Anthony Perkins

In the parlour in Psycho (1960), Anthony Perkins makes Norman Bates work at being polite. He wants the conversation to go well so badly that an ordinary exchange becomes hard to relax into. We felt uneasy, then sorry for him, because the strain makes his need for kindness painfully clear. Leigh’s Marion notices enough to keep us alert, and Alfred Hitchcock lets the encounter hold our attention without hurrying towards a shock.

His early work had already made sensitivity part of his appeal. Friendly Persuasion (1956) helped establish him, and Fear Strikes Out (1957) gave him a leading role as a baseball player struggling with inner conflict. Psycho changed the course of his career, after which he worked extensively in Europe during the 1960s. As Josef K. in Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), he carried that nervous intensity into a different sort of threatening situation.

The difficulty was that later casting so often asked for some version of Norman again. That repetition narrowed the public impression of Perkins, obscuring the sensitive leading man of the earlier films. He returned to the part in Psycho II (1983), then both starred in and directed Psycho III (1986), before appearing in Psycho IV (1990). Those returns make it tempting to let one character account for the whole actor. We would start by looking more closely at what he did the first time.

That history can also encourage the wrong way of watching Psycho: waiting for each awkward moment to confirm what we think we know. Perkins gives us a lonely man whose effort to be agreeable deserves attention in itself. Hitchcock’s film occasionally labours the mystery, but the conversation with Leigh needs no explanation to hold us. If its surprises are familiar, watch it again for the courtesy, the embarrassment and the difficulty of keeping an ordinary conversation going.