There have been several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock in which a man has a mother, which is usually a bad sign.  Most notable among them is the movie Psycho (1960), of course.  Preceding that movie was Strangers on a Train (1951), in which Robert Walker, who is a psychopath, is unduly attached to his mother while hating his father.  In Frenzy (1972), as soon as we find out that Barry Foster loves his mother, we are right to suspect him of being the necktie strangler.  In The Birds (1963), Rod Taylor has a strange relationship with his mother.  For four years, he has spent every weekend with her, during which time he has had no girlfriend because he didn’t want to upset her.

In all these cases, the man is a bachelor.  If a man is married or has previously been married, then there is nothing to worry about.  In The Wrong Man (1956), Henry Fonda has a mother, but he is married to Vera Miles, so that makes it all right.  In North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant has been married and divorced twice, so we know he is normal, and his mother is just amusing.

I thought that the Hitchcock movies mentioned above were all the ones in which a bachelor has a mother. But the other night, I decided to watch Notorious (1946).  I had completely forgotten about the mother angle in this movie, probably because I find the movie so disturbing in other respects that I overlooked it.

A few film critics have compared Notorious to Gilda, also made in 1946.  In that movie, the title character, played by Rita Hayworth, is married to an older man, Ballin Mundson (George Macready), a Nazi living in South America. Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda used to be lovers, but that love on his part has turned into hate.  To vent his hatred on her, he sees to it that she remains trapped in her marriage to Ballin.  And then, at the end of the movie, after Ballin is killed, Johnny and Gilda are now together and will live happily ever after.  At least, that is what we are expected to believe, which is asking a lot.

A similar love/hate triangle exists in Notorious.  Cary Grant plays Devlin, an American secret agent whose job it is to enlist Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) to infiltrate some Nazis in South America shortly after the end of World War II.  The fact that she is the daughter of a Nazi spy, who has just been convicted of treason, will presumably make it possible for her to gain their confidence.  The intelligence agency Devlin works for has had her bungalow wired for three months, and from the arguments they have heard her having with her father, they know that she is patriotic.

However, Alicia is also known to be a woman of loose morals, who enjoys drinking and screwing, hence the title of this movie.  Being hardboiled, she sneers at love.  When Devlin asks her why she likes a particular song, she says, “Because it’s a lot of hooey.  There’s nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.”

Because of her promiscuity, one of the men Devlin works with had misgivings for a while, saying, “She had me worried for some time, a woman of that sort….  I don’t think any of us have any illusions about her character….”  On the other hand, it turns out that a woman of that sort is just what they need.

Devlin falls in love with Alicia before finding out exactly what her assignment is.  That assignment turns to be the seduction of Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), who is one of the Nazis, and who used to be very much enamored of her. When Alicia does not adamantly refuse to prostitute herself in that manner, Devlin hates her for being willing to go along with it, and he starts being mean to her.  I said I found this movie disturbing, and this is the reason, the way Devlin is so mean to Alicia throughout most of the movie.  It is for the same reason that I find it difficult to watch Gilda, given the way Johnny is mean to Gilda.

Of course, we have to wonder, what did Devlin think Alicia would be asked to do if not use sex to get information about what the Nazis are up to?  After all, is he not supposed to be the honeypot that will lure her into this scheme?  In other words, the normal procedure, one would think, would be to invite Alicia into an office at the intelligence agency to see if they can get her to help them by appealing to her patriotism.  We might imagine Devlin’s superior, Paul Prescott (Louis Calhern), explaining the situation to her.  Besides, she doesn’t seem to have a job, so maybe she needs a paycheck.

Instead, Prescott gets Devlin, presumably the sexiest secret agent they have, to wangle his way into one of her parties, where he can seduce her into doing his bidding.  And then, just because he ends up falling in love with her while enticing her with his charm, he ends up hating her for not living up to his high moral standards.

It turns out that Devlin did not know that Sebastian already had a thing for Alicia a long time ago, but that merely raises the question, why didn’t Prescott let Devlin know that when he was assigned to the case?  There is no good answer to that question regarding the movie’s internal logic.  Instead, the answer is one of external logic.  The movie needs to make excuses for Devlin by keeping him in the dark, otherwise he would have no reason for being upset when Alicia goes along with a plan that he knew about all along.

Anyway, she succeeds in making Sebastian fall in love with her, and soon they are married.  At the end of that movie, when it is clear that Sebastian’s Nazi friends will kill him for being foolish enough to marry a secret agent, Devlin and Alicia will be able to live happily ever after, especially since, as in the movie Gilda, there will be no need for a messy divorce.  But as with Gilda, we feel put upon when asked to accept such an ending.  Whether we are talking about Johnny in Gilda or Devlin in Notorious, these men have shown Gilda and Alicia respectively how cruel they can be.  Such cruelty would be bound to manifest itself again in the future, for people do not change that much.  These women would be foolish to marry them.

There is, however, one big difference between these two movies. In Gilda, Ballin does not have a mother, whereas in Notorious, Sebastian does have a mother, played by Leopoldine Konstantin. Suppose that Sebastian, like Ballin, had not had a mother.  In one sense, the movie could have proceeded in pretty much the same way.  Sebastian’s mother is not essential to the plot, but she is essential to the characterizations.

Claude Rains was about 57 years old when he made this movie.  His character of Sebastian is that of a man who, on account of his mother, has been bachelor all his life.  His mother says she doesn’t like Alicia because she suspects that Alicia just wants to marry him for his money, but he knows the real reason. “All these carping questions are merely the expression of your own jealousy,” he says to her, “just as you’ve always been jealous of any woman I’ve ever shown any interest in.”  In other words, Sebastian is not merely a bachelor with a mother, which in a Hitchcock movie is bad enough, but she is the reason he is a bachelor as well, which makes it worse.  In fact, the only reason he got to know Alicia long enough to fall in love with her when he met her in Washington was that his mother was not with him at the time.

Claude Rains was 5 feet, 6 inches tall.  Ingrid Bergman was 5 feet, 9 inches tall. Now, in real life, some men marry women who are taller than they are without there being any psychological implications.  But this is a movie, and Hitchcock deliberately chose these actors for their parts. Because our mothers were taller than we were when we were children, the pairing of Alicia and Sebastian, with her being 3 inches taller than he is, naturally has a mother-son connotation. Not only does Sebastian have a mother in this movie, but his wife Alicia is like a second mother to him as well.

Although a bachelor with a mother in a Hitchcock movie indicates something bad, what that bad thing is varies from one movie to another.  Freud may have conditioned us to think of an Oedipus complex, but only in Psycho is there any hint of that, and that hint occurs only in the novel on which the movie was based, and even then, the novel only refers to rumors of incest and necrophilia. In none of the other movies are there any indications of an Oedipus complex. Far from having a sexual desire for his mother in Strangers on a Train, for example, Robert Walker’s character is thought by many critics to be a homosexual.

The character flaw of Sebastian in Notorious, other than the fact that he is a Nazi, is that he is weak, which is made clear by the way he is dominated by his mother.  While we are children, we depend on our mothers for protection. This is something we naturally grow out of, but Sebastian has not. When he realizes that Alicia is a secret agent who has learned that there are wine bottles filled with uranium in his wine cellar, he goes to his mother’s bedroom and wakes her up, telling her he needs her help, berating himself, saying, “I must have been insane, mad, behaved like an idiot to believe in her with her clinging kisses.”

“Stop wallowing in your foul memories,” comes his mother’s curt response, as she lights up a cigarette and prepares to take charge of the situation.  She decides they will poison Alicia, killing her before the other Nazis find out.  Of course, Devlin rescues her from their clutches in the nick of time.

In 1956, William H. Whyte, Jr. published The Organization Man, in which there is a chapter on personality tests.  His advice for any man wanting to rise in a corporation to upper management is to cheat when taking such a test.  To that end, he provides a list of mantras to instill in one’s own mind before taking a personality test, which will hopefully allow one to answer the questions in a way that will be conducive to one’s advancement to upper management.  For example, one such mantra is, “I like things pretty much the way they are.” Another is, “I don’t care for books or music much.”

