Original Release . . .

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2005)

In one of life's little ironies, my mother and I attended the opening of "Psycho" together. Unusual in itself, since I was in 10th grade and cannot remember EVER attending another film with Mom. Neither of us had any idea what we were in for.
The audience was seated (as contractually required by Hitchcock) before the lights went down. The theatre was pitch black except for the small "Exit" lights. So effective was Hitchcock's pre-publicity for "Psycho" that everybody was already nervous: all we knew was that "Psycho" was going to be "shocking." Suddenly, out of the darkness, Bernard Herrmann's immediately nerve-jangling score attacked and the massive curtains slowly opened in front of the screen. "Uh-oh," I recall thinking. No one had ever heard a score like this.
Once the title and credits ended and the quiet pan across Phoenix's skyline began, I relaxed -- but only briefly. For here we were peering into a hotel window where the magnificently endowed Janet Leigh (in a bra and half slip) and a shirtless John Gavin were concluding their lunchtime tryst. Not the scene I would have chosen to be sitting next to my Mother for.
By the time the shower sequence stunned everybody, I can still remember my Mother squirming audibly and uncomfortably next to me with every stab.
Happily, she and I had a healthy relationship. Walking out after the lights came up, we were as silent as everybody else until we hit the sidewalk and daylight. She shook her head: "What did you think of THAT?"
"Damndest thing I ever saw!"
She agreed.
It would be 13 years later, after I'd moved to Los Angeles and was writing for films and television, before I attended another opening that had an equally jolting impact on the public: "The Exorcist." I can't add anything to the comments already made about "Psycho's" technique and brilliance -- except perhaps to point out its film-making economy, still endlessly studied in film schools around the world.
Try this: shut off the sound. "Psycho" STILL plays, coherently, as a maniacal SILENT FILM study of a psychopath.
One shot in particular still haunts me for its storytelling simplicity. It's certainly not the most "spectacular" sequence in "Psycho," yet its meticulous planning and perfect placement say perhaps as much about Hitchcock's command of film as anything else in his long career.
After Marion Crane's brutal murder, and the camera pulls back from her lifeless eye, the camera moves out of the brightly lit bathroom over the sound of still-running water, across her empty motel room, past the rolled-up newspaper (containing the $40,000) on the nightstand, to the open window and the Bates house on the hill, where Norman is heard shrieking, "Mother! Oh, God! Blood! Blood!" After the assaultive flash-cuts of butchery (and the screeching violins of Herrmann's score, and the stabbing sounds) we've just witnessed . . . we're given a chance to catch our breaths over the near-silent sound of the shower. "What on earth can happen NEXT?" The lead character is dead.
In this brief, quiet coda to one of the most electrifying sequences in film history, Hitchcock "lets" us recover . . . sort of. In fact, the camera's simple movement re-establishes the entire story arc of "Psycho's" first third, backwards from the murder to the reminder that Marion's stolen cash has led us here and lies in plain sight, waiting to be discovered, then forward in time again to the unknown horror on the hill. (The seemingly simple shot of the house through the window is actually a rather elaborate process shot that itself involves several elements, including that menacing sky.)
Equally remarkable, Bernard Herrmann's disturbing score. If you can find it and listen to it apart from the picture, you'll appreciate its demented insect-like constantly unnerving, web-spinning, unsettling, biting, frightening power.
Shockingly, Herrmann's score occupies barely thirty-minutes of the total screen time. Yet it's unforgettable.
Here is a film, and a director, that is as effective and appreciated over 45 years later as it was the day of its release. Costing under a million dollars, it will retain its position as one of the finest, most visceral suspense films ever made . . . long after Spielberg's (another fine director) heartless, emotionless, expensive special-effects extravaganza, "War of the Worlds," has been forgotten (if it's not already).