Psycho

Rating: 10/10 (3 October 2010)

For my money, you just don't find a better performance of a character than Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Perkins never totally got his due as an actor. The man was brilliant, and Norman was of course his greatest achievement.
One of the interesting things about Psycho now is the not-so-publicized trouble the film had on initial release. Reviews were mixed, to say the least. One British reviewer (C. A. Lejuene) actually quit her job because the movie so offended her. But it was a massive hit with the public, and then critics literally changed their minds. Different world.
That Bates became such an iconic film character is no surprise. Perkins makes that happen in every shot. Norman is about as creepy a character as you can find. Despite being a murderer, he's no killer. He's an extremely nervous, anti-social, near-shell of a man so mentally and morally corrupted and broken that it's hard to imagine him doing anything else with his life. He waits at his dingy motel for the rare occupant. Surely, he doesn't have much at all to do with most of them. It's the ones who want to talk to him that find trouble, as he's incapable of interacting peacefully.
There is a shame to Norman. He is constantly embarrassed by his own perceived shortcomings, despite being a tall, good-looking man. Given that everyone and their mother has seen and discussed this film, we know the reason for his eternal agony with himself, but just in case someone stumbles upon this and has not seen Psycho or doesn't know the ending, I'll avoid going into it, because I'd hate to be the person who ruins this movie.
I saw this movie first when I was eight years old. It thrilled me, and that is really the only time I've ever been truly and completely detached and sucked into a film's world. I am not saying this is the greatest film of all-time (it would be up there on my personal list, in part because of my attachment to it), but I was born 22 years after this movie was released. A lot changes culturally in 30 years, especially when the start of that was in 1960. Since I was just a kid and movies from 1960 weren't exactly lunch line talk, I didn't know anything at all about Psycho. It just happened to be on TV, and I fell in love with it. It was gripping, I probably had the sense that it was beyond me (or however you'd put that at eight), and Perkins' performance mesmerized me. I'd never seen anything like that. I started watching non-kids movies and TV a lot earlier than a lot of folks did, because supervision of TV was never a big thing for my family. It was just assumed that if I saw a bad guy kill a broad, I would have the common sense instilled in me to not go out and do that myself. But I'd never seen anything like Norman Bates.
And really, I still haven't.
This is a film people will still be watching in another 50 years. The revelations and twists have become less shocking as time has passed, because so many movies have gone down similar roads, but Psycho has its own tone and that performance from Perkins that keeps it elevated among the best.