First on his list of mantras, however, is this:  “I love my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more.”  The idea behind this is that a man who loves his father more than his mother is a healthy male, one capable of taking the reins of power in a corporation.  Of course, he must still love his mother to some degree, but to love your mother more than your father would be a bad sign, indicating that one is insecure and still feels the need for maternal protection.

Ultimately, just as in Gilda, there may have been a need to diminish the masculinity of the rival male in the triangle.  A lot of critics believe Ballin is a homosexual, making it easy for us to believe that Gilda’s sex with him was not all that good, not like the kind she will have with Johnny.  In a similar way, giving Sebastian a mother and making him shorter than Alicia was necessary to facilitate a happy ending for her and Devlin, if you are willing to call it that.  In so doing, Hitchcock made it easier for Devlin to accept the sexual relationship between Alicia and Sebastian.

Now, on the one hand, it probably bothered Devlin that a mama’s boy like Sebastian was the one who got to have sex with Alicia while Devlin himself, who was tall, handsome, and manly, was deprived of that privilege.  It just wasn’t fair!  But on the other hand, if Sebastian had not had a mother, and if, in addition, he had been played by an actor that was taller than Ingrid Bergman, Devlin might have worried that Alicia really enjoyed the sex she was having with Sebastian.  The image in his mind of that Sebastian bringing Alicia to orgasmic ecstasy would have been too much for a man like Devlin to forgive.

In the opening scene of Marnie, we see a woman with long, black hair, carrying a suitcase, walking through a train station.  Though we cannot see her face, yet we just know, somehow, that she must be beautiful.

Then the scene jumps to the office of one Mr. Strutt, who runs a tax-consulting firm, Strutt & Co., in New York.  He is played by Martin Gabel, who is only a character actor because he is not handsome. Rather, he is just ordinary in appearance.  And so it is that we are not surprised that the beautiful woman has taken advantage of this homely man, having robbed him.

He is being interviewed by two police detectives, and as an indication of just how much Strutt is irritated by what has happened, he states the amount stolen from him to the dollar, which is $9,967. (Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $99,000 in 2023 dollars.)  The detectives ask him if he can describe the woman, who went by the name Marion Holland.  He does so: “Five feet five.  A hundred and ten pounds. Size eight dress.  Blue eyes. Black, wavy hair.  Even features. Good teeth.”

As he so describes her, his secretary rolls her eyes.  She knows well the influence that women like that can have over men like Mr. Strutt.  Then the detectives start chuckling as well.  One of them continues, noting that Miss Holland had been working for Strutt for four months.  He asks about her references.  Strutt begins hedging, as if trying to remember.  His secretary, through half-closed eyelids, says, “Oh, Mr. Strutt, don’t you remember?  She didn’t have any references at all.”

No surprise there.  As Aristotle said, “Beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of introduction.”

Once, while in a philosophy course I was taking, the professor quoted this line from Aristotle.  “Aristotle?” another student in the classroom interjected. “Didn’t they kill him?”

“No,” the professor replied, “that was Socrates.  And he was ugly.”

Anyway, about that time, a major client of Strutt shows up from Philadelphia, Mark Rutland, played by Sean Connery.  Connery had recently starred as the suave and sophisticated spy, James Bond, in Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963), where his physical beauty made him irresistible to the women he met.

Strutt tells him that he was just robbed of almost $10,000.  “So I gathered,” Mark replies.  And then, showing no mercy, says, “By a pretty girl with no references.”

Strutt says he pointed her out to him the last time Mark was there, noting that Mark said at the time that Strutt was “improving the looks of the place.”

“Oh, that one,” Mark replies, “the brunette with the legs.”  Strutt comments, with irritation about how she acted so prim and proper, that she was always pulling her skirt down over her knees.

In the next scene, the brunette with the legs is entering a hotel room.  She puts everything that could be associated with Marion Holland into a gray suitcase, while putting a new wardrobe and the money she stole into a brown one.  It all reminded me of when another Marion, Marion Crane, switched outfits in a bedroom with a lot of stolen money lying on the bed in Psycho (1960).  And just as “Marion” in that movie was an anagram for “Normai,” similar to “Norma” and “Norman,” so here “Marion” is almost an anagram for “Marnie,” which is her real name, or rather, nickname, for her real name is Margaret Edgar.

She has several Social Security cards in her wallet with different names on them.  There would have been no difficulty about that when this movie was made.  Just previous to seeing this movie, I decided to get a Social Security card for myself.  I simply walked into the Social Security office and filled out a short form.  I had no identification, no driver’s license or birth certificate, for example, nor was the card itself supposed to be a form of identification once I had it.  Those were innocent times. Anyway, Marnie puts a Social Security card with her real name on it in the front section of the wallet.

She removes the black dye from her hair and becomes a blonde.  At the train station, she deposits the gray suitcase in a locker and then drops the key down the grate of a drain, taking only the brown suitcase with her.  She takes the train to Virginia, and then takes a hotel limousine to the Red Fox Inn, where she is known by her real name, and near Garrod’s, where she keeps her horse Forio stabled.

After riding her horse, she travels to Baltimore to visit her mother, which is apparently located on the waterfront, given the ship docked in the background.  As she gets out of the taxicab, we see little girls playing jump rope, singing a song that begins with, “Mother, Mother, I am ill.”  She knocks on a door, and a little girl opens it, a spoiled brat named Jessie, with whom Marnie does not get along, but whom her mother, Bernice (Louise Latham), babysits.

Marnie comes inside with some white chrysanthemums.  She turns to look at the vase and sees it is filled with red gladiolas.  Marnie has a strong, visceral reaction to those red flowers, insisting that they be removed and replaced with her white ones.  It is at this point that we know that this will be another Hitchcock movie with a Freudian theme.

Hitchcock’s most Freudian movie of all was Spellbound (1945).  Looking back, it is hard to believe how influential Freud was at that time, and still was to a certain extent when Marnie was made in 1964.  Even into the 1970s, you could walk into a bookstore and find over a dozen books by Freud. About fifteen years ago, just out of curiosity, I checked out the psychology section of a major bookstore.  There were no books by Freud on the shelf, just one little book about Freud, sitting there all by itself, looking a little sad. There were several books by Carl Jung, of course, but he appeals to a completely different set of readers.

One of the great things about Freud, as far as movies were concerned, is that repressed memories could be the basis of a mystery, something that happened in the past that is causing problems for someone in the present.  In Spellbound, there were two acts of repression for Gregory Peck, one in childhood, and one as an adult.  In Marnie, there is just one, as was usually the case.

While Marnie is at her mother’s, we get several clues to the Freudian mystery. In addition to the way the color red bothers her, we find out that both Marnie and her mother hate men.  “A decent woman,” Bernice says, “don’t have need for any man.”  There is a reluctance on the part of Bernice to show affection to Marnie, though she has no trouble doing so with Jessie.  Marnie asks her mother why she doesn’t love her, why she always moves away from her, avoiding physical contact, as if there was something wrong with her.  Marnie wonders if her mother believes that she gets her money by being a kept woman.  Then Marnie goes upstairs to take a nap, where she has a recurring dream, precipitated by the tapping of a window shade.  In her dream, her mother wants her to move, but Marnie doesn’t want to because it’s cold. Bernice wakes her up, just as in the dream.  She tells her supper is ready. Then Bernice slowly makes her way back down the stairs, descending with a limp and using a cane, on account of an accident she had a long time ago.

The next time we see Marnie, she has light brown hair.  Once again, she has a gray suitcase, the color of the suitcases she uses for a fake identity, so we figure she is about to embark on her next act of larceny. She spots an ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer for a payroll clerk.  It says references are needed, but she knows she has something better to offer than that.  By coincidence, the ad had been placed by Rutland & Co., a publishing company of which Mark is the owner.

At the office where she is to be interviewed by a Mr. Ward, he is just finishing up his interview with another woman for the same position.  That other woman appears to be in her late fifties and is referred to as Miss Blakely. When this movie was made, such women were called spinsters or old maids, and Miss Blakely matches the connotations.  Such a woman would not be given to foolishness but would be strictly business.  However, while she has the letters of recommendation, she has not the beauty.  In fact, she is quite unattractive.  So, we are not surprised that she doesn’t get the job.

