
• 1:26:38
  Bernard Herrmann score and John L Russell's cinematography.
• 1:26:41
  But first we're starting with the man who took a pulpy novel
• 1:26:44
  and turned it into an acclaimed screenplay.
• 1:26:47
  So Joseph Stefano had barely any feature credits to his name when
• 1:26:50
  he landed Psycho with experience on Broadway and TV.
• 1:26:53
  He moved to film with a Co writing credit on French Italian
• 1:26:55
  comedy and Out of Brooklyn and his first solo feature was The
• 1:26:59
  Sophia Loren starring The Black Orchid, both 1958.
• 1:27:03
  So Psycho was just his second full feature screenplay.
• 1:27:07
  Matt shall we? How was the screen writing on
• 1:27:09
  Psycho? I mean, we'll get on to the
• 1:27:12
  changes they made in a minute, but to me, this is a prime
• 1:27:15
  example of how you do adapt something and how what you take
• 1:27:19
  out is maybe more important than what you leave in.
• 1:27:21
  Because this is pared back to the bone, which it absolutely
• 1:27:24
  needs to be. Every character in this needs to
• 1:27:27
  be in it, and every character is in it for exactly the right
• 1:27:30
  amount of time that they need to be.
• 1:27:32
  No one is cluttering up the narrative.
• 1:27:34
  There's no scene in this film where I'm checking my watch and
• 1:27:37
  wanting to get a move on to the next scene.
• 1:27:39
  Even that arsehole businessman at the start, he's in it just
• 1:27:42
  enough to make him memorable and make you glad Marian steals his
• 1:27:46
  money. But he's not in it so long that
• 1:27:48
  you sort of wonder, well, how is he going to tie into the rest of
• 1:27:50
  the film to see the cycle? Is that why he's in it so much?
• 1:27:52
  It makes all these right decisions?
• 1:27:54
  There's no plot details that don't matter.
• 1:27:57
  Every scene, every line in this film is completely relevant to
• 1:28:00
  the finished article. It's a really ruthless
• 1:28:02
  adaptation. I agree, Yeah.
• 1:28:05
  I mean, for me, the structure alone is impressive basically
• 1:28:07
  because of how unusual that is. Because like we talked about, it
• 1:28:10
  starts with Marion as a protagonist.
• 1:28:11
  Like a simple classic protagonist, beautiful Hitchcock
• 1:28:14
  blonde gone astray. And then halfway through, she
• 1:28:16
  gets killed. The main character switches to
• 1:28:18
  Norman even though he's a murderer, which is weird.
• 1:28:21
  But then Lila and Sam come into it, and the focus moves to Lila
• 1:28:24
  as a protagonist. And by the climax, Norman's back
• 1:28:27
  to your classic antagonist, just the guy who needs to be stopped.
• 1:28:30
  It's like switching points of view all over the place.
• 1:28:31
  It's madness. It should feel like chaos, but
• 1:28:34
  we don't even notice, I don't think, do we?
• 1:28:37
  It's not jarring or confusing. I don't think I've seen that
• 1:28:39
  done anywhere before. Not as successfully as this
• 1:28:41
  anyway. It's some piece of writing, but
• 1:28:43
  also there's loads of little technical touches from the
• 1:28:45
  writing that I love. Like we said, lots of the
• 1:28:47
  exposition is told through voices in Marion's head.
• 1:28:50
  That's such a clever way of telling us what's going on back
• 1:28:52
  home without having to cut there and killing the pacing.
• 1:28:55
  And in terms of the books, the following does keep its core but
• 1:28:58
  changes quite a lot. We'll talk about what changed.
• 1:29:00
  But he takes a pretty grimy horror novel about a murderer in
• 1:29:03
  his mother's clothes and turns it into what is still that, but
• 1:29:06
  also a more tragic sympathetic character study of a split
• 1:29:10
  personality. And the dialogue seems to be
• 1:29:12
  taught about the parlor and Arbogast with Norman.
• 1:29:15
  They are fantastic pieces of dialogue, scene writing, the
• 1:29:18
  whole thing. It is just a master class.
• 1:29:19
  I agree in adopting a novel. Sensational piece of screen
• 1:29:22
  writing for me. Yeah, I think it's just
• 1:29:24
  wonderful how this feels like it's more than one film and it
• 1:29:26
  doesn't feel tacked together either.
• 1:29:28
  It feels like 2 separate journeys almost with the same
• 1:29:31
  goal because kind of a remake of the first half in the
• 1:29:34
  second-half without it seeming weird.
• 1:29:37
  It's just like you say, it's very, very easy to follow, but
• 1:29:39
  at the same time it's quite non linear.
• 1:29:41
  It does kind of bounce around. To me.
• 1:29:43
  It just feels like when you watch Domino's get knocked over
• 1:29:45
  without the next one. It just feels like, but it never
• 1:29:48
  goes back to the first domino and repeats it.
• 1:29:50
  All of the numbers of the Domino's are individual and it
• 1:29:52
  takes you through that. And the best thing about the
• 1:29:55
  writing here is the dialogue spot on.
• 1:29:57
  Every character's fleshed out. Every character seems to have a
• 1:30:00
  real motivation to move forward in the story.
• 1:30:03
  Like you say, nobody feels that they're just put there for the
• 1:30:05
  sake of it in less as writers hands.
• 1:30:07
  That guy at the start who lost the money would come back with
• 1:30:09
  Abergath and he would then be investigating.
• 1:30:11
  He would then be killed. You'd be happy that he'd been
• 1:30:13
  killed and then you'd be. That's why he was there at the
• 1:30:16
  start. It just doesn't happen.
• 1:30:17
  Doesn't need to come back. He comes back in the voice over
• 1:30:19
  and that's enough. And think the best thing about
• 1:30:21
  the writing is that it's not patronising at all to the the
• 1:30:23
  audience. It's really brave, it's really
• 1:30:26
  forward thinking and it's just it's really intelligent writing.
• 1:30:29
  I totally agree. It is all those things.
• 1:30:31
  And Robert Block was a pulp writer who'd been selling
• 1:30:33
  fiction to the classic horror and fantasy magazine Weird Tales
• 1:30:37
  since he was 17. And in 1957, he was living in
• 1:30:41
  Wisconsin, about 35 miles away from where serial killer Ed Gein
• 1:30:44
  was arrested. And those murders revealed a
• 1:30:47
  house full of furniture made from human remains and Gein's
• 1:30:50
  dead mother's bedroom, perfectly preserved.
• 1:30:52
  On the back of this block wrote a manuscript for a horror novel
• 1:30:55
  called Psycho in about 6 weeks, and Simon and Schuster published
• 1:30:58
  it in 1959. So Block later said that he knew
• 1:31:02
  almost nothing about Ed Gein when he wrote Psycho, right?
• 1:31:05
  I mean, like 30 odd miles away, loads of similarities.
• 1:31:08
  Like a year later and he goes, no, I made it all up.
• 1:31:10
  Yeah. If so, that's one hell of a
• 1:31:12
  coincidence. Block.
• 1:31:18
  And game was apparently an inspiration for The Texas
• 1:31:21
  Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs as well,
• 1:31:23
  wasn't he? Yes, he was, yeah.
• 1:31:25
  After Hitchcock bought the rights to Blocks novel, the
• 1:31:27
  first person he hired to adapt the screenplay was an Emmy
• 1:31:30
  award-winning TV writer called James P Covener who had worked
• 1:31:33
  with Halpert Hitchcock Presents on the TV show.
• 1:31:35
  He had a reputation of being a master of black humor, but he
• 1:31:39
  had never written a screenplay. His draft was rejected by
• 1:31:42
  Hitchcock, who said it was like ATV horror short story.
• 1:31:45
  Imagine being the guy that got rid of from a psycho Pete Best.
• 1:31:52
  Pete was. But then Hitchcock went to Ned
• 1:31:55
  Brown, who was literary agent that he really respected.
• 1:31:58
  Apparently he said he was looking for a writer, and one of
• 1:32:00
  Ned Brown's clients was Joseph Stefano.
• 1:32:03
  So the rest of history. Fair enough, and we've talked
• 1:32:06
  about some changes that Stefano made to the book around how
• 1:32:08
  Norman looked and renaming Mary as Marion, but there were others
• 1:32:12
  as well. Yeah.
• 1:32:13
  So just before you start, Matt, the reason they changed Mary to
• 1:32:15
  Marion is that the way apparently two people living in
• 1:32:18
  Phoenix at the time called Mary Crane and the one who avoid any
• 1:32:21
  potential litigation issues. Right, right.
• 1:32:24
  I think Marion Crane sounds better anyway.
• 1:32:26
  It does. Yeah, miles better, yeah.
• 1:32:28
  Well, in the book, Mary Crane only appears in two chapters,
• 1:32:31
  Stefano said in his first meeting with Hitchcock, he
• 1:32:33
  pitched the 1st 25 minutes of the film, which fleshes Marion
• 1:32:37
  out into a more developed character.
• 1:32:39
  That kind of makes the film, doesn't it?
• 1:32:41
  Totally makes the. Film.
• 1:32:42
  That's where it becomes killing the leading lady.
• 1:32:44
  Not to open with Norman either and keep him in the wings.
• 1:32:47
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Marian's murder scene is
• 1:32:50
  less violent in the film. In the novel, Norman doesn't
• 1:32:53
  just stab Mary to death, he decapitates her and mutilates
• 1:32:56
  her corpse. Stefano raced this with
• 1:32:58
  Hitchcock and said even if the Haze Code allowed that they
• 1:33:01
  shouldn't do it. Decapitates that mutilates the
• 1:33:04
  corpse. Don't know anything about I'd
• 1:33:05
  gain my own. Exactly.
• 1:33:07
  Mean finish her out of her what? Yeah.
• 1:33:11
  IKEA. Well, yes, the final said that,
• 1:33:14
  Hitchcock said. Oh no, we can't cut Janet Lee's
• 1:33:16
  head off. I mean, I certainly don't want
• 1:33:19
  to say that either. Definitely not.
• 1:33:21
  Definitely. Not and the novel gives his
• 1:33:23
  mother's name, Norma Bates, and the full back story of Norman's
• 1:33:26
  relationship with her. Norma's lover Joe Considine
• 1:33:29
  convinces her to start the Bates Motel and gave her the money to
• 1:33:32
  start it. Norman gets jealous and kills
• 1:33:34
  both Considine and his mother by poisoning them with strychnine
• 1:33:38
  in their tea and then takes over the motel.
• 1:33:41
  This back story's hinted at in the film when the sheriff and
• 1:33:43
  his wife tell the story, but from the point of view that they
• 1:33:46
  don't know Norman killed them. Yeah.
• 1:33:48
  Yeah, and when Norman burst into the cellar at the end, he
• 1:33:51
  shouts. I'm Norma Bates, but it's really
• 1:33:53
  hard to make it out. It is, yeah.
• 1:33:54
  Yeah, got to listen for her, Yeah.
• 1:33:56
  Also, at the time of writing, Joseph Stefano was apparently in
• 1:33:58
  therapy dealing with issues relating to his own mother.
• 1:34:01
  Right. That must have fed into what he
• 1:34:03
  was putting into the script here.
• 1:34:04
  Oh, my God. Yeah.
• 1:34:08
  Matt's shocked. Mom, do you know what I've done
• 1:34:13
  to kind of get over issues? I wrote this.
• 1:34:15
  What do you think? You're all right, son.
• 1:34:19
  And in the final act of the novel, Sam Loomis ends up
• 1:34:22
  falling in love with Lila Crane. But Stefano removed the subplot
• 1:34:25
  and said it made Sam's love seem cheap.
• 1:34:27
  Just a bit. Just anyone will do.
