For
some reason the scene embarrassed Gavin, who resisted playing it with his shirt
off. Hitchcock fobbed the actor off on writer Joseph Stefano, who was on the
set. "Stefano persuaded him by encouraging him to use that very
embarrassment as part of the scene," according to John Russell Taylor's
book, "particularly when having an argument while half undressed."
?
The
embarrassing nature of the scene was aggravated by the fact that it was the
first one Gavin acted with Leigh - and unlike, say, The 39 Steps, he and she
were not supposed to be "meeting cute." "It isn't easy to say,
'Hello, nice to see you again,' and then hop in the sack and make love,
remembered Leigh. "We were bound to be somewhat awkward. I thought we had
begun to warm up and were progressing fairly well. "
?
After
some lackluster takes, Hitchcock beckoned the white-lingerie-clad actress over
and complained, "I think you and John could be more passionate! See what
you can do!" (According to Rebello, Hitchcock actually instructed Leigh
"in discreet but descriptive terms" to "take matters in hand, as
it were. Leigh blushed, acquiesced, and Hitchcock got a reasonable facsimile of
the required response.") Then, almost as an afterthought. the director strolled
over to Gavin and whispered something in his ear, too. tantalizing each
performer by giving the other secret advice. "I wouldn't have put it past
him to pull my chain, and then to pull John's chain," said Leigh,
"just to get the desired results."
?
Give
Gavin credit: he was struggling with his role. Years later, when Leigh was
researching her book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, Gavin
told her that his chances weren't improved by the odor he detected on the set.
Hitchcock's body odor? he wondered. Or perhaps the director's breath? Or maybe
his cigar, as Hitchcock sat there, puffing placidly away, mere inches away from
the performers pretending a love scene. And that's the way the tryst opening of
Psycho plays: audacious bur awkward, provocative but cold, sexy with a whiff of
BO.
?
"In
a strange way," Leigh argued later, Gavin's passivity "worked for the
suspense. Real passion would have justified Marion's theft. But the lack of the
complete abandon with Sam might have led some audience members to think, 'I
wonder if he really loves her that much?' It made Marion even more sympathetic,
which Hitch was very concerned about her being."
?
During
the filming, however, those who watched the dailies though: they were seeing
way too much of the back of Gavin's head, according Rebello's book, whereas,
under Hitchcock's more sympathetic tutelage. Leigh was exposing unprecedented
parts of her anatomy - while achieving her most immortal performance.
?
Leigh
was a good sport, who got a kick out of the director's off-color limericks,
puns, and pranks. Kim Novak had arrived on the set of Vertigo on the day of her
semi nude scene (waking up from her "suicide attempt" in Scottie's
apartment), to be greeted by a plucked chicken hanging from her dressing room;
her unamused disgust undoubtedly wrecked any second chance Hitchcock might have
been giving her. The worst jokes on Leigh seemed to come just moments before
her most important scenes - and she found most of them terribly funny.
?
Hitchcock
had one running gag involving Leigh and Mrs. Bates -? Norman's mother - as he tested the various
mummified skeletons created by the effects department. The director
"relished scaring me," Leigh wrote in her memoir. "He
experimented with the mother's corpse, using me as his gauge. I would return
from lunch, open the door to the dressing room, and propped in my chair would
be this hideous monstrosity. The horror in my scream registered on his Richter
scale, decided his choice of the Madam."
?
Hitchcock
CARED about Leigh (and the character she was playing), a concern reflected in
the way he helped her out, even acting from the sidelines, during the
protracted car-driving interludes. In those scenes Marion wears a troubled,
guilty face," according to the script, and the director "completely
articulated for me what I was thinking," Leigh recalled. " 'Oh-oh,'
h'd say, 'there's your boss. He's watching you with a funny look.' "
?
The
shower stabbing - Leigh's most demanding scene - was scheduled for the week of
December 17-23, just before Christmas. "During the day," recalled
Leigh, "I was in the throes of being stabbed to death, and at night vas
wrapping presents from Santa Claus for the children."
?
Darkness
and light: Mrs. Bates's knife was a retractable prop. The bathroom, at the
director's insistence, was lined with "blinding white tiles" and
shining fixtures. Plenty of chocolate syrup, in a squeeze bottle, supplied the dark
?blood. A professional dancer stood by
for the more intimate shots (Hitchcock had thrown a publicity lightning bolt
when he announced he was planning a "rearview scene of Miss Leigh"),
but Leigh herself appeared in most of the shots, wearing flesh-colored
moleskin, though it occasionally peeled away under the watery onslaught.
?
-Hitch
and I discussed the implications [of the scene] at great length," remembered
Leigh. "Marion had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the
consequences, so when she stepped into the tub it was as if she were stepping
into the baptismal waters. The spray beating down was purifying the corruption
from her mind, purging the evil from soul. She was like a virgin again,
tranquil, at peace."
?
(The
shower as baptism" was an idea Hitchcock extrapolated from Robert Bloch's
novel, where Mary Crane decides "that's what she was going to do right
now, take a nice, long, hot shower. Get the dirt off as she was going to get
the dirt cleaned out of her insides. Come clean, Mary. Come clean as
new.")
