Hollywood Codebreakers: ‘Psycho’ Scares the Censors
“No visitors on the set, no press interviews, no story synopsis, no releasing of stills, no sneak previews,” Variety reported in the spring of 1960. “All this is part of the ‘campaign’ for Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho.’”
By that point, it was a miracle the press even knew the name of the movie. For his 47th film, Hitchcock was engaging in an anti-publicity publicity campaign, one that kept even the smallest details of his movie under wraps. He wouldn’t divulge the title for months, letting reporters believe he was filming some Greek mythology mash-up called Psyche instead, and when it came time to release a trailer, he shot six minutes of himself touring the Bates Motel. The man was being so mysterious that people had no trouble believing the rumor he had tried to buy all remaining copies of Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho. If he was going to all this trouble, why should he leave obvious clues on the bookstore shelf?
But the director had good reason to hide Psycho from the public. It was, in his own words, his first “shocker” — a prototypical slasher film that didn’t merely thrill, but shock audiences. The gasps weren’t confined to the infamous shower scene, either. Audiences weren’t used to watching a protagonist steal from her boss, or lounge in a slip with a shirtless man in the very first scene. They weren’t accustomed to serial killers with mommy issues. They had never seen a toilet flush on camera.
Although it earned PCA approval, Psycho went against everything the censors held dear. It was violent, sexual, and utterly remorseless — and it only inspired more filmmakers to follow its lead. “After Psycho,” scholar Thomas Doherty insists, “the Code was walking dead.”
By 1960, the number of state censor boards had dwindled to just five: New York, Kansas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The next year, Pennsylvania would bow out and the U.S. censor board tally would stand at four states, 11 cities. This shrinking censor presence, combined with the PCA’s growing irrelevance, might explain why Hitchcock felt so comfortable adapting Bloch’s twisted thriller.
Bloch wrote his novel soon after the arrest of Ed Gein, the serial killer who became famous for his gruesome habit of fashioning belts and lampshades out of his victims’ skin. Gein descended into madness after the death of his mother, and began constructing a “woman suit” out of flayed flesh so he could bring her back to life. Bloch lived not too far from Gein’s hometown at the time of these crimes, and based his novel off “the notion that the man next door may be a monster.”
Hitchcock paid $9,000 for the rights to Bloch’s book, hiring screenwriter Joseph Stefano to adapt it for film. While Stefano softened some aspects of the novel — most notably, he rewrote the shower scene so that Marion Crane was stabbed, not beheaded — he still delivered a sensational script with multiple, glaring Code violations. In November 1959, Hitchcock received a report from Luigi Luraschi, the Paramount executive who served as liaison between his studio and the PCA. Luraschi had good news and bad news. The good news was the PCA approved the basic story of Psycho. The bad news was they would not approve the ultimate film unless the “very pointed description of an incestuous relationship between Norman and his mother” disappeared.
Hitchcock had fought with the censors before, and found the PCA just as tiresome as he had in 1940. “Men do kill nude women, you know,” he sighed to The New York Times. But by his star Janet Leigh’s account, Hitchcock had designed a system to outfox the PCA, one that took a page out of Mitchell Leisen’s playbook: he simply included more outrageous lines to distract them.
One of those lines was a shocking sex innuendo that referred to Marion’s bed as “the only playground that beats Vegas.” It was later eliminated, and Leigh claims that was no mistake. She told author Philip J. Skerry:
“[Hitchcock] put in such rash things that he knew they would take out and then, it was like levels. He would put in level C and A, hoping that would compromise it, so he would get B. I know that he deliberately put in that line about Vegas and there were a couple of other lines… He’d say, ‘Well you’re going to take away that? Then you have to give me this.’ That’s what he did. He had to have the piece of paper in the toilet. At that point, you’d never seen a toilet. You’d never seen a toilet in a bathroom. You’d never seen a toilet flush.”
The toilet flush refers to a moment right before Marion hops in the shower, when she disposes of a torn piece of paper. Considering how harsh the PCA usually was on bathrooms, that shot was a big deal. But when faced with a cross-dressing serial killer who stabs women in the shower, were the censors really going to die on the toilet hill? Hitchcock’s scheme appeared to be a shrewd one.
But the battle wasn’t over yet. The censors were concerned with Leigh’s various states of undress, in both the shower sequence and her opening scene, where she’s clearly having a lunchtime tryst with her boyfriend. Everyone was so paranoid over these scenes that they started seeing things. Hitchcock’s longtime assistant Peggy Robertson attended a preliminary screening where Luraschi made them stop the tape at the shower scene, insisting he saw an errant boob. “No you didn’t, Luigi,” she recalled Hitchcock saying. “It’s just your dirty mind.” On the replay, Luraschi didn’t see anything. But, he sighed, “we’re going to get in a lot of trouble.”
The PCA rejected Psycho on its first screening. As Robertson remembered, “They didn’t like Janet in her slip in the beginning, and a few other things like that. But we tidied them up.” The movie was apparently altered to Geoffrey Shurlock’s liking, because it got a seal on the second try. It would debut in the summer of 1960, and for the release, Hitchcock insisted on an unusual gimmick: no admittance once the movie began. If you missed the first minute, you missed the movie.
Although this stunt annoyed some exhibitors, audiences ate it up. Psycho became a summer smash, grossing $9.2 million by the following January, according to Variety estimates. Those strong numbers didn’t necessarily translate into universal praise. Sweden and Australia demanded cuts, while London critics called Psycho the worst film of Hitchcock’s career. Some American viewers tended to agree. “I want to register my despair, horror and anger upon seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho,’” Dr. James H. Schwartz wrote to The New York Times. “Does the recent relaxation of film censorship require the admission of a deliberately sadistic movie?”
But no amount of angry letters could prop the PCA back up. As Dr. Schwartz notes, film censorship was already relaxed and if anything, Psycho was only speeding along the Code’s decline. Just months after the release, the makers of the Canadian thriller The Bloody Brood cited Hitchcock’s film when they were denied PCA approval, essentially asking why they couldn’t be violent like Psycho. Filmmakers would try to match or exceed the movie’s shocks in subsequent years, chasing their own version of the iconic shower scene.
Spartacus featured an equally contentious shower scene — or rather, a public bath scene, since it takes place in ancient Rome. The historical drama had swearing, gory deaths, nude bodies, and a coded chat about bisexuality. It would have to give up a few of these features to earn its PCA seal, but it still managed to pack a lot of objectionable content into its three-hour screenplay, scripted by the blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. We’ll discuss this gladiator epic next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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