• 1:34:30
  Any Crane sister? I'll have your sister and said
• 1:34:32
  yeah. Yeah, it does seem that way.
• 1:34:34
  Though when you see them together, it does seem like they
• 1:34:36
  are developing like a bond together.
• 1:34:38
  It's not explicitly explained, but it is there.
• 1:34:41
  Yeah. I mean, I guess at that time
• 1:34:43
  especially would be pretty typical for that to happen,
• 1:34:45
  wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:46
  When Stefano delivered the first draft of the script, Hitchcock
• 1:34:49
  gave it to his wife to read, too.
• 1:34:51
  As he always did, he fed back Stefano by saying Alma loved it.
• 1:34:56
  The only significant note he gave was to make the highway
• 1:34:59
  patrolman the tales Marion more threatening and less
• 1:35:02
  flirtatious. Right, just everyone flirting
• 1:35:04
  with Marion. Fair enough.
• 1:35:06
  Just make him terrifying. For his work on Psycho, Joseph
• 1:35:09
  Stefano received no recognition in the Academy Awards.
• 1:35:11
  Not nominated. That's the real crime, yeah.
• 1:35:14
  Yeah, it is. His mother would have been
• 1:35:15
  furious. The winner was Richard Brooks,
• 1:35:20
  who adapted Elma Gantry and won a few that year.
• 1:35:22
  That one. Right.
• 1:35:23
  Yeah, Big one. Joseph Stefano would never reach
• 1:35:25
  his psycho heights again as a screenwriter, but in turning a
• 1:35:28
  horror novel into a radical psychological acclaimed
• 1:35:31
  screenplay, this film doesn't exist as it is without.
• 1:35:34
  Him. Absolutely not.
• 1:35:37
  Look next, the composer and what a composer Bernard Herman that
• 1:35:41
  had been scoring films in Citizen Kane in 1941.
• 1:35:44
  What a bad place to start and cycle with his 32nd feature.
• 1:35:49
  Other previous highlights included The Magnificent
• 1:35:51
  Ambisons, The Day of the Earth Stood Still and The 7th Voyage
• 1:35:54
  of Sinbad and this was his sixth collaboration with Hitchcock, a
• 1:35:58
  fairly handy little partnership going on by this point.
• 1:36:00
  Westie. So Bernard Herman score for
• 1:36:02
  Psycho, What do we make of it? I think Bernard Hermann knows
• 1:36:06
  this film better than Hitchcock knows it at this point when he's
• 1:36:09
  making this music lovely, because he knows he knows
• 1:36:11
  exactly what the tone needs to be to bring it out of this TV
• 1:36:16
  movie area that Hitchcock was probably so used to doing.
• 1:36:19
  And without Bernard Hermann making this a cinematic score, I
• 1:36:22
  don't think the film would have seemed as cinematic as it
• 1:36:25
  definitely does. And not only does he have them
• 1:36:27
  beats where it totally makes the shower scene and totally makes
• 1:36:30
  them jump scares when Mother shows up when that bird's eye
• 1:36:33
  shot, but I also remember the the dreamlike score that he does
• 1:36:37
  when she's reminiscing and the thoughts are in her head.
• 1:36:39
  And it's all, it's all. And it's just got this WAVY feel
• 1:36:44
  to it. And it's very romantic.
• 1:36:46
  But also at the same time, it's quite, it's full of guilt and
• 1:36:49
  Norman's got this kind of 3 N theme that goes through that's
• 1:36:52
  really foreboding and really scary.
• 1:36:54
  But it's always just hinted at under the surface.
• 1:36:56
  And it's just this duality as well to the score where it's
• 1:36:59
  just got so many elements to it, but it just seems to be two
• 1:37:01
  sided. But like we're talking about
• 1:37:03
  with this shower scene. I mean, he's just, I don't want
• 1:37:05
  any music in this. He's like, yeah, OK, man,
• 1:37:08
  whatever, whatever else, I'll be back in 20 minutes.
• 1:37:11
  And then he turns on. He's like, fucking put this to
• 1:37:13
  it. All right.
• 1:37:14
  You cannot understate how important Bernard Hermann was
• 1:37:18
  not only to this film. Go to the landscape of cinema
• 1:37:21
  going forward from here. He absolutely nails this to the
• 1:37:24
  wall and probably one of the only people who I'll stand up
• 1:37:28
  and say at this point in cinema history was just as important as
• 1:37:31
  Alfred Hitchcock. Why was that?
• 1:37:34
  I mean, yeah, when you're talking composers who made a
• 1:37:36
  contribution to a film that goes above and beyond what you can
• 1:37:39
  ever like, reasonably expects, you've got like, John Williams
• 1:37:41
  and Jaws or Ennio Morricone and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
• 1:37:45
  and Bernard Hermann. Psycho is right in that
• 1:37:47
  conversation, no problem. It's about as iconic as film
• 1:37:50
  scores get, I think. I think firstly, Herman's
• 1:37:53
  creative decision to score the whole thing with just strings is
• 1:37:56
  incredible. I love that.
• 1:37:57
  And the kind of ostinato style of the melodies he writes, like
• 1:38:00
  the opening credits that we talked about, gives the film
• 1:38:03
  this constant sound of being furious.
• 1:38:05
  It just sounds feels angry, but it's all the way through.
• 1:38:08
  Like Marian's driving scenes are scored with the title music,
• 1:38:11
  which sounds great. And that also means that when
• 1:38:13
  Hitchcock decides not to use music, it stands out even more,
• 1:38:16
  like Norman cleaning up after Marian's murder or singing in
• 1:38:19
  the car in the swamp they carried out to basically
• 1:38:21
  silence. It's so unusual, but makes the
• 1:38:23
  whole thing feel like real. It's just the perfect choice for
• 1:38:26
  me. I mean, obviously it's the music
• 1:38:28
  in the shower scene that gets taught about the most,
• 1:38:31
  understandably because those screeching one note strings, the
• 1:38:34
  transcender film, they're known outside of cinema.
• 1:38:36
  That's incredible by itself. But also the whole score, it's
• 1:38:40
  just film composition on another level, I think from Bernard
• 1:38:43
  Hermann A. 100%. Yeah, I mean Herman's gave
• 1:38:46
  Hitchcock this score and Hitchcock just, he uses it like
• 1:38:49
  a weapon. Like I said, the the opening
• 1:38:50
  credit, it's it's like being assaulted by the music.
• 1:38:53
  I mean, I think, I mean you've mentioned John, I think it's
• 1:38:55
  biggest influence is obviously on Jaws.
• 1:38:57
  And I think about those scores in the same way.
• 1:38:59
  Like what sound goes through with shark's head when it's
• 1:39:02
  swimming towards it's spear? Well, it's the Jaws thing,
• 1:39:04
  obviously. That's the sound of it.
• 1:39:06
  Yeah, he's in Shark Tale, anyway.
• 1:39:10
  What sound is going through someone's head in a brutal knife
• 1:39:12
  attack? Well, it's the theme from
• 1:39:13
  Psycho, obviously. That's what that sounds like.
• 1:39:15
  Like I said, it's that's what rage sounds like.
• 1:39:18
  That's how well it fits. But as you're saying, it's not
• 1:39:20
  just the famous bit, it's everything else.
• 1:39:22
  It's the way it sits under so many scenes because as we've
• 1:39:24
  been saying, there's lots of scenes without dialogue because
• 1:39:27
  it's either just marrying or it's Norman.
• 1:39:29
  But the skull fills the gap and it gives it that constant sense
• 1:39:32
  of her knees constantly putting you on edge.
• 1:39:34
  But then when it ramps up for the big moments it is like
• 1:39:37
  someone jumping out at you with a knife.
• 1:39:40
  Brilliant. Work.
• 1:39:40
  It is, Yeah. I mean, those screeching strings
• 1:39:42
  are so good, they can be taken in different ways, like you said
• 1:39:44
  there, man. It's like the sound of what's in
• 1:39:46
  the killer's head. I was thinking the sound of
• 1:39:47
  what's in Marion's head, just like sheer terror about what's
• 1:39:50
  about to happen. And it also sounds like the
• 1:39:52
  sound of the the knife itself maybe itself.
• 1:39:54
  Totally, Yeah. Bernard Herman had worked with
• 1:39:56
  Hitchcock five times before Psycho.
• 1:39:58
  The other films were The Trouble with Harry, The Man Who Knew Too
• 1:40:02
  Much, The Wrong Man. Vertigo and North by Northwest
• 1:40:06
  Because of the lower budget, though, Hitchcock was worried
• 1:40:08
  that he might not be able to get Herman on board.
• 1:40:10
  Herman was reluctant at first, but agreed to sign on at a
• 1:40:13
  reduced fee, and Hitchcock later said that 33% of the effect of
• 1:40:17
  cycle was down to Herman's score. 33% I don't agree with.
• 1:40:22
  More than that. I think it's more than that.
• 1:40:24
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Herman went from, oh, not
• 1:40:27
  sure about this one to, oh, go on then.
• 1:40:29
  I'll just write the best score ever.
• 1:40:30
  Yeah. I mean one of the great director
• 1:40:35
  composer collaborations though, surely?
• 1:40:36
  Hitchcock, Herman, isn't it? 100% up there, yeah.
• 1:40:39
  Been working with the reduced budget, one of Herman's first
• 1:40:41
  ideas was that he wanted the film to be scored entirely by
• 1:40:44
  string instruments. So he had an orchestra of 50
• 1:40:47
  musicians, but no brass, percussion or woodwind.
• 1:40:51
  All fifty of them want stringed instruments, and Herman said the
• 1:40:54
  idea was he wanted to create a black and white sounding score
• 1:40:57
  to match the visuals. Yes.
• 1:40:59
  So 26 violins, 10 violas, 8 cellos and six bases was the
• 1:41:04
  breakdown apparently. Right, But down to the reduced
• 1:41:06
  budget, isn't it? Yeah.
• 1:41:08
  And Herman just turns into like an advantage, an artistic
• 1:41:10
  advantage. That's just a great composer
• 1:41:12
  right there. Oh.
• 1:41:13
  Yeah, 100%. Yeah, all the things give us the
• 1:41:15
  sound of the score just slicing through the visuals all the way
• 1:41:17
  through the film. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:41:19
  For his work on Psycho, Bernard Herman received no recognition
• 1:41:22
  at all of the Academy Awards. What's going on here?
• 1:41:24
  Did the Academy forget Psycho existed?
• 1:41:26
  Must hate. Hitchcock.
• 1:41:29
  Too scared to nominate it to scare them too much.
• 1:41:31
  The winner was Ernest Gold, who scored Exodus, the Ottawa
• 1:41:34
  Preminger historical drama. Right, OK.
• 1:41:37
  Hitchcock, though he doubled Herman's salary on Psycho
• 1:41:39
  because he was so pleased with the music.
• 1:41:41
  It's not fair enough. Yeah, and it was one of the
• 1:41:43
  great and most influential film scores to come out of Hollywood.
• 1:41:47
  Yeah. Yes, 100%, Well, 33%, yeah.
• 1:41:54
  Finally, in the crew, it's the director of photography, John L
• 1:41:57
  Russell. Cycle was Russell's 32nd feature
• 1:41:59
  as cinematographer, but the bulk of his career had been in
• 1:42:02
  television. He'd also be in DP for Orson
• 1:42:04
  Welles on Macbeth in 1948, and reportedly Orson Welles called
• 1:42:09
  him, get this, the greatest camera operator in Hollywood
• 1:42:12
  history. Wow, yeah.
• 1:42:14
  So it is. Quietly impressive CV Westie How
• 1:42:18
  is John L Russell's work on Psycho?
• 1:42:20
  I think as an operator, you can see that.
• 1:42:22
  You can see when he's just taking the camera to the places
• 1:42:24
  you he wants the audience to discover.
