"A boy's best friend is his mother."

Rating: 9/10 (11 August 2015)

SPOILER ALERT: Norman Bates committed the murders. PSYCHO has been around for over 50 years, and if you haven't seen it by now it's your own fault. Of course, it's been several years since I first saw it and, going through a Hitchcock marathon, I thought it would be an appropriate time to revisit it. My only memories of seeing it the first time are wondering what the big deal was. However, now having seen many films since then (including several more Hitchcock pictures), it seems even better to me the second time around. This is in large part thanks to the Bernard Herrmann's score, which punctuates all the right moments and backs off when necessary. The first thing other than the main theme that people will probably think of is the celebrated shower scene, but this time the moments where the score takes a back seat, or goes away entirely, stood out more. In particular, the scene where Norman and Marion have dinner in his parlor came off as extremely creepy, and the way in which Norman's demeanor changes within that scene was nothing short of amazing. Also, in contrast to NORTH BY NORTHWEST, PSYCHO has a rear-projected driving scene which actually worked for me. Again, a lot of this has to do with the score, but Janet Leigh's facial expressions and reactions to what goes on around her helped just as much to make it work. What also makes this film stand out from a lot of Hitchcock's other pictures was the conscious artistic choice to shoot in black and white. Although he said it would have been too gory to shoot in color, it gives the film a distinct griminess that stands in contrast to the high glamour of his other work. PSYCHO is decidedly unglamorous, and it succeeds because it fits with the subject matter. Lastly, Hitchcock is notorious for playing with audience expectations, and PSYCHO contains perhaps his greatest cinematic joke: the (apparent heroine) is killed off nearly halfway in to the film. Now her death does provide the dramatic momentum for the rest of it, but I can only imagine how audiences 1960 would have been shocked by this twist. In terms of his overall corpus (at least what I've seen so far), I'd put it up there with REAR WINDOW and NORTH BY NORTHWEST just shy of VERTIGO. The only thing that brings it down a peg is some needless psychoanalysis in the last scene. For me, it would have been more powerful to cut most of that out and skip to the chilling final shot that gradually zooms in on Anthony Perkins' face. Still, even with that scene, PSYCHO is definitely one of Hitchcock's finest, and laid the groundwork for the next generation of horror films.