Not that her appearance would have been a problem for Mr. Ward.  He is not like Strutt, for he thinks she would be perfect for the position.  However, Marnie, now going by the name of Mrs. Taylor, supposedly a widow, is sitting outside Ward’s office hoping to get that job, where she is spotted by Mark.  He seems to be trying to remember where he has seen her before, but he cannot quite place her, not even when she makes the characteristic gesture Strutt referred to of pulling her skirt down over her knees.

Mark is there to see Ward, who introduces him to Miss Blakely just as she is leaving.  Mark can barely conceal the feeling of revulsion he has at the thought of hiring a woman who looks like that.  He and Ward step into his office, where we gather that Mark says he wants “Mrs. Taylor” to be considered for the job. She is invited into Ward’s office.

While she is in the office, Mark realizes that she was the woman he saw at Strutt’s office.  He becomes amused as he listens to her explanation as to why she has almost no references.  And so, in addition to wanting her to get the position on account of her looks, his fascination with her criminal character further titillates him, leading him to overrule a bewildered Mr. Ward, who can’t believe Mark would want to hire a woman without the proper references when they could have had Miss Blakely.

After Marnie has settled into her new job, we again see indications of a repressed memory.  When a drop of red ink falls on her blouse, looking like a drop of blood, she panics and runs to the restroom to wash it off.  On another day, she agrees to work on Saturday to do some typing for Mark.  While in his office, a storm blows up.  The flashes of lightning alarm her, especially when the flashes turn red in her imagination.

We already figured that Mark didn’t really need any typing done, that he just wanted to get her alone for sexual purposes, and when she seems paralyzed by the storm, he takes advantage of the situation by kissing her.  One thing leads to another, and soon they are going to the racetrack together, after Mark finds out Marnie likes horses.  When she has a strong reaction to a jockey wearing a shirt with large red spots, Mark starts wondering, perhaps connecting it to the other ways in which she has been acting strange.

When the track closes, he brings her home to meet his father, who, unlike Mark, also likes horses and has several stabled on the grounds of his mansion.  Mark’s sister-in-law Lil (Diane Baker) is there as well. (Mark’s wife, Lil’s older sister, had died almost two years ago.)  She wants Mark for herself and thus regards Marnie as a rival.

Then Marnie makes her move, stealing the money out of the safe in Ward’s office, switching back to Margaret Edgar, and going back to Garrod’s to ride her horse Forio again.  But in the middle of her ride, Mark shows up.  She tries making up all sorts of stories, but eventually she finds out that he knew she was a thief all along.  He threatens to turn her over to the police, but since he has fallen in love with her, he offers her a way out.  She can marry him.

All right, we understood that Mark would prefer to have a beautiful woman like Marnie to be hired, rather than Miss Blakely, and we even understood why he might still be interested in her after realizing she had stolen the money from Strutt & Co.  But when he not only wants to marry her anyway, but also is willing to blackmail her into going along with it, we have to wonder about Mark too.

Marnie recalls that he is an amateur zoologist.  She thinks about Sophie, the jaguarundi he told her about that he trained to trust him, which for a jaguarundi, he says, is a lot.  She says, “You don’t love me.  I’m just something you’ve caught!  You think I’m some kind of animal you’ve trapped.”

“That’s right,” he says, “you are.  And I’ve caught something really wild this time, haven’t I?  I’ve tracked you and caught you, and by God, I’m gonna keep you.”

If we are sympathetic to what Mark is proposing, even regarding it as somewhat romantic, it is only on account of the fact that he is played by Sean Connery.  Suppose, however, that Mark had been played by Percy Helton.  In Wicked Woman (1953), for example, Helton is a pathetic character who lusts after Beverly Michaels.  She gets him to give her money, promising to go out with him, but when he subsequently pressures her for a date, she tells him she would never go out with him because he’s a “repulsive little runt.”  She is planning to run off with Richard Egan after he sells the bar he owns, cheating his wife out of her share of the money, but when Helton overhears their plan, he pressures Michaels into having sex with him.  That makes Helton not only pathetic, but despicable as well.  We would feel the same way were he to play the role of Mark Rutland, trying to force Marnie into marrying him.  It would give us the creeps, just as it gives us the creeps when we hear the story about how Alfred Hitchcock tried to coerce Tippi Hedren on the set of Marnie into having sex with him, threatening to ruin her career if she did not.

Mark and Marnie get married and go on a South Seas cruise for their honeymoon.  It is then that Mark finds out that Marnie cannot stand to have a man touch her. She had let him kiss her a few times, because she thought she could fake it, but when it comes to consummating the marriage, she cannot go through with it.  Mark becomes convinced that something happened to her when she was young, and he suggests that she see a psychiatrist, but she dismisses the idea, saying that when a man is rejected, he always says it’s the woman’s fault, that there must be something wrong with her mentally.

He promises not to touch her, and for the next few days, they seem to be getting along amicably. Little by little, however, Mark becomes angry that she still refuses to have sex with him.  So, one night he goes into the bedroom and tears Marnie’s nightgown off her, leaving her completely naked. He apologizes, but when she goes into a catatonic trance, Mark takes advantage of the situation and has sex with her. Though it is a clear case of marital rape, yet we forgive Mark for what he did because, well, it’s Sean Connery. Now, it was bad enough when, in Wicked Woman, Egan walked in just as Helton was kissing Michaels on the neck. But in Marnie, if it had been Percy Helton raping Tippi Hedren, people would have been getting out of their seats and leaving the theater.

The next morning, Marnie is gone.  Mark searches for her all over the ship, finally finding her face down in the swimming pool.  He pulls her out and resuscitates her, asking, “Why the hell didn’t you jump over the side?”

She replies, “The idea was to kill myself, not feed the damn fish.”

Of course, the real reason is that if she had jumped over the side, the movie would be over.  In any event, the honeymoon is over, and they return home. Mark brings Forio to her, and she looks at Mark with genuine affection for his having done so.

Meanwhile, Lil has been snooping and eavesdropping, finding out about Strutt and how Mark has secretly paid him off, and finding out that Marnie has a mother in Baltimore, a fact that she passes on to Mark. Mark in turn hires a private detective, from whom he gets the address of Marnie’s mother, and from whom he finds out something about a man being killed when Marnie was five years old.

One night, Marnie has that dream again, talking in her sleep.  Hearing her, Mark and Lil come into her bedroom and wake her.  After Lil leaves, Mark starts asking questions about that dream.  At first, she is cooperative, saying there are three taps, after which her mother wants her to move, but she doesn’t want to because it’s cold, and “they’ll hurt her.”  Mark asks who “they” are.  She says she doesn’t know, but there are noises.

When Mark asks about the noises, Marnie recovers from this weak moment and looks at him with a level gaze.  “You Freud, me Jane?” she asks.  When this movie was made, that snide remark was as much for the benefit of the audience as for Mark.  Although, as noted above, Freud was still being taken seriously at the time, audiences were becoming a little weary of Freudian themes in the movies.  A Freudian explanation for behavior could no longer be advanced with the same expectation of acceptance on the part of the audience that was possible when Spellbound was made.  It was necessary to have Marnie express some detachment from Freud, which would match a similar attitude on the part of the audience.

She is aware that Mark has been reading books on abnormal behavior and psychoanalysis.  Mark asks if she has read them, and she replies, “I don’t need to read that muck to know that women are stupid and feeble and that men are filthy pigs.”  Then she adds, “In case you didn’t recognize it, that was a rejection.”

Mark says he wants her to read them, saying, “Start with The Undiscovered Self.”  Why he would want her to read that, I don’t know.  Repressed memories from childhood are not the subject of that book.  I would have suggested Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, but neither that nor any of the other books Mark has been reading are by Freud.  Perhaps Mark’s recommendation of this book by Carl Jung is also for the benefit of the audience, another way of establishing some distance from Freud.

Marnie asks him why he won’t just leave her alone, and he says, “Because I think you’re sick, ol’ dear.”  She sits up and replies:

I’m sick?  Well, take a look at yourself, ol’ dear.  You’re so hot to play Mental Health Week, what about you?  Talk about dream worlds!  You’ve got a pathological fix on a woman who’s not only an admitted criminal, but who screams if you come near her. So, what about your dreams, Daddy dear?

