In 1924, Balcon recruited Hitchcock for his new production company, Gainsborough Pictures, to work on two Anglo-German coproductions—The Prude’s Fall and The Blackguard—directed by Graham Cutts at the Neubabelsberg film studios near Berlin, a hub of the German expressionist film movement, and where Hitchcock’s ideas about the artistic dimensions of filmmaking were first shaped. During this time, he observed the director F. W. Murnau making The Last Laugh. This, Hitchcock said, was where he learned the rudiments of expressionist filmmaking: using the camera to tell a story without words, to capture the subjective emotional experience of a character, and to paint the screen with black pools and bright lights, an effect the German film theorist Lotte Eisner says represents “a twilight of the German soul, expressing itself in shadowy, enigmatic interiors, or in misty, insubstantial landscapes.”
His own director proved less inspiring. Although some believe that Graham Cutts was also applying expressionist ideas to his work, Hitchcock maintained that Cutts knew little about directing, and he, Hitchcock, grew weary of having to cover for his boss’s extramarital affairs that intruded on their working schedule. When Cutts walked out on The Blackguard, denouncing his “know-it-all son of a bitch” assistant, Balcon turned to the twenty-five-year-old Hitchcock to finish the picture, and soon after gave him the chance to direct a movie of his own.
The Pleasure Garden was filmed in Germany and northern Italy, and proved to be an object lesson in Murphy’s Law. Equipment was mislaid; film stock was confiscated at customs; money to cover location expenses was stolen; actors absented themselves from crucial scenes—everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. “I can smile about them today,” Hitchcock said of the stresses, “but at the time they were ghastly.”
Happily, the movie turned out just fine, full of stylistic flourishes he learned in Germany and preoccupations now considered definitively Hitchcockian: voyeurism, guilt, enchanting blondes—and murder. Over the next fifty years, he would dispatch victims in an ingenious array of horrific scenarios. There was a pre-dinner party garroting in a swanky Manhattan apartment, a knife hurled into the back of an international diplomat, and a shootout in a dingy London backstreet. On his word, women were slaughtered in the shower, pushed from a bell tower, hacked to pieces, and buried in flowerbeds; men were set alight, suffocated, and taken out for a little drive, never to be seen again. In Hitchcock’s lethal universe, nowhere is safe; violence stalks factories, schools, and churches; bathrooms, bedrooms, and kitchens; windmills, motels, movie theaters—even the children’s carousel at the local fairground. To Hitchcock, all life is in murder. If you want to crack the Hitchcock code, there’s no better place to start than at the grisly end.
In any discussion of Hitchcock and his murders, there is a blood-spattered elephant in the room. The shower scene in Psycho—in which Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh (and, from the bare neck down, Marli Renfro, her body double), is stabbed to death in a frenzied attack by Norman Bates—is an emblem of postwar popular culture, unceasingly referenced, parodied, and reinterpreted. The movie was born of Hitchcock’s desire to captivate a younger generation brought up on television and rock and roll, and to meet the challenge of elevating the slasher genre to the heights of Hitchcockian brilliance. He had also noted, with envy, the critical acclaim that the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot had won for his film Les Diaboliques (1955), a psychological horror film with its own scenes of bathtub-bound violence. Clouzot had clearly been influenced by Hitchcock, yet his film was edgier than the Hitchcock of the mid-1950s, who was making Technicolor escapism with Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly. When Hitchcock’s assistant Peggy Robertson handed him Robert Bloch’s latest novel, Psycho, loosely based on the real-life crimes of the serial killer Ed Gein, she had an inkling that the strangeness of the book’s violence, replete with cross-dressers and taboo sexual fetishes, would catch her boss’s eye. She was right. Hitchcock was gripped by the novel, especially “the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue.”
On first viewing, many critics trashed the film, and expressed disbelief that Hitchcock could’ve wasted his talent on such gratuitousness. One ignored Hitchcock’s pleas to keep the plot twists secret, saying he had a duty to warn anybody thinking of seeing the film that they would be confronted by “a rotting corpse in a shawl, a maniac in a wig, and that they are going to share the camera’s loving preoccupation with the process of swabbing out the bath where Janet Leigh has been knifed.” The sneering and shrieking of critics had no effect; Psycho was an instant hit, making a gargantuan profit on its $800,000 budget, which Hitchcock had financed himself after his studio of the time, Paramount, declined to fund such a risky project.
As Psycho broke box-office records and launched Hitchcock into a new sphere of cultural relevance, some raised questions about what kind of mind could have produced those fifty-two seconds of savagery. In conversation with Dr. Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist who was alarmed by onscreen violence, Hitchcock insisted that poor Marion Crane was no different from Little Red Riding Hood, that other flaxen-haired damsel killed by a wolf in old ladies’ clothing. Neither, Hitchcock swore, did the scene “reflect in any way whatsoever my own private life or my own private mind.” Violence, anger, and conflict of any sort were anathema to him, he insisted. In fact, long before Psycho, he had expressed distaste for films that resort to “sadism, perversion, bestiality, and deformity” to elicit emotional responses from audiences, a tactic he condemned as “utterly wrong, being vicious and dangerous.” Staff of his recalled a time in
