A masterwork by the master of suspense

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

Oft-cited as one of the top horror movies of all time, along with such fare as "Jaws" and "Alien", "Psycho" is Alfred Hitchcock's most well-known film. Why would this one film, made before the peak of his career, come to be the most famous? It's simple: Hitchcock was at his best when he toyed with audiences' expectations, and "Psycho" did that in a big way.
Viewers in the 1960's were not as jaded and suspicious when they waled into theaters as they are today. Now, people try to guess the endings of M. Night Shyamalan movies before the first hour is up, whereas the audiences of Hitchcock's time were more passive. Hitchcock took advantage of this quality by establishing a seemingly unstable character -- the titular psycho -- only to force us later on to question who was really most deserving of that dubious honor.
The plot is simple: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is a struggling office worker, carrying on a relationship with a man she knows can't support her. Faced with these pressures and an opportunity to change them, she steals $40,000 from her workplace and goes on the run. She stops at the Bates Motel, a forgotten little establishment strapped for visitors ever since the highway was diverted elsewhere. The caretaker there is Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), a charming young man who exudes an aura of strange intensity. It is there at the motel that the fate of Marion and her stolen money will be decided, by forces outside her control. The nature of those forces is not truly revealed until the last minutes of the film, in what was an truly outrageous ending for a movie of the 60's.
The performances of the main characters are very good, with special attention being paid to Anthony Perkins. Perkins never got another major role after his turn as the conflicted Norman Bates; his stellar performance in "Psycho" cementing him in audience's minds as a certain kind of character actor. Janet Leigh as Marion Crane acts just as you would expect a desperate and paranoid criminal on the run to. The supporting cast is capable, with the exception of Marion's love interest, Sam Loomis (John Gavin). He comes off as the typical, brutish boyfriend type, a one-note character with little to do other than exist in various stages of outrage.
The camerawork in "Psycho" is exceptional, especially considering the tools available to Hitchcock at the time. The long zoom in to the room where Sam and Marion are meeting is phenomenal for a 60's movie, as is the way Hitchcock stages the infamous "shower scene" that so scared the public. As in the aforementioned classic horror movies, Hitchcock deftly hides his "monster", his "psycho", allowing us only brief glimpses at it to let the tension and suspense to build. Perhaps the ultimate failing of "Psycho" is in its lasts minutes, when the unmasking of the true "psycho" leaves audiences over-saturated with information when they had so long been left in the dark. There is such a thing as "too much information", and the end of "Psycho" suffers for it.
"Psycho" is and will continue to be remembered as the seminal Hitchcockian film, whether it is his best or not (I, for one, find "Rear Window" to be a better film). With the way Hitchcock played the movie-going audience of his time, it is little wonder why this is. As long as people crave an intelligent, suspenseful horror movie as a respite from "Texas Chainsaw Massacre"-style gorefests, "Psycho" can be assured of its firm place in the cinematic cosmos.