When Mark persists in encouraging her to read those books, she throws down the gauntlet:

You’re really dying to play doctor, aren’t you?  OK, I’m a big movie fan.  I know the games.  Come on. Let’s play.  Shall I start with dreams, or should we free associate?  Oh, Doctor, I’ll bet you’re just dying to free associate.  All right, you give me a word, and I’ll give you an association.

Not only does this further express a cynical regard for Freudian analysis, but it does so by making reference to the movies as well, movies in which she had once been part of the audience herself, thus assuring us that she is not some ingénue who has never seen movies like Spellbound.

All this having been established, the movie can now proceed to go full Freud without further apology. Probably not expecting much, Mark takes her up on the offer, giving her words for her to associate. At first, she is playful about the whole thing.  But then her own associations begin to bother her. When Mark says, “Black,” she says, “White,” as we expect.  But then he says, “Red!” and she repeats “White!” again and again, desperately turning away.  He grabs her, and she holds on to him, pleading with him to help her. This is a critical turning point, an essential step toward freeing her from her psychosis.

However, there is the additional problem of freeing herself from any criminal charges.  Lil maliciously invites Strutt and his wife to a big party being thrown at the Rutland estate.  Strutt recognizes Marnie, and she wants to make a run for it, but Mark figures he can coerce Strutt into keeping his mouth shut, and perhaps he can make restitution to others she has robbed as well. Because Strutt may come back the next day, he wants Marnie to ride in the hunt that has been scheduled so she will be out of the house.

Ah, the hunt!  What fun it must be ride on a horse, fashionably attired, behind a pack of hounds pursuing a fox.  When the fox is trapped, everyone other than Marnie is having a great time watching the fox being torn apart by the fangs of those hounds.  Marnie looks around, bewildered by all the happy, laughing faces she sees.  If only she were a normal, healthy human being like them, then she could enjoy the spectacle too.  Given her mental problems, however, she becomes distressed.  And then she sees the red coat being worn by one of the participants.  She has to get away, riding off at full gallop.  Forio clears fences with no problem, but when Marnie sees a brick wall that is too high, she tries to bring him to a stop, but is unable to do so.  She is thrown to the ground, and Forio’s leg is broken.  She has to shoot him.  As she does so, we see that look in her eyes and that little-girl tone in her voice that tells us when she under the influence of her past.

Once again, she decides to make a run for it.  She steals the keys to the office, intending to rob the safe again.  But she finds she cannot touch the money. Mark shows up.  He tells her they are going to see her mother.  She is afraid he will tell her mother about her crimes, but he says it is her mother who will do the talking.  It is Marnie who does the talking, however, regressing to her past, when Bernice tries to hit Mark, and they start struggling.

It turns out that Bernice was a prostitute.  Having only one bed, she would make Marnie get out of bed and sleep on the couch when a sailor came calling.  One night, having been moved to the couch, Marnie starts crying on account of the storm.  The sailor, played by Bruce Dern, comes out to quiet her.  But when he starts kissing her, Marnie doesn’t like it, and neither does Bernice.  She and the sailor start struggling. She tries to hit him with a poker from the fireplace, but the sailor falls on her, breaking her leg.  She calls to Marnie to help her.  Marnie picks up the poker and hits the sailor with it, killing him, the blood covering his white sailor suit.

Bernice thought it was a blessing from God that Marnie didn’t remember anything, and she resolved to become a better person.  She told the police she killed the sailor in self-defense.  Marnie and Bernice become reconciled.  As Mark and Marnie leave, she says she wants to stay with him.

I don’t how things are with psychoanalysis in real life, but in the movies, when the repressed memory is brought to the surface, the patient is completely cured. So, we figure Mark and Marnie will now be happily married, having a normal sex life.

But even if they don’t, they sure make a good-looking couple.

When watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie, we have learned to be suspicious of men who have mothers. In Strangers on a Train (1951), Psycho (1960), and Frenzy (1972), they turned out to be psychopaths.  But that is true only if the son is a bachelor.  In North by Northwest (1959), on the other hand, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) has been married and divorced twice, thereby establishing a normal sexuality on his part.  As a result, the scenes he plays with his mother are harmless, no need for alarm.

And so it is that in The Birds, we wonder about Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor).  He does not live with his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy).  Rather, he has an apartment in San Francisco where he works as a defense attorney.  But every Saturday, he drives up to Bodega Bay, which is sixty miles away, taking at least an hour and a half to get there, and then spends the entire weekend with his mother, returning on Monday morning.  He has been doing this for years.

However, Rod Taylor’s screen persona would seem to preclude any kind of Oedipal attachment to his mother, so we dismiss any thoughts along this line. He says he prefers Bodega Bay to San Francisco, but that could be a rationalization.  More likely it is because his mother is emotionally needy, her husband having died four years previously, although she is still raising her daughter Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), who is approaching her eleventh birthday, so it’s not as though she is all alone.  This is one Hitchcock movie in which it is primarily the mother, not the son, who is suspect.

There is, however, one sense in which we might wonder about Mitch.  He seems to be something of a prude.  At the beginning of the movie, he goes to a pet store in San Francisco, where he sees Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), whom he recognizes as the woman he saw in court one day on account of a practical joke she played, which accidentally resulted in a broken window. This was something he sternly disapproved of.  In fact, he says she should have been put in jail.  For a broken window.  Later, we find out that he also read about her in the tabloids, especially the story which said she jumped into a fountain in Rome naked.  He disapproved of that too.

I don’t know.  If I met a woman that was rich and beautiful, who had jumped into a fountain in Rome naked, I might want to get to know her.  The problem is, I probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with her.  Women like that prefer men who look like Rod Taylor.  Anyway, the story turned out not to be true. But Mitch still disapproves.

To express his disapproval, he pretends that he thinks Melanie is a salesclerk in the pet store, saying he wants to buy some lovebirds for his sister for her birthday.  When she finally realizes he knew who she was all the time, she decides to get even, after a fashion, by purchasing the lovebirds for him, and attaching a note telling him the lovebirds might improve his personality.  She starts to leave the birds outside his apartment.  That’s when a neighbor tells her that Mitch goes up to Bodega Bay every weekend.  So, what else can she do but drive up to Bodega Bay with the birds?

I don’t know.  That’s a lot of trouble to go to for a man she says is ill-mannered, arrogant, and conceited. If a woman didn’t like me for some reason, I don’t think she would bring me lovebirds. But then, that’s probably because I don’t look like Rod Taylor.

When she arrives in Bodega Bay, she rents a motorboat to cut across the bay to Mitch’s house, or rather, to his mother’s house.  Having surreptitiously deposited the birds inside, leaving only a note to Cathy, tearing up the original letter to Mitch, she gets back in the boat.  Mitch discovers the birds and sees Melanie crossing the bay.  He hops in his car, racing around to reach the dock before she does.  Suddenly, a seagull swoops down and hits Melanie in the head, drawing blood.

Is this the first incident involving aggressive behavior on the part of birds?  It’s not clear.  At the beginning of the movie, Melanie commented to the owner of the pet store about all the seagulls in the air.  Later in the movie, Sebastian Sholes (Charles McGraw) comments on some trouble he had with birds earlier, but we are not sure whether this happened before or after Melanie was attacked. In any event, the first attack by a seagull that we witness is on Melanie.

This introduces a feature unique among Hitchcock’s films:  it is a monster movie, provided we think of the birds in this movie acting collectively like a monster.  A lot of monster movies are science fiction, such as Frankenstein (1931), while in others, the monster has supernatural qualities, such as Dracula (1931). In Film Genre Reader, there is an essay by Margaret Tarratt, entitled “Monsters from the Id.”  The thrust of her essay is that many science fiction movies are unconscious expressions of the self.  The title, of course, is taken from Forbidden Planet (1956).  In that movie, thanks to a technological breakthrough on another planet that allows one to generate physical objects merely by an act of will, Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) unconsciously produces a monster that threatens visitors to the planet on account of his incestuous feelings toward his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).  When the doctor from the spaceship visiting the planet figures out what is going on, he says to the commanding officer, John Adams (Leslie Nielson), “Monsters, John, monsters from the id.”

