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Today is Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday (according to IMDB anyway), so it’s worth mentioning a little-known trick that the world’s greatest director perpetrated on those nagging censors in 1960 with my favorite film, “Psycho”.

Hitchcock pushed a lot of boundaries with this little low budget film (Hitchcock was known for big blockbusters such as “North by Northwest” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” at the time). “Psycho”, for instance, was the first time in American film that a flushing toilet was shown. As well, Janet Leigh in her undergarments in a hotel room with John Gavin was the first time a woman was seen wearing nothing but a bra in an intimate situation. So, changing morals of the time, allowed Hitch to get away with quite a bit off the bat. It was with the infamous shower scene, though, that the censors would draw their line in the sand.

The first cut was an overhead shot, after Marion Crane is murdered, of her falling over the edge of the bathtub. “Psycho” screenwriter named this as one of his favorite shots, he said, “I must tell you there was a shot in the shower scene that was never used that was one of the most heartbreaking shots I’ve ever seen … There was something very tragic about seeing this beautiful figure with the life gone from it.” Gus Van Sant did include this shot in his shot-for-shot remake (as well as the intended helicopter opening shot which technology allowed Hitchcock to only do as a series of pans and dissolves).

It’s said that a censor sat for hours with the director pouring through every frame of the scene, to Hitchcock’s devious delight. They would roll the scene, the censor would yell for him to stop, thinking he’d seen a nipple, Hitch would smile, prove there was no nipple and they would move on.

Satisfied with it’s minor cut — and a black strip that appears in one shot where Janet Leigh reaches for the shower curtain — the censors allowed “Psycho” for public consumption and is was a massive hit, and film history today. Rumors persisted, for years, about an unmasked version of the scene, but it never materialized on any of the Laserdisc or DVD versions of the film.

Yet, all these years, a full set of naked breasts does in fact appear, once splashed across 1960’s screens and prime-time television. True, the naked breasts are out of focus, but they are still clearly there, the master filmmaker, of course, knew how to direct the viewer’s eye, and merely chose to direct them away from the breasts, to the hand in the foreground.

I’m sure Hitchcock laughed and laughed and laughed, knowing that unsuspecting America was looking at another “Psycho” first, but this is what made Hitchcock such a talent, he knew what the audience could accept, then pushed them, just that little bit further.

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