• 1:42:27
  But again, this screams to me, we're on a budget here boys, and
• 1:42:31
  we've got to try and make this work.
• 1:42:32
  But it definitely does work. I mean, they used Mitchell BNC
• 1:42:35
  cameras, which were a little bit cheaper at the time, and he shot
• 1:42:38
  everything on A50 mil. Well, they say everything.
• 1:42:40
  I would say 90%, ninety 2% of this film was shot on A50 mil,
• 1:42:45
  which gives it like the equivalent of the human eye when
• 1:42:47
  it's shot on 35 mil film. So that's kind of what you would
• 1:42:50
  see. And it was shot on Bosch and
• 1:42:52
  loom bolt lenses, which were again a little bit cheap.
• 1:42:55
  I mean, the £145.00 now for the same lens, if you want to buy it
• 1:42:59
  on eBay, you know, it's next to nothing.
• 1:43:00
  So that's basically what what he was dealing with, which is why
• 1:43:04
  it feels so creepy, why it feels so immediate and why it feels a
• 1:43:07
  little bit nasty at times because it's just, it's almost a
• 1:43:10
  point of view from your point of view.
• 1:43:12
  So you just, you can't escape it, which again is just
• 1:43:15
  incredible work. I mean, it's shot on Tri X5233
• 1:43:18
  film, which is really contrasting.
• 1:43:20
  So that really accented the black and white, but it also
• 1:43:23
  accented the shadows and the highlights.
• 1:43:25
  This film is very black and white, like the shadows are
• 1:43:27
  pitch black. You're absolutely lost in them.
• 1:43:30
  And I think that's what Hitchcock wanted.
• 1:43:32
  He wasn't looking for any middle ground, and John El Russell was
• 1:43:34
  integral in that. Yeah, he surely was.
• 1:43:37
  I mean, he had a lot of experience at this point, John
• 1:43:39
  Russell. And I think you can see that in
• 1:43:41
  his influences because the lighting here with the black and
• 1:43:43
  white, it looks like those classic German Expressionism
• 1:43:46
  films. You see all the harsh angles and
• 1:43:48
  those deep shadows. One of the best examples, I
• 1:43:50
  think, are those shots of Norman by the swamp.
• 1:43:52
  He's barely layered, all almost a silhouette against the war.
• 1:43:55
  Dad could be from, like, Nosferatu or something.
• 1:43:57
  Yeah. And tapping into those early
• 1:43:59
  horrors which go for this like primal terror, it's surely
• 1:44:01
  intentional, because that's what Psycho does as well.
• 1:44:03
  Yeah, but doesn't ramp it up with like a small machine in the
• 1:44:05
  background, anything like that. Just keeping it really simple
• 1:44:08
  though. It's like, let's just use that,
• 1:44:10
  but then just keep it as realistic as possible.
• 1:44:12
  Yeah, yeah. And it works great.
• 1:44:13
  Yeah. I mean, what I like is how some
• 1:44:14
  of the shots are really odd, like the opening shot of Marian
• 1:44:17
  lying on the bed from this really strange angle, like below
• 1:44:20
  her. And there's a famous shot of
• 1:44:21
  Norman looking at the log book with Arborgast when Norman's
• 1:44:24
  shot from below and we're looking like open his chin it.
• 1:44:26
  Just moves around with him, doesn't it?
• 1:44:27
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, I think that's Lugery as
• 1:44:30
  well. It's like, where can we put the
• 1:44:31
  camera to get everything in this shot with this lens?
• 1:44:34
  I mean, a typical director has hands.
• 1:44:35
  I'm not sure any of that would work.
• 1:44:37
  Yeah, it doesn't just work. It's really striking.
• 1:44:39
  Another great shot. When Norman leaves Marion's and
• 1:44:41
  goes home, he sits at the kitchen table and he's framed in
• 1:44:44
  the doorway. Looks like he's caged by the
• 1:44:46
  house or what the house represents.
• 1:44:47
  How good that? Yeah, like the reverse of the
• 1:44:49
  searches. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:44:52
  He's trapped, yeah. And after Sam goes to the motel
• 1:44:55
  alone and then back to the hardware store, that shot of
• 1:44:57
  Lila in silhouette running towards the camera, Yeah, get
• 1:45:00
  out. Far too good.
• 1:45:01
  Yeah. So working with the constraints
• 1:45:03
  of television, I mean John L Russell under Hitchcock's
• 1:45:05
  extreme guidance, I would guess you managed to produce all of
• 1:45:08
  this. Literally some of the most
• 1:45:09
  famous images in all of cinema. I can't believe they did that on
• 1:45:12
  the TV budget with ATV crew. I think it might be one of the
• 1:45:16
  great unsung DP jobs there is. And ATV camera with ATV lens.
• 1:45:20
  It's crazy. It doesn't look like it at all.
• 1:45:24
  It's so precise. There's not a wasted shot here
• 1:45:27
  and evidence to a point. The amount of visual
• 1:45:29
  storytelling or tonal said and done by the Cinema Trophy is
• 1:45:33
  incredible and it's always served in the sorry.
• 1:45:35
  I mean, the way that motorcycle cop is framed, he's usually
• 1:45:38
  either in that huge close up or he's in that wide when he's
• 1:45:41
  observed and marrying from across the street.
• 1:45:43
  Both of them put you on edge because he's never framed
• 1:45:45
  normally like a regular character race.
• 1:45:47
  There's always something off about him and there's one
• 1:45:50
  repeating visual motif which is so effective.
• 1:45:52
  And, and Wes, he's mentioned the mirrors already.
• 1:45:54
  But what I picked up on from that, it's whenever Norman is
• 1:45:57
  talking to someone at the motel reception, he's on the right at
• 1:46:00
  the frame, the other person's on the left.
• 1:46:02
  The mirror's hanging on the wall between them and it always
• 1:46:05
  reflects the other person. It happens with Sam, it happens
• 1:46:07
  with Orbigas, so visually Norman is always outnumbered in these
• 1:46:11
  situations. He's always ganged up on, which
• 1:46:14
  makes us feel sympathy for him because there's only one of him.
• 1:46:17
  But it's all done subliminally, it's all done through the
• 1:46:19
  cinematography. It's amazing work.
• 1:46:21
  Yeah. Yeah, really, really clever
• 1:46:23
  that. Yeah.
• 1:46:24
  I wonder if that's meant to signify how Norman feels as
• 1:46:26
  well. He always feels the victim.
• 1:46:28
  Totally does. Yeah.
• 1:46:29
  That's the sense he gives you. And that's just you can't see
• 1:46:31
  his other side, his other persona either.
• 1:46:33
  You can see exactly what else his other side is.
• 1:46:35
  It's very cleverly done because you can just, you can explore
• 1:46:38
  that all day, just out of them shots.
• 1:46:39
  Amazing. Yeah, you could.
• 1:46:41
  Absolutely. Hitchcock's 10 films before this
• 1:46:43
  had all had the same director of photography, Robert Burks.
• 1:46:46
  Due to the budget, Hitchcock couldn't afford Burks this time
• 1:46:49
  so turned to John L Russell who was the main cinematographer on
• 1:46:52
  the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
• 1:46:54
  He came on board with most of the camera crew he worked with
• 1:46:57
  on the show as well. 75 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents he
• 1:47:00
  shot and that's a lot, yeah, but working with the same crew we
• 1:47:03
  knew so well, that must have helped as well.
• 1:47:05
  I'd imagine 100. Percent, yeah, would have kept
• 1:47:07
  the budget down, would have kept the morale up.
• 1:47:08
  Everything would have moved a lot faster.
• 1:47:10
  And it'd be loving it. Working on a Hitchcock film, I
• 1:47:12
  bet, yeah. It would have been great.
• 1:47:14
  And Hitchcock had made eight films in colour by this point
• 1:47:16
  but went back to black and white for Psycho, 1 of the main
• 1:47:19
  reasons being it was just cheaper to shoot in black and
• 1:47:22
  white. But another factor was it meant
• 1:47:24
  he could show more blood on screen without getting censored.
• 1:47:26
  Yeah, or chocolate sauce, without anyone realising.
• 1:47:29
  Yeah, exactly. But apparently John Russell
• 1:47:31
  complained to Hitchcock about not shooting in colour because
• 1:47:33
  at the time colour was like a sign of prestige.
• 1:47:35
  Yeah, and Hitchcock said to him, but dear boy, it would have so
• 1:47:38
  much more impact in black and white.
• 1:47:41
  Don't think he was wrong. Definitely.
• 1:47:42
  Not exactly. I mean, I wouldn't have argued
• 1:47:44
  with him like we're going to shoot in colour.
• 1:47:45
  It just wouldn't have worked in colour, not at all.
• 1:47:49
  And another influence was a French director called Enri Jos
• 1:47:52
  Clouseau. He made a black and white horror
• 1:47:54
  film in 1955 called Le Diabolique, and it was based on
• 1:47:58
  a novel called She Who Was No More that Hitchcock had also
• 1:48:02
  tried to buy the rights to. Yeah, you had.
• 1:48:04
  It also features a murder in a bathtub as opposed to a shower.
• 1:48:07
  Right. Yeah, and no spoilers, but the
• 1:48:10
  endively Diabolic it's not a million miles away from Psycho
• 1:48:12
  either. Right.
• 1:48:14
  No. It's a great film and it's very,
• 1:48:15
  very Hitchcock. You can see why he wanted to do
• 1:48:17
  it. Right.
• 1:48:18
  For his work on Psycho, John L Russell was nominated for Best
• 1:48:21
  Black and White Cinematographer the Oscars.
• 1:48:23
  That was still a thing. Then he lost out to Freddie
• 1:48:26
  Francis for Sons and Lovers, right?
• 1:48:28
  No win, but he deserved nomination.
• 1:48:30
  And for us in Psycho, John L Russell pulls off some of the
• 1:48:33
  most striking and influential black and white cinematography
• 1:48:36
  out there. Oh, it's definitely up there,
• 1:48:37
  yeah. Incredible.
• 1:48:38
  So that's our crew. We've taught Joseph Stefano's
• 1:48:40
  innovative screenplay at Bernard Herrmann's legendary score and
• 1:48:44
  John L Russell's effective cinematography. 3 massive
• 1:48:46
  contributions, 2 of them possibly all of them with career
• 1:48:49
  best work. I would say so, yeah.
• 1:48:51
  Hitchcock surrounded himself with some pretty good people on
• 1:48:54
  this one. Yeah, he knew what he's doing.
• 1:48:55
  Yes, he did. The end.
• 1:49:02
  Into the final act of cycle and the Bates Motel walls are
• 1:49:05
  closing in around Norman. We'll be talking about Lila's
• 1:49:08
  solo trip up to the Bates house and down to the food seller, but
• 1:49:11
  before that is Lila and Sam teaming up.
• 1:49:14
  There is. So, with no contacts from
• 1:49:16
  Barbagast, Lila and Sam decide to take matters into their own
• 1:49:19
  hands. First they visit Fayville's
• 1:49:21
  Sheriff Chambers and his wife Eliza, before checking into the
• 1:49:24
  Bates Motel themselves. Norman's being investigated yet
• 1:49:27
  again, Matt, how did Lila and Sam deal with it?
• 1:49:30
  Well, they do a bit better, you know they're not dead.
• 1:49:34
  Put them. Out exactly.
• 1:49:35
  Couldn't do much fucking worse. Yeah, but all of about the
• 1:49:40
  scene, it's exposition, but it's exposition done really well
• 1:49:43
  because it's piling up the questions at the same time.
