Wigging Out: Norman is subdued by Marion’s boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin).
people swear to this day that you do see it, and they will watch it frame by frame looking for the knife penetrating the body, but it never did. I was there and we never filmed that.
Anyway, I think all of that suggestion led to people wanting to see more, and thus the beginning of the violence that you see onscreen today.
SR: If you read Joseph Stefano’s adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel, you would see there are lines that are pushier than what made it into the movie. But that was part of Hitchcock’s game. He would sacrifice and put something in that he knew he would have to take out, and really kind of play dodgeball with the censors. The funny thing is that he got away with it, and Michael Powell didn’t get away with it in Peeping Tom.
DT: Up until Psycho, censors really had tight control over what went into movies and Psycho led to the breakdown of that censorship. Movies were being censored in a way that was stupid, clumsy and damaging. It was really out-of-date and foolish and they had a different set of stan- dards with respect to sexuality and language. Hitchcock really struggled with those censors.
David, your book argues that Psycho ushered in a new era for movies, one that emphasized sex and death at the expense of content and style. Would you say that Psycho’s legacy is mostly
negative? DT: I wouldn’t say that Psycho has a negative legacy. It is a very important film. But where it concerns me is it seems to have taken us to a place where we irrevocably expect a certain level of sex and violence at the expense of things like plot and character development. Historically, we have lived through new freedoms as a result of the 1960s, and many films are a product of that era. But what we have lived to is an era of a sort of lip-smacking gleeful approach to vio- lence that is really kind of disturbing. I am not into censorship but it’s dangerous because no one can really watch all this violence and not in some way absorb it.
HG: I think you could have something there. But if Hitchcock hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
Anatomy Of A Murder: Saul Bass’ shower scene storyboards. RM24
SR: In the ’30s, Hitchcock said one of the difficult things with movies is that the audience was becoming jaded and demanding bigger thrills, so it took more to shock them. The thing with Psycho is that really good people were making it. Hitchcock’s idea was, “What if someone really good made one of these movies?” which I think is one of the funniest things he ever said but it’s one of the truest. The problem is that not everyone is Hitchcock, not everyone is Anthony Perkins and not everyone is Joseph Stefano or Robert Bloch.
Cont’d on p.26
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