Anthony Perkins: Young Man with Secrets

You know, I must have one of those faces you just can’t help believing.
—Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho

IT’S NOT just the face—the level gaze, the open-hearted smile, the utter absence of guile. It’s also the fumbling, childlike innocence, the unassuming sweetness, the apparent willingness to confide feelings (as when he tells Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane that taxidermy must be more than a hobby for him, because a hobby is supposed to pass the time, not fill it). It’s the beanpole frame—he’s a slender six foot two and a half—that always makes him look as if he still isn’t quite accustomed to the more rarefied air. And the bashfulness: he’s so shy that, when he shows Marion around the unit she’s rented at the deserted motel he operates near the old highway, he can’t quite get out the word “bathroom.” It’s the preppy look, slacks and a button-down shirt and a sports jacket, though in the normal course of his day he rarely interacts with the public. It’s the way he gets this young woman—so desperate to marry a man who’s weighed down by financial obligations to his ex-wife that she impulsively steals $40,000 from her boss and hightails it out of Phoenix—to admit that she’s running away from something, just as if he were a longtime friend who’d earned the right to trespass into personal territory. It’s the almost lyrical contemplativeness with which he ventures an observation that everyone is caught in a private trap, scratching and clawing at the air but never getting an inch closer to pulling out of it.

Anthony Perkins’s portrayal of Norman Bates in the 1960 film isn’t the only great piece of acting in an Alfred Hitchcock picture, and it isn’t the best performance Hitchcock ever directed. (That would probably be Jimmy Stewart in two years earlier.) And the other psychopaths in Hitch’s , Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie and Robert Walker as Bruno Antony in , are just as disturbing and just as memorable. But Perkins’s is the most famous piece of acting in any of the director’s thrillers. That’s because the disjunction between the way he presents himself and the secret he’s hiding is so great that, even though it’s hard to imagine anyone watching now without the foreknowledge that Norman is a homicidal lunatic, living half-time in the personality of the tyrannical mother he poisoned, we want so fervently to believe that he’s the nice young man he presents himself as that we participate willingly in Norman’s perfect deception. Norman is irresistibly lovable, and only rarely does the mask slip so we’re able to catch a glimpse of something sinister underneath. It occurs when Marion asks, over sandwiches and milk, if he’s considered putting his difficult mother, the one she thinks lives with him in the Gothic house on the hill, in an institution, and again when Arbogast (Martin Balsam), the detective investigating Marion’s disappearance, persists in his request to talk to Mrs. Bates. Even when Norman stows Marion’s body in the trunk of her car and pushes it into the swamp, it’s the nature of the act that horrifies us, not the way he looks while he’s committing it; after all, he’s committed to the fantasy that he’s merely covering up, like a loyal son, for the indiscretions of a crazy mother he needs to protect so no one will lock her away. When he does the same with Arbogast’s car after “Mother” has stabbed him to death, Hitchcock zooms in on him standing by the swamp listening to Sam (John Gavin), Marion’s boyfriend, out at the motel calling the detective’s name, and Perkins has an oddly abstracted look. This shot—my personal favorite in the movie—is like a mysterious black-and-white photograph of a man we don’t know anything about whose body and face are sculpted against an unsettling landscape.