• 1:49:45
  When they say our wall gas was going to Cressy and Mrs. Bates,
• 1:49:49
  the sheriff's wife was so happily surprised Norman took a
• 1:49:52
  wife. What's really clever is when Sam
• 1:49:56
  goes no with his mother, it's just a facial reaction from the
• 1:49:59
  sheriff and his wife that just don't jump straight in with, oh,
• 1:50:02
  can't be her, she's dead. It's just really drawn out for
• 1:50:05
  maximum effect, building up the tension of, well, something
• 1:50:08
  isn't right, but we don't know what yet.
• 1:50:10
  You know, the sheriff is more suspicious about Arborgas and I
• 1:50:13
  love the way he delivers that line at the end.
• 1:50:15
  Norman Beats, his mother has been dead and buried in
• 1:50:18
  Greenlawn Cemetery for the past 10 years.
• 1:50:21
  And it's like, that's all that's missing.
• 1:50:24
  Great stuff. Because what the hell is
• 1:50:26
  actually going on with Norman? It's like Harry wasn't there to
• 1:50:28
  save those men because you weren't there to save Harry.
• 1:50:30
  Harry. Yeah, amazing.
• 1:50:33
  Yeah. I mean, this whole stretch of
• 1:50:34
  the film kind of opened with Norman carrying Mother down to
• 1:50:36
  the food seller. How good's that shot?
• 1:50:38
  The camera follows him up the stairs and spins round above the
• 1:50:41
  door to watch Norman carrying her down.
• 1:50:43
  Yeah. And she's like, you think I'm
• 1:50:45
  fruity, huh? Puns from Mother.
• 1:50:47
  Yeah. And then Sheriff Chambers.
• 1:50:50
  He's played by John McIntyre, who'd also been in a few Alfred
• 1:50:52
  Hitchcock Presents episodes. And he was married to Jeanette
• 1:50:55
  Norman, who we mentioned being one of the actresses who did the
• 1:50:57
  voice of Mother. So couple of things.
• 1:51:00
  But he's furious about being woken up in the middle of the
• 1:51:02
  night and he offers no help whatsoever.
• 1:51:05
  No, Lila's like we want you to do something about it.
• 1:51:08
  Like what? Look into all these people who
• 1:51:12
  keep going to the motel and vanishing.
• 1:51:13
  Maybe, yeah, but just nothing. He's back to bed.
• 1:51:17
  Yeah, it's great, though, because you totally feel like
• 1:51:18
  he's on Norman's side and that these people are nuts.
• 1:51:21
  Yeah. You do?
• 1:51:21
  Kind of, yeah. It's like what you're coming
• 1:51:23
  into our small community for making trouble.
• 1:51:26
  Yeah, it just also sort of fill that plot all of why don't they
• 1:51:28
  just go to the police? Well, because they're pretty
• 1:51:30
  rubbish, yeah. Yeah, so from there they learned
• 1:51:33
  Sam just decided to take things in their own hands and they go
• 1:51:36
  to the hotel and the meet Norman.
• 1:51:37
  And I absolutely love this moment because I love the choice
• 1:51:40
  of it being in broad daylight, which is a really nice contrast
• 1:51:43
  to everything else. Like our guys goes there, it's
• 1:51:45
  night time, it's mysterious. You can see everything.
• 1:51:49
  You can see Norman at the window.
• 1:51:50
  So there's he's not necessarily hiding anything again, which
• 1:51:52
  makes this even better as a mystery because they're looking
• 1:51:55
  for something in broad daylight and they still can't find
• 1:51:57
  anything. I do like Sam here as a
• 1:52:00
  character. I like the way he just kind of
• 1:52:02
  takes control and he's pressing and he does seem quite clever
• 1:52:05
  for about two seconds, 3 seconds.
• 1:52:07
  And I really like that because to be clever in front of Norman
• 1:52:10
  is not a big feat, is it? It's not a hard thing to pull
• 1:52:12
  off. And all of the dynamic shift,
• 1:52:15
  the way it becomes that Leela is the brains and then Sam's the
• 1:52:19
  brown. In private, she's like telling
• 1:52:22
  him what this is where we need to go, this is what we need to
• 1:52:23
  do. And then they go into the first
• 1:52:25
  cabin, which is great. And I love Sam is straight in
• 1:52:27
  the drawers. That's all he's good for.
• 1:52:29
  Draw there, draw there, I'm out. Nothing.
• 1:52:33
  No more ideas, Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:52:34
  And then she goes into the bathroom.
• 1:52:36
  We've got the toilet again. The audience must have been
• 1:52:38
  gasping. Please, like, don't fucking
• 1:52:39
  flush it twice. I can't handle this.
• 1:52:41
  Don't do it again. It's just really convenient that
• 1:52:45
  you pick, sit up and say it's $40,000.
• 1:52:46
  I was looking at you this tiny bit.
• 1:52:48
  He puts it in his wallet, it's fine.
• 1:52:49
  Then when she goes up to the house from there, it's just an
• 1:52:52
  incredible moment. But just that dynamic between
• 1:52:55
  them all, between all three of them, I think it's just great to
• 1:52:57
  see all three of them just bouncing off each other.
• 1:53:00
  Yeah, we get that little scene before this at the Fairville
• 1:53:02
  church, don't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:53:04
  The sheriff's still there doing nothing.
• 1:53:06
  Yeah. It just starts to feel like we
• 1:53:08
  might be in danger of the plot star in the saga base.
• 1:53:10
  But then Lila and Sam are checking into the motel, and
• 1:53:13
  suddenly we're back in business. Yeah.
• 1:53:14
  And after all the discussions about Norman, seeing Lila come
• 1:53:17
  face to face with him for the first time, I think it feels
• 1:53:19
  really powerful. The attention of their talking
• 1:53:21
  is incredible. It does very much to me feel
• 1:53:24
  like the calm before the storm, which we know obviously that's
• 1:53:27
  what it is. This is around the time that Sam
• 1:53:29
  Loomis started to play a bigger part in the film and when
• 1:53:32
  looking for the actor to play him, Hitchcock had been
• 1:53:34
  interested in some well known actors like Stuart Whitman, Tom
• 1:53:37
  Tryon, Brian Keith, Cliff Robertson and Rod Taylor.
• 1:53:42
  Yeah, they'd have been too expensive, presumably.
• 1:53:44
  And John Gavin plays Sam, doesn't he?
• 1:53:46
  Do we like him in there? I mean, Sam's a bit crap, isn't
• 1:53:50
  he? That's what.
• 1:53:50
  He's saying just a bit. Just a bit, you know, and, and
• 1:53:53
  Gavin, you know, some performance.
• 1:53:54
  He's functional. I don't think Hitchcock has any
• 1:53:57
  great interest in him as a character.
• 1:53:58
  He is. So he fulfills the brief.
• 1:54:00
  But when you talk about the performances and Psycho, you go
• 1:54:03
  Janet Lee, Anthony Perkins, Martin Bolts and very Miles.
• 1:54:06
  Oh, yeah, John Gavin. You know, there's a reason he's
• 1:54:09
  #5 on the cast list. Yeah.
• 1:54:11
  Yeah, I know at the time universally been trying to turn
• 1:54:13
  John Gavin into like a Rock Hudson style leading man.
• 1:54:16
  Yeah. And because they already had him
• 1:54:17
  under contract, it seems like Universal put the squeeze on
• 1:54:19
  Hitchcock a bit to cast him. Yeah, maybe like, oh, cast John
• 1:54:22
  Gavin and we'll give you this Ripes deal that you want or
• 1:54:24
  something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:54:26
  He looks very Rock Hudson in this film as well.
• 1:54:28
  He does? Yeah.
• 1:54:28
  You're going to wear a suit in this bit.
• 1:54:29
  OK. Do I have to?
• 1:54:30
  Yes, you do. And Stephen Rebello, who wrote
• 1:54:35
  Alfred Hitchcock in the making of Psycho, said that Hitchcock
• 1:54:38
  agreed to John Govan being cast with the words.
• 1:54:40
  I guess he'll be all right. He wasn't happy with his
• 1:54:43
  performance or and referred to Gavin as the Stiff.
• 1:54:46
  Yeah, he is a bit warden, isn't he?
• 1:54:48
  He is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:54:50
  He had a big year though. Also in 1960, he played Julius
• 1:54:53
  Caesar in Spartacus. Yes.
• 1:54:55
  Yeah, Yes, that's right. Yeah, I.
• 1:54:56
  Wonder what Kubrick said about him?
• 1:54:58
  Yeah, back to our narrative. And Lila and Sam are booked into
• 1:55:01
  the Bates Motel as a married couple and they have a plan.
• 1:55:05
  Should we talk about them putting it into action?
• 1:55:07
  Let's do it. Right, here we go, the climax.
• 1:55:12
  Sam keeps Norman occupied with a chat in the motel office while
• 1:55:15
  Lila heads to the Bates residence.
• 1:55:17
  What follows is tense Lilac explores the empty house, Sam
• 1:55:21
  gets decked, and we end up in the food seller for one of
• 1:55:24
  cinema's most famous reveals, Lilacs in the house, literally
• 1:55:28
  and figuratively. Westie, what are your thoughts
• 1:55:30
  on this? My thoughts on this always
• 1:55:33
  combat a Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• 1:55:34
  Every single time I watch it, it feels like this is the house
• 1:55:37
  from Texas Chainsaw Massacre before it got sold to Shell the
• 1:55:41
  threw chickens in the front room.
• 1:55:44
  It just feels like you need that sliding door that Norman's going
• 1:55:47
  to build that in about 20 years time, stop putting faces on and
• 1:55:50
  just have things squeal like a pig when people walk in.
• 1:55:53
  And I get that real feel to it. But there's just, I love that
• 1:55:55
  back and forth between Sam and Norman, which is a distraction.
• 1:55:58
  You keep cutting back to that scene.
• 1:55:59
  Then you get cut by Elila. She's looking around the house.
• 1:56:01
  She's going to deal with an old woman.
• 1:56:03
  If she gets face to face with Norman's mother, there's going
• 1:56:05
  to be a bit of a scuffle here. And like, she could probably
• 1:56:08
  take her, I think, because she understands her.
• 1:56:10
  But once she gets upstairs, man, some of the stuff that you see,
• 1:56:14
  it's just really unsettling. But settling.
• 1:56:16
  You make it unsettling yourself because Hitchcock doesn't show
• 1:56:19
  you in an unsettling way. Like you're looking literally
• 1:56:22
  looking around somebody's house and you shouldn't be there.
• 1:56:24
  So you feel a bit, I feel a bit creepy.
• 1:56:26
  I feel a bit sick when she's kind of walking around.
• 1:56:28
  And again, we get that incredible mirror shot, which
• 1:56:31
  we've seen all the way through the film, but that actually
• 1:56:33
  scares her. And that could be somebody else
• 1:56:35
  reflected in these mirrors. And it just shows that she's
• 1:56:38
  cemented and who she is. She doesn't have a split
• 1:56:40
  personality. She is definitely just one
• 1:56:42
  person. And then you go into Norman's
• 1:56:44
  room or the child's room, or you would imagine that's where
• 1:56:46
  Norman's sleeping. And then obviously, Sam,
• 1:56:48
  straight out of the fucking idiot.
• 1:56:50
  Where's that woman that you came with?
• 1:56:52
  Bang. He's about 8 foot tall.
• 1:56:54
  He's massive, went to the hard way.
• 1:56:56
  Still, that seems cut off. All the blood to his brain.
• 1:56:58
  I can't even think properly with that tie on.
• 1:57:00
  So Norman's knocking him out. He's straight up to the house,
• 1:57:03
  you think? Right.
• 1:57:04
  So there's going to be two against one.
• 1:57:05
  Now, you get Norman coming into the house, as we've seen before,
• 1:57:08
  and he decides to go upstairs. We don't know where she's going,
• 1:57:11
  We don't know what she's doing at this point, and it's
• 1:57:13
  completely wide open. Yeah, it is.