Forbidden Planet is the only example provided by Tarratt in which there is an explicit causal connection between a person’s id and the monster it creates. In the other examples, the manifestations of the monster and its relation to the id is acausal, perhaps a form of synchronicity, if you don’t mind mixing a little Carl Jung in with your Sigmund Freud.  For instance, in her discussion of The Thing from Another World (1951), Tarratt argues that the Thing (James Arness) represents the repressed desires of Captain Hendry (Kenneth Tobey), but neither one is the cause of the other.

The Birds is not science fiction, although there is a scientist in the movie, Mrs. Bundy, an ornithologist, who rejects the notion that birds are collectively attacking the citizens of Bodega Bay, but who nevertheless gives us a lot of ominous information about the sheer number of birds in the world.  Are the birds under some supernatural influence instead?  We never find out. Though Tarratt does not refer to this movie in her essay, yet her arguments would seem to apply here.  In some mysterious way, the birds would seem to be a physical expression of Lydia’s id.  Just as Morbius was possessive about his daughter Altaira, becoming especially angered by her attraction to Adams, so too is Lydia possessive about her son Mitch, angered by the presence of Melanie.  We certainly see the hostility in her eyes when Mitch introduces his mother to Melanie.

Unlike Forbidden Planet, however, where there is a clear causal connection between Morbius’s id and the monster, there is no perfect fit between Lydia’s id and the behavior of the birds, which may be merely analogous, like the relationship between Captain Hendry and the Thing.  For example, when Nikki (Margaret Sheridan) playfully ties up Hendry because he was so sexually aggressive on a previous occasion, this corresponds to the rope tied around the block of ice containing the Thing.  Hendry manages to get loose, and shortly after, so does the Thing.

That the relationship between the birds and Lydia’s id would seem to be acausal is suggested by the fact that it is only after Melanie has been attacked that Lydia is even aware of Melanie’s presence in Bodega Bay.  On the other hand, Morbius is not present when Adams kisses Altaira, which results in her pet tiger attacking Adams.  Therefore, Morbius’s id would seem to have gone into action prior to his knowing there was anything going on between his daughter and Adams.

Other parallels suggest themselves.  Lydia’s neighbor, Dan Fawcett, is no threat to Lydia, and yet the birds killed him and plucked his eyes out.  In Forbidden Planet, the monster sneaks aboard the flying saucer and kills Chief Engineer Quinn, who was not a threat to Morbius.  Eventually, the whole town is subjected to an attack from the birds, even though the whole town has done nothing to Lydia.  In Forbidden Planet, the id of Morbius kills all the members of the original expedition, of which he was a part, even though their attempt to leave the planet posed no problem for him.  Finally, children are attacked on two different occasions, including Lydia’s own daughter Cathy. In Forbidden Planet, the monster even becomes a danger to Altaira, Morbius’s possessive desire for her turning into hate when she threatens to leave.  The id is irrational, even to the point of being self-destructive.

Mitch talks Melanie into staying the weekend, so she rents a room from Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette).  It turns out that Annie used to live in San Francisco.  She says of Mitch, “I was seeing quite a lot of him.”  Then one weekend he invited her up to Bodega Bay to meet Lydia.  Somehow, that ended her relationship with Mitch.  She tells Melanie that she needn’t worry, that it was over between her and Mitch long ago.  Melanie replies that there is nothing between her and Mitch either.  Annie shrugs, saying, “Maybe there’s never anything between Mitch and any girl.”

At the end of Psycho, Simon Oakland, in the role of a psychiatrist, explains the behavior of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins).  In so doing, he speaks with an authoritative voice, so we accept everything he says as true.  Furthermore, what he says makes sense and is easy to understand.  The same cannot be said of Annie.  Her personal involvement with Mitch makes what she says suspect, and her explanation of what happened when she met Lydia is hard to follow, not only for us, but for Melanie as well.

She says that Lydia was distant when she spent the weekend at the Brenner house, that her attitude “nearly drove me crazy.”  When she returned to San Francisco, she tried to figure out what she had done to displease her.  Melanie asks what she had done.  Annie replies:

Nothing! I simply existed. So, what was the answer? A jealous woman, right? A clinging, possessive mother?  Wrong. With all due respect to Oedipus, I don’t think that was the case at all….

Lydia liked me, you see. That was the strange part of it. In fact, now that I’m no longer a threat, we’re very good friends….

[She was afraid] of any woman who’d give Mitch the only thing Lydia can give him: love.

As a result of meeting Lydia, Annie says her relationship with Mitch soon came to an end.

Melanie has as hard a time following Annie’s reasoning as we do.  “Annie,” she says, “that adds up to a jealous, possessive woman.”

To this Annie replies, “No, I don’t think so. She’s not afraid of losing Mitch, you see.  She’s only afraid of being abandoned.”

Huh?  I don’t know what to make of that distinction.  I suppose the former is psychological; the latter, physical.  Well, if Mitch were to get married, I doubt if his wife, be it Annie, Melanie, or some other woman, would agree to spending every weekend with her mother-in-law.  So, in that physical sense, Lydia would be “abandoned.”  As for the psychological assertion that Lydia is not afraid of “losing Mitch,” this might be another way of Annie’s denying an Oedipal relationship.

When we are speaking of a man in an Oedipal relationship with his mother, we think in sexual terms, as rightly we should, even if the desire is repressed.  In a similar way, we understood that Morbius had a repressed sexual desire for Altaira.  But maternal jealously can be a different thing from that. When a mother wants to retain possession of her son, viewing with hostility any woman her son might become interested in, we need not assume there is any kind of sexual desire for him on her part. She probably does not want her son for sexual purposes, not even in a repressed sense, but only to preserve a feeling of security and protection, or simply companionship.

Maybe.  As I said, I really don’t understand what Annie is talking about, and that’s the best I can do to make sense of it.  Anyway, Melanie asks, “What about Mitch? Didn’t he have anything to say about this?”

Annie makes excuses for Mitch, something about what he had to go through with Lydia after his father died, and not wanting to go through it all over again. So, it’s not enough that Mitch has spent every weekend with his mother for the last four years, he can’t even have a girlfriend?  Perhaps this explains his disapproval of Melanie’s behavior at the beginning of the movie.  Having been forced to repress his own sexual desires to keep from upsetting his mother, he naturally resents what he takes to be Melanie’s free-spirited sexuality.  I’d really start having doubts about Mitch at this point, suspecting him of being a momma’s boy, if it weren’t for the fact that he looks like Rod Taylor.

Finally, Melanie asks what we have all been wondering about.  Given that it is all over between Annie and Mitch, what is she doing here in Bodega Bay? Annie admits she wants to be near Mitch.  I don’t know about you, but I’d call that stalking.

As the movie progresses, the bird attacks increase.  In a scene at the Tides Restaurant, as Melanie tries to tell how the children were attacked by birds at the school where Annie teaches, a woman becomes upset with her story because it is frightening her two young children. Then the birds start attacking again. Melanie ends up hiding in a phonebooth, from which Mitch eventually rescues her and brings her back inside the Tides Restaurant.

Although I watched this movie again before writing this review, I also availed myself of an online script to help me remember who said what when.  I soon learned that there are many differences between the script and the movie.  One in particular stands out.  Given my thesis that the behavior of the birds is either the effect or the correlate of Lydia’s id, precipitated by Melanie’s arrival, I looked for the scene where the woman with the two children accuses Melanie of being the cause of it all. But I could not find it in the script.  I checked several other online scripts with the same result.  All I could find was the woman asking of the birds, “Why are they doing it?”  The script says the woman is screaming at Mrs. Bundy, the ornithologist, who mutters some weak explanation for what is happening.

But in the movie, when Mitch and Melanie come back inside the restaurant, everyone starts looking at Melanie with accusatory eyes.  The woman does not address Mrs. Bundy, who seems visibly shaken by what has just happened.  Instead, she angrily approaches Melanie with the following words:

Why are they doing this?  Why are they doing this?  They said when you got here the whole thing started. Who are you?  What are you?  Where did you come from?  I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil.  Evil!

Melanie slaps the woman to shut her up.

We hear nothing from Mrs. Bundy, contrary to what is indicated in the script. In other words, not even a weak scientific explanation is attempted.  Rather, the movie has the woman with the children suggest a supernatural explanation, that Melanie is a witch.

