Marion Crane began her (brief) life as Mary Crane, the ill-fated heroine of
Robert Bloch's novel,
Psycho. We meet Mary when she arrives at the Bates Motel, exhausted and badly in need of a night's rest. She doesn't get it.
As part of the novel is told from her point of view, we learn that she has a secret. She's stolen money from her boss and is now in flight. She's traveled by car a long way from Phoenix to meet her boyfriend in a small town called Fairvale. This is her first (and last) stop for lodgings. She plans to surprise her boyfriend, make some excuse for why she has the money and finally wed the man whose financial situation has prevented him from agreeing to marriage.
The shy, nervous proprietor of the motel is Norman Bates. Bates offers her supper in a parlor behind his office. He's lonely and grateful for conversation. He's also dominated by a mother whom he reveals is insane. Mary pities the pathetic Bates, trapped by circumstances outside of his control. She realizes in talking to him that she is about to step into her own trap. She decides to return the money.
She goes to her room and takes a shower, which feels to her like absolution. But it's too late for that. Bates's insane mother enters the bathroom carrying a kitchen knife, which she uses to stab Mary to death.
Or so it seems. At the end of the novel we learn that "Mother" is Bates himself, afflicted with a mental disease that has given him a split-personality. Bates's mother is long dead, the victim of Norman's matricide.
We spend a relatively brief time with Mary before she is dispatched. When
Joseph Stefano began adapting the novel for
Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 shocker,
Psycho, he suggested to Hitchcock that the story should focus on Mary (who has been renamed Marion). Shocking as Mary's death was to readers, moviegoers would be far more shocked. Marion would be played by a star (
Janet Leigh). No one would expect that the leading lady would be murdered less than halfway through the film.
The movie opens with Marion and her boyfriend, Sam Loomis (
John Gavin), at the end of their lunchtime tryst in a cheap hotel. She's unhappy having to meet Sam in such a place for a quick coupling. She wants to be his wife. Sam reminds her how impossible this is. He's paying alimony to his ex-wife; he's paying off his dead father's debts; he's struggling as the manager of a hardware store in a small town called Fairvale. The two of them couldn't get by. Later, Marion's frustration leads her into a rash act.
She returns from her tryst with Sam to the office where she works as a secretary. We see the circumstances that conspire to trick her into justifying a foolish decision. She works for a real estate agent, Mr. Lowery (
Vaughn Taylor), who air conditions his inner room while allowing his two secretaries to swelter in the outer office. The other secretary, Caroline (
Patricia Hitchcock), brags about her own marriage. In walks Mr. Lowery and his client, an oilman named Tom Cassidy (
Frank Albertson), who brags about his own wealth, boasts that he cheats on his taxes and makes a drunken pass at her while waving his money in the air, announcing that he never carries more than he can afford to lose. He's carrying $40,000 in cash, with which he intends to pay Lowery for his services.
This makes Lowery nervous. He asks Marion to take the money directly to the bank; he doesn't want it in the office overnight. Would that he had kept it there, for his sake, his client's and especially Marion's. The money tempts her to folly. Instead of taking it to the bank, she brings it back to her apartment, where she packs up her things and then flees in her car, intending to drive all the way to Fairvale, where she'll tell Sam some story as to why she suddenly has all this money. The money, she thinks, will allow Sam to marry her.
Along the way to Fairvale, she nearly falls asleep at the wheel. She takes a quick nap in her car, but soon finds a motorcycle cop (
Mort Mills) tapping on her door and waking her up. This terrifies her, and the cop becomes suspicious. Unable to find any grounds for holding her, he allows her to go.
Marion stops at a used car lot to trade in her car for another and thus cover her tracks. Her insistence on quickly making the trade unsettles the salesman (
John Anderson); but California Charlie, as he calls himself, can find no reason to deny her the trade, even after she suspiciously avoids haggling over the price: $700 plus her car. Marion's anxiety increases when she sees that the patrolman has parked across the street. He seems to be watching her.
Marion makes it out of the car lot, but knows she has aroused suspicions, especially since she paid for the car in cash. A rainstorm comes, making it nearly impossible to drive. She loses her way off the main road and fatefully winds up blinking up at a neon sign that says "Bates Motel" and "Vacancy."
She stops at the motel and runs to the office, where she finds no one. There's a forbidding, Gothic house next to the motel. She sees an old woman passing by a window and, assuming the manager must live there, returns to her car and honks her horn to announce her arrival.
A young man comes running out of the house, holding an unopened umbrella. He opens it when he gets to Marion's car and leads her back into the office. She asks if there's a vacancy. The young proprietor, who introduces himself as Norman Bates (
Anthony Perkins), tells her there is: "Twelve, in fact. Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies." He gives her cabin one, explaining that it's closer, in case she needs anything. She tells him she needs sleep more than anything--and maybe food. He invites her to have supper with him in this house; but after he goes to make preparations, she hears the raving voice of an old woman all the way from the house to her cabin, where she is unpacking (and wrapping her money in a newspaper in order to hide it). The evidently lunatic mother is arguing with her son Norman and refusing to allow the woman into her home, insinuating that this unwanted guest only wants to seduce her erring boy.
Norman returns to the motel with a tray of food and apologizes to Marion for his mother's behavior. He takes her into his parlor behind the office, where she eats the supper as he sits and makes conversation. The poor young man is clearly lonely and pathetically eager for any small talk. He tells her about his unhappy life, including the hobby that fills his time, rather than passes it: taxidermy. The parlor is filled with stuffed birds.
His conversation is innocuous, if rather sad, although it takes one dark turn. She makes the mistake of suggesting that he put his mother, who dominates him and makes his life miserable, into an institution. He becomes livid, sputtering that his mother "is not a maniac, a raving thing; she just goes a little mad sometimes." She apologizes and he quickly recovers. In spite of this, it's clear she likes and pities Norman.
By this point, the audience (especially the original, unwary 1960 audience) may suspect the possibility of romance between Marion and the strange, but sympathetic and boyishly handsome Norman, a thought that would not have occurred to readers of the novel, whose Norman Bates is a fat, unappealing man in his forties. The audience has already been led to doubt the true feelings of Marion's boyfriend, Sam. But the possibility of romance proves to be a horrific joke.
Her encounter with Norman has shown her the folly of her criminal act. Should she follow through with it, she would wind up in "a private trap," just like Norman. She decides to return the money, but it's too late. Later in her cabin, she suffers the same fate as her literary counterpart: stabbed to death in the shower by Norman in drag. Marion fares negligibly better than Mary, whose stabbings were so brutal that they removed her head. Marion keeps her head, but just as surely loses her life. Her body, and the money she stole (still concealed in the LA Times), wind up in the trunk of her car, which Norman, the dutiful son covering up the crime "Mother" committed, pushes into a nearby swamp.
Marion of course is missing from the many sequels to
Psycho, except in flashback in
Psycho II (1983); but she returns in
Gus Van Sant's
1998 remake of Hitchcock's classic. The 1990s Marion (
Anne Heche) seems more flippant and less anxiety-ridden than her predecessor, but winds up just as dead.
company.