• 1:57:16
  I mean, it's just Hitchcock is the most of suspense, isn't it?
• 1:57:19
  Yeah. Cutting back between Sam with
• 1:57:20
  Norman Delilah swimming about the house is about the most
• 1:57:23
  tense part of the film, which is seeing something.
• 1:57:25
  And how many times has that happened since this film though?
• 1:57:28
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
• 1:57:29
  Every time, yeah. And Sam, I'll keep Norman
• 1:57:32
  occupied, will you? Will you know you've?
• 1:57:35
  Got 8 lines of pattern. That's it.
• 1:57:38
  That conversation, he's like, would drive me crazy being here
• 1:57:41
  alone. I'd do anything to get away,
• 1:57:43
  wouldn't you? Doing his absolute best to give
• 1:57:45
  the game away to Norman. But the bits with Lila are just
• 1:57:48
  superb film making. The shots as Lila's walking up
• 1:57:51
  to the house, cutting between her and her point of view.
• 1:57:54
  Brilliant. Yeah.
• 1:57:55
  And then once we're in the house, it's like every shots
• 1:57:57
  doing work. The hallway now looks massive
• 1:57:59
  and the staircase looks massive. How Big's mother's indentation
• 1:58:02
  on the bed. Yeah, Looks like Wiley Coyote's
• 1:58:05
  fallen off a Cliff and just landed there.
• 1:58:06
  It's ridiculous. And I think here Miles is great,
• 1:58:09
  she's got no dialogue, but the tension she manages to inject
• 1:58:12
  just by reacting to things, a look of disgust as she looks at
• 1:58:15
  things and yeah, shocks herself in the mirror.
• 1:58:17
  That's great. But we do get some more back
• 1:58:19
  story I think here as well in the visuals, because Mother's
• 1:58:22
  room is all huge and ornate, but Norman's childhood room is
• 1:58:26
  really small. Seems like he was stuck away in
• 1:58:27
  the corner, which is quite clever.
• 1:58:30
  And I think a shout out to Robert Clatworthy as well.
• 1:58:32
  He was the art director. He created lots of the interiors
• 1:58:35
  of the Bates house. Just fantastic from him.
• 1:58:37
  It's all fantastic. Just come on, Sam, you had one
• 1:58:41
  job. And there's some small details
• 1:58:44
  we see in Norman's house which mean more than they might see.
• 1:58:47
  At one point, Lila picks up a book and looks horrified when
• 1:58:50
  she looks inside. We don't see what she sees, but
• 1:58:53
  the book tells us that Norman was a collective pornographic
• 1:58:56
  illustrations. So apparently Hitchcock wanted
• 1:58:59
  to show she was looking at pictures of half naked African
• 1:59:01
  tribes like you might see in the National Geographic.
• 1:59:04
  Right, Get your name in the National Geographic.
• 1:59:06
  But either way, it probably wouldn't have got past the Hayes
• 1:59:08
  code. I wouldn't.
• 1:59:10
  Know you know. But I think it might work better
• 1:59:12
  that we don't see what it is, surely.
• 1:59:14
  What the Hell's in that book? Yeah, exactly.
• 1:59:17
  Imagine we've seen a page from that book which is like an
• 1:59:19
  illustration of 1/2 naked woman being flushed down the toilet.
• 1:59:25
  I lost the minds. Doing terrible maths.
• 1:59:30
  And when Lila is in Norman's bedroom, the camera holds on a
• 1:59:33
  record player that has Beethoven Symphony #3 on a turntable.
• 1:59:37
  That piece is called eroica, which means heroic in Italian,
• 1:59:40
  maybe reflecting Lila's bravery. Also, with a glance, I think it
• 1:59:44
  kind of looks a bit like erotica.
• 1:59:45
  Yeah, maybe that's why it's there.
• 1:59:47
  I think Hedgecock would have definitely chosen it for a
• 1:59:49
  reason, because that's what he does, isn't it?
• 1:59:52
  And the Bates House itself is a big presence from the time
• 1:59:54
  Marian gets to the motel, and Hitchcock had lot of work put
• 1:59:58
  into the creation of it. The way it Looks was modelled on
• 2:00:01
  a 1925 painting by the classic American artist Edward Hopper,
• 2:00:05
  called House by the Railroad. And that is the same painting
• 2:00:09
  that Charles Addams used when he created the Addams Family
• 2:00:11
  Mansion in the 30s. Right.
• 2:00:13
  I think the influence of that painting on Psycho and the
• 2:00:15
  Addams Family is obvious when you see it.
• 2:00:17
  Yeah, it looks exactly the same. And Hopper's biographer, GAIL
• 2:00:21
  Levin, said that Hopper and his wife, Joe were delighted that
• 2:00:24
  Hitchcock put the house in the film.
• 2:00:25
  And Hopper's painting was apparently based on a real house
• 2:00:28
  in Haverstraw, NY, which was built in 1885 and is still there
• 2:00:33
  today. It's the Bates house when you
• 2:00:35
  see it. Yeah.
• 2:00:36
  Not sure I'd fancy living there. No, I.
• 2:00:38
  Don't love it me. And the set for the house and
• 2:00:42
  the motel were built on the universal back lot.
• 2:00:45
  Hitchcock always preferred a film indoors, so only the wide
• 2:00:48
  shots of the house were shot outside on the back lot.
• 2:00:51
  Another set of just the house porch was built indoors in the
• 2:00:53
  sound stage. So those shots were Lila
• 2:00:56
  approaching the house. We're cutting between shots of
• 2:00:58
  both of those sets, right? I mean, not that you can really
• 2:01:00
  tell the magic of film making. Yeah, brilliant.
• 2:01:03
  The 8's house cost $15,000 to make and was built as a facade
• 2:01:09
  only. It had no right side or back, as
• 2:01:11
  we never see that in the wide shots.
• 2:01:13
  They were both added in 1964, so the house could be added to the
• 2:01:16
  Universal Studios too. Yeah, it was built on the same
• 2:01:19
  sound stage where Universal had filmed Phantom of the Opera in
• 2:01:22
  1925, the LON Chaney classic. Right.
• 2:01:24
  Yeah. Oh yeah, and again, the house is
• 2:01:26
  still there at Universal. What?
• 2:01:28
  Sure, that must be Wow, Christmas do.
• 2:01:31
  Let's go. It's that Christmas, so might as
• 2:01:34
  well might as. Well as well, yeah.
• 2:01:36
  Go there for Halloween. Just stay for Christmas.
• 2:01:37
  Yeah. So Lila's in the house.
• 2:01:41
  There's only one place to look now and here we go the
• 2:01:44
  revelation to end all revelations and again just put
• 2:01:48
  yourself in the shoes have seen this for the first time in 1960.
• 2:01:51
  Like the feeling of thinking what on earth is going on here
• 2:01:54
  what she going to find. I mean they must have been on
• 2:01:57
  the absolute edge of their seat and that's what this scene plays
• 2:02:00
  in do brilliantly. I mean, because Lila going into
• 2:02:03
  the food seller, on one hand you really, really don't want it to
• 2:02:06
  because there's definitely nothing good down there waiting
• 2:02:08
  for her. But on the other hand, you do
• 2:02:11
  really, really want it to go down there because it's the only
• 2:02:13
  way you're going to find out what's going on here.
• 2:02:15
  And this is what I mean by Hitchcock manipulating the
• 2:02:17
  audience. It's like when you've got a
• 2:02:18
  piece of string with a kitten and you just dangling it and
• 2:02:22
  then yanking it away just to tease it at the last minute.
• 2:02:25
  And let's face it, this should be silly beyond belief.
• 2:02:27
  I mean, if you read this on the page, the corpse of Norman's
• 2:02:30
  mother swings around in a chair. Well, he comes charging into the
• 2:02:33
  room dressed up as her. You go?
• 2:02:35
  No, Surely not. That can't work.
• 2:02:38
  And yet it does. And it's because Hitchcock's got
• 2:02:40
  the audience in the palm of his hand, and he's got such control
• 2:02:43
  over everything that he can pull this ending off.
• 2:02:46
  And it's not laughable. It's absolutely terrifying.
• 2:02:49
  Yeah. I mean what a scene.
• 2:02:51
  Love that shot when Norman comes in the house and runs up the
• 2:02:53
  stairs and we track back to Lila hiding in one shot.
• 2:02:55
  That's great. And yeah, when she looks down
• 2:02:57
  the stairs to see the cellar door, that's such a clever
• 2:03:00
  choice because there's an audience.
• 2:03:01
  You're like, she can't not go down there.
• 2:03:03
  Maria might be in there, but if she does, she's trapped.
• 2:03:06
  So it's really good. And the reveal of mother, surely
• 2:03:08
  the best single shot reveal there is spinning around in the
• 2:03:11
  chair, grinning, horrific. The sound design's brilliant.
• 2:03:15
  Vera Miles scream is absolutely massive.
• 2:03:17
  And then Lila hits the light bulbs would create this really
• 2:03:19
  unsettling, like sway in the lighting.
• 2:03:22
  Just inspired stuff. But I remember watching this for
• 2:03:24
  the first time, and when we hear Norman's footsteps coming
• 2:03:26
  thundering down the stairs, I remember, like, catching me
• 2:03:29
  breath. And that was, like, decades
• 2:03:31
  after it came out. Yeah.
• 2:03:32
  Also a nice touch that I love is everything we've seen Norman in
• 2:03:35
  the film, he's left-handed because Anthony Perkins was
• 2:03:37
  left-handed. But everything we've seen,
• 2:03:39
  mother, she's holding the knife in her right hand, right?
• 2:03:41
  Right. Wow.
• 2:03:43
  But in 1960 we'd see nothing like this.
• 2:03:44
  Surely audiences must have been pissing in the seats.
• 2:03:50
  Hitchcock wanted the coordination of Mother spinning
• 2:03:52
  around in the chair, then Lila hitting the light bulb to be
• 2:03:55
  perfect. The props man was sitting below
• 2:03:57
  the frame spinning the chair, and he and Vera Miles had to do
• 2:03:59
  it again and again until Hitchcock was happy.
• 2:04:02
  Also, Bernard Herrmann had composed a piece of music
• 2:04:04
  specifically for the moment Norman bursts into the cellar.
• 2:04:07
  Hitchcock got rid of it and told Herman he wanted something based
• 2:04:11
  around the shower scene theme instead.
• 2:04:13
  Yeah, much better that way, surely, because it works as a
• 2:04:15
  call back. But also just in case anybody
• 2:04:17
  was in doubt about the twist and if Norman was the guy in the
• 2:04:20
  shower scene, Hitchcock tells us through the music.
• 2:04:22
  It's the same music because it's the same guy.
• 2:04:25
  And Mothers Mummified Corpse was created by the make up
• 2:04:28
  supervisor Robert Dawn at Universal's make up department.
• 2:04:31
  He apparently worked on top of a real human skull, and after
• 2:04:35
  production wrapped, Hitchcock mailed the skull to the
• 2:04:37
  Cinematech Francais Film Museum in Paris, where it is still on
• 2:04:41
  display. Yeah, Hitchcock apparently said
• 2:04:43
  an American museum would probably sell it or lose it.
• 2:04:46
  Please send it off to Paris. Probably, yeah.
• 2:04:48
  But a real skull? Where did they get these things
• 2:04:51
  from? Just like dig someone up.
• 2:04:53
  Yeah, yeah. No, I didn't know anything about
• 2:04:55
  Ed Gein, honestly. Yeah, exactly.
• 2:04:58
  Do you need a skull? I can get your.
