The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Alfred Hitchcock · a film · 1960 · about 109 minutes · screenplay by Joseph Stefano, from Robert Bloch’s novel
Mode
Crime film turned horror film at the point of a killing; suspense thriller, case history and study of the spectator in one structure
Mythos
The descent to the underworld, twice, by the cellar stair and into the swamp; the dead parent living on in the child; the house of the dead above, the transients below
Phase
Ten sequences in two films, a woman’s flight and the search for her, hinged on her death a little under halfway, from a hotel window at lunch hour to a car drawn out of a swamp
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, about 109 minutes, for Shamley Productions, released by Paramount; Saul Bass’s titles, Bernard Herrmann’s score for strings alone, John L. Russell’s photography, George Tomasini’s editing
Register
From a lunch-hour hotel room and an oil man flirting over cash to the shower and the fruit cellar; a comic sheriff’s wife, a psychiatrist’s lecture
Scale
Two lives and one divided mind; a motel off the highway, a small town and its law
Governing Proposition
A secretary in Phoenix steals forty thousand dollars so that she can marry, runs, and stops for the night at a motel on an old road, kept by a mild young man who lives with his mother in the house above. A little under halfway through she is killed, and the film hands itself to the man who cleans up after the killing. The wager of the film is that the audience’s sympathy will follow the camera wherever it goes, and that, led from a thief to her killer, it will want the car that holds her body to sink.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with bars. In Saul Bass’s titles they slice across the screen and through the names, under Bernard Herrmann’s driving prelude, written, like the whole score, for strings alone. Then a title card places the action in Phoenix, Arizona, and gives a day and an hour. The camera pans across the city and goes in at a half-open hotel window. From the first shot it is an intruder, and the film is about what it was not meant to see. Inside, at lunch hour, Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh, lies on a bed with Sam Loomis, played by John Gavin. They want to marry and cannot, because his debts prevent it.
Back at the office an oil man, Cassidy, flirts over forty thousand dollars in cash, and Marion is sent to bank it. At home she packs. The money lies on the bed, and the camera keeps returning to it as though it were watching her. She drives out of Phoenix with it. The theft is small and frightened, the act of an ordinary woman pushed by money and desire into a trap. The film spends its first part making the audience care what becomes of her and of the money, as if the money were what the film is about.
Hitchcock directed and produced the film for Shamley Productions, and Paramount released it in 1960. The screenplay, by Joseph Stefano, comes from Robert Bloch’s novel of 1959. The studio would not fund it, and Hitchcock financed it largely himself. He made it cheaply, in black and white, with much of the crew of his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: a modest picture, in the manner of the exploitation films, from the director of North by Northwest. John L. Russell photographed it and George Tomasini edited it. Its first part is a crime film about a woman and stolen money, and almost everything in it is built to be lost.
Movement II
Marion’s flight is a run of watching eyes. At a crossing her employer sees her pass in the car. She drives on into the night. A highway patrolman questions her, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and at a car lot she trades her car for another. None of this will come to anything, and all of it is spent on the audience’s fear for her and the wish that she get away. Then rain, and in the rain a motel on a road the highway has moved away from: the Bates Motel, a long, low row of cabins, and above it, on the hill, a tall house.
The motel is kept by Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, a mild young man with a stammer, who lives with his mother in the house. He offers Marion supper in the parlour, among stuffed birds; an owl spreads its wings above him, shot from below. The birds are a pattern the film keeps: her name is Crane, she comes from Phoenix, and the predators watch from the walls. Norman talks of traps and of his mother. “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” he says, and later, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”
The talk puts her guilt beside his. Her theft and his madness are set side by side, and he names what they share: “we’re all in our private traps”. When she has gone to her cabin, Norman looks through a peephole in the wall at Marion undressing, and the audience looks with him. Everything turns on this shot. From this moment the camera’s eye is his, and the audience, without being told, has begun to see as he sees.
