B/W is Best

Rating: 10/10 (18 October 2014)

Do we actually need color pictures? How come that this in that perspective so outdated movie still does its job so much better than colored counterparts?
In fact, I ask myself why other film makers still insist on color instead of B/W knowing the impact of Psycho and Film Noir. There are some clever adaptations, though viz the bleak colors, such as in Seven, Sixth Sense and The Ring. Psychological horror tends to fade to gray.
Well, despite all this, Hitchcock's the Suspense Master and Psycho is his best film. I'd like to compare to Agatha Christie's best story, the 6th most sold novel of all times, Ten Little N*****s aka And Then There Were None: there is something crude about both productions. TLN is not very elaborated in its language, rather straightforward. Yet, the background information about each victim is direct and convincing. The main plot is fantastic and the atmosphere the novel brings at least got me entangled in it.
Now, Psycho on the other hand, has a less fantastic story: it could happen that a girl at large ends in a gloomy motel at the will of a mentally ill murderer. The similarity rather lies in the movie's lack of pretension, in stark contrast to say, Vertigo.
Besides this comparison, it's noteworthy that Psycho

started of the slasher type flicks, complete with the eerie staccato musical score

introduced and indulged in various new elements in film such as a toilet bowl close up

is a two act movie: first act is about the female protagonist's stealing of money, the second is about the male protagonist's killing of her and his disturbed life

lacks the typical Mac Guffin ingredient as the motivations for the protagonists are well introduced and of great importance to the plot

deals openly with sex topics as transvestism

has a Christiesque the-detective-presents-the-crime-summing up in the final scene where the psychologist explains to the DA what has happened

has a number of details from other movies, for instance, Norman Bates was not the innovative character it could have been since Orson Welles already invented the neurotic Motel Host in A Touch of Evil (1958) played by Dennis Weaver. In the same movie Janet Liegh was terrorized in the motel, as well, even making the choice of actress unoriginal. The corpse dumping method by means of putting it in a car trunk was used by Hitchcock in One More Mile to Go (1956).