?
In
addition to the scene of Arbogast climbing the stairs to meet Mother, Saul Bass
had storyboarded the shower sequence, sketching the "high shot with the
violins, and suddenly the big head with the brass instruments clashing,"
in Hitchcock's words - the cuts coming staccato and furious, each lasting mere
seconds. The montage conjured up complete nudity and savage violence, even
though, as the director tirelessly explained in interviews, it was all an
illusion - giving "an impression of a knife slashing, as if tearing at the
very screen, ripping the film," in the words of the script.
?
Blond
dripping hair, dark gaping mouth, blood spattering everywhere. It took seven
days to collect the individual shots - seventy-eight pieces of film (Hitchcock
could stipulate the exact number for interviewers). Pat Hitchcock O'Connell has
said that her mother conceived the precise order of the images. Saul Bass later
claimed that he was on the set and actually directed the scene, though of
course he didn't - yet it was possible, if unprovable, that Bass was nearby (it
would have been like Hitchcock to keep him around).
?
The
hardest shot was the last one of Marion, dead, "starting with the eye in
full frame and gradually easing back to disclose the draped body still
clutching the torn curtain, the running water, the entire bathroom," in
Leigh's words. They filmed it some twenty times before Hitchcock was satisfied -
and then during the postproduction, according to legend, Mrs. Hitchcock
detected a blink from the actress, and a freeze shot was ordered.
?
Norman
Bates, of course, was Marion's costar in that scene. But Anthony Perkins had
been let off for the week; he was safely on the East Coast when the shower
scene was filmed. The knife-wielding Mother was actually a costumed
"double" - stuntwoman Margo Epper. Hitchcock deployed slow motion to
cover Leigh's breasts - "the slow shots," the director told Francois
Truffaut, then "inserted in the montage so as to give an impression of
normal speed." Leigh's lifeless eye was optically enlarged in
postproduction, according to Rebello's book, "so that orb appeared to be a
perfect 'fit' in the bathtub drain as his camera spiraled down the drain."
All of Hitchcock's long experience and magicians hip went into these, his most
spectacular forty-five seconds of terrifying illusion.
?
After
a Christmas break filming resumed on the second half of the film, with Arbogast
going to meet Mother and meeting his maker instead, and Lila stumbling upon
Mother in the basement.
?
Mother
herself was a piece of elaborate Hitchcockery. For the film to work, audiences
had to think Mother was alive, right up to the climax. Paul Jasmin, an actor
friend of Anthony Perkins, offered up his talent for doing an old-lady,
Marjorie Main kind of voice; when Mother spoke, sometimes it was Jasmin,
sometimes lines that had been looped by actresses Virginia Gregg or Jeanette
Nolan (John Mclntire's wife). Hitchcock spliced and melded the voices together,
keeping moviegoers guessing until Mother's actual "appearance" as a
mummified corpse in a rocking chair. That bit of stagecraft was even more
troublesome than the shower sequence.
?
"First
of all it was very difficult to get Mother to turn," Hilton Green
recalled. "A prop man had to be squatting down on the back of his heels,
out of sight, turning the chair in unison with the hitting of the light bulb,
in sync with the movement of the camera. Trying to get all of that in one
precise moment proved extremely tough. Oh, I've never seen Hitch so furious. He
looked at the dailies and it wasn't the way he wanted." They had to try it
again.
?
Only
the last voice, with Bates sitting forlornly in jail, his mind subsumed by
Mother, is entirely female: "Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette
spliced in," according to Jasmin.
?
Hitchcock
paid more attention to Mother, some people involved in the production thought,
than to Lila and Sam. Joseph Stefano kept arguing that the stars of Part 2 of
Psycho deserved "a few seconds of silent memory" at the end,
reflecting on what had happened to Marion, but the director was reluctant to
stir the ashes. In order to keep the pace moving he cut dialogue Stefano had
written for the pair, expressing their feelings of loss.
?
That
may be one defect of Psycho, and especially of the final scene (among the last
Hitchcock filmed, in late January 1960): the psychiatrist's monologue
dissecting the psyche of Norman Bates. The scripted version of sequence
included exteriors outside the police building, a television crew broadcasting
news of Bates's arrest, and a patrolman holding crowds back. Inside, an errand
boy brings take-out coffee into the office of the Chief of Police. Sam asks
Lila, "It's regular, okay?" and Lila answers pointedly, "I could
stand something regular," followed by small talk that would give audiences
a chance to decompress.
?
Hitchcock
didn't want the audience of Psycho to decompress. He wanted the final
crescendo, then a quick coda. He shot the coda sequence virtually as scripted,
before deciding to eliminate the atmosphere and small talk and focus purely on
the psychiatric explanation of Norman's pathological relationship with his
mother. Sam and Lila received only terse cutaways. After Simon Oakland, a
smooth, authoritative actor, breezed through his lines, Hitchcock brought two
months of photography on Psycho to a close on February 1, 1960.
?
Patrick
McGilligan "Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light" (2003)
