Psycho

The success of Psycho and its enduring reputation has far exceeded any expectations its makers could have had of it. Shot in five weeks, mostly on the Paramount backlot, with a television crew and a cheap but reliable cast, it could not have been more different from the lavish and expensive production that the director had delivered to MGM earlier in the same year. Based on a novel by Robert Bloch (in turn inspired by the real life cannibal crimes of Ed Gein), it married film noir with Gothic horror and, with the new decade, ushered in an increasingly graphic representation of screen violence.

Its story - a young woman steals $40,000 dollars from her employer and takes refuge in an isolated motel where she herself becomes the victim of a far worse crime - was a masterly exercise in misdirection. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano and director Hitchcock encourage the viewer to follow the money to the very end ("And the forty thousand dollars? Who got that?" "The swamp. These were crimes of passion, not profit.") whilst carefully constructing an entirely different sub-plot. The audience of 1960 who saw the movie without any prior knowledge (an almost impossible set of circumstances today) were sucker-punched by the shower scene and never really recovered.

Psycho is one of the truly great works of art of the twentieth century (read Robin Wood's original essay on the film if you need convincing) and it reveals new riches with each successive viewing. Its geometric design of conflicting horizontal and vertical lines is infinitely fascinating: the slats of the blinds in the opening hotel room scene, the telegraph pole slicing the screen next to Marion's parked car, the bungalow-like motel building squatting under the dark tower-like house on the hill, the twin columns that frame Sheriff Al Chambers (the name also suggesting the solemnity of his office) as he comes downstairs and prefigure the exterior of Fairvale's County Court House where the story ends. Hitchcock may have been shooting on a tight schedule, but it's clear that he had everything carefully mapped out in his head.

Or did he? Herrmann tells a story that suggests the director had a crisis of confidence in post production. "Hitchcock ... felt it didn't come off. He wanted to cut it down to an hour television show and get rid of it. I had an idea of what one could do with the film, so I said, 'Why don't you go away for your Christmas holidays, and when you come back we'll record the score and see what you think.' ... 'Well,' he said, 'do what you like, but only one thing I ask of you: please write nothing for the murder in the shower. That must be without music.' " This is the stuff of Hollywood legend: Herrmann did indeed do what he liked, and that included  - in direct defiance of the director's specific instructions - writing his most famous few bars of music for the murder in the shower. The composer's instincts were right. Hitchcock magnanimously admitted he was wrong and showed his appreciation for Herrmann's contribution by almost doubling his salary to $34,501. Ironically, this incident was likely the seed for the rift between the two men over the score for Torn Curtain. On this occasion when Herrmann went against the director's instructions he was summarily dismissed from the picture and replaced.

For Psycho Herrmann wrote what he called "a black-and-white score". Hitchcock had originally envisioned a nervous jazz soundtrack, but he had hired Benny Herrmann not Benny Goodman. By limiting the orchestra to strings alone, the composer was also able to work within the movie's modest budget. But if his pocket book was limited, his inventiveness was not. The care with which he constructed the score is evident in the music that accompanies Lila Crane as she climbs the hill to the Bates house. Hitchcock employs his classic cross-cutting technique, alternating between Lila's point of view as the Gothic monstrosity looms closer and closer and shots of her approach, which convey both her nervousness and her determination. The architecture of the cue that Herrmann wrote for this scene ("The Hill") is best described by Kevin Mulhall in his liner notes to the re-recorded soundtrack album. "Herrmann has high-range first violins playing descending long notes with a low-range, rhythmic figure heard in counterpoint. The figure ascends from the cellos to the violas and the second violins. The strings converge on the same note when Lila reaches the front door."

The entire score neatly dovetails with the geometric complexity of the film's visual motifs introduced by the slashed horizontal lines of the opening credits. The cues "Prelude", "Flight", "Patrol Car" and "The Rainstorm" move relentlessly forward with an insistent ostinato whilst other cues ("The Madhouse") suggest a slow but irreversible descent. For the final revelation Herrmann wrote a cue ("Discovery") that spiralled into darkness (like the water draining down the dark eye of the plughole), but Hitchcock replaced it in the final edit with the shrieking violins. The director's choice here was wrong - Herrmann wrote the stabbing strings for the murder scenes, and there is no murder at the end of Psycho. Still, Hitchcock always had the last word.

In some ways, the Psycho score suffers from over-familiarity, and it must be the single-most recorded work of Herrmann's entire output. The composer arranged a suite of its main themes and this has become an obligatory inclusion on any Herrmann compilation disc. In 1975 - the year of his death - he released his own re-recording of the entire score (without the "Discovery" cue) on the Unicorn label (B000001PBG), and the slow tempo he takes it at says more about his state of health than anything else. Rumour has it that he was unable to conduct the entire score and had his friend Laurie Johnson stand in for him. Joel McNeely re-recorded the score for the Varese Sarabande label (VSD-5765) and included the "Discovery" cue and the previously unheard "Cleanup". For Gus Van Sant's wacky shot-for-shot remake of the picture, Danny Elfman (himself a big Herrmann fan) did a re-recording for the Virgin label (B00000J6ED) that pretty much duplicated the original movie's frantic tempo.