• 2:04:59
  Skull. Yeah, I can get your skull with
• 2:05:01
  nail Bully. And Mother's corpse was dressed
• 2:05:05
  by costume supervisor Helen Colvic.
• 2:05:07
  She said she made 12 different dresses made in various sizes
• 2:05:11
  because of all the different people that played Mother.
• 2:05:13
  She said Hitchcock wanted Mother to be dressed normally as it
• 2:05:16
  would be scary that way. And Colvic said it was a lot of
• 2:05:18
  fun to do. Yeah, looks it.
• 2:05:21
  Yeah, it's black and white, but we know the colour of that
• 2:05:22
  dress, don't me, because Eliza Chambers tells us earlier when
• 2:05:25
  she says she helped Norman pick out the dress and periwinkle
• 2:05:28
  blue, she says yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a story, does the
• 2:05:30
  rounds as well. But to test the corpse out,
• 2:05:32
  Hitchcock placed it in Janet leaves dressing room to scare
• 2:05:35
  her. I'm not sure how true that is,
• 2:05:37
  but I wouldn't put it past him. I.
• 2:05:38
  Wouldn't put it past him. Yeah, that would have worked.
• 2:05:42
  The twist is revealed and Norman's caught, but we're not
• 2:05:45
  finished just yet. Back at the police station, we
• 2:05:47
  get two final scenes, one final look at Norman in his cell, but
• 2:05:50
  not before psychiatrist doctor Fred Richmond, played by Simon
• 2:05:54
  Oakland, is brought in to explain what's been going on.
• 2:05:57
  The contentious scene with Richmond.
• 2:05:58
  Matt, what are our thoughts? Yeah, I mean, not a lot of
• 2:06:01
  people don't like this scene because it is 5 minutes of
• 2:06:03
  something explaining why Norman's done what he's done,
• 2:06:06
  but I've never had a problem with it.
• 2:06:08
  And the reason is I need this 5 minutes to just decompress a
• 2:06:11
  bit. Like after everything we've just
• 2:06:14
  seen that scene in the future. Like I need 5 minutes just to
• 2:06:16
  take a breath, calm down a bit, let the nerve settle.
• 2:06:19
  And I think that's what this scene does really well.
• 2:06:22
  I mean, yeah, it over explained some stuff, but it's still a
• 2:06:24
  time for one last little shiver down the spine when he asks if
• 2:06:27
  they have any unsolved missing persons case.
• 2:06:30
  Yes, two young girls and just leaves her to that.
• 2:06:33
  Yeah, we do get some new deals out of it, like we find out
• 2:06:36
  about the two of the girls, so we know Norman was a serial
• 2:06:38
  killer. But aside from that, I do think
• 2:06:40
  it over explains Norman's motivations too much.
• 2:06:43
  I mean, we've seen the reveal. Do we need 8 minutes of getting
• 2:06:46
  explained back to us? Yeah, although I do quite enjoy.
• 2:06:48
  I would start with Sheriff Chambers saying Delilah.
• 2:06:51
  Well, if anyone gets any answers, it'll be the
• 2:06:52
  psychiatrist. Well, yeah, it certainly won't
• 2:06:55
  be you. Will it?
• 2:06:56
  It won't be. You did nothing.
• 2:06:58
  Yeah. I mean, I think to be fair, we
• 2:07:01
  don't really need this now. But I think the audience, if you
• 2:07:04
  sat through this in 1960, you're going to need a little bit more
• 2:07:06
  of an explanation about why you've just been shook to your
• 2:07:09
  very core through everything that you've just witnessed for
• 2:07:14
  the first time. And I think it's Hitchcock just
• 2:07:16
  nailing it into the audience's mind so that when they leave the
• 2:07:18
  theatre, they won't stop thinking about it.
• 2:07:20
  They'll be driving home like Marion Crane, and all they'll be
• 2:07:23
  hearing in the head is the whole film of Psycho.
• 2:07:25
  And he's telling you, yes, you're right.
• 2:07:27
  You have seen the psychopath on screen, you've witnessed it.
• 2:07:30
  Deal with it. Yeah, so this scene has been
• 2:07:33
  criticized over the US for being unnecessary, but it was added to
• 2:07:36
  the film by Joseph Stefano, who was trying to satisfy Production
• 2:07:39
  Code expectations that horrific events be explained properly.
• 2:07:43
  In the book, Sam figures out Norman's condition and explains
• 2:07:46
  it to Lila. Simon Auckland apparently nailed
• 2:07:49
  his monologue in one take, and Hitchcock shook his hand and
• 2:07:52
  told him he'd just saved the picture.
• 2:07:54
  Wow. Great.
• 2:07:56
  I'll be slightly more impressed by that.
• 2:07:57
  If Simon Oakland was brilliant, I'm not sure he is.
• 2:08:00
  He's a bit theatrical for me. Yeah, he's a bit happy.
• 2:08:03
  The bit where Lila is like did he kill my sister?
• 2:08:05
  And Richmond goes yes and no. Awful, Yeah, awful.
• 2:08:10
  Might be a lad the more in The Simpsons going.
• 2:08:12
  These stories are completely true.
• 2:08:14
  And by true, I mean false. But also, we mentioned earlier
• 2:08:18
  that Joseph Stefano was in therapy himself, wasn't he?
• 2:08:20
  I wonder if that influenced his bringing this scene in maybe.
• 2:08:23
  Yeah, yeah. Well, from there we closed out
• 2:08:26
  with Norm in his cell. Now totally consumed by mother,
• 2:08:29
  we get one final monologue from the lady herself.
• 2:08:31
  Yeah, less controversial, this one, Wesley.
• 2:08:34
  Yeah, great though it is. I just love it when it's kind of
• 2:08:37
  taking this blanket and say, no, sure, I'm finished with them,
• 2:08:43
  whatever my work's done. And they just walk in and just
• 2:08:47
  the way they hold the shot from the corridor and Scorsese, he's
• 2:08:50
  like, I'm using after taxi driver.
• 2:08:51
  We're not going to say what's going on.
• 2:08:53
  And then you get mother's voice with that.
• 2:08:54
  Thank you, that's wonderful. I love that.
• 2:08:57
  And then you're in with him and you get that wonderful low shot.
• 2:09:00
  Perfect. You know, Nolan used on the joke
• 2:09:03
  when he's in the cell, it's the same, same kind of shot and it's
• 2:09:06
  just that slow creep up. And again, he starts repeating
• 2:09:09
  things in his head, much like we'd seen marrying at the start
• 2:09:11
  of the film. So you're just thinking, yeah,
• 2:09:13
  I've seen the same film. It isn't 2 films separated.
• 2:09:15
  And it's just that wonderful moment where he looks up and
• 2:09:18
  he's trying to justify everything.
• 2:09:19
  He wouldn't hurt a family in the start.
• 2:09:21
  You know, the shot of the skull in the face and then the music,
• 2:09:26
  the cars getting pulled out, the end just at the bottom.
• 2:09:29
  Fantastic way to end the film. Very confident and very modern
• 2:09:32
  for the time. Yeah, yeah, it is a very modern
• 2:09:34
  looking shot. I think that's ending his goal.
• 2:09:36
  It's basically a masterpiece, That shot that slowly pushes in
• 2:09:39
  on Norman. It's beautifully framed with
• 2:09:41
  Norman just offset from the sender.
• 2:09:43
  And then the sculpt results of a Norman's face, the horrible
• 2:09:45
  little smile he gave us and the final line, She wouldn't even
• 2:09:48
  harm a family. It's just perfect.
• 2:09:50
  No notes. Yeah, I mean think Perk and see
• 2:09:53
  was just incredible. All those little nods he's given
• 2:09:56
  to himself is he's even with his voice, the way his eyes dot
• 2:09:59
  about when she says they're probably watching me, and then
• 2:10:03
  to end with him breaking the 4th wall, that slow grain across his
• 2:10:07
  face. I mean, he's gone from those
• 2:10:09
  kind of babyish good looks to looking genuinely terrifying for
• 2:10:13
  the first time. And then that line.
• 2:10:15
  She wouldn't even harm a family. I mean, anyone still want to
• 2:10:18
  tell me Hitchcock just doesn't find this hilarious?
• 2:10:23
  The only thing for me, why is that not the final scene?
• 2:10:26
  Because we could back to the car being dragged out the swamp.
• 2:10:28
  Which is fine, the narrative kind of needs it.
• 2:10:30
  But put that before Norman surely?
• 2:10:32
  I can't believe the last thing we see isn't Norman looking into
• 2:10:35
  the camera. Fade to black.
• 2:10:36
  Best fade to black ever. Is that just me?
• 2:10:39
  Maybe there might have been too much for people.
• 2:10:41
  Yeah. Burned in the mind completely.
• 2:10:45
  You get the complete closure. Then I think it's full circle.
• 2:10:47
  You start with marrying, you kind of end with marrying.
• 2:10:49
  Yeah, fair enough. And Hitchcock actually wasn't
• 2:10:52
  convinced about superimposing Mother's skull on top of
• 2:10:55
  Norman's face at the end, so apparently send out different
• 2:10:58
  versions for screenings. 1 had the end in receipt today and
• 2:11:01
  another had no dissolve at all. And that's why some old
• 2:11:04
  audiences sometimes swear they never saw it first time around.
• 2:11:07
  Yeah, it wasn't some like Mandela Effect or anything like
• 2:11:10
  that. Exactly, Yeah.
• 2:11:12
  Yeah, I like to dissolve, but I don't think it needs it
• 2:11:14
  necessarily. Or does it?
• 2:11:15
  No, I don't think it needs it. No, no, I agree.
• 2:11:17
  I don't think so. It's it's a nice little touch,
• 2:11:19
  but it could have been even more subtle, to be honest.
• 2:11:21
  Yeah. So that's it.
• 2:11:23
  Norman's a corpse, Norman's in custody, poor Marian's been
• 2:11:26
  found, and as ever, mother has the last word.
• 2:11:29
  Overall, for us, the final act of psycho is one for the ages.
• 2:11:33
  Well, absolutely. It still delivers of.
• 2:11:35
  Course it does. It's all the right.
• 2:11:36
  No, it might not be in the right order.
• 2:11:43
  Reception and awards. So that's the film itself, the
• 2:11:48
  making, the murders and the mother.
• 2:11:50
  But how was Psycho received when landed in cinemas on September
• 2:11:53
  the 8th, 1960? Well, a box office's best friend
• 2:11:57
  is Matt, so here he is to give us the rundown.
• 2:12:00
  Go for it, please, Matt. So production budget of $807,000
• 2:12:06
  and on that cycle was a huge financial success, taking just
• 2:12:10
  over $32 million worldwide. It was the second highest
• 2:12:14
  grossing film of 1960 behind Spartacus.
• 2:12:17
  So Goodyear for John Gavin, it went on to be the most
• 2:12:20
  commercially successful film of Alfred Hitchcock's career.
• 2:12:23
  And at the Oscars, as we're saying, Psycho got nominations
• 2:12:26
  but no wins. Janet Leigh was nominated for
• 2:12:29
  best actress in the supporting role, Alfred Hitchcock nominated
• 2:12:32
  for best director, John L Russell nominated for the best
• 2:12:35
  cinematography, black and white, and Joseph Hurley, Robert
• 2:12:39
  Clapworthy and George Milo were nominated for best art direction
• 2:12:43
  and set direction, black and white.
• 2:12:45
  Yes. So from the deal Hitchcock cut
• 2:12:47
  with the studio we talked about, he ended up making $15 million
• 2:12:51
  from Psycho. Wow.
• 2:12:52
  Wow. In 1960 money as well.
• 2:12:54
  So yeah. Laughing at the bank, yeah.
• 2:12:57
  Yeah, it was a bit joke for him, wasn't it?
