PSYCHO is nearly a perfect movie . . .

Rating: 10/10 (6 August 2013)

. . . until you get to the very end, where Hitchcock himself overruled his better judgment to "humor" screenwriter Joseph Stefano (according to Stefano, in Universal's 1999 "Making of" mini-documentary) and inflicted an endless 10 minutes of psychobabble upon an audience now more in danger of being bored to death than dying of fright. One can only surmise that Hitch viewed this seeming rare misstep as a "necessary evil," feeling that those members of his 1960 initial release theater audiences who were born before the "Roaring Twenties" would be literally at risk of death if he did not include a hum-drum "cooling off period" toward the end, before they'd have to get up on their feet and leave. The crying shame is that all of this now hopelessly dated and quaint THREE FACES OF EVE crud could not have been trimmed to a minute or so in a subsequent director's cut. To hear Joe Stefano tell it, Hitch could not get enough of Joe's reports on Joe's on-going psychoanalysis (which I take for a lack of perception of "being humored" on Joe's part). However, this drawn out CLOSING of endless exposition is a cinematic no-no more worthy of Miss Marple than Hitchcock, and tacked on here to PSYCHO it is the equivalent of painting a Hitler mustache on Da Vinci's Mona Lisa!