Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" Trivia Quiz

Answer: She is the other secretary in the office where Marion works.

Patricia Hitchcock, billed in Psycho as Pat Hitchcock, although she was married, and by that time was Patricia O'Connell, was in two other Hitchcock films, "Stage Fright" and "Strangers on a Train". Her role in the second film was a large role, and many critics feel she stole the show from the lead actors.

She was also in several episodes of Hitchcock's TV series, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", several television movies in the 1970s, and one non-Hitchcock film, "The Mudlark", in 1950, where she was uncredited. "The Mudlark" was a film about Queen Victoria, with the unusual casting of Irene Dunne as Victoria.

Her appearance in Psycho is brief-- a single scene, and a small voice-over part, but she almost steals this scene as well.

Answer: A scrap of paper with something subtracted from $40,000

$40,000 was the amount of money Marion stole, and the cost of a large house in an upscale neighborhood in 1960. Even then, when people bought cars, and most other things outright that it is now common to buy on time, it was highly unusual to buy a house without a mortgage. Lila found a scrap of paper on which Marion had been calculating what it would take to repay the money she had spent of the $40,000 she had stolen, as she has decided to go back to Arizona, and not go on to see Sam.

Zip codes did not exist in 1960. They were introduced nationwide in 1963.

Marion did buy a newspaper, but it was a Los Angeles paper.

Answer: Green Lawn

When the sheriff asks "Who's that buried in Green Lawn cemetery?" in place of Mrs. Bates, it opens an interesting subplot, but it is never explored. Large cuts were made to the script before filming began, so screenwriter Joseph Stefano may have intended to let us know how Norman managed to steal his mother's body and somehow weight down the coffin, and with what; all the resolution we ever get to this very curious mystery, which is underscored by a close-in shot of the sheriff's face, and a musical decrescendo, is a passing comment at the end by the psychiatrist that "a weighted coffin was buried".

Answer: A toilet flushing.

"Psycho" is the first film to show a toilet flushing. Although the Hays Code did not expressly forbid toilets in films, Part III, which said that "The treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant, though not necessarily evil, subjects should always be subject to the dictates of good taste and a regard for the sensibilities of the audience," dissuaded most directors from even trying to show toilets at all, let alone suggest their function. There are films released before The Hays Code, such as "The Crowd", in 1928, which showed toilets in bathrooms, although not toilets flushing.

Deaths with blood were rare, but recent horror films had shown many monsters and villains dispatched that way. Marion Crane may be the first innocent victim dispatched with blood since the establishment of the Hays Code, but since silent films often showed violent crowd and accident scenes, hers is not the first bloody death, although it may be the goriest post-Hays death to date at the time of its filming. Still, there were far gorier scenes before the Hays code, and some very gory animal deaths even afterward.

There are a few silent films with frontal female nudity that have survived destruction and later editing, so we know that they did, in fact, show it.

The first desiccated corpse was probably the walking, talking one played by Boris Karloff in "The Mummy" in 1932.

Answer: There were two women living in Phoenix, AZ named Mary Crane.

Hitchcock did not want either of the real Mary Cranes to be the subject of pranks or harassment. The legal department originally recommended the change, though, just as a prudent move to avoid a lawsuit if anything untoward did happen to either of the two women as a result of sharing a name with this character in the film.

It is true that the name "Mary" does belong to several Roman Catholic saints, while the name "Marian" specifically refers to the Virgin Mary. The spelling "Marion" is an Old French name meaning "star of the sea," and was a man's name for most of its history. By 1900, "Marion" was given to both boys and girls in the US. Most baby name references today simply list it as a girls' name, and variant of "Marian". Several of them also list Janet Leigh's character under "Famous Marions".