• 2:12:59
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
• 2:13:00
  Hitchcock filmed an official trailer, which was him giving a
• 2:13:03
  guided tour of the Bates Motel. It ran for 6 1/2 minutes and
• 2:13:07
  ended with Hitchcock pulling over the shower curtain to
• 2:13:09
  reveal a woman screaming. Janet Lee wasn't available when
• 2:13:12
  they shot it, though, so Vera Miles stood in for her wearing a
• 2:13:14
  blonde wig. Brilliant that.
• 2:13:16
  Yeah, it's a great trailer. It's fantastic.
• 2:13:18
  Yeah, you mentioned it before, man.
• 2:13:19
  Check it out if you've not seen it.
• 2:13:21
  Yeah. Also something I absolutely love
• 2:13:23
  is the Psycho logo. Yeah, that like, block sans
• 2:13:26
  serif font with the crack through the middle.
• 2:13:27
  Yeah, it was actually designed for the book by a designer
• 2:13:30
  called Tony Palladino. And Hitchcock just kept it
• 2:13:32
  right, as he should have. Fair enough.
• 2:13:33
  Yeah, Usually it's in yellow as well, Wesley.
• 2:13:35
  Yeah, there you go. And in 1960, movie audiences
• 2:13:39
  would pay once and then have access to a day screen into the
• 2:13:43
  theatre, so people would just often come into a film halfway
• 2:13:46
  through. But Hitchcock wanted people in
• 2:13:48
  their seats when Psycho started, so a cardboard display was sent
• 2:13:52
  to theaters to be displayed in their lobby in Detroit.
• 2:13:55
  Hitchcock pointing at his watch and said the manager of this
• 2:13:58
  theatre has been instructed, at the risk of his life, not to
• 2:14:01
  admit to the theatre any persons.
• 2:14:03
  After the picture starts, any spurious attempts to end by side
• 2:14:07
  doors, fire escapes or ventilating shafts like John
• 2:14:10
  Mcclane will be met by force. The entire objective of this
• 2:14:15
  extraordinary policy, of course, is to help you enjoy Psycho
• 2:14:18
  more. Alfred Hitchcock.
• 2:14:22
  Yeah. In the studio was also give the
• 2:14:24
  theatre as a record to play in the foyer with background music
• 2:14:27
  and a voiceover saying 10 minutes to psycho time. 5
• 2:14:30
  minutes to psycho time. Really.
• 2:14:31
  Amazing and. The marketing around this is
• 2:14:33
  just ludicrously good, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:14:36
  Great. Yeah.
• 2:14:37
  I mean, this is really the start of the whole formalising of like
• 2:14:39
  definite start and end times in cinemas, I think.
• 2:14:41
  Yeah, Huge. Yeah.
• 2:14:43
  Hitchcock letter said that after the film came out he received an
• 2:14:45
  angry letter from the father of the girl who had refused to have
• 2:14:48
  a bath after seeing Lead Diabolic in 1955 and now she
• 2:14:52
  refused to have a shower after scene cycle.
• 2:14:56
  Hitchcock sent a note back that said send her to the dry
• 2:14:58
  cleaners. Amazing.
• 2:15:01
  She was in about huge 6 foot shower head.
• 2:15:03
  This will sort her out. Exactly.
• 2:15:04
  Yeah, absolutely stank. Stand her through a car wash.
• 2:15:09
  And from that feedback, we can dive straight into the critics
• 2:15:12
  comments, starting with the great Roger Rebut.
• 2:15:14
  Although one caveat, his review was a retrospective, not from
• 2:15:17
  the original release because he wasn't a critic in 1960.
• 2:15:20
  Yeah, yeah. So what do we reckon Roger gave
• 2:15:23
  Psycho out of four full for easily?
• 2:15:25
  Of course it was. And, he said, What makes Psycho
• 2:15:28
  immortal, when so many films are already half forgotten by the
• 2:15:31
  time we leave the theatre, is that it connects directly with
• 2:15:33
  our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of
• 2:15:36
  a madman and, of course, our fears of disappointing our
• 2:15:38
  mothers. No other Hitchcock film had a
• 2:15:41
  greater impact. Yeah.
• 2:15:42
  Yeah, hard to argue with Roger on that.
• 2:15:44
  Roger may have had a domineering with that too sounds.
• 2:15:47
  Like it? Yeah.
• 2:15:49
  Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, however, at the time of
• 2:15:51
  release gave Psycho a more lukewarm reception.
• 2:15:54
  He said there's not an abundance of subtlety or the lately
• 2:15:57
  familiar Hitchcock bent towards significant and colourful
• 2:15:59
  scenery in this obviously low budget job.
• 2:16:02
  Right. I mean, no, there's no colourful
• 2:16:04
  scenery. It's in black and white.
• 2:16:06
  Yeah, exactly. And David Parkinson in the
• 2:16:08
  retrospective Empire magazine review gave Psycho the full 5
• 2:16:11
  stars over the five, of course, saying timeless classic, superb
• 2:16:14
  performances and the infamous shower scene make this the
• 2:16:17
  perfect nightmare. Yeah, Yeah, I think The Perfect
• 2:16:20
  Nightmare is a pretty good description, pretty much.
• 2:16:22
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You won't shake it.
• 2:16:23
  Yeah. And today in Rotten Tomatoes,
• 2:16:25
  Psycho has a 95% audience approval rating and 97% from
• 2:16:30
  critics. And on IMDb it currently sits
• 2:16:33
  with a rating of 8.5 out of 10, placing it 36 on the IMDb top
• 2:16:39
  250. And that is one place below
• 2:16:41
  Grave of the Five Flies, and one above The Lion King.
• 2:16:45
  Yeah, there's a trilogy I. Was going to say, not real bad
• 2:16:48
  fellows those things. Sandwich between 2 animated Tia
• 2:16:52
  Jaggers. Yeah, 2 right, Yeah.
• 2:16:54
  So Cycle was a phenomenon, the biggest of Hitchcock's career, 4
• 2:16:57
  Oscar nominations, a marketing campaign that reinvented how
• 2:17:00
  audiences watch movies, and the critical legacy that's only
• 2:17:03
  grown over the years. Seems like the world worked out
• 2:17:05
  pretty quickly. This was something special.
• 2:17:07
  Yeah, I think so. Sequels and influence.
• 2:17:15
  A film of Psycho Stature doesn't just spawn sequels, it's spawned
• 2:17:18
  franchises, remakes, TV series, and more.
• 2:17:21
  Let's start with the sequels though.
• 2:17:22
  Three direct ones. Psycho 2 came out in 1983 with
• 2:17:26
  Anthony Perkins back as Norman after he gets released from the
• 2:17:28
  Asylum, Psycho 3 in 1986 and Perkins himself directing and
• 2:17:33
  Psycho 4 the Beginning in 1990 is a prequel made for TV, also
• 2:17:38
  written by Joseph Stefano. Less of acclaimed in the
• 2:17:41
  original Westie. But what do you make of the
• 2:17:43
  Psycho sequels? I'll go for Psycho 2 if I may.
• 2:17:46
  Lovely. I loved Psycho 2, based 22 years
• 2:17:49
  after the first film. So he's coming out of the asylum
• 2:17:52
  and if you haven't seen it, I would highly recommend checking
• 2:17:55
  it out. I think it's really good
• 2:17:56
  writing. The directions obviously nowhere
• 2:17:58
  near Hitchcock's level, but the acting's good.
• 2:18:01
  Obviously Perkins is great in it, he's just bringing that back
• 2:18:03
  as if he'd never left. Very underrated sequel.
• 2:18:06
  I think it's really good. Lovely.
• 2:18:08
  Yeah, so picking up from that, I think Psycho 3 is worth a watch
• 2:18:11
  if you've not seen it, right. It's definitely got the 80s vibe
• 2:18:15
  through with, you know, a lot of unnecessary nudity.
• 2:18:17
  But it does have this real kind of sleazy, neon drenched
• 2:18:19
  atmosphere. The kills are well done.
• 2:18:22
  It's got a one with ice cubes. I must have seen this really
• 2:18:24
  young and it's been stuck in my head since.
• 2:18:26
  I thought you meant ice Cube. I was like seeing it.
• 2:18:31
  Been around a while. Before boys, no.
• 2:18:34
  See, that one's worth watching. And then for the beginning, I
• 2:18:38
  mean, it's very much ATV movie from the 90s.
• 2:18:41
  It's filling in a lot of stuff we don't need filling in.
• 2:18:44
  Henry Thomas plays the young Norman and he's no Anthony
• 2:18:46
  Perkins, to be fair. All right.
• 2:18:48
  It's just beating you over the head with all the subtext from
• 2:18:51
  the first film. Like on.
• 2:18:52
  Did you get the incest undertones?
• 2:18:54
  Did you get that? Did you get that?
• 2:18:55
  Yeah, I've got got that on the first film.
• 2:18:57
  Yeah. Yeah, It's just a bit dull.
• 2:18:59
  It's a bit enough. And if you want to explore the
• 2:19:01
  early life of Norman and his mother, I'd recommend watching
• 2:19:04
  the Bates Motel TVCVS instead. So I did it a lot better.
• 2:19:07
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was 2013, wasn't it?
• 2:19:10
  Freddie Highmore's Norman Vera Farmiga played mother.
• 2:19:13
  She's. Brilliant in it.
• 2:19:14
  Yeah, she is. That is worth a look.
• 2:19:16
  Yeah, for sure. How about the impact, though, of
• 2:19:18
  the first Psycho and everything that came after it that wouldn't
• 2:19:21
  exist without it? Matt, what do you think of the
• 2:19:23
  legacy of Psycho? I mean, how long have you got?
• 2:19:27
  It's arguably the most influential film ever made,
• 2:19:30
  certainly up there in the conversation, the birth of the
• 2:19:32
  slasher movie. There were movies before this
• 2:19:35
  that had big twists, but cycles, probably the first one that made
• 2:19:38
  the twist the the huge part of the market.
• 2:19:40
  And I think he said don't give away the end.
• 2:19:42
  And it's the only one we have like, say the trailer playing
• 2:19:46
  the music in the lobby that we've just talked about.
• 2:19:48
  As you said, this is the film I made.
• 2:19:50
  Film started at a specific time. It really did change the
• 2:19:54
  industry and then the film makers.
• 2:19:55
  I mean, this one is definitely in Spielberg's DNA, but
• 2:19:58
  definitely in Jaws. The way he creates suspense.
• 2:20:01
  And the light bulb definitely went off over Brian De Palma's
• 2:20:05
  head the first time he watched. It really did.
• 2:20:07
  I'll, I'll just remake this for my entire career, I think in one
• 2:20:10
  way or another. And then the amount of film
• 2:20:13
  makers who watch this and realise Hitchcock did this on
• 2:20:15
  the small budget really quickly. Sam Raimi, Evil Dead, The Corns
• 2:20:18
  with Blood Simple, The Blair Witch Project.
• 2:20:20
  Yeah, yeah. It is endless the influence of
• 2:20:22
  this one. Yeah, you're right Mark.
• 2:20:25
  The influence of Psycho is enormous.
• 2:20:27
  Obviously so big it is like, where do you begin?
• 2:20:29
  Yeah, for me, there's maybe 3 main things I find interesting.
• 2:20:32
  1st, the slasher genre. Without Psycho, I don't think we
• 2:20:35
  get Halloween in 1978 and Friday the 13th and scream the whole
• 2:20:39
  template of the slasher, like the mass killer and knife, the
• 2:20:42
  suburban setting, the woman victim, the final girl.
• 2:20:45
  All of that is in Psycho. Yeah, I mean, in Halloween,
• 2:20:48
  Donald Pleasence's character is called Doctor Sam Loomis the
• 2:20:51
  Stiff. Yeah, yeah, John Comlin knew
• 2:20:54
  what he was doing. Yeah.
