1b. Dead of Night (1945)
There are two main pathways for DON to have influenced Psycho (i) though Hitch himself and (ii) through Robert Bloch,the author of the novella, Psycho on which the film was based.
The argument for the second pathway is straightforward. Here is how Bloch has Sam Loomis recount Dr Steiner's diagnosis of Norman to Lila:
"It isn't quite that simple. According to Steiner, Bates was now a multiple personality with at least three facets. There was _Norman_, the little boy who needed his mother and hated anything or anyone who came between him and her. Then, _Norma_, the mother, who could not be allowed to die. The third aspect might be called _Normal_--the adult Norman Bates, who had to go through the daily routine of living, and conceal the existence of the other personalities from the world. Of course, the three weren't entirely distinct entities, and each contained elements of the other. Dr. Steiner called it an 'unholy trinity.'
"But the adult Norman Bates kept control well enough so that he was discharged from the hospital. He went back to run the motel, and it was then that he felt the strain. What weighed on him most, as an adult personality, was the guilty knowledge of his mother's death. Preserving her room was not enough. He wanted to preserve her, too; preserve her physically, so that the illusion of her living presence would suppress the guilt feelings.
"So he brought her back, actually brought her back from the grave and gave her a new life. He put her to bed at night, dressed her and took her down into the house by day. Naturally, he concealed all this from outsiders and he did it well. Arbogast must have seen the figure placed in the upstairs window, but there's no proof that anyone else did, in all those years."
"Then the horror wasn't in the house," Lila murmured. "It was in his head."
"Steiner says the relationship was like that of a ventriloquist and his dummy. Mother and _little_ Norman must have carried on regular conversations. And the adult Norman Bates probably rationalized the situation. He was able to pretend sanity, but who knows how much he really knew?
And the scenes in the novella between Norman and Mother are more extensive than in the movie, and her first belittling him and then at the end distancing herself from him (1 and 2 above) is even more pronounced. Thus the parallels between Bloch's Psycho and DON's Ventriloquist Dummy tale feel extensive.
The argument for the first pathway, for Hitch having seen and been impressed by DON, is more circumstantial. First, DON is from Ealing Studios which was run by Michael Balcon who'd given Hitchcock his start as a director at Gainsborough Pictures in the '20s, and produced for Hitchcock in the '30s, esp. The 39 Steps. We know for sure that Hitch kept a pretty close eye on Ealing's output probably in part because of that personal connection with Balcon, but consider too that Hitchcock loved Ealing's greatest film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) enough to restage it in 1957 for The Salt Lake Times! This link contains a sub-link to the whole Salt Lake Times photo-article. That photo-article contains the famous shots of Hitch dressed as a woman (catnip to Cultural Studies programs everywhere!), since in the article he plays versions of all eight roles that Alec Guinness played in KH&C, i.e., including suffragette Aunt Agatha.
Second, one of the writers on DON was Angus MacPhail. Immediately before DON, Macphail wrote the screenplays for two wartime propaganda shorts that Hitch directed, Bon Voyage and Aventure malgache, and immediately after DON, MacPhail did some writing for Hitchcock on Spellbound. Later MacPhail would have a hand in the Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) screenplay, and he'd co-write The Wrong Man (1956) with Maxwell Anderson. It's hard to believe that DON wouldn't have come up on one of those occasions. (Note that MacPhail also seems to have originated the term for and concept of the MacGuffin.)
Third, the star of the Ventriloquist Dummy segment, Michael Redgrave, had had a major role for Hitch in The Lady Vanishes (he's the musicologist, Gilbert).
To summarize: really, how likely is it that Hitch, a guy who in the early '40s was already a publisher of mystery anthologies in the UK, wouldn't check out the acclaimed first mystery-horror anthology picture made not just by his friends but also by his own personal 'if I hadn't gone to Hollywood', 'road-not-taken' studio? Not very, I'd say. (I'd guess that some Library or Archive in LA probably has definitive proof of Hitch catching DON and other Ealing Studios films in 1945 and 1946, but until then our circumstantial will have to do. )
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