My guess is that Hitchcock wanted to establish that Melanie’s presence in Bodega Bay is what started it all, that it was not just a coincidence, and he added this scene after the script had been written to make that clear.  Of course, if anyone is a witch, it is Lydia, whose id has manifested itself through the birds.

Finally, the birds kill Annie.  Although, as Annie noted above, Lydia had ceased to regard her as a threat, Lydia’s id, aroused by the presence of Melanie, probably became hostile to Annie once more, with lethal consequence.

Mitch and Melanie return to his mother’s house, where they begin boarding things up, preparing for the next attack, which is quite terrifying for a while, but then subsides.  Melanie makes the mistake of going into attic because she heard something.  The roof, it turns out, had been torn open by the birds, and she is attacked.  She fights them off and then faints.

At this point, there is another major difference between the movie and the script.  In the script, after Mitch rescues Melanie from the attic, she recovers and, though having been physically injured by the birds, yet she is perfectly all right mentally.  They decide to leave for San Francisco in Melanie’s convertible, but the birds attack them as they are driving down the road, even tearing open the roof of the car.  But finally, they get away.

The movie is quite different.  Mitch rescues Melanie, but she has had a complete mental collapse, almost catatonic.  The birds having done their work, destroying Melanie’s mind, she is no longer a threat to Lydia. Lydia even comforts Melanie, as one would a small child.

They decide to leave the house and head for San Francisco.  The birds do not attack when they try to leave, but silently watch them go.  Lydia’s id has become quiescent.

There is a scene in Annie Hall (1977) where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton have a date to see a Bergman film.  Keaton arrives late, and the ticket clerk informs them that the movie started two minutes ago.  Allen says they’ll have to forget it because he can’t go in a theater in the middle of a movie.  Keaton replies, with exasperation, that all they will miss are the titles, which are in Swedish. Allen is adamant, and they have to find something else to do.

In its exaggerated way, this scene illustrates a fundamental difference between two types people: those who must see a movie from the beginning, and those who don’t care.

I saw North by Northwest when it first came out in 1959.  It was rereleased in 1965, when I was in college, and I asked a girl out on a date to see it.  She had never even heard of the movie, and I didn’t tell her that I had seen it before.  My idea was that she would thoroughly enjoy the movie, which would redound to my credit, making her more likely to want to go out on dates with me in the future.

“What time does the movie start?” she asked me when I called to confirm our date that Saturday.

“It starts at seven,” I replied.

“All right,” she said, “pick me up at seven fifteen.”

I was in shock.  I had never heard of such a cavalier attitude toward watching a movie. After much protestation on my part, she said she would be ready at seven, which she said I should take as an indication of just how much she liked me.  She lived close to the theater, but it still meant we would come in about ten minutes after the movie started.  I’m ashamed to admit it, but I agreed. Well, I was young, and she was beautiful.  The things we do for love!

I have since seen several old movies, made back in the 1930s or 1940s, where a man and woman are in a theater watching a movie, when one of them says, “This is where we came in,” and they get up and leave. It must have been common for couples to do that in those days.

One night when my friend and I were at a drive-in movie theater, a car pulled into the spot next to ours, twenty minutes after the movie started.  The woman stayed in the car while the man took their two children to the concession stand.  When they got back and got settled, the man asked his wife if she knew what movie it was.  “I think it’s a spy movie,” she replied.  Eventually the movie ended, and it was back to the concession stand.  Then the second movie began, and about an hour into that one, they pulled out of their spot and headed home.

It is on account of people like that, I suppose, that in the advertisements for Psycho, when it first came out in 1960, there were taglines informing us that no one would be admitted into the theater after the start of each performance, that it was important to see the movie from the very beginning. According to Robert A. Harris and Michael S. Lasky, in their anthology, The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock, “Hitchcock had Paramount enforce the policy by having it written into the booking contract of all the theaters that exhibited it.”  In the bonus material of the DVD for this movie, we can see for ourselves how a big deal was made out of this policy.

Unfortunately, there is another fundamental difference between two types of people: those who don’t want to know what happens in a movie before they see it, and those who don’t care.

Those who don’t care if they know what happens in a movie before they see it also don’t care how much it matters to those of us who do, and thus they will blab about the movie once they’ve seen it, in spite of our objections.  Although I saw The Godfather (1972) the first month it came to the theaters where I lived, I was told twice by two different people about the horse’s head in the bed before I actually managed to see the movie.

Harris and Lasky say that steps were taken by Hitchcock to minimize this:

First of all, it was shot on a restricted set, with no visitors allowed.  Stills of important scenes were not released in advance, as is usually customary.  Reviewers and theater owners were not permitted to view the film until opening day.

In his Alternate Oscars, Danny Peary says that Psycho should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year.  One reason it did not was that the members of the Academy are snobs, always wanting to present themselves as sophisticated and refined, so they disdain giving the Award to a horror movie no matter how good it is. But another reason was that the members of the Academy were “indignant because Hitchcock denied them special advance screenings lest they reveal the surprise ending.”

In one of the advertisements for this movie, Hitchcock encouraged those who are inclined to talk about a movie after they’ve seen it to avoid being around other people after watching Psycho.  But some people who have seen a movie will tell others how it ends out of spite, and Hitchcock’s admonition in this regard only enhanced the pleasure they took from ruining the movie for those who had not yet seen it.  This kid I knew when I was in high school gleefully told me, before I had a chance to see Psycho, that the mother that kills people in the movie is really her son dressed up to look like her.  I despise him to this day.

According to Harris and Lasky, all this secrecy on Hitchcock’s part resulted in the audience being shocked early in the movie:

The shock comes in the form of an unexpected and violent slaying. Janet Leigh, ostensibly the star, is killed off one-third through the film. First of all, we didn’t expect the murder and are that much more surprised by it.  Second, Hitchcock knows that audiences think that nothing can happen to her because she is the star.

Over the years, several critics have made this point, and I suppose it sounds believable to those who were not around back then.  But those of us that saw the movie when it first came out know that it simply is not true, because Hitchcock himself gave that much away in the trailer that he made for it.  I remember seeing the trailer at the time, and was able to refresh my memory of it, thanks again to some of the bonus material on the DVD.  Hitchcock takes us onto the set of the Bates Motel.  In the house up the hill, just behind the motel, he takes us to the stairs and says this is where the second murder took place, involving a knife, and resulting in a mangled corpse with a broken back at the bottom of the stairs.  Then he takes us into what he refers to as a parlor, the room just behind the desk where motel guests would register.  It was where the son would go to get away from his mother, who Hitchcock says is “maniacal,” thereby letting us know to whom the title refers.  Then he takes us into Room Number 1.  In the bathroom, he tells us about all the blood that was in there before it was cleaned up. What happened, he tells us, is that the murderer crept into the bathroom while someone was taking a shower.  Hitchcock pulls back the shower curtain, and we see Janet Leigh screaming.  Most people back then saw this preview, because Hitchcock featured it a couple of times during his popular television show.

It is hard to fault Hitchcock for giving so much away himself, for I’m sure that it made a lot of people want to see the movie, people that might have skipped it had he not talked about there being two murders with lots of blood, and then shown us a naked Janet Leigh screaming in the shower.

So far, we have been considering what people knew or didn’t know when the movie was being released for the first time.  A further consideration is how people experience this movie when they watch it for the first time years later.  Even in 1988, in his book Cult Movies 3:  Fifty More of the Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird and the Wonderful, Danny Peary could begin his review with a note of regret, saying that this movie can never again be experienced the way it was back then:

Almost everyone who saw Psycho in 1960 remembers that terrifying experience as if it were yesterday…. Today Psycho fans swap stories about how they closed their eyes during the film’s violence (but not the sex) or literally ducked under their seats (I admit measuring the amount of room down there), or how it scared them out of several nights’ sleep.

He is right about that.  Because I was only thirteen years old when this movie came out, I saw it at a drive-in with my parents. My mother screamed during the two slasher scenes and ducked her head to keep from seeing what happened.  You might think it would be enough merely to shut one’s eyes, but people ducked beneath their seats, not merely because they did not want to see what was happening, but because they wanted to protect themselves from the knife-wielding Mrs. Bates.

