a classic, but hardly Hitch's best

Rating: Null/10 (12 February 2001)

The first time I saw this film I was quite disappointed. So much of it has become cliché in the four decades since its release, including the famous shower scene, Perkins' oedipal relationship with his mother, and even Bernard Herrmann's unsettling score. I had known the identity of Perkins' "mother" even before I saw the film and had to be told by a sibling that the audience was not supposed to be aware of this up to the last. It was like knowing the punch line in advance and not really getting the joke once it was actually told. It is, to be sure, a tribute to Hitchcock that this film has become so much a part of North American popular culture, but the downside is that the element of shock that so affected audiences back in 1960 is almost entirely lost on a later generation of viewers. One thus has to imagine what it would have been like to see it during its first run in the movie theatres.
Had I been there at its opening, I think I would still have judged this film to be inferior to the string of excellent Hitchcock offerings preceding it during the previous decadefrom "Strangers on a Train" to "North by Northwest." Why? So much of his previous work had relied on the use of suspense to draw the viewers into the plot. A good thriller builds this up carefully and deliberately until the final climax at or near the end of the film. Good suspense leaves much unstated and works its way subtly into the imagination. It's what you don't see that's the scariest. Think, for example, of the murder in "Rear Window." You hear a crash and a short, shrill scream followed by ominous silence, but you're not really sure what's happened until much later. Here, on the other hand, Hitch kills off his heroine brutally near the beginning of the film, leaving little if anything to the imagination, and largely putting aside the issues we had been misled to think the plot was building up to.
Moreover, despite Hitch's tongue-in-cheek claim that he had intended it as a comedy, there is little of the director's famous humour so much in evidence in the immediately preceding film, "North by Northwest." There is not much humour to be found in shock, while there is great humorous potential in suspense. He should have stuck with suspense and left shock to a lesser director.
I alluded to Herrmann's score. Without it, I think this would have been judged a far less effective film and less the classic it is generally reputed to be. Imagine Leigh driving along the highway without the composer's jittery music in the backgroundor, perhaps more accurately, the foreground. In such scenes it is the music that almost entirely creates the suspenseful atmosphere. Without it there is nothing of the sortjust Leigh driving and looking in her rear view mirror. Period. Not very scary.
Is it a classic then? It is, insofar as it influenced a whole generation of movie-goers and film makers who sought to imitate it. But on its own merits, I don't think so.