Movement III
Marion steps into the shower. Through the curtain a silhouette appears; the curtain is torn back; Herrmann’s violins shriek in a figure the ear cannot settle. The killing is assembled from fragments, cut by Tomasini and Hitchcock, and no single one of them shows a knife entering flesh. The audience builds the act in its own head. Then stillness. The water runs, the drain dissolves into Marion’s open eye, and the camera turns slowly away from it.
The star of the film, billed as such, is dead a little under halfway through, and with her goes the story the audience has been following: the money, the patrolman, the marriage. The film has broken the oldest contract of the commercial feature and handed itself to the one person left. Norman comes down from the house and cleans the bathroom, and the film watches him do it with care. The body goes into the trunk of her car, and with it, tossed in unknowing, the newspaper in which the money is hidden. Within minutes the audience’s sympathy has passed from the dead woman to the young man covering for his mother.
The car goes into the swamp. It sinks, and stops halfway. For a moment it does not go down, and the audience wants it to: on his side now, it wishes a dead woman’s car to vanish. Then it goes under, and the money sinks with her. The film has proved its argument on its audience without a word. The first film is over, a crime film drowned with its heroine, and a second has begun, about the man who killed her, though the audience does not yet know it.
Movement IV
The second film is a search. Lila Crane, Marion’s sister, played by Vera Miles, comes looking for her with Sam, and an investigator, Milton Arbogast, played by Martin Balsam, follows the money to the motel. He questions Norman, and then goes up to the house. On the stairs the camera lifts to an overhead view as a figure rushes out at him, and his fall back down the stairs is seen through his own reeling eyes. It is the second killing on the screen, and the last.
In the town of Fairvale the sheriff, played by John McIntire, tells Lila and Sam that Mrs Bates died years ago. That night Norman carries his mother down from her room to the cellar. The film’s geography is now plain: the house on the hill holds the past and the dead parent; the flat motel below holds the trade of strangers passing; and Norman goes up and down the path between them. Under the house is a second descent, to set beside the swamp.
Lila searches the house: the mother’s room, then Norman’s, then down to the fruit cellar. A figure sits in a chair with its back to her. She turns the chair, and it is the mother, long dead; the bulb swings, and the light passes back and forth across the empty sockets of her face. Then Norman appears in his mother’s clothes, and is overpowered. The woman the audience has heard and glimpsed throughout was the son.
Movement V
At the courthouse a psychiatrist, Dr Richmond, played by Simon Oakland, explains. For several minutes he tells in clinical prose what the cellar has already shown: that Norman killed his mother and her lover years before, and, by implication, two girls who went missing; that he kept her body; and that the mother lives on inside the son. It is the film’s one lecture, the one place where it explains instead of showing, and the only scene in which it speaks a language not its own.
Then the cell. Norman sits alone, and the mother’s voice speaks over his face. A fly is on his hand, and the voice leaves it there: “she wouldn’t even harm a fly”. His smile holds, and for an instant a skull shows beneath it. Then a chain draws Marion’s car out of the swamp. On a second viewing every innocent remark of Norman’s doubles as a confession, the traps, the best friend, the fly, and the film turns itself inside out.