Peary continues:  “Viewers really were afraid to take showers for a long time afterward (and I am not alone in still occasionally thinking of Psycho when in a motel shower).” My mother told me that for years after that, whenever she took a shower alone in the house, she brought our dog into the bathroom with her. Another woman I knew also said she was scared to take showers alone in her house for years after seeing this movie.

Peary goes on to say that people seeing the movie “today,” which means in 1988, are so inured by all the slasher movies produced since then, with an ever higher body count and more grisly gore, that Psycho is regarded as “camp.”  And if that was true in 1988, then all the more so today.

When I watch the movie all these years later, I try to imagine myself not knowing anything about it.  To the extent that one is able to do this, the movie starts out as a melodrama, like Back Street (1961), for instance. We slowly close in on a hotel room in the middle of the day, entering inside to find Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) lying supine on the bed in a white brassiere and half slip, and Sam Loomis (John Gavin), standing up bare chested, the two of them in a postcoital state.  He says to Marion, “You never did eat your lunch, did you?”  As he says this, the camera shows us some uneaten sandwiches sitting on a plate, notwithstanding the remark Marion makes about this being one of the “extended lunch hours” she takes when Sam is in town.

We conclude that they spent so much time having sex that she never got around to those sandwiches, and we don’t give it much thought beyond that.  But later on, we might notice that she never has anything to eat again until the night of the following day when she eats some sandwiches that Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has prepared for her as the two of them have a conversation in the office of the Bates Motel.  And Robin Woods, in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, is just one of several critics that have commented on the fact the there is a physical resemblance between John Gavin and Anthony Perkins.

In the novel by Robert Bloch, on which this movie is based, there is no physical similarity between Sam and Norman.  In the first chapter, there is reference to the way Norman’s “plump face, reflected from his rimless glasses, bathed the pinkness of his scalp beneath the thinning sandy hair,” and later on to “the blubbery fat, the short hairless arms, the big belly.”

Back to the movie:  Sam and Marion want to get married, but Sam says they cannot afford it:

I’m tired of sweating for people who aren’t there.  I sweat to pay off my father’s debts, and he’s in his grave.  I sweat to pay my ex-wife alimony, and she’s living on the other side of the world somewhere.

I like that part about the alimony.  We are not to imagine his ex-wife holding down a menial job, just making ends meet in her small apartment, anxiously looking in the mailbox for her monthly check from Sam.  No, we envision her living in luxury in some foreign country, basking in the sun on a beach filled with rich tourists, telling her friends, “I earned it.”

I wondered about this business of having to pay off his father’s debts, since children are not legally obligated to pay off the debts of their parents when they die.  However, this is explained in the novel:

There was this hardware store, in a little town called Fairvale, up north. Sam had worked there for his father, with the understanding that he’d inherit the business. A year ago his father had died, and the accountants had told him the bad news.

Sam inherited the business, all right, plus about twenty thousand in debts. The building was mortgaged, the inventory was mortgaged, and even the insurance had been mortgaged. Sam’s father had never told him about his little side investments in the market—or the race track. But there it was. There were only two choices: go into bankruptcy or try and work off the obligations.

Sam Loomis chose the latter course. “It’s a good business,” he explained.

In general, the movie follows the novel closely.  Sometimes, as is the case with the debts Sam inherited from his father, the novel proves to be illuminating, at least for those of us that wonder about such things. In other cases, the differences between the novel and the movie can be regarded as Hitchcock’s contribution, giving us insight into how he wanted to present the story, as in the physical similarity between Sam and Norman, which wasn’t it the novel.

There is also the difference between descriptions in the novel and dramatizations in the movie based on it. The novel begins with Norman carrying on a conversation with his mother, who we have every reason to believe really exists.  In the movie, such a scene would have revealed that Mother did not exist except in Norman’s imagination, giving away the whole surprise ending. Nevertheless, because we never see Norman talking to his mother in the movie, most people begin to suspect she doesn’t really exist long before we have that revealed to us explicitly.  On the other hand, about halfway through the novel, we also get a clue, as Norman reflects on his dual nature:

It was like being two people, really—the child and the adult. Whenever he thought about Mother, he became a child again, with a child’s vocabulary, frames of reference, and emotional reactions. But when he was by himself—not actually by himself, but off in a book—he was a mature individual. Mature enough to understand that he might even be the victim of a mild form of schizophrenia, most likely some form of borderline neurosis.

When this book was written, most people thought that someone with schizophrenia had a split personality.

Back to the movie:  In addition to explaining why Sam does not feel that his financial situation can allow him and Marion to get married, having to pay off his father’s debts introduces a theme, that of a dead parent preventing an adult child from having a normal sex life.  Much in the way the sandwiches in a hotel room anticipates sandwiches later in a motel office, so too does Sam’s struggle with obligations imposed on him by his dead father anticipate Norman’s struggle with imagined obligations to his dead mother.

In the novel, by the way, his father’s debts are the only reason for Sam’s financial difficulties.  There is no ex-wife getting alimony payments.

Back to the movie:  Marion tells Sam this will be the last time they meet this way, secretly in a cheap hotel. She admits she’s thinking of breaking off the relationship, and she wouldn’t care if Sam broke off with her instead, now that she has ruled out any more sexual encounters.

In fact, as Raymond Durgnat points out in The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock:  or, the Plain Man’s Hitchcock, we don’t care either.  We are interested in these two, to be sure, but we neither expect nor hope that they will eventually get married and live happily ever after.  Durgnat does not say so, but I suspect that is because they don’t really act as though they enjoyed the afternoon they just spent together.  Sex is very pleasurable, but only sometimes fun.

Sam says he wants to keep seeing her anyway, even if it’s only to have lunch in a public place.

Marion:  Oh, we can see each other.  We can even have dinner.  But respectably.  In my house, with my mother’s picture on the mantel and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.

Sam:  And after the steak, do we send sister to the movies, turn Mama’s picture to the wall?

Marion:  Sam!

Now we know why they’ve been meeting in cheap hotel rooms instead of at Marion’s place.  She lives with her sister, who we later find out is Lila, played by Vera Miles. And while Marion could move out and get an apartment of her own, Lila would suspect that she was doing it in order to have sex with Sam, which wouldn’t have been respectable.  At least, it wouldn’t have been respectable in 1960.

Marion’s name in the novel, by the way, is Mary.  (One critic has noticed that an anagram of “Marion” is “Normai,” suggesting a connection between her and Norman, as well as with his mother Norma.) There is no indication in the novel that Sam and Mary are having sex with each other.  In those days, though it seems almost unbelievable now, a lot of people actually waited until they were married before they had sex, and that is the case with these two.  As a result, there would be no reason for Mary to get her own apartment.

Back to the movie:  The reference to the picture on the mantel, by which Marion’s deceased mother can cast her disapproving eyes, reinforces Marion’s need for respectability.  This is another instance of a dead parent preventing an adult child from having a normal sex life, once again prefiguring the hold that Mother has over Norman.

Objectively speaking, things are not all that bleak.  Sam expects to have the debts paid off in two years, and if his ex-wife remarries, the alimony will stop.  But Marion is impatient.  She says they should just get married anyway, but Sam rejects that idea, saying they would have to live in the storeroom in the back of his hardware store. Marion doesn’t care, but he does.  Marion leaves to go back to the office, and this ends the section of the movie that appears to be a melodrama.

Now we enter into the section of the movie that purports to be a crime drama.  Shortly after Marion gets back to the real estate office where she works, a client, Tom Cassidy, comes in with Mr. Lowrey, Marion’s boss.  Cassidy flashes $40,000 in front of her, which he says he isn’t worried about, because he never carries more cash than he can afford to lose.  Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $400,000 today.  The purpose of the money is to buy a house as a wedding present for his daughter. His philosophy is that while money cannot buy happiness, it can buy off unhappiness. With a mischievous look in his eyes, he asks Marion if she is unhappy.

In the novel, on a previous occasion, Cassidy put a hundred-dollar bill on Mary’s desk, suggesting she take a “little trip” to Dallas with him for a weekend.  Mr. Lowrey came in at that moment, ending the matter, but it irked Mary, and she never forgot it:

She couldn’t forget the wet-lipped smile on his fat old face.

