The greatest film ever made

Rating: 10/10 (12 September 2006)

Hitchcock's greatest film, an adroit blend of grizzly horror, crazy pop psychology and clipped social satire, is about a girl called Marion Crane, (Janet Leigh in a career-defining performance), who takes the money (her employers) and runs all the way to the Bates motel where ... well, if you haven't seen it and really don't know the plot, I won't spoil it for you, suffice to say at which point it becomes a movie about a boy called Norman, (Anthony Perkins in one of the greatest pieces of screen acting ever; like Anthony Quinn's Zorba, Perkins was doomed to play Norman for ever more).
Dismissed by serious critics at the time, (for it's violence, for it's cheap, tawdry milieu - talk about pulp fiction - and for what they saw as Hitchcock's degeneration into what now would be dubbed the slasher movie genre), it is now widely regarded as a masterpiece, a brilliant fusion of technique and content, drawing us first into Marion's world, then dismissing her as fatuously as Antonioni did with his heroine in "L'Avventura", before creating in Norman one of the most multi-layered characters in all cinema and finally 'explaining' the whole plot in a totally audacious coda. Even without the shock element the film repays repeated viewings and was needlessly remade by Gus Van Sant, virtually frame by frame and in colour, and which should be avoided at all costs.