Hitchcock sold the film with a rule that no one be admitted after it began, and with a trailer in which he tours the house and the motel himself. It drew four Academy Award nominations, for direction, for Leigh as supporting actress, and for black-and-white cinematography and art direction, and won none. Others made sequels in 1983, 1986 and 1990, a shot-for-shot remake in 1998 and a television series. Its descendants run wider: Halloween (1978) cast Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, and named a character Loomis, and the slasher cycle followed. What they took is the move the film made first: terror brought home to the roadside motel and the boy next door, and an audience led, without noticing, to the killer’s side.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing loose. The forty thousand dollars, the patrolman and the trade at the car lot seem to promise a crime film, and they are required because they are a decoy: the film needs the audience invested in a story it is about to drown, and Marion’s flight is spent on that investment. Even the newspaper hiding the money, tossed into the trunk by Norman unknowing, bears weight, since the money sinks with her. What holds the axis is the courthouse, where the psychiatrist states in clinical prose what the cellar has already shown: the one place the parts are permitted rather than compelled, a few minutes in a film of about 109, after which the cell takes the film back at once.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it is made in image as fully as in words. Ordinary guilt and monstrous guilt are continuous: Marion’s frightened theft and Norman’s madness are set side by side in the parlour, and he names the shared condition, “we’re all in our private traps”. The dead mother lives on inside the son. More lasting is the spectator’s complicity. The film moves sympathy from the victim to her killer within minutes, and proves it when the car stops in the swamp and the audience wants it to sink: a truth about watching, shown rather than asserted. What holds the axis is its object: the great truth concerns the audience and its sympathy more than any human or social order beyond them.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation here is of the dreadful kind, and it comes repeatedly. The shower is the summit of the film’s suspense: the curtain torn back, the silhouette, Herrmann’s violins shrieking in a figure the ear cannot settle, then the water running and the drain dissolving into Marion’s open eye. The house carries the dread to the same height: Arbogast on its stairs, seen from overhead, his fall seen through his own reeling eyes; the fruit cellar beneath it, where the swinging bulb passes light across the empty sockets; and the last face, where a skull shows for an instant beneath the smile. Four heights in under an hour. What holds the axis is the first part, which rises to tension rather than transport.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The archetypal structure is built, not only evoked. The house stands vertical on the hill above the flat motel, a moral geography with the dead parent and the past above and the commerce of transients below, and Norman passes between them. The cellar is a descent to the underworld, and the swamp a second one, taking money, car and girl and giving them back only at the end. The birds run through as a built system, not ornament: Crane, Phoenix, the stuffed predators, the fly the mother will not harm. Norman, the mild son with the mother inside him, has an archetype’s standing. The built shape carries the axis past the gate; what holds it at the figure is the foundation, a myth resting on a case history, which the courthouse explains where myth would leave it dark.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The turn and the stake are both large. The film breaks the oldest contract of the commercial feature: it kills its billed star a little under halfway and hands the story to her murderer. It brings into a studio release a lunch-hour bed, a flushing toilet and a killing cut with a violence no mainstream American film had shown. And it turns against its maker’s tradition: the director of North by Northwest makes a cheap black-and-white picture with a television crew. The studio would not fund it; Hitchcock staked his own money and name, and the material courted the censors. Held below the top because the swerve stays within suspense, a form he had mastered: it turns the genre rather than leaving it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
At its hinge the form is the knowledge. The film’s argument, that the spectator will follow sympathy wherever the camera takes it, exists only in the broken structure. Keep Marion alive to the end, or reveal Norman’s secret at the start, and the film can say nothing about its audience. The peephole is the hinge: the audience looks through Norman’s eye at Marion undressing, and from then on the camera’s point of view is his. The shower, a killing assembled from fragments, is a second instance. What holds the axis here is that this knowing is gathered at the break: between its set pieces the search of the second film moves by the familiar steps of the investigation thriller, where the plot knows more than the form, and the courthouse closes it with a lecture in a film whose method is to show.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The evidence is long and broad: more than six decades of argument, from early readings of a moral work about everyone’s capacity for evil, through psychoanalytic and feminist theory of the gaze, to book-length studies of the production and of single scenes, and a feature documentary on the shower sequence alone. Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake was itself an experiment in what the film’s power consists of, and its failure taught something. Return yields new things: each innocent remark of Norman’s, in the parlour and at the close, becomes a confession, and the whole film turns inside out. What holds the axis is the twist: the first viewing’s surprise cannot be had twice, and the depth of return is that one reversal, worked through every scene.