And she never forgot that this world belonged to the Tommy Cassidy’s. They owned the property and they set the prices. Forty thousand to a daughter for a wedding gift; a hundred dollars tossed carelessly on a desk for three days’ rental privileges of the body of Mary Crane.

Back to the movie:  After Cassidy and Lowrey go into his office, Caroline, Marion’s co-worker, played by Hitchcock’s homely daughter Patricia, says, “He was flirting with you. I guess he must’ve noticed my wedding ring.”  That’s funny, of course, but it adds to Marion’s exasperation.  Cassidy’s daughter is going to get married, and Caroline is already married, but Marion’s desire to get married is stymied.  And Cassidy’s daughter will have no money problems, unlike Marion’s situation with Sam, where money, or the lack of it, is keeping them apart.  Perhaps this explains why Hitchcock added the part about alimony in writing the script, which wasn’t in the novel.  The debts Sam inherited from his father are, to Marion, just an unfortunate fact.  But the idea that the woman who used to be married to Sam is enjoying a carefree life at Marion’s expense completes the circle closing in on her.

Cassidy leaves the money with Lowrey, who in turn tells Marion to deposit it in a bank. In the next scene, she is in her house alone (Caroline told her Lila would be gone all weekend).  Now she is wearing a black brassiere and slip.  She looks at the bed with the $40,000 on it.  Well, she didn’t deposit it in the bank, so we figure she is going to take the money and run.  If she has to commit grand larceny to be respectable, so be it.

But why the change in her brassiere and slip?  If I were about steal that much money, it would never occur to me to change my underwear first.  But, since she is about to make a fresh start on life, perhaps, dare I say it, she took a shower.  And as she packs, we do see the shower head and curtain through the open bathroom door, another anticipation of what is to come.

There is something so desperate and futile in what she is about to do.  What does she have planned, and how does she expect to get away with it?  In the novel, her plan is to cover her tracks by switching out cars several times, marry Sam, and then sell the last car under her married name, Mrs. Sam Loomis.  She would tell Sam she inherited some money and that Lila moved to Europe, explaining why Lila would not be attending the wedding.  Lila wouldn’t tell the police about Sam until she talked to Mary.  The whole thing makes me nervous just thinking about it.

Back to the movie:  After leaving home, she doesn’t even make it out of town before she is spotted by her boss, who naturally wonders what she is up to, since she said she was going straight home and to bed after depositing the money in the bank.  Hours later, she pulls over to the side of the road to get some sleep.  She is awakened the next morning by a motorcycle cop wearing ominous sunglasses.  He tells her she should have checked into a motel, just to be safe.  She drives on for a while and then decides to sell her car and get another, as a way of throwing the police off her trail when her boss realizes she stole the money.  But while buying a used car, she sees that same cop watching her from across the street.

Everything thus far indicates that the movie will continue to be about her trying to get away with stealing the money.  That would be enough for most movies.  And we expect that cop to be on her trail unrelentingly, like Javert in Les Misérables, who will now know the make and model of the car she just bought, along with its license plate.  And yet, we never see him again.  Nor does her car play any role in her effort to hide from the police.  It just ends up being sunk into the swamp, along with Marion’s body and the $40,000.

As she drives to Fairvale, she imagines what various people she knows will say, especially Sam and Mr. Lowrey.  The look on her face is one of concern.  But then she imagines what Cassidy will say: “Well, I ain’t about to kiss off $40,000!  I’ll get it back, and if any of it’s missing, I’ll replace it with her fine, soft flesh!”  A slight smile appears on her lips.

It starts raining, making it difficult for her to see, leading her off the main highway, right up to the Bates Motel, with the spooky house behind it, just up the hill.  All of a sudden, “It was a dark and stormy night,” thereby leading the plot in a totally different direction as well.  And so, pretending we know nothing of this movie in advance, we are surprised by this turn of events, in which we now find ourselves watching a horror movie.

After Marion rents a room at the motel, she has a conversation with Norman while eating those sandwiches, indicating that she intends to go back and try to make things right.  And she might have been able to do so, for when her sister Lila shows up at Sam’s hardware store, Sam is just finishing the letter he has written to Marion, saying she is right, that they can get married right away, living in the back of the store for a couple of years, until the debts are paid off.  They will be poor, but happy. And Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam), a private detective that enters the store right behind Lila, says Lowrey and Cassidy just want her to return the money and there will be no prosecution.  We might imagine Marion’s announced resolve to return to Phoenix being the final scene in one of Hitchcock’s television shows, lasting just under an hour, after commercials.

The anticipations we have noticed so far have not allowed us to guess what would come next.  They were only for the sake of aesthetics, structural similarities that create a sense of artistic unity. However, while Marion was in the office with Norman, she might have become aware of an anticipation that would have given her pause, had she noticed it.  There are several paintings of naked women on the walls, including a painting of “Susanna and the Elders,” based on a story in which two men watch a naked woman taking a bath.  This has been a favorite subject by many artists over the years because the artists were men, and men like naked women.  Bad enough that two men saw Susanna naked, but then the scene is imagined in different ways by different artists over and over again so that everybody gets to see her naked.  But at least the women were not really Susanna, only models that were perfectly happy to let all the world see them without any clothes on. It’s not like the way things are now, where if two men watched an unsuspecting woman bathing today, her pictures would end up all over the internet.  The paintings of Susanna are based on a story in the Book of Daniel, which is either in the Bible or in the Old Testament Apocrypha, depending on which version of the Bible you have.  In some paintings of this story, two lascivious men simply watch a beautiful woman taking a bath, but in the painting in Norman’s office, the men are also groping Susanna.

Hitchcock points to that painting in the trailer, saying it has significance, but we have forgotten all about that when watching the movie for the first time.  Moreover, we, like Marion, are distracted by all the stuffed animals in the office, anticipating the stuffed Mrs. Bates up in the house.  Had Marion noticed the painting of “Susanna and the Elders,” it might have warned her about taking that shower later on.  And indeed, just behind the painting is a peephole, allowing Norman (but not us, unfortunately) to watch Marion get completely naked, much in the way that Hitchcock turned us into voyeurs by pulling us in through the window of that hotel room in the beginning of the movie. Norman gets so aroused that Mother just naturally has to come down there and hack Marion up so she can have Norman all to herself.

Toward the end of the movie, Lila discovers Mrs. Bates’ stuffed body in the fruit cellar, at which point Mother comes running in with a knife, screaming, “I’m Norma Bates!” Sam comes in right behind Mother and grabs her, revealing that she is Norman when his wig falls off.  The hold that Sam has on Mother is similar to that in the painting of “Susanna and the Elders.”

After this comes the epilogue, the fourth section of this movie.  The scene is at the County Court House where Dr. Fred Richman (Simon Oakland) explains how all this came to be, how Norman became jealous when his mother started having sex with some man, so he poisoned them both. Then, since he loved his mother, he dug up her body and stuffed it.  But that’s all on the outside. On the inside, Norman Bates had a split personality, in which he would sometimes become Mother. Since Norman was jealous of his mother, he believed that Mother was jealous of him, a form of projection, killing any pretty woman that aroused him.  But now Mother has completely taken over Norman’s mind and blames Norman for all the killings.

In the novel, when all this comes to light, it makes headlines on the front page of the newspapers and is even covered on television, some write-ups comparing Norman to Ed Gein.  Rumors spread about “cannibalism, Satanism, incest, and necrophilia.” Regarding those last two items, incest and necrophilia, Robert Bloch doesn’t say that Norman was having sex with his mother, either before or after he killed her, for that would be too gross.  Bloch is only telling us that there were rumors to that effect.

My pretending not to know what is going to happen when I watch this movie adds to my enjoyment, notwithstanding that kid in high school, who tried to spoil it for me, and the trailer in which Hitchcock gives everything away but the ending.  Oddly enough, I also appreciate the anticipations of which I am now aware, having seen the movie so many times before, knowing how one scene is pregnant with a scene that will occur later, so that I enjoy the movie more on subsequent viewings than I did when I saw it for the first time.

No matter how many times I have seen this movie, however, on each subsequent viewing I must see it from the very beginning, as is the case with all the movies I see. The only exception was with that girl I knew in college, and I never asked her out to see another movie.  I’m sure she didn’t care.