Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)

In an interview in Fangoria #55, screenwriter Joseph Stefano commented on a scene that didn’t make the final cut of Psycho. “It’s a scene in one of the motel rooms between Sam and Marion’s sister, Lila. It’s a little passage between them in which Sam expresses his grief over having lost Marion. It was, to me, a very important scene because at no time does anyone shed any tears. This is a very touching moment, and I wish they had left it in. But I think that, again, shows something about Hitchcock. If he was going to cut a scene, it wasn’t going to be anything with any suspense or fear in it. But that was my only complaint.”

190. SAM AND LILA IN TRUCK – (PROCESS – HIGHWAY)

For a moment, both are silent; Sam watching the road as if there were other cars on it, Lila staring at nothing in particular, except perhaps her own inner fears.

LILA

I wonder if we’ll ever see Mary again.

SAM

Of course we will.

LILA

Alive.

Sam looks as if he’d like to say something humorous, something to cheer her. He cannot. He remains silent.

LILA

We lived together all our lives. When we woke up one morning and found ourselves orphans, Mary quit college and got a job, so I could go to college.

SAM

Where’d you go to college?

LILA

I didn’t. I got a job, too.
(A pause)
I wonder if that hurt her, my not letting her sacrifice for me? Some people are so willing to suffer for you that they suffer more if you don’t let them.

SAM

(Almost to himself)
I couldn’t let her lick the stamps.

Lila looks quizzically at him, is too concerned to pursue it.

LILA

I wonder so many things about her now. Why she never told me she was having an affair with you ...

SAM

We were going to get married. Are going to get married!

LILA

All she ever said was ... she had lunch now and then with a nice fellow from out of town.

SAM

This is the old highway.

LILA

I suppose ... when you were able to marry her she’d have presented you, all shiny and proper ... she always tried to be proper.

SAM

Watch your tenses!

LILA

Huh?

SAM

She always tries to be proper.

LILA

(A pause, then, looking ahead)
The Bates Motel.

Sam slows the truck to a stop, sighs, starts to light up a cigarette. Lila looks questioningly and impatiently at him.

The scene continues as it does in the film with Sam and Lila deciding that they will register as husband and wife when they arrive at the motel, and then “search every inch ...” Although Stefano remembered the setting of the scene differently, he is right about its tone and more importantly, what the scene reveals about Marion’s willingness to sacrifice for her sister, which links her further to Sam (burdened by familial obligations) and Norman (who’s given away “half his life, so to speak”).

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