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of horror: terror moved from the gothic elsewhere to the roadside motel and the boy next door, the killer made a mind rather than a monster, and the protagonist abandoned with the audience kept. The reach was immediate, with nothing delayed, and runs through more than one field: it founded a genre and carried into the thriller, film music, editing, censorship and exhibition. What holds it short of the top is that it reorganised a genre and its audience, not the grammar of film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the slasher cycle, whose Halloween (1978) cast Leigh’s daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, and named a character Loomis; Brian De Palma’s long homage; the shower strings, the most imitated cue in film music; the low-budget picture by a major director; and audiences taught to see films from the beginning.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across sixty-six years. The form is whole, with no lost reels and no recut of consequence. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and in teaching, and the shower and the house on the hill are among the most widely known images in film, recognised by people who have never seen it. The fabric is preserved and restored, with no physical loss. The twist has been common knowledge for decades and the film survives without its surprise, which is itself evidence. The surface is fixed in places to its moment: the courthouse psychiatry reads now as period theory, and its conflation of madness with a man dressing as a woman is dated. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it; the evidence here would carry more, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. The shower montage, built by Tomasini and Hitchcock from fragments into a killing the eye believes it has seen, is among the most studied pieces of editing in the medium. Herrmann’s score for strings alone is a feat of restriction, black-and-white music for a black-and-white film, from the driving prelude under Bass’s slicing bars to the stabbing glissandi. Russell’s photography gives the parlour its low angles and the owl its wings spread over Norman. Perkins holds a double life in plain sight. The costs are visible: rear projection in the driving scenes and, above all, under Arbogast’s backward fall, where the trick shows; and the static staging of the courthouse.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bright noon office in Phoenix, an oil man flirting over cash, and the dark cellar in Fairvale with the mother’s mummified body. One law governs both: secret guilt carried in private, money and desire pushing ordinary people into traps, and the watching eye, from the employer at the crossing and the patrolman’s sunglasses to the peephole and the cellar’s sockets. Mirrors and birds recur throughout, and the swamp gives back at the end what the first part stole. Crime film and horror film obey one physics, and the break between them is the design. What weakens it is register: the courthouse speaks the expert’s language, and the comic sheriff’s wife and the hardware store sit lighter.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Narrow by design, the film holds more than its size suggests: the individual consciousness, two of them and one divided; the family, a dead mother and the son she governs; money and work, the office, the cash, the car lot, the motel ruined when the highway moved; sex and its frustrations, the lunch-hour affair and the marriage that debt prevents; the law and its experts. They are joined causally: the stolen money brings Marion to the motel, the moved highway made it a trap, the mother’s rule made the son. What holds the axis lowest is absence. The state, history, the sacred and the natural order, save the swamp, do not enter, and the figure records the ceiling of a thriller among a handful of people.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, then The Made at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.9, and The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.8. A reorganisation of horror that moved terror to the roadside motel and the boy next door, with an immediate reach that founded the slasher film and runs through the thriller, film music and the habit of arriving at the start; a making in which the cutting, the score for strings and the camera’s point of view never fail; a film that killed its billed star a little under halfway and handed the story to her murderer; a broken form that alone can show the audience its own sympathy; and sixty-six years of unbroken presence, without the surprise.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the mind, the family, money and work, sex and the law are joined causally, but the state, history, the sacred and the natural order, save the swamp, do not enter, and a thriller among a handful of people cannot reach further. Above it, The Unconcealment at 8.4, where the lasting disclosure concerns the audience more than any human or social order; then The Inevitable and The Inner Law at 8.6, held by the courthouse, the one scene permitted rather than compelled, and by the lighter register of a few scenes.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.4, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. The work is held below the summit by one axis, The Unconcealment against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.7 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Psycho as released by Paramount in 1960, black and white, about 109 minutes, from Saul Bass’s titles to the car drawn from the swamp: directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock for Shamley Productions, written by Joseph Stefano from Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho (1959), photographed by John L. Russell, edited by George Tomasini, with music by Bernard Herrmann. No print, script or transcript was consulted. The novel is a source and not part of the work. The sequels Psycho II (1983), Psycho III (1986) and Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990), Gus Van Sant’s remake (1998) and the television series Bates Motel (2013 to 2017) are separate works made by others after the film was finished; they stand outside the unit and bear only on its reach and its survival. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are certain, and four short lines are given. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the counts of setups and cuts in the shower sequence and the days spent shooting it, the minute of the killing, the date on the opening title card, the length of the trailer and the year of the film’s entry in the National Film Registry, are not given.