• 2:20:55
  Also the crafting techniques being ridiculously influential.
• 2:20:57
  The shower scene alone gave the master class in how to use
• 2:21:00
  montages to create terror in chaos.
• 2:21:03
  I know against Scorsese model the montage and Raging Bull when
• 2:21:06
  Jaylen Mona was getting his brains beaten out from Sugar Ray
• 2:21:09
  Robinson on the shower scenes. Editing like shot for shot, he
• 2:21:11
  said. And just as placed in popular
• 2:21:13
  culture is as big as about any film.
• 2:21:15
  Those screeching strings transcend the film.
• 2:21:18
  Everyone knows what that means. It's been parodied by Mel
• 2:21:21
  Brooks, by National Lampoon, by The Simpsons, even Looney Tunes
• 2:21:25
  to the shower scene and it's mentioned and We Didn't Start
• 2:21:28
  the Fire by Billy Joel. That's all he did.
• 2:21:31
  Should we check a psycho bell in the Congo?
• 2:21:33
  If that's not a measure of cultural impact, I don't know
• 2:21:35
  what is. Neither do I.
• 2:21:39
  Yeah, exactly the same as you guys.
• 2:21:40
  I think for me, the biggest influence is not how it was
• 2:21:43
  made, but how it was viewed. I mean, arriving at the cinema
• 2:21:45
  on time. Can you imagine that now people
• 2:21:47
  just walk in and out the halfway through a film?
• 2:21:50
  No, no. It just absolutely baffles me.
• 2:21:53
  And I think without that rule in place, then you can't have
• 2:21:57
  necessarily the record of the ticket sales and you can't have
• 2:22:00
  the record of how many people it's been to see it and how many
• 2:22:03
  views it's had and how much that's turned over and how that
• 2:22:05
  marketing works. And then you get Star Wars and
• 2:22:07
  then you get Jaws, then you get the Blockbuster.
• 2:22:09
  Then you get start getting the success of film based on an
• 2:22:12
  actual blueprint that Hitchcock set up because he didn't want
• 2:22:15
  people to miss the end of the film.
• 2:22:17
  Some of my favorite films. I don't think you'd have Misery
• 2:22:20
  without this. I don't think you'd have Silence
• 2:22:22
  of the Lambs without this. Texas Chainsaw, I've already
• 2:22:24
  mentioned we could do a full podcast on the legacy of Psycho
• 2:22:27
  and the influence of Psycho. That's how big it is.
• 2:22:30
  Absolutely. And Psycho was first scheduled
• 2:22:32
  to air on US television in 1966. Just before that, though,
• 2:22:36
  Valerie Percy, who was the daughter of a US senator, was
• 2:22:40
  stabbed to death by an intruder in their family.
• 2:22:42
  Whore. It was huge news.
• 2:22:43
  And as a result, cycle was shelled from TV until 1970,
• 2:22:47
  right? Yeah, the Valerie Percy murder
• 2:22:49
  still unsolved. Really sad.
• 2:22:50
  Really. Really.
• 2:22:51
  Yeah, but in 1969 cycle was re released in theatres.
• 2:22:54
  It did really well and that led to the 1970 screening.
• 2:22:57
  Right. OK, OK.
• 2:22:59
  So Cycle's influence is pretty hard to calculate.
• 2:23:01
  Just about every horror film since 1960 has its fingerprints
• 2:23:04
  somewhere and basically the foundations of an entire genre.
• 2:23:08
  A new way of screening films and a new way of thinking about
• 2:23:10
  cinematic film making. Pretty big influence.
• 2:23:13
  Yeah, forget about it. Made with ATV crew.
• 2:23:15
  Yeah, unbelievable. All the right movies ranking.
• 2:23:23
  And we've nearly checked out of Psycho. 109 minutes of black and
• 2:23:26
  white Hitchcock horror. Now it's time for the moment we
• 2:23:29
  put a number on it where we each rate the film out of 10.
• 2:23:33
  Matt, your choice. Get us started, please.
• 2:23:35
  Your summary in school for Psycho.
• 2:23:37
  Yeah, no, great. Need to elaborate on this one.
• 2:23:39
  For me, I think everyone knows where this is going, probably
• 2:23:41
  for all of us. Sometimes I'll give a film A10
• 2:23:44
  because it's got a real personal and nostalgic importance to me.
• 2:23:47
  Sometimes I'll give a 10 because the film is just so entertaining
• 2:23:51
  I can't find anything to bring it down.
• 2:23:52
  And sometimes I give a 10 because of its place in
• 2:23:55
  cinematic history and it can't be denied.
• 2:23:57
  And it's impact, it's beyond measure.
• 2:23:58
  Psychotics, all three of those boxes to be honest.
• 2:24:01
  So I really should be giving it 30, but it can't.
• 2:24:05
  But it's got one of the easiest turns I'll ever give a film.
• 2:24:08
  Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things
• 2:24:10
  for me is just how fresh this still feels.
• 2:24:12
  Hitchcock was 60 years old, 51 films in, and it's black and
• 2:24:16
  white, but it still feels modern in lots of ways.
• 2:24:19
  And there's some moments like scenes or shots or characters
• 2:24:21
  they have. I saw them in a film now.
• 2:24:23
  I'd still be like, oh, that's new.
• 2:24:24
  Oh, that's cool. Yeah.
• 2:24:26
  I mean, some of the creative choices are incredible.
• 2:24:28
  He kills the star, he switches to protagonists, he shoots the
• 2:24:31
  toilet flushing outrageous and craft wide.
• 2:24:34
  It's non-stop. The opening pound into Phoenix
• 2:24:36
  is still superb. The Saw bus titles and Bernard
• 2:24:39
  Herman score stuff for the Hollywood Hall of Fame.
• 2:24:42
  And then Janet Lee, Anthony Perkins, 0 Miles, all brilliant
• 2:24:45
  and iconic. There's so much more.
• 2:24:47
  You just can't fit it all in. One misstep maybe for me with
• 2:24:50
  the psychiatrist scene, but the rest is so incredible it easily
• 2:24:53
  carries it. I mean, it's one of the most
• 2:24:55
  famous and influential films in the history of the whole medium,
• 2:24:59
  so it's an easy one for me. 12 cabins, 12 vacancies, 10 hour
• 2:25:03
  10. Nice.
• 2:25:04
  Nice and Westie, your submarine score for Psycho, please.
• 2:25:07
  Yeah, I mean, what else can you say?
• 2:25:10
  It's just incredible. I mean, just one lens, that's
• 2:25:12
  enough for me for a 10, let's be honest.
• 2:25:16
  And then everything else on top of that.
• 2:25:17
  I mean, this was just a film that wasn't necessarily born of
• 2:25:21
  we need to make money, we need to turn over screenings.
• 2:25:23
  We need. It was just Hitchcock needed to
• 2:25:25
  make something that he really wanted to make.
• 2:25:28
  It was a film of creative necessity done on a budget with
• 2:25:31
  his TV crew who wanted to make something scary.
• 2:25:34
  And we had this idea for something and everybody brought
• 2:25:36
  their A game to something that didn't deserve it.
• 2:25:39
  And what we got was something we didn't deserve either.
• 2:25:41
  But I'm so glad that we do have it.
• 2:25:43
  I'm so glad that it still works now.
• 2:25:45
  And I'm so jealous for anyone who hasn't seen it, It's such an
• 2:25:47
  easy 10 for me. It'll stay with you for the rest
• 2:25:49
  of your life. So that's not goes in and of
• 2:25:52
  course we also have some from our ATRM patrons should we see
• 2:25:55
  what they have to say about Psycho.
• 2:25:56
  Yeah, go through. Do it.
• 2:25:57
  First up, it's Dane de Josie. Dane says.
• 2:26:00
  One of the easiest 10s I've ever given.
• 2:26:02
  I wish I had a time machine to go to one of the original
• 2:26:04
  showings of Psycho going in completely blind.
• 2:26:07
  It must have blown viewers tops off at the time.
• 2:26:09
  This is one of those films that simply changed movies forever.
• 2:26:12
  Yeah, nice. That's brave.
• 2:26:13
  Going in blind though. I'd want to know what was going
• 2:26:15
  on. And I just watched other people.
• 2:26:17
  Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Next up, Shazzap, who said it's
• 2:26:20
  a nine for me. Superb film.
• 2:26:22
  Yet I find The Birds more terrifying.
• 2:26:24
  Right. OK, The Birds is a good shout.
• 2:26:26
  Also great in its own rice. Great.
• 2:26:27
  They're in this one. They're just stuffed.
• 2:26:29
  Yeah, the prequel. Yeah.
• 2:26:33
  Yeah. And finally, Oliver Betts said
• 2:26:35
  it's my favorite. Hitchcock had a humongous
• 2:26:37
  influence on the horror genre, which I love.
• 2:26:39
  And being partied by The Simpsons on more occasions than
• 2:26:41
  any other film. Right.
• 2:26:42
  It's a stone cold classic. And 10 on 10.
• 2:26:45
  Nice. If it's good enough for The
• 2:26:47
  Simpsons, it's good enough for me.
• 2:26:48
  Absolutely, yeah. And the scores are in from our
• 2:26:50
  paid runs. What do you think they gave it
• 2:26:52
  out of 10 I'm. Going to say 10.
• 2:26:54
  Oh full whack, I'll go 10 as well.
• 2:26:56
  It has to be. It was a huge 10 out of 10.
• 2:26:59
  Beautiful. There we go.
• 2:27:00
  Which gives Psycho the full whack.
• 2:27:02
  It does 40 out of 40 joining a very special list, that one.
• 2:27:06
  It is indeed. Yes, it should.
• 2:27:07
  So for now that's Psycho doing Dusted.
• 2:27:09
  Hopefully you've enjoyed it, hasn't made you go a little mad.
• 2:27:12
  Yeah. Well, we all do sometimes, yeah.
• 2:27:16
  Well, next time out, Matt and Westie will be creating the
• 2:27:18
  Bathe Motel for the two of us, and we'll be joined by Luke.
• 2:27:21
  It's all happening as you talk 1970s American rock and Cameron
• 2:27:25
  Crows Almost famous. Yes.
• 2:27:27
  Yes, yeah, 3 golden gods there, right?
• 2:27:30
  Yeah. On top of the roof.
• 2:27:32
  I'm only the fucking lead singer.
• 2:27:38
  But before we sign off, one last reminder about Patreon.
• 2:27:41
  If you've enjoyed today's episode, you can help support
• 2:27:43
  what we do and get loads more bonus content by becoming an
• 2:27:45
  ATRM Patreon. So visit patreon.com/all the
• 2:27:49
  Right Movies to find out more or subscribe directly on Apple
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  Podcast, Spotify, or YouTube. Yep.
• 2:27:56
  Also, don't forget to follow us across our social platforms.
• 2:27:58
  We're on X at AT right movies and on Instagram threads, blue
• 2:28:02
  sky, TikTok, YouTube, and we've got a fantastic community on
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  Facebook as well. Go for all that and we have a
• 2:28:09
  website at all the way movies.com.
• 2:28:11
  Yep, harder to not find us, let's be honest.
• 2:28:13
  Exactly. It is.
• 2:28:15
  We're all off now to find out what's really behind that
• 2:28:17
  painting on Matt's wall. Yeah, and pull his car out of
• 2:28:20
  the swamp, I want to say. Find that North by Northwest
• 2:28:25
  picture behind. Yeah, that's fitting, isn't it?
• 2:28:28
  Yeah. Come back for Almost Famous and
• 2:28:30
  until then, thanks for listening everyone.
• 2:28:31
  Yes. Thank you so much, guys.
• 2:28:32
  Take care. Thanks for listening guys.