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven's "Eroica Symphony"

"Eroica" means "Heroic", but many native speakers of English, at first glance mistake it for "Erotica". Hitchcock played on both meanings of the word. Norman Bates is an antihero, a main character with whom the audience is asked to identify, but who lacks the qualities typically associated with a hero. The movie is also charged with erotic feelings. It opens with the end of an erotic encounter. Marion is motivated by romantic love, and psychosocial reasons (not wanting to be an "old maid"), but also by her erotic feelings for Sam when she steals the money. Norman's erotic feelings for Marion are what drive "mother" to murder, and Oedipal feelings drove Norman to matricide. There are two reference to newlyweds as well; Caroline the other secretary in the office where Marion works has recently been married, and the $40,000 is to buy a house for a young woman about to be married.

Incidentally, the specific mention of the age of the daughter for whom the house is being purchased, 18, is quite deliberate on the part of screenwriter Joseph Stefano. The thought of a 18-year-old girl, half Marion's age (Janet Leigh was 32 when the film was made, but Marion is supposed to be a few years older) reinforces Marion's concern, which the audience in 1960 would assume her to have, that her chance to marry is slipping away; on top of that, Caroline manages to allude her recent marriage twice in a short space of time. This makes Marion's desperation, and therefore motive for theft, believable.

Answer: To Marion, to say he has reconsidered marrying her now

He begins it with, "Dear right-as-always Marion."

It is both ironic and tragic, since at this point, the viewer knows both that Marion is dead, and that she committed a serious crime before she died. In two senses, she is not "right".

Hitchcock was fond of the double entendre, and this is just one of many examples in the film "Psycho" alone.

Answer: "He must have seen my wedding ring."

In Gus Van Sant's remake, with Anne Heche in Janet Leigh's role, and Rita Wilson in Pat Hitchcock's role (the other secretary), the line loses all its humor and irony.

Pat Hitchcock, playing the adorably cute, but not beautiful Caroline delivers the line just perfectly. We think she probably is just kidding, and she knows Janet Leigh is the knock-out in the office-- probably. There is both humor and irony, depending on how you choose to understand her delivery. Or maybe somehow she means it both ways. Janet Leigh is the beauty, yet Caroline is the one with a husband.

Answer: Her head was shaved, so she wore a very obvious wig in "Psycho".

Hitchcock had intended to use Vera Miles in Kim Novak's role in "Vertigo", but Miles became pregnant. Psycho completed a contract agreement she had with Hitchcock to make two films for him (the other film was "The Wrong Man"). He might have waited for her hair to grow back, but he was miffed at her for not doing "Vertigo", and wanted to complete her contract, and be done with her. While Hitchcock regretted not being able to use Miles in "Vertigo", he thought Miles did not give a good performance in "Psycho". He thought she and John Gavin, who played Sam, and whom Hitchcock did not like at all (he referred to him as "the stiff") did not work well together, and so filmed them in shadow for their most dramatic scenes, in order to add the tension he thought their acting did not supply.

Hitchcock was well aware that making the audience strain to get a good look at something adds to the tension of a scene. The quick cuts of the "shower scene" include about 90 different edits in a two minute scene, so the audience is never quite sure what is happening; the shadowy attacker is especially indistinct. Mother is visible in silhouette, in the house's upper window, and from a distance only, except for the brief scene shot from overhead when Norman carries her. When Vera Miles explores the house, the audience is made to feel that something is watching her, but cannot see just what. Even Marion's difficulty seeing through the rain on her windshield adds to the tension of the film's first half.

Hitchcock must have forgiven Vera Miles eventually for not appearing in "Vertigo", as she appeared in several episodes of Hitchcock's television show, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".

Miles reprised her role of Lila, Marion's sister, in the (non-Hitchcock directed) sequel to "Psycho," "Psycho II", released in 1983. Anthony Perkins appeared in this film as well.

Answer: That it be painless.

She wants to kill the insects, but doesn't want them to suffer.

This seems at first to be a comical bit of throwaway dialogue, but it is full of symbolism. The woman is about the age Norman's mother would be, and Norman's mother, who at that time the audience still thinks is a separate, living person, considered Marion a pest, whose right to exist was less important than mother's wishes. But mother is even less feeling than this silly woman in the hardware store, because mother didn't even care about Marion's painful death.

At the end of the film, Norman-mother, says she is harmless, and won't even kill the fly in her cell, a